by Ian Buruma
What all these admirers chose (and, alas, often still choose) to overlook was that China’s order was the order of a slave state. It is said that Mao, however much blood still sticks to his waxy hands, restored pride to the Chinese people. If so, it was only to the People, and not to people that he gave this pride. The price for Mao’s proud banners was the virtually complete destruction of Naipaul’s universal civilization, which did exist in China: the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect and so on. In this respect, despite all the subcontinent’s problems, China should take a leaf from India’s book.
What makes Naipaul one of the world’s most civilized writers is his refusal to be engaged by the People, and his insistence on listening to people, individuals, with their own language and their own stories. To this extent he is right when he claims to have no view; he is impatient with all abstractions. He is interested in how individual people see themselves and the world in which they live. He has recorded their histories, their dreams, their stories, their words.
As we know, the first thing that leaders or worshipers of the People do is to rob people of their words, by enforcing a language of wood. Naipaul’s characters, most of whom talk at considerable length, never speak a language of wood. In his interviews, Naipaul insists on details: he wants to know how things smelled, felt, sounded, looked—especially looked. And where it concerns ideas, he wants to be told how they were arrived at: not just what people think, but how they think. This is also the method of his own writing. Naipaul, in Finding the Centre:
Narrative was my aim. Within that, my travelling method was intended to be transparent. The reader will see how the material was gathered; he will also see how the material could have served fiction or political journalism or a travelogue. But the material here served itself alone.… All that was added later was understanding. Out of that understanding the narrative came. However creatively one travels, however deep an experience in childhood or middle age, it takes thought (a sifting of impulses, ideas, and references that become more multifarious as one grows older) to understand what one has lived through or where one has been.
The extraordinary achievement of India: A Million Mutinies Now is that we can see his characters. More than that, we can see how they see, and how they, in turn, are seen by the author: Amir, the melancholy son of a raja in Lucknow, Cambridge-educated, a Marxist, a devout Muslim; Namdeo, the outcast poet, whose “ideas of untouchability and brothel-area sex, childbirth and rags, all coming together, were like an assault”; and many, many more. This is what makes the book a work of art. At this level it ceases to matter whether the writer is engaged in fiction or nonfiction, or whether you call a book such as The Enigma of Arrival a novel. Whatever his literary form, Naipaul is a master. The people in India: A Million Mutinies Now are so alive they could have sprung from a great writer’s imagination.
There is, however, one thing that sets such a book apart from fiction, and that is the language itself. Whereas the writer controls every word in a work of invention, this cannot be the case in a factual account. Here there is a problem: compared to the author’s own literary prose, the language of Naipaul’s characters inevitably tends to sound flat. This is particularly true when Naipaul has to go through an interpreter to hear the person’s story. I must admit that here and there I felt relief when a long quotation ended and Naipaul’s words began.
And what words! The few paragraphs describing the decrepitude of Calcutta allow you to see that sad, wonderful, dying place. Naipaul writes like a painter. Small, visual details tell you all: the buzzards hovering over the grubby little street market behind the Grand Hotel, where people go about their minute tasks, one man walking by “carrying a single, limber, dancing sheet of plywood on his head.” Or the “pink-walled room” of the Hindu activist in Bombay who worships at the shrine of Ganpati in Pali: “On the wall at the back of the Sony television there was a colour photograph or picture of this image at Pali: the broad, spreading belly of the deity a violent, arresting red, not altogether benign.”
Referring to himself, Nirad Chaudhuri once wrote, “To be déraciné, is to be on the road forever.” This could serve nicely as V. S. Naipaul’s motto, too: Naipaul, the grandson of uprooted Indians, uprooted himself to come to England. He is a man continually fretting about roots—his own and those of the people he meets. One sometimes has the impression of a man traveling through the dark and rainy night, stopping at houses on the way, pressing his nose against the windows. Peering at the people inside, sitting around the family hearth, he is reminded of his own rootlessness. The assumption is that those others, seen through the window, are at home, rooted and whatever the opposite is of déraciné.
