|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Temptations of the West
Pankaj Mishra’s
first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, captured brilliantly the
shoddiness and shabbiness of middle-class, middle-town India. It was in
the nature of a travelogue, and I was greatly impressed by his
descriptive powers and his ability to excavate the commonplace to expose
the pretensions of upwardly mobile Indians. After this auspicious
beginning, he wrote a book of fiction and then of biography. With his
latest offering, he has gone back to the genre he began with:
travelogue. Temptations of the West, although more voluminous,
is slimmer in substance, especially with regard to India. The most
obvious reason is that the book is dated. Many of the incidents Mishra
describes and analyses occurred several years ago, and in regurgitating
them he often ends up by not adding anything new. This becomes painfully
obvious in the chapter on Nepal, but is evident, too, in the piece on
the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which happened a decade
and a half ago. Much about India is, indeed, timeless, but a great deal
is changing faster than ever before. A travelogue needs to be timely,
otherwise it loses its relevance. A second weakness is that the author
is often mesmerised by his own image of what India is. No one can argue
with the fact that Dalits and other lower castes have been the victims
of centuries of discrimination, and are still poor and exploited. But,
over the decades since 1947, they have ceased to be as helpless or as
vulnerable as Mishra imagines them to be. Almost 60 years of
participation in democratic politics, even if as underdogs to begin
with, have made them aware of their rights and the value of their votes,
and no political party can afford to ignore them. In India’s most
populous state, Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party, which avowedly
seeks to represent dalit interests, is tipped to win the next state
elections. It is also not always appreciated that India has run one of
the most successful policies for affirmative action. There are seats
reserved for the lowest castes in government jobs and parliament.
Although sometimes such reservations benefit disproportionately the
creamy layer from within these sections, these measures, along with the
democratic process, have been a hugely empowering tool. One proof is
that, while reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
in Parliament was pegged at 22.5 per cent, today the number of lawmakers
from this section exceeds this quota. Similarly, representation of the
lowest castes and tribes in the higher echelons of government was a mere
4.5 per cent in 1965; by 1995, it had risen to 22.5 per cent, and today
is even higher. The condition of the Muslims in India is another case
where Mishra remains a prisoner of preconceived notions. He harps on
their sense of isolation, of a "besieged secularism" in which
Muslims are "full of anxiety about their fate in India".
Mishra is a Brahmin, and while such solicitousness may reinforce his
liberal credentials in the eyes of some interlocutors, the facts on the
ground are quite different. It is true that Muslims are more poor and
backward than some Hindu compatriots, but they are increasingly a part
of the national mainstream. The way Muslims vote influences the results
in as many as 125 Parliamentary constituencies, almost one-fourth of the
house. No party can survive without taking their welfare into account.
Nor is India on the verge of some cataclysmic religious confrontation.
In 1996, a study by two scholars at Harvard confirmed that religious
violence in India is neither chronic nor pervasive, and that most of the
time Hindus and Muslims live peaceably enough together. In fact, today
both Hindus and Muslims want to swim away from the islands of religious
exclusiveness towards the secular opportunities of the mainland. The
membership of the RSS, the right-wing militant Hindu organisation, is
falling, and the most conservative Muslim seminary at Deoband has
quietly begun classes in computers and the English language. In a
"mood of the nation" survey carried out by the magazine India
Today in August 2003, a majority of the Hindu respondents said that
the Ayodhya agitation does not determine their voting choice. And the
Bharatiya Janata Party, whose cadres spearheaded the destruction of the
mosque in 1992, has been out of power in UP since 1996. Any observer
who chooses to write on India must be very vigilant about stereotypes.
He must be careful not to be simplistic, and yet Mishra’s book abounds
with simplifications. To believe, as Mishra does, that the Indian state
carried out the murder of 35 Sikhs in Kashmir to convince President
Clinton, who was to visit Delhi, about Pakistani terrorism is bordering
on the absurd. To argue that Pakistani troops evacuated the heights of
Kargil in Indian Kashmir in 1999 only because the US put pressure on
Islamabad is an unforgivable distortion. Thousands of Indian soldiers
and hundreds of officers went to certain death in dislodging the
invaders. It is inconceivable that Mishra is not aware of this, but that
he chooses not to take it into account says a great deal about the
biases he has uncritically internalised. The book has redeeming
features. Mishra writes well; his narrative powers are exceptional; and
his profiles of ordinary people all over the subcontinent make for good
reading. But these talents are marred by his inability to overcome the
judgments he has already come to about India while living in London,
where he confesses "he knew security and stability for the first
time". Why this should be so is not clear, because Mishra does not
exactly belong to the great exploited masses he conjures up so often. I
suspect his distaste for the pretensions and deceit of the small towns
in India where he grew up overly colours his vision. In Butter
Chicken in Ludhiana, he transmutes these experiences into a
brilliant polemic; in Temptations he is defeated by them. A
pity. — By arrangement with
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
