Coming up

in the next few weeks, or fortnights maybe: some thoughts on VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River; critical reviews by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, famous most for his 1959 classic, Things Fall Apart, but also well-known for his taking apart of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is generally regarded as one of the classics of English literature; and finally, thoughts on a couple of chapters of what I feel is a remarkable recent book of narrative historical non-fiction, Middle Passages: African American Journeys, by James T Campbell. And I hope I can also say something – though I am not sure – about this PBS documentary, especially in the context of Campbell’s book.

So I guess I’ve got my work cut out now :)

The Lost Boys of Sudan

I

Lost Boys of Sudan is a documentary that follows the stories of two orphaned Sudanese refugee youth, Peter and Santino, from the time just before they left Sudan, to twelve months after their arrival in the United States. Both Peter and Santino, like many other young men and women, were orphaned by the protracted civil conflict in Sudan. The documentary presents selected day-to-day occurences (mostly in the United States) as they happened to Peter and Santino. The method is an effective one; it captures the refugee experience very well; and, judging from its reach and its popularity, the movie appears to have touched a chord in audiences all over the United States.

I saw the movie two years ago in Tempe, Arizona, at a local coffee shop. A refugee help group, consisting of mostly young volunteers, had organized the screening. The small room in which the movie was shown was packed. And at the end of the screening the audience could meet and talk to three Sudanese youth who had been through experiences similar to those shown in the movie, and were now refugees in the Phoenix area.

The Sudanese young men stood out in the crowd. They were thin and very black. It was one of things that Santino had talked about in the movie: his blackness and appearance set him apart from everyone, even African Americans. (In the movie, there are several pronouncements on African Americans: even before leaving Sudan, Peter and Santino are advised to avoid blacks who wear baggy pants and do “all the bad things in America”).

The Sudanese men were like celebrities that night at the coffee shop. But they took the attention very well; they seemed almost to bask in it. And for a moment – seeing their big smiles, hearing their confident answers to questions, hearing of their eagerness for education and degrees – it was easy to forget the tragedies and difficulties they had been through, and continue to go through: the loss of their parents, the break-up of their tribal communities, the uncertain political situation back home, and their solitude in America.

II

I somehow had the mistaken notion that there were different versions of the movie; I thought that each version would focus on a different set of Sudanese refugees. This was why I attended a screening of the movie at the public library, just two days ago, in Rochester, Minnesota. It was the same movie, but in other ways the experience was different.

At the screening, I met Gabriel, a Sudanese refugee - yet another of the many "lost boys", to use the movie's term, in the United States. I thought that Gabriel – and perhaps others who would shortly be there – had been invited to meet and discuss with the audience, just as at the Tempe screening. But it wasn’t so. Gabriel was the only Sudanese refugee at the library that night. He had come with a notebook; he had come because the instructor of one of the classes he was taking at the local college had asked him to attend the screening. In a way, it was ironic: Gabriel would see in the movie what he knew very well; and even without seeing it he could probably have written just as vivid an account.

Gabriel too was lean and very black. He was dressed plainly in dark pants and a striped, full-sleeve shirt that he hadn’t tucked in; he wore white sneakers. And because he was shy and reserved, he seemed to be quietly carrying the grief of his past within him.

Gabriel hadn’t seen the movie but he knew some of the refugees in the movie; he had come to the US with them at the same time, just a week before Sept 11, in 2001. At a couple of points during the screening, he turned to tell me (I was seated next to him) of the people he recognized in the movie. Some of the scenes – such as the singing of Sudanese songs and slogans of liberation; the dances of the villagers; the reunion of the lost boys at a retreat in Washington a year after their arrival, a retreat that Gabriel had been unable to attend – some of these scenes would have been powerfully nostalgic and painful to him. And I felt it was just as well that he had an assignment to finish that night and could not attend the post-screening discussion: it might have been awkward for him; all the politeness and empathy around him might have made him very conscious.

Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra

After Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a wide-ranging work of non-fiction on the city of Mumbai, Vikram Chandra’s voluminous Sacred Games traverses the same terrain differently: the 900-page book, as the review in Outlook describes it, is “a vertiginous crime thriller in the style of a Hindi potboiler”; the book “has two heroes but its true star is the impossible and impossibly seductive city of Bombay.” See the full Outlook review of the book here, and Chandrahas’s review here.

My grandfather and my name

My name causes much frustration for those who have to type or print its full snake-like length; it elicits wry smiles from those who realize that even an attempt to say it right would be futile. My long cumbersome name which recalls popular and powerful deities might have been shorter had it not been for my grandfather’s insistence.

I last met my grandparents a year ago at their rented house in a residential alley of Perambur, in Chennai. I knew my grandpa wasn’t well, but that hadn’t prepared me enough: I was shocked to see him shriveled and bed-ridden, resting uncomfortably on a water bed against a stack of ten pillows, wincing at every movement, his skin wrinkled and gray. He called me to his side, took my hand, kissed it, and with respect, touched his forehead with it. I was overwhelmed by the sentimentality of the moment, by his unexpected show of reverence, and it was only with some sustained effort that I controlled my emotions.

My earliest memory of being with grandpa is at the Menambakkam airport where through a meshed grill he showed me great winged things that, twenty odd years later, still fascinate and terrify me in equal measure. I had accompanied him then on his morning walk, a part of his unshakeable daily routine. And after all these years, segments of his routine are what I remember most. Every night, soon after the news ended at nine, my grandfather would hang the yellow tote-bag at the gate for the milkman, remove his dentures, spread his mattress on the floor, place a torchlight by his side so he wouldn’t have to grope in the pitch darkness of early morning, and go to bed. As he slept, his fingers would move intermittently of their own accord: subconscious, still-persisting rhythms of his working days when he had typed, for a meager monthly income, hundreds of documents as a clerk for India Pistons.

The precision of his routine was equaled or surpassed only by the precision with which he dealt with financial matters. He was sometimes known to be cold and calculating when it came to monetary issues. And so when I handed him an envelope with some money from my earnings, my grandma, still at her witty and sardonic best, lightened the somber ambience: "Now that he’s sniffed dollars, there's nothing stopping him from prancing around despite his fractured leg."

I left that afternoon, wondering if my grandpa would get to his 90th birthday next January, or whether I’d be able to see him again. My grandpa did make it to his 90th birthday. He died on his birthday, on Jan 14 this year, also the day on which Pongal is celebrated. His memory will live on in many ways: in the minds of those who had been close to him; in framed photographs and albums; in the Brahmanical ceremonies organized by his sons, ceremonies that will time and again commemorate his passing away. The Jagannathan in my name (often confused as a middle name) is always referred to by my parents as grandpa’s special contribution; and it will be one way I shall remember him.