This must account for Naipaul’s nostalgia for what he has called “whole and single societies.” He has often used such words as “damaged” or “wounded” for societies that are fragmented and apparently rootless. Gandhi, the Mahatma, he told Andrew Robinson, “is a man, whose life, when I contemplate it, makes me cry. I am moved to tears …” This is, as always, largely a matter of pride, of dignity: Gandhi’s own sense of dignity, which he imparted to the Indian masses. But it is also a question of Naipaul’s admiration for Gandhi’s vision of one single India, a vision of wholeness. Nehru had the same vision, albeit in a more secular way. So did Naipaul on his first visit to India. It was an idea of India which, as Naipaul writes, incorporated the independence movement, the great civilization, the great names, the classical past. “It was,” Naipaul writes,
an aspect of our identity, the community identity we had developed, which in multi-racial Trinidad, had become more like a racial identity.
This was the identity I took to India on my first visit in 1962. And when I got there I found it had no meaning in India. The idea of an Indian community—in effect, a continental idea of our Indian identity—made sense only when the community was very small, a minority, and isolated.
And now Naipaul believes he has found the makings of this all-Indian community. He calls it “a central will, a central intellect, a national idea.” The Indian Union, he writes, “was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness.” This may be right, even though Hindu chauvinism poses a threat to the secular state of India. But this focus on the whole, the single, the central, also reflects Naipaul’s own state of mind, his nostalgia for an orderly identity. He has remarked elsewhere, quite convincingly, that Gandhi’s all-Indian vision was shaped in South Africa, just as Nehru’s was formed at Harrow. It is the old dream of the deracinated, a regret about things past.
But a dream is all it is. One senses the same nostalgia in most of the people Naipaul met on his Indian trip. As Naipaul himself has pointed out so many times, a common desire of those who have escaped the dark embrace of the tribe is to find the way back; nostalgia is the concomitant of change: for the educated Sikh who dreams of restoring Ranjit Singh’s nineteenth-century kingdom; the urban intellectual in Calcutta dreaming of pastoral purity; for Dravidian politicians in Madras dreaming of medieval emperors who preceded the rule of the Brahmins. Whether or not they know it, the millions of mutineers, wrestling with their fates, are all on the road forever.
1991
BHUTTO’S PAKISTAN
Political autobiography, as a genre, tends to produce tiresome, self-serving, ghostwritten works. But once in a while a book stands out; not necessarily because it is better written than the usual stuff, but because it is the closest thing we have to classic mythology. The message is moral; the characters stand for Good and Evil; the story is a variation of the quest for a holy grail, involving not just hardship—“tests”—but exile of one kind or another. The authorship is often anonymous—ghostwriters seldom reveal their names.
When the heroes and villains come from countries where pure myths still cast their spells, where, as a Pakistani politician once put it to me, “words have magic,” these politi
cal fairy tales follow the traditional patterns more closely than in the modern West, where the drama tends to get lost in media buzzwords, earnest political analysis, academic jargon or a ghastly combination of all three. Besides, the complexity of modern life leaves little room for mythical feats of heroism. Good and evil are not so clear-cut. Our politics, as puritans of all persuasions keep telling us, has lost its moral dimension.
We can be just as much enchanted by myths, of course, and sometimes something approaching classic myth will occur: Winston Churchill emerging from his “years in the wilderness” (exile) to save the world from evil dragons in the name of freedom and democracy (the Grail). But this could only happen in a war, and Churchill was rather exceptional in that he was the greatest narrator of his own myth—no ghostwriters for him. Great leaders since Churchill—the Iron Lady, the Gipper, even Gorby—may have aspired to mythical status, but have not been able really to pull it off convincingly.