Odds and Ends

I have nothing substantial to post and this has been the case for a while now. There’s an article I am working on but that will take a while to finish. So, to keep things going, this will be a filler post consisting of some quotes and some links from here and there – odds and ends really, with no unifying theme.

1) Pankaj Mishra recently wrote an article in The Guardian that was lambasted in the blogging world. Salil Tripathi's very civil and measured response to Mishra's article can be found here; Mishra writes to Tripathi here; and Tripathi writes back again.

2) On to Naipaul, whose books and travel writing I can’t stop reading and who continues to intrigue me. I am currently reading A House for Mr. Biswas, undoubtedly one of his masterpieces. Naipaul traces in the book the life of Mohun Biswas – the character is based on his father – in the Trinidad of early and mid twentieth century.

In 1992, Naipaul gave a lecture at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank based in New York. In the opening paragraph, Naipaul is apologetic about the grand title of his lecture, "Our Universal Civilization".

"I've given this talk the title Our Universal Civilization. It is a rather big title, and I am a little embarrassed by it. I feel I should explain how it came about. I have no unifying theory of things. To me, situations and people are always specific, always of themselves. That is why one travels and writes: to find out. To work in the other way would be to know the answers before one knew the problems; that is a recognized way of working, I know, especially if one is a political or religious or racial missionary. But I would have found it hard."

Although he does not mention it directly, Naipaul is referring to western or modern civilization. The lecture is really a paean; and here are some sentences from Naipaul’s finishing paragraph:

“This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

For some heavy but not scholarly or measured criticism of Naipaul, see Meena Kandasamy’s Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate.

3) Some excellent blogs I’ve come across in the last month or so: Samanth Subramanium and Chandrahas Chaudhry.

Blogging, almost a year on

In July – July 21st to be exact – it’ll be a year since I started blogging. But since July will be a busy month and I don’t expect to post much, I’ve decided to go ahead and do the looking-back-in-retrospect thing right now, more than a month early. :)

I had been skeptical about blogs and blogging and it was only after some conversations with Brewtus (thanks very much to him) that I decided to start a blog myself. Almost a year on, I’ve come to realize that blogging has sustained my writing, or whatever little there is of it, in unexpected ways.

So here's a list of my favorite posts:

1. Phoenix, Arizona: First post - a dreamy sort of tone.

2. On alcove residences and Chaco Canyon: This is one of many posts that came out of my frequent road trips to northern Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

3. Empires of the Word, A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler: A casual review but I really enjoyed writing this, and the pleasure of reading this again and again hasn’t gone away either.

4. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature and Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi: Casual review again, along the same lines as the previous one.

And now for the next three – the three that I especially like. The ideas for all of them came from a short trip to southern Arizona, close to the Mexico border, in December 2005.

5. Chasing a Mirage
6. The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 1. On matters spiritual and temporal
7. The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 2. The Killing of Saeta

And finally,

8. The atrium and related thoughts: This post is too recent to pass a judgement on, but that’s fine.

Ahmadinejad's Letter

An interesting find: this is the letter that Iranian president Ahmadinejad wrote a few weeks ago to President Bush.

The atrium and related thoughts

The atrium of the Renaissance Resort Hotel in Orlando has an imposing presence. It is the central space of the hotel building; the hallways of the ten odd stories of the hotel face the atrium. White-painted metal columns rise from its sparkling floor to the mostly glass ceiling; they end in a series of crisscrossing beams. The glass ceiling allows the sunlight to cast a bright glow on the main space of the atrium, and the conditioned air gives no hint of the humidity outside. There are decorative palms, tall and short, throughout the atrium; there is a waterfall too at one end, and the pleasing sound of water splashing on rocks can be heard from far.

At the center of the atrium is a large birdhouse with glass windows along its sides so that the birds – exotic, with long beaks and unique feathers – incarcerated within can be viewed. The birds are perched on the thin, bare branches of a dramatic-looking tree; they are mostly still but flutter occasionally. Along the circumference of the domed top of the birdhouse are small statues of bearded men, conquistadors possibly, dressed elaborately and holding spears and weapons; the statues alternate with models of ships full of unfurled sails.

The birds, the palm trees, and the waterfall: there is an irony in this attempt to create the impression of a tropical setting. Hotels like the Renaissance Resort are part of entrepreneurial initiatives driven by theme parks and the convention industry of Central Florida; they are part of the effort to recast the landscape and subjugate it to achieve economic ends. But the landscape always manages to make a comeback for we are always enamored of it; we return to it again and again, though in a superficial manner, as in the atrium; we return to it once all conveniences have been established. All that is pristine is desirable but all that is pristine also has to be sanitized.

In the suburban communities of the Phoenix, it is not uncommon to see a saguaro – the tall cactus that in the popular imagination sums up the Arizona terrain – in the front yard of a home. But the solitary saguaro is merely symbolic. For in the ever expanding 26-city Phoenix metropolitan area, where a drive from one end to the other is nearly 100 miles long, where there is talk already of combining Phoenix with the smaller city of Tucson, 90 miles to the south, into one single megapolitan area; in this ever expanding region the desert is constantly being swallowed by new development, the earthmovers are always raking up saguaros, mesquites, palo verdes, and replacing them with smooth pavements and roads, turquoise swimming pools and spacious homes, which in turn spawn their own strip malls and shopping conveniences. And in the midst of all this, the desert plants make their ornamental appearance, along with lush green, heavily watered lawns and golf courses: as incongruous a sight as any.

This Summer on PBS

A Frontline four-part series on AIDS. The preview calls it "The most important scientific and political story of our time". With 70 million infected and 22 million already dead – these are staggering numbers – there can hardly be any doubt. The series (240 minutes in all) examines all aspects of the disease: political, scientific and human.

Unrelated to this, I also found on the Frontline website a documentary, Bolivia: On the Road with Evo, that tries to understand Bolivia’s new leader Evo Morales –the country's first indigenous president – and his left-leaning policies. The 24 minute film is part of Frontline World's Stories from a Small Planet series.

From Minneapolis to Fargo

Minnesota is known as the land of 10,000 lakes. Only today, as the plane I was in approached Minneapolis, did I actually believe it: the expanse below was wooded in parts and dotted, overwhelmingly, with lakes. It was a surprise for me, understandably, for in Phoenix lakes are either created by dams, or forcibly built in suburbs – complete with ducks, boats, and palm trees along the circumference – to maintain in a water-starved region the illusion of paradise.

On from Minneapolis to Fargo, on to the northern Great Plains region, to flatter- than-flat land apportioned, with some geometrical precision, into massive square tracts of intensively irrigated farms. And in the corner of each square, a home – the farm residence one presumes – well ensconced in a stand of trees.

But the northern Great Plains – they bring to my mind something else: the Plains Tribes, whose fierce warrior dances I had seen and enjoyed at Native American dance events that are better known as powwows.

Revisiting Midnight's Children

25 years on, Salman Rushdie reflects on his most enduring work Midnight's Children.

Granta 93: God's Own Countries

Granta is a quarterly magazine that publishes non-fiction and fiction from writers from all over the world. The latest issue is titled God’s Own Countries. Ian Jack, the editor of Granta writes in his introduction:

“For most of the twentieth century, and not only in the West, organized belief in the supernatural was held to be in decline. All of us know the story. Science, rationalism and materialism—usually personified by the Europeans Darwin and Lyell, Marx and Freud—had given religious belief such a bashing that its explanations of how the world came to be, how we came to be in it, how we should best live in it, and what would happen to us after our death—these explanations and the strictures that went with them became, quite simply, unbelievable and disagreeable. The idea of God as creator and custodian died, and many words in the old vocabulary were robbed of their potency, even their meaning: heaven, hell, salvation, sacrilege, blasphemy.

Or so the secularists thought, forgetting the great psychologist William James’s judgement that beliefs do not work because they are true, but true because they work. Today the godly, if not God, have bounced back. As I write, I can see them at work in today’s news...”

God's Own Countries attempts to understand the role religion plays in the world today. There are short articles – titled God and Me – by many well-known writers including Pankaj Mishra and Nadeem Aslam, a writer of Pakistani origin who now lives in England (his most recent novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, received very good reviews). Also, there’s an interview with Orhan Pamuk, one of my favorite writers.

The Tumacacori National Monument

Below is a photograph of the church that is now part of Tumacacori National Monument. The monument is 20 miles north of Nogales and the Arizona-Mexico border. The church was built in the late 1700s under the supervision of the Franciscan priests of the Spanish empire, and was never fully completed (the region was steadily entering a period of lawlessness at the time). But the root of the mission at Tumacacori goes back to the foundations that Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino (1645-1711) had laid earlier.

The Pima Indians did the actual construction, and something of their style would have surely made its way into the building of the church. The presence of the church in what was then the land of the Pima Indians brings to fore the theme of a revealed religion (specifically Islam or Christianity) ushering in new ideas, new ways of viewing things, but also attempting to erase centuries-old, perhaps millennia-old, earth religions and beliefs. The theme is a persistent one in history.

I visited the church last December; it made me think of the Spanish presence in southern Arizona, and spurred me on to research the history of the time. For more details on this, see posts 1 and 2.

The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 2. The Killing of Saeta

Some notes before you read on:

1. This article is a continuation my post last month The Spanish Among the Pimas: Part 1. On Matters Spiritual and Temporal

2. Both Part 1 and Part 2 deal with the Spanish period in northern Mexico (the Sonora province) and southern Arizona, in the late 1600s. Two important and primary references for both articles are: Kino’s Favores Celestiales (Historical Memoir of Pimeria Alta; translation by Herbert Bolton); and Manje’s work Luz de Tierra Incognita (Unknown Arizona and Sonora; translation by Harry Karns).

3. Part 2 is mostly about the events of one specific week: March 28-April 2 in 1695. It's interesting that I've posted this article in the same week of this year, exactly 311 years later. I did not arrange this coincidence. I realized this myself only recently.

4. The maps showing the region in the late 1600s are from Edward Spicer’s Cycles of Conquest, an excellent book that examines the different ways in which the tribes of northern Mexico and the American Southwest responded to and changed after European incursions. The scanned picture of Kino’s drawing of the killing of Saeta is from Kino’s Biography of Saeta (translated by Charles W Polzer; original Spanish text edited by Ernest J Burrus).

5. There is a prevalence of usages of the type “might have”, “would have”, “in all likelihood”, “most probably” in this article. This is because I have tried to construct things based on very meager facts stated in Kino and Manje’s works.

I

It might seem from Kino’s writings that the Pimas were a docile people, easily giving in to Christianity and the needs of the Spanish. And though this is partly true, there are indications, in some of Kino’s passages, of the dissent that seethed beneath the surface. The slow northward march of the Spanish into the Sonoran desert had dramatically transformed communities in its wake. The world of the Pimas was changing fast, and the suddenness of the change would have been traumatic for many.

As they began their conquest of the Pimas, the Spanish brought with them – for help and labor – Indians from the tribes to the south. Like pollen that get dispersed in unexpected places, Indians from various backgrounds were scattered around by the forces and upheavals of the Spanish conquest. A number of these Indians were Opatas who had not been on friendly terms with the Pimas before the advent of the Spanish. This unexpected juxtaposition of people traditionally hostile to one another brought its own tensions to the mission villages and towns of the time.

Francis Xavier was one such alien Indian among the Pimas. He was most likely a Seri Indian from Ures (not on the map; Ures is further south of the region shown). In the 1660s, around the time that Xavier might have been born, the Spanish had decimated a particularly resistant tribe of two to three hundred people near Ures. The orphans spared of this slaughter were distributed in the villages and towns of the region. Xavier might have even been one of these orphans; at the very least, he might have come to know of the calamities that people around him had been through. Somehow, Xavier picked his way through the difficulties of the time, became a Christian, learnt the Castilian language, retained knowledge of Indian ways, and made himself valuable to the very people who had thrown his lot into tumult.

Due to his skill in languages, Xavier was a much sought-after interpreter; his job took him to the frontier Pima villages of the north. From the experience of his travels and from his knowledge of Spanish and various Indian cultures – the Seri Indian culture that he came from, and the Pima Indian culture that he came to know during his work as an interpreter – Xavier would have developed a unique perspective. But nothing of his perspective is known; in Kino and Manje’s accounts, Xavier is mentioned just once or twice; like all other people not Spanish, he recedes into the background and lingers there as a servile presence.

During his travels, Xavier met and married a Pima girl named Lucia. While Xavier had lifted himself to a position of some importance, Lucia had just been through an immense tragedy. She was from Mututicachi, a village just northeast of Dolores. At one point Mututicachi had had nearly 200 Pimas. In the 1680s, there had been many thefts in the region, of mostly cattle and horses. Spanish understanding of the differences between the tribes of the region was poor. The Jocomes and the Apaches were responsible for these thefts (for many nomadic tribes of the time raiding was a means of sustenance) but the Pimas were blamed for it.

For punishment, the Spanish took all the Pimas of Mututicachi as captives – Lucia was one of them – and some of them were sent off to work in a mining town. Fifty people were beaten to death; many of them might have been Lucia’s relatives. In just a few years, a whole community had been uprooted and brought to the brink of annihilation. But at the end of it all, there was redemption of a sort: the Spanish realized their folly and the captives were released. Lucia then went to Dolores where Kino had his mission. In all likelihood, she found solace and comfort in Kino’s mission, and was baptized there; and Kino probably gave her the name Lucia. It was also in Dolores, sometime in the early 1690s, that Lucia married the interpreter Francis Xavier. The hope of beginning a new life might have helped her assuage the wounds of her past.