No, for the truly inspiring tales we must turn to that mythical land called the Third World. That is where we can escape from not so much the decadence as the banality of Western life, and be enchanted once again, like children, our disbelief suspended. More than that, in the Third World we can retrieve the pure moral order that we feel is lost to us in the West. The story of Cory Aquino—made into an Australian TV miniseries—was perfect: she, a religious paragon of modesty and virtue; her opponents, symbols of villainy and greed. How enchanting it must have been in 1986 for American senators and congressmen to take a break from their daily affairs and don yellow ribbons for St. Cory of Manila.
The South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae Jung tried his hardest to be a mythical hero, and many Western reporters did their best to help him, but he never quite made the grade. His story had all the makings of the real thing: evil generals, exile, heroic hardship, the quest for freedom … But then something went wrong: Kim suddenly appeared less heroic, more like his opponents—aggressive, intransigent, hungry for power. Perhaps South Korea is too prosperous now, not Third World enough for fairy tales.
Pakistan, on the other hand, is about as Third World as you can get, and the story of Benazir Bhutto’s quest to avenge her father’s death at the hand of the wicked General Zia ul-Haq fits all the requirements of the classic myth. Her book Daughter of the East, clearly written to enchant Western readers, does not disappoint. The heroes are saintly; the villains drip with poison. There is excruciating hardship; there are years of exile; there is the wonderful combination of Western high life and ancient Oriental culture (at one point in the story, our heroine is “enthused with a sense of Asian identity”); and, finally, there is victory, made all the sweeter for the difficulties of the quest.
Miss Bhutto’s prose, though satisfyingly breathless and emotional in parts, shows the dead hand of the ghost in others. Those interested in the true language of myths should turn to a collection of Benazir’s speeches, interviews and assorted public utterances, aimed at her domestic supporters, entitled The Way Out. There we find the “clarion calls,” the “night of the tyrant,” the “streets painted in blood.” To quote one typical clarion call:
We must face the oppressor, the Tyrant, the Usurper, the unjust in whatever fashion or manner he manifests himself. The martyr is the life of history and history is woven of the threads of revolution …
But how fragile it is. How easily it is crushed. How easily the crystal that dazzled the rainbow color in the morning light vanishes.
The martyr is of course Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged for murder in 1979, on orders from General Zia, who had ousted Bhutto two years before in a military coup. But that is getting ahead of the story. Let us begin at the beginning.
Benazir Bhutto was born in 1953 in Karachi, “my skin evidently so rosy that I was immediately nicknamed ‘Pinkie.’ ” Very soon Pinkie began to lead what can only be called a bicultural life. There was Miss Bhutto, educated in English, first at Lady Jennings’s nursery school and later by Irish nuns at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. The older students were divided into houses with such inspirational names as “Discipline,” “Courtesy,” “Endeavor,” and “Service.” This was the same Miss Bhutto who later went to Radcliffe, where she savored the delights of peppermint ice cream, apple cider, Joan Baez and peace marches. It was also the Miss Bhutto who moved on to Oxford, her father’s alma mater, where she drove a sports car, sharpened her wit at the Oxford Union, and was squired around town by dashing young men in velvet jackets. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, call this stylish young woman the Radcliffe Benazir.
There is another Miss Bhutto, however—one who expresses herself better in the mythical language of The Way Out. This is the Benazir sitting adoringly at her father’s feet at the family estate in Larkana, listening to his tales of heroic ancestors, “directly traceable to the Muslim invasion of India in 712 AD.” One of these heroes, her great-grandfather, defied the British by taking an English lover. Rather than hand her back to the outraged officers of the raj, his retinue killed the woman. This, said the hero, was a matter of honor.
We might call this romantic lady the Larkana Benazir. She was the one who, as she writes in her autobiography, “loved hearing these family stories, as did my brothers Mir Murtaza and Shah Nawaz, who naturally identified with their namesakes. The adversities faced by our ancestors formed our own moral code, just as my father had intended. Loyalty. Honour. Principle.”