II

In 1695, Francis Xavier was in Caborca (west of Dolores). He was working as an interpreter for a young missionary, Saeta, who was in the process of establishing a mission.

Caborca in 1695 would have consisted of a hundred or so Pimas. Most of them lived in simple shelters that had matted roofs supported by wooden poles. Dirt roads connected Caborca with other villages, and messengers and servants constantly traveled these trails, carrying sacks of wheat or maize or cattle or other important trade items, and facilitating written exchanges between missionaries, soldiers and Spanish officials. As news spread that a mission was being established, more people began to move closer to Caborca to avail the temporal benefits – farms, cattle, better clothing – attendant to the presence of a mission. Saeta, the missionary, lived in a small adobe house that also had an altar for worship and other religious items. Outside the house, Saeta had begun a field of wheat and a small vegetable garden.

Not all of Xavier’s work would have involved interpreting. Servants of Saeta worked in the field, herded cattle, maintained the horses, and helped in renovating the only adobe house in the village.

On the morning of April 2, 1695 – it was the Saturday of the Easter weekend – Xavier would have been busy with some such work at the mission, when a band of Pimas, full of aggression, stormed into Caborca with war-like cries. Xavier might have seen them enter the adobe house and slay Saeta; he would have sensed that they would come after him as well. But so sudden and unexpected was the attack that he wouldn’t have had the time to escape or even think clearly. Xavier was killed – probably impaled with arrows – for he was an Indian not of Pima origin, and because he worked for the mission. The band of Pimas also killed other servants of the mission. In all five people died in Caborca that morning.

It is not known if Lucia was also at Caborca. If she was, she most likely saw her husband being killed. Yet again forces beyond her control had played their hand; yet again she found herself surrounded by gloom and tragedy.

III

The angry group that had burst upon the idyll of that morning was not from Caborca. The trouble had started five days earlier in the village of Tubutuma, northeast of Caborca. The Pimas of Tubutuma had felt particularly oppressed by the manner in which the few Opata Indians working at the mission had been treating them.

It is fair to state that the Indians who worked or were connected to a mission, or were servants of a missionary, had a certain amount of privilege. These Indians wore Spanish clothes – which would have had great prestige value – they could travel with the missionary to other villages and receive gifts; they had access to cattle and horses and to fields of wheat and corn; and they felt secure in the knowledge that the might of the much-feared Spanish army was always there to protect missions.

But the privilege also meant that it could be misused. At Tubutuma, there was an Opata servant at the mission named Antonio. He was known for being particularly harsh. His conduct rankled the Pimas all the more as he was an outsider and a condescending overseer of the village. On the Monday of the holy week of Easter in 1695 – five days before the incident in Caborca – Antonio furiously assaulted a Pima foreman on the farm of the mission. He kicked him with spurs in the ribs and the flanks and left the foreman half dead.

It is difficult to piece together exactly what happened at the time, but a crowd of shocked Pimas must have gathered to watch, resentment of Antonio increasing all the time. According to Kino, who got the story from others, the foreman shouted to the crowd: “Look my brothers; this Opata is killing me, protect me! Defend me!” This moved some of the watching Pimas into action: they fired arrows at Antonio and wounded him, and though he tried to escape on a horse they caught up with him and killed him. Two other Opata Indians in Tubutuma were also killed. Suddenly, the Pimas of Tubutuma who had been humiliated under the Spanish and the Opata Indians had found a violent expression to their suppressed rage: over the next few days in Tubutuma and neighboring villages adobe houses that served as churches were burned and looted, sheep were skinned, sacred vestments were profaned and more people killed.

It was this rage – the rage of a discontented people who had been subjugated by others in their own lands – that consumed Francisco Xavier, the Seri Indian interpreter from Ures.

IV

In that manic week of 1695, the Spanish could have lost many missionaries. But luckily none of them happened to be in the villages they were posted in. The only missionary, and indeed the only Spaniard, killed that week was the Sicilian missionary Saeta. Saeta, too, was unwittingly swept away by forces he must have only begun to fathom. He had started the mission in Caborca only in the later months of 1694 when Kino and other established missionaries had provided him with servants, cattle and other necessary items.

Both Kino and Manje have written in detail on Saeta’s death. In contrast, the other deaths are mentioned in a sentence or two. This is not a surprising thing: Saeta was Spanish missionary, and by writing mostly about him, Kino and Manje were writing of the concerns of their own group; Kino, in particular, was writing about a fellow missionary who, before his death, had been in a position Kino himself would have been in at the start of his mission in Dolores eight years ago in 1687.

The description of Saeta’s death is dramatic. The image that comes to mind is that of a fatally injured Saeta dressed in a long, formal missionary robe; the arrows that have pierced him – in Manje’s account there are 22 arrows – are still in place; blood is dripping from his wounds, and poison from the tips of the arrows is slowly taking its toll. He is kneeling in front of the makeshift altar in his adobe house. Firmly clasped in his hands is a beautiful cross, made of a special transparent and elastic material, a cross that Saeta had brought from Europe.

Since no one went close to the mission for days after the attack, the dead bodies rotted away. In the end, a Pima messenger Kino had sent ahead found the dead bodies and burned them in the Pima custom. The messenger also found the special cross that Saeta had held in his dying moments. Perhaps to save such a precious thing from being stolen, he hid the cross in the field of wheat that Saeta had begun a few months ago.

A beautiful cross hidden in a field of wheat: it was a chance occurrence, but there is much symbolism one can draw from this if one wishes to.

V

After Saeta’s death, Kino set about documenting what had happened and ultimately went on to write a biography of Saeta. He also made a drawing that depicted the killing of Saeta. The drawing was made on a map of the region. Caborca at the time was known by its full name La Concepcion de Caborca. The meandering black line shown in the map is the San Ignacio river (it should actually be the Magdalena river; there seems to be a discrepancy here) running into the sea. Indeed Caborca wasn’t too far away from the coast.

VI

The Pima rebellion did not last long. There was no united front; what had happened seemed only to have been a spontaneous, violent reaction of perhaps a hundred or so Pimas. Soon after the news of the rebellion spread, the villages were deserted for most of the Pimas, innocent and guilty, had fled to the hills fearing the Spanish response.

The Spanish reprisal was quick and brutal. Many innocent Pimas were killed in the hostilities that ensued. During their search for the perpetrators of the rebellion, the Spanish military aided by allies from Indian tribes, found a few Pimas who for some reason had been unable to flee to the hills. They interrogated these people, and killed a few here and there. In one case they found a woman, and took her as a prisoner. After questioning her, in Kino’s words “they catechized the woman, baptized her, and flogged her.” Forced conversion, and then the lash of a whip: a glimpse of the cruelties that went on.

The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 1. On matters spiritual and temporal

I

Cornonado’s expedition in 1540-1542 through what is now the American southwest had been fruitless for the Spanish. No wealth or riches had been found. But the expedition had made the Spanish aware of the numerous Indian tribes of the region. Over the next century or so, missionaries trickled to these places, and set about explaining to the "heathen" multitudes the "mysteries of the Holy Faith"–to quote the English translation of the commonly used Spanish term found in the written accounts of the time.

At the Arizona State University library, I found a copy of one such written account: a field diary that the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino had kept during the late seventeenth century. Kino had been in southern Arizona, which had then been the northern frontier of the Spanish empire in the New World. Though the diary is in Spanish, the neat, hand-written account, with blotches of ink here and there, gives a startling sense of intimacy to Kino’s labors.

Kino was born in Italy in 1645. He recovered from a serious illness in his youth and joined the Society of Jesus. He started his missionary work among the Pima Indians in 1687. His mission was in Dolores, just south of what is today the Arizona-Mexico border. For Kino, the Dolores mission was a base mission of sorts from which to explore other parts of the region and spread Christianity. And for 24 years, until his death in 1711, Kino was involved in a number of expeditions and traveled long distances.

Eusebio Kino’s task was not easy. To live in an arid land at the limits of the Spanish empire – the Rim of Christendom, as the historian Herbert Bolton called it – amongst a people very different from his own; to gently impress upon them that their earth religions, ways of thinking and beliefs had to be effaced; to soften and make palatable the condescension that lay beneath the proselytizing mission: all this required a special kind of zeal, diplomacy and pragmatism, and Eusebio Kino had these qualities in plenty.

II

The Pima Indians mostly lived north and northwest of the mission in Dolores; and there were some in Dolores as well. The term Pima is a broad one, and at the time it referred to hundreds or thousands of people belonging to related tribes scattered in different parts of the Sonoran desert. Today this region would include the northern part of the Sonora province of Mexico and much of southern Arizona.

Perhaps in the early stages of Spanish conquests, news that pale-skinned warriors mounted on strange beasts and robed men with crosses were slowly making their way northward might have reached the Pimas through trade routes, but in the late 1600s Spanish proximity was a very real thing: their influence could be seen in the mines and missions of Sonora, not too far from where the Pimas lived; and in Dolores and the small villages and towns west of it, the Spanish were already among the Pimas.

In the December of 1687, Kino held the Holy Week of Christmas with other missionaries. His audience consisted more than a hundred Pimas, forty of them recently baptized children. The children were dressed richly with ornaments and jewels, “like new Christians” – to borrow a Kino phrase – by Spanish ladies of a nearby mining town. Earlier, Kino had sent Indian messengers far and wide, inviting the chiefs of villages to attend, and see for themselves the new faith that had come to their lands.

Surely for the Indians attending Christmas celebrations for the first time, listening to strange scriptures, watching children wearing jewels and ornaments, there must have been a sense of awe. Over the next few years, there might have been more such celebrations with many attendees from various places, for Kino knew the effect such displays would have. And sure enough, in 1690 the chiefs of some villages to the north invited Kino to instruct them in the ways of the new faith.

III

Kino’s visits to Pima villages not yet under complete Spanish control were occasions of great festivities. The written accounts of these visits are so similar that it is easy to piece together a single narrative that summarizes all of them.

The Indians receive Kino and his entourage – an entourage of pack animals, visiting missionaries, Spanish soldiers and Indian servants from other villages, slowly progressing through the dry, mountainous desert landscape, raking up a cloud of dust – with songs and dances, crosses and arches made out the branches of mesquite and oaks. They point out to Kino the walled adobe house they have built to receive a priest who can instruct then (Pimas then lived in huts, and adobe houses were rare; the skills had to be learnt). The adobe house has been swept clean; roads in the village have been swept clean. Children are brought out to be baptized and are given new names; and Spanish soldiers become godfathers. The sick and dying are baptized (Kino hardly mentions epidemics that must have ravaged the Pimas and considerably and reduced their numbers). A head of cattle is butchered and there is a feast. Kino continues his instruction. The Pimas continue to sing, dance and provide food; they are servile, eager to please and convert, and readily pledge their allegiance to the Spanish king.

IV

But it wasn’t only the faith that attracted the Indians; there were other more important things at work as well. The Spanish had brought with them an agricultural package that had the potential to transform the way the Indians lived. The Pimas had for long been hunter-gatherers and a nomadic people. Through trade routes that linked to the Mexican and Central American civilizations, they had learned and perfected the art of cultivating corn, squash and beans in desert landscapes. And yet these crops were never enough to ensure a perennial supply. They might have made some tribes partially sedentary, but food production was still inadequate; and the absence of domesticated animals meant that hunting and gathering still had to go on.

The Spanish introduced wheat and cattle that ensured a constant food supply; they also brought horses that provided great mobility. Such innocuous-seeming things as crops and domesticated animals profoundly transforming communities! It is not easy to imagine this today when almost all of the products of the world are available everywhere to an extent that they are taken for granted. But in the late 17th century, preaching at a remote outpost of the Spanish empire, Kino, like many other missionaries, was certainly well aware of changes he was bringing about. He writes in many of his reports of two distinct things: spiritual matters, matters to do with conversions, baptizing and explaining the religion; and temporal matters, matters to do with growing of crops and finding land fertile enough to do so, keeping and herding cattle, and making new buildings.

To the Indians, the temporal would have been inextricably linked with the spiritual. To avail the benefits of the temporal they would gladly accept the spiritual. And this abstract, figurative notion would have become very literal during some of Kino’s visits: for surely an Indian would have kneeled in veneration in front of the missionary, and Kino might have motioned to one of his servants to hand over gifts that included seeds for cultivation and cattle to raise and herd.

V

Next post on the topic:
The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 2. The Killing of Saeta

Notes:

1. Primary References: Kino’s expeditions are well recorded, by himself and Juan Mateo Manje, a Spanish captain who often traveled with Kino. Kino went on to write Favores Celestiales (Historical Memoir of Pimeria Alta; translation by Herbert Bolton). The work is difficult to read and rarely breaks out its monotone religiosity. Manje’s work Luz de Tierra Incognita (Unknown Arizona and Sonora; translation by Harry Karns) is better in this respect. Manje too was God-fearing, but he had an eye for detail, and a wish to discover things.

2. Secondary References: There are a number of interpretive secondary references. Father Kino in Arizona, a work of the Arizona Historical Foundation is one such work. The historian Herbert Bolton , who brought Father Kino’s work to light through his translations, has a number of books on the topic (see Rim of Christendom and Padre on Horseback).