Here, clearly, is a family born to rule. The Bhuttos are land-owning grandees in the desertland of Sindh, a backward part of the subcontinent, a kind of sandy Sicily, where politics consists of murky family feuds. Benazir’s grandfather, Sir Shah Nawaz, founded the first political party in Sindh, in the days of the British raj. He was, as his title suggests, a very grand personage indeed. Benazir tells us nothing much about her paternal grandmother, Sir Shah Nawaz’s second wife, for she, a humble Hindu from Bombay who converted to Islam just before her marriage, does not fit so neatly into the illustrious family annals—something, by the way, which Z. A. Bhutto’s political opponents exploited in their campaigns against him: he was, they said, not a “real” Pakistani, but the son of an Indian, and a Hindu Indian to boot.
Just as there are two Benazirs (who sometimes get mixed up: only the Radcliffe Benazir could be “enthused” by her Asian identity), there are two Bhutto families: one is compared to the Kennedys, the blessed clan destined to deliver the people from poverty and oppression, but punished by political martyrdom. Like Kathleen Kennedy, “who had worn her father’s parka at Radcliffe long after the Senator had been killed,” Benazir “tried to keep my father near me by sleeping with his shirt under my pillow.” And then there is the family inspired by Muslim martyrdom. Benazir calls her father shaheed, a martyr for Islam. In The Way Out she finds the appropriate words:
The same dedicated workers whose courage is higher than the mountains and whose dedication is deeper than the oceans are even now ready to come forward and to sacrifice inspired by Shaheed Bhutto and in the manner of sacrifice known only to the political descendents of Muslim Martyrs.
It is sometimes tempting to sneer at the Radcliffe Benazir, shocked at army thugs “lolling on one of Mummy’s delicate blue and white brocade Louis XV chairs,” trying to act as the daughter of a Muslim martyr. So much about the Larkana Benazir smacks of kitsch; so much of the Radcliffe Benazir strikes one as half-baked. But to reconcile the two roles, or indeed, to forgo the sports cars and May Balls and risk torture or death, took extraordinary courage. After her father’s execution in 1979, Miss Bhutto spent much of the next five years under appalling conditions in Zia’s jails. And, after she had braved the worst at the hands of a military dictator, her political success has given hope to millions. It all makes one feel a little churlish to challenge some of her more cherished myths. But, as Benazir herself remarks when describing some fraud perpetrated by General Zia’s government, “what matters is the truth.” And the truth, however enchanting and moving Benazir’s own tale may be, is
an elusive thing.
But let us return to the story. When Benazir was still with the Irish nuns, her father was foreign minister in the government of General Ayub Khan. In 1966 the general and Z. A. Bhutto parted ways one year after India and Pakistan had fought over Kashmir. Bhutto thought Ayub Khan had been soft on the Indians. Benazir appeared to agree: “During the peace negotiations held in the southern Russian city of Tashkent, President Ayub Khan lost everything we had gained on the battlefield.” But, according to Benazir, her father’s resignation was a matter of democratic principles: “After my father broke with Ayub Khan in 1966, the words ‘civil liberties’ and ‘democracy’ were the ones that came up most, words that were mythical to most Pakistanis.”
The general’s rule, in Benazir’s account, was marked with lawlessness, violence, corruption and economic failure. Only Ayub’s “family and a handful of others had become rich.” But now, with Z. A. Bhutto on the loose, the first crusade for democracy was about to begin. The first clarion call, so to speak, had sounded.
This is not entirely the way less partisan observers saw things. Shahid Javed Burki, for example, has some interesting things to say about the Ayub years in his Pakistan Under Bhutto. First of all, he argues, Ayub’s rule made far more people rich than his family and friends. Tax incentives and land reforms created a new middle class of small businessmen, entrepreneurs and middle-sized farmers. The ones who suffered were big industrialists, unskilled urban workers and the landed aristocracy. The aristocracy was Bhutto’s traditional constituency. The new middle class would turn against him, as did the industrialists when Bhutto nationalized their assets. This left him with the support of landowners and the urban poor, whose interests were by no means always identical.