Excerpt from an unfinished story

It was a day in January. I was on the terrace with Virang scouting the skies, when I spotted a bright red kite severed in some duel of threads heading our way. It was dipping fast, and went between the building we were in and the one next to us; it dipped further and went beyond, but only just beyond.

Later, from the bedroom window of my parents’ first-floor apartment, I saw the kite wedged in the roof of a patchworked hut. The hut was part of the slum that sprawled right next to the flats we lived in. Our window framed the disconcerting heart of the slum. The view was one of disorder and squalor: cramped, hastily built huts, somehow erected using long sticks, rags, sackcloth, cardboard, and tarpaulin. The abjectness of it all was brought sharply into focus by the well-defined colors and box-like symmetry of the 3-story flats that seemed to victoriously overlook the slum.

Miraculously, the kite stayed wedged, and interested no one. After a few months, it was still there – like other kites trapped in trees and electric lines – and though it was torn and crumpled, I could easily pick it out from the window owing to its bright color.

I would come to know their names only later, but since they lived in that low hut marked by the presence of the kite, I felt I had always known them. I saw Valli almost every day, thin and frail until her belly began to swell oddly. I saw Murugan in his ubiquitous colored dhoti and nothing else, his skin dark as chocolate, hair neatly curled on his chest, squatting outside the hut. Afternoons, when he came back from work, he used a rusted can to splash water over himself. Valli sometimes brought out a blackened stove, and a few utensils that she cleaned using the coir of coconut.

The slum was full of quarrels. Valli and Murugan quarreled too. And I wasn’t sure if Murugan was abusing Valli physically, but in some of these verbal fights – which, because of their intensities and overlapping voices, remained mostly unintelligible – I could sense that something physical was involved, for Valli’s wails would stop rather suddenly and start afresh, louder, fiercer than before. In these discontinuities, I thought I heard vague noises that sounded like slaps – sharp, I imagined, when the open palm landed on bare skin, muffled otherwise. Finally, Murugan would come out with a blank stare that conveyed nothing of what had gone on while Valli would stay inside; her wails ebbed until they were lost the din of the slum.

Chasing a Mirage

I

The Coronado National Memorial commemorates the first organized European exploration of the American Southwest. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a 16th century conquistador, led the exploration. I visited the memorial just two days before Christmas last year. The memorial is in southeastern Arizona along the U.S-Mexico border, at the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains.

The guide at the visitor's center, a man in his early sixties, told us the memorial was free. He had a gray beard and his eyes had a certain intensity. He seemed more interested in the wildlife of the memorial than in Coronado. And that is indeed the other main – and perhaps more relevant – purpose of the memorial: to preserve the wildlife and the oak woodlands of the Huachuca mountains. At the back of the visitor's center was a large glass window, through which the guide showed us birds – hermit thrushes, acorn woodpeckers, Mexican jays – in the trees just outside. “I’ve seen nearly forty species of birds this morning,” he said proudly and with awe.

From the visitor's center a 2-mile road (mostly unpaved) leads to the foot of Coronado Peak. It was desolate that afternoon, and the views of the mountain ranges of Mexico and southern Arizona were excellent. Coronado’s expedition might have passed someplace close, perhaps within a ten or twenty mile radius of where I stood.

The only other car parked in the lot was that of the Border Patrol. With Mexico so close, its presence shouldn’t have been unexpected, yet I found it unsettling. All around me was the inhospitable landscape of low desert bush and oak trees. It is a landscape that hundreds of Mexicans, Central and South Americans attempt to overcome, hoping for a piece of the American dream. Many of them succumb to the difficulties of the journey; the desert is specked with the death of many of these migrants.

II

A lure of a different kind had been at work in the 16th century, during Coronado’s time. In the decades after Columbus’s landing, conquistadors from Spain were possessed of a frenzy that would unravel much in the New World. A lot of this frenzy had to do with the ease with which Cortez and Pizarro brought down rich, magnificent empires of the region – the Aztec and the Inca. Suddenly, there was considerable wealth to plunder, and other conquistadors dreamed of discovering their own rich cities, their own Tenochtitlan and Peru, and claiming the spoils for themselves and Spain. In the excitement and delirium of those years, every distorted tale of an unfound empire with unimaginable riches would have seemed legitimate.

The 1530s seems to have been a decade rife with rumors. The most famous of them of was that of El Dorado. The quest for El Dorado would occupy explorers for two more centuries. VS Naipaul in his short essay Columbus and Crusoe wrote: “And even in the violated New World, the Spaniards themselves remained subject to the fantasy. The quest for El Dorado became like a recapitulation of the New World adventure, a wish to have it all over again; more men and money were expended on this in twenty expeditions than on the conquest of Mexico, Peru and New Granada.”

Another, less glamorous rumor was afoot around the same time. This had to do with seven cities of gold located far north of the lands that the Spaniards had conquered in Mexico. The legend of the seven cities of gold was an older one; it came out of an Old World conflict, when the Muslims (the Moors) in the 11th century managed to conquer Merida in Spain. It was said that seven bishops had escaped this conquest and in a far-away place, each bishop had set up his own city of gold.

The legend found its way to the New World; it seemed to some Spaniards that through their transatlantic journeys and new findings they had come to that far-away place. The reports from some explorers seemed to substantiate notions that these cities existed to the north of Mexico, in what is today the southwestern United States. The reports spoke of “large cities, with streets lined with goldsmith shops, houses of many stories, and doorways studded with emerald and turquoise!”

An expedition of roughly 350 Spanish soldiers, 4 Franciscan priests, 1100 Indians and 1500 heads of livestock was organized. Coronado, who was then a governor of a province in Mexico, led the expedition. The journey started Compostela, a coastal town in the west of Mexico and traveled hundreds of miles north in two years (1540-1542): through Arizona, New Mexico, and eastern Kansas before returning to Mexico. Perhaps from what they had heard, Corondo and his Spanish expedition might have expected a land dusted, specked and studded with gold. Instead they found desert villages of the Pueblo people with flat adobe dwellings, large storehouses of corn and beans, a beautiful but stark landscape, and the impassable Grand Canyon that sprang upon them from nowhere.

III

At the visitor’s center of the Coronado memorial there is a short ten-minute video, a sort of documentary on the expedition. It shows Coronado and other bearded conquistadors on their horses. (The horse can go unnoticed today but when it made its appearance with the arrival of the Spanish in the New World, it had a telling role to play in conquests.) The video also shows the disappointment of the conquistadors when, on reaching a village of Pueblo Indians, they realize there are no cities of gold, and that their arduous journey through the desert is probably a fruitless one. The actors in the video simulating disappointment with their grave expressions only manage unwittingly to caricature the conquistadors. And since beneath all the talk of endurance and valor is just the avaricious core, the feeling of tragedy comes across as comic.

A day with Michael Mazgaonkar

I

Michael Mazgaonkar and his wife Swati work in the villages and hamlets of a district in Gujarat that is close to the Maharashstra border. They work with the tribal communities in the area on many issues: development of women’s co-operatives, bringing electricity to the villages, land rights of tribes, bunding of fields to prevent soil erosion, and environmental problems.

Michael toured the US late last year; he visited different US-based chapters of the Association of India’s Development (AID), an organization conceived in the US more than a decade ago, and that supports grassroots activists and volunteers like Michael and Swati and other development projects in rural India.

Michael was at the Tempe chapter of AID in November. His talk was on a Wednesday evening. I was to have lunch that Wednesday and show him around the Arizona State University campus.

II

I went to pick Michael up at noon at the AID volunteer’s apartment where he was temporarily put up. He was tall man, dark-complexioned, probably in his early forties, balding and gray-haired. He had a ready, disarming smile that suffused his face with a sort of benevolence.

I suggested Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant close to the university, for lunch. I thought he might interestd in tasting injera, Ethiopian “bread”, made from teff, a grain that had first been cultivated in Ethiopia, in the unique climate and setting of its highlands. Michael liked the ambience of the restaurant – dark colored walls, African masks – and took particular note of the woodwork on the backless low stool used for seating. “This is very well done,” he said. And when food was served to us in a large circular plate, a plate clearly meant for a communal meal, he recalled a dinner he had had in Palestine with Bedouins. That way, in bits and pieces, I learnt a little where had traveled: the Middle East; North or South Dakota to meet the Lakota tribe; and Europe, which he referred to once in a while.

The particular village in Gujarat where Michael and Swati live is called Juna Mozda. I had read on a website that Michael and Swati had sold greeting cards there for a living while simultaneously helping the tribals with their various problems.

“The market for greeting cards is very competitive,” he said. “You have to keep changing designs.” And yet they had done that for a long time, for a decade or so, upto 1999.

I asked him when he had decided to become involved in people’s issues.

“There wasn’t just a day or a moment when I made the decision,” he said. “It was slow process that happened over time. It has to be slow.”

I wanted to know more about his background, so I could try to understand where the motivation for his work might have stemmed from. Had his parents been involved in social work?

“My parents were part of Gandhian movements,” he said. I thought he wasn’t very forthcoming. It was understandable – I had only just met him.

We then talked about the tribals in and around the villages that he worked in.

“There were hunter-gatherers fifty, sixty years ago. There was a significant forest cover then. There still are forests now, but not as many,” he said.

“Has the transition from being hunter-gatherers to settling down as farmers been traumatic?”

“It might have been, but they are quite settled now to a agrarian lifestyle. But they have lost quite a bit in nutrition. Their diet then used to consist of a lot of meat. Now they eat mostly vegetables. They used to eat rabbits, and there was the occasional deer hunt.”

“What language do they speak?”

“It’s a mixture of the different languages of the region. But they also have words of the forest.” So the memory of the forests was probably still there in their oral traditions. Their religion too, he said, couldn’t be categorized under Hinduism; but nowadays, the influence of the BJP and the RSS could not be denied. The tone of this last remark seemed to indicate his disapproval for the politics of Hindutva.

I asked him whether he had felt some resistance from the villagers as Michael came from an essentially urban background: he had grown up in Bombay and had later done his engineering degree in Baroda. I thought he wasn’t comfortable with the question; his discomfort was essentially a defense of the villagers. He said it took time to win trust, and even now the villagers sometimes “checked”, but that was fine; there was nothing wrong in that.


III

After lunch, I offered him to walk him through the ASU campus. It was a partly cloudy day but warm. Michael admitted to feeling a bit disoriented – as part of his itinerary he had already been to a number of other cities in the US. And there were many more cities more to go.

I have an interest in trees and plants and eagerly pointed out to him those that were native to Arizona. I told him how ill-suited the non-native ones were. The many palm trees that adorned streets and walkways of the campus seemed to be native but actually weren’t, I said. They upset the water table in an already arid, water-starved region. He agreed that non-native vegetation was a menace, was particularly severe on eucalyptus trees: “Nothing grows under the eucalyptus tree. It makes the soil acidic. We’ve cut eucalyptus trees in Mozda.”

But he had a keener eye for other things: he was very interested in all the construction going on around the campus; he lingered next to a half finished building with its innards on display – “So, this is how they do it,” he said, almost to himself. He was also interested in an antenna on the roof of one of the buildings, and wondered what its purpose was, for it didn’t look to him like the antennas he knew. On our way back to the apartment we passed by the APS (Arizona Public Service) plant. He noticed the many solar panels, some large and some small. He said he knew what the small ones were for – he had used them back in Gujarat – and was curious about the function of the larger ones.

IV

At the presentation there was an audience of about ten – mostly members and volunteers of AID. It might have been disappointing for a speaker who had come from far, but Michael was relaxed.

(He was in the same casual attire I had seen him in earlier in the day. I had thought then that his trousers were corduroy but when I saw them again now, I realized I was wrong. The trousers had a peculiar nap, a sort of furry nap. I wondered if they might have been made of khadi, the furriness a sign perhaps that the fabric was crumbling now after much use. Michael would have received Gandhian ideas even as a child, from his parents, so khadi wouldn’t have been surprising. I wondered, further, if his heritage was that of the merchant class not unlike what Gandhi's family and ancestors had been part of. For during lunch he had mentioned – with a hint of reverence, not just matter-of-factly – of how Gujratis had controlled much of the pepper trade first millennium and the much of the second, and how they had traveled extensively: to Beijing, Constantinople and East Africa. Many had even settled in these places.)

In his presentation, Michael talked of the work he had done with Swati in the villages for the last decade or so. There was a lot of engineering involved: bunding of the fields; designing and assembling a windmill with the help of some villagers (these villagers, whom Michael called colleagues, were actively learning skills, and not just a compliant background presence); making torches for farmers that last longer the commonly used kisan torch; a pedal-power project for generating electricity (at a school, 20 students pedaled for 5 minutes each, and they had electricity for four or five hours). His curiosity about the construction on the ASU campus, the antenna, the solar panels were now very clear and understandable: Michael loved working with and creating new devices; and that love of his was coupled with a social and environmental cause.

Most of the things he presented had an understated – that was Michael’s style – yet positive ring to them: small innovations, step-by-step improvements. The last part of his talk was on environmental pollution. It was stark, and hard not to feel strongly about. The Golden Corridor is a strip that stretches north-south in Gujarat; it is a region known for its good infrastructure, and therefore has many factories and plants – notable among them are Essar, Reliance, IPCL. The wastewater effluents and hazardous materials dumped by the companies, small and big, has not been brought under control and have continued; these dumps have now contaminated the groundwater. Drinking water in several places has tested positive for carcinogens. Michael showed photographs of wastewater flowing out of pipes; it was obvious, he said, from the strange, unnatural color of the water that it was bad, and yet the regulations were not in place. There was more: a photograph of a well used by a small school that had water with a reddish tinge. And in some houses, when water from taps inside was exposed to the sun, it turned red or some other color, clearly indicating the presence of chemicals sensitive to the sun.

These facts brought out strong reactions in the audience. Someone asked: Are the people there not fighting this? They have been fighting, Michael answered, for a long time since the 60s and 70s when the industries were set up, and perhaps now they are tired for nothing has been done. Can’t something be done that is independent of the government, at least on a small scale, something like the windmill and pedal-power projects that Michael, Swati and their colleagues had successfully engineered? Michael said they had focused on small cases, the school for instance (whose contaminated well he had shown in a slide); they had protested until the clean water was made available. Had nothing been done by the government officials, they had been planning on doing something themselves.

Despite the anger and sense of helplessness that ran strong in the audience – all of us so used to clean drinking water and basic amenities – Michael was composed; there wasn’t a hint of dogma or idealism in what he was presenting; they were collected facts, clear and incriminating, shocking but not the least bit sensational. He seemed well aware of ground realities, and, even in this case, was content to take the problem step by step: collect evidence and samples from different rivers and water sources and report them. And he wasn’t cynical either: for he was continuing with what he had started, and only hope could have driven him.

I found it interesting that the activism in Michael hadn’t possessed him. Others I had met, like Reetu Sogani who works in the villages of Uttaranchal, were possessed of idealism and righteousness. Or possessed of a fatalistic view, like my uncle who promotes organic farming and environmental movements in South India but who sees no sustainable solutions in the long run. Michael’s activism seems more measured, as if he has thought everything through. I was reminded of his comment earlier during the day that his involvement hadn’t happened suddenly, and his confident assertion that the process has to be slow.

Later that evening, over dinner with AID volunteers, Michael loosened a bit; he told us a joke he had heard about a development consultant from the West and an African shepherd; the joke was a sly stab at the ambiguous nature of development today. We asked him: what did he do during his free time? He took walks in the forests around the village, and sometimes bathed for hours in the river. And with that remark of his, I got the impression that Michael was able to extricate himself from his work and lead a full personal life; or, even better, he had turned work into a kind of idyll, to be enjoyed.

V

To learn more of Michael and Swati’s work, see mozda.net

My favorite books this year

It was a good year of reading for me. Usually I start a book and then finish it before starting another, but this year I tried reading many books at the same time. This has worked better for me - I read a lot more though I leave more books unfinished.

Some notable books:

1. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, by Pankaj Mishra: A memoir; also a study of Buddhism and its relevance today.

2. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk: Unrelated to this book, Pamuk is now on trial in Turkey for having made the following statement: “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”. He can be imprisoned for as long as 3 years for his statement. Here is a link where Pamuk discusses his trial.

3. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler: I wrote about this book earlier, in August. Such detail and erudition in Ostler's work - he knows so much of languages and through languages, cultures and histories!

4. VS Naipaul’s Travel Books: From October on, I’ve been doing little else other than reading non-fiction work by Naipaul. I started with some of his essays from The Writer and the World. The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro - about his trip to the Ivory Coast; this is not about a jaunt into swamplands as the title might suggest - was a good piece. And then I read two of his three books on India: India, A Million Mutinies Now and India, A Wounded Civilization. Currently, I am reading A Turn in the South (on Naipaul’s travels in the southern states of the US) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Amongst the Converted Peoples (on his travels in Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia). Here is a link to my post on Beyond Belief this month.

Jared Diamond at Arizona State University

Jared Diamond, author of Guns Germs and Steel, is coming to campus on Feb 2, 2006. I am pretty excited. The lecture will be related to his most recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed. I haven’t read the book yet, but hopefully can read some of it before his talk.

Beyond Belief, by VS Naipaul, and Some Thoughts on Revealed Religions and Earth Religions

I

In the mid 1990s, V.S.Naipaul revisited countries – Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia – he had been to in the late seventies to follow up on his earlier work Among the Believers. The book that emerged from his travels, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, is a sequel of sorts. It has received much criticism.

The reason for the criticism becomes clear when one reads the prologue: in short, sharp sentences Naipaul summarizes his thoughts on countries whose major religion is Islam but whose people are not Arabic. “Islam in its origins is an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert.” “A convert’s worldview alters; his holy places are Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story.” Consequently, “the disturbance for societies is immense”, “people develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism.”

These sweeping pronouncements apart, Beyond Belief is a book of stories. It is Naipaul’s approach to travel writing: meet people, talk at length with them, understand their backgrounds and their particular experiences and create a narrative out of them. It is an immensely effective technique; the writer recedes into the background and the stories stand for themselves.

But Naipaul can be severe on Islam, as he is in the prologue and other places in the book. How does he arrive at his analysis? Naipaul calls Islam and Christianity as “revealed religions”, religions that came into being through prophets who revealed the word of God. In a sense Buddhism, and a number of other religions – Jainism, Sikhism – can be classified the same way though they differ significantly from Islam and Christianity. The revealed religions, in many places of the world, have supplanted the “earth religions”, religions that believe in ancestral spirits, “cults of rulers and local deities”, involve the animals, birds and insects of the region in which they are practiced; religions that are intimately connected to, and worship the sacredness of topical landmarks – an imposing mountain, a river that sustains life, a tree or a plant that yields food and utilities.

“The crossover from the classical world to Christianity is now history. It is not easy, reading the texts, imaginatively to enter the long disputes and anguishes of that crossover. But in some of the cultures described in this book the crossover to Islam – and sometimes to Christianity – is still going on. It is the extra drama in the background, like a cultural big bang, a steady grinding down of the old world.”

Such summaries of his thoughts, as these finishing sentences of the prologue, are always there in Naipaul’s writings. His prose is known to be clear and brilliant. Later, in a chapter on Indonesia, Naipaul writes: “The overthrow of the old religions – religions linked to the earth and animals and deities of particular place or tribe – by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. Even when there are texts, as with the ancient Roman-Christian world, the changeover is hard to follow. There are only indications.”

Naipaul seems to have feeling for the old beliefs and earth religions, and animus for the “arrogance” and proselytizing fervor of revealed religions. He says as much in an interview with Farrukh Dhondhy:

“I had a great interest - an ignorant interest, I should say as well - in African art. And through that I have a feeling for the religions of the earth, if you can call or classify African religions as that. They're so mysterious, and really to me quite wonderful. The missionary who wants to convert them all to a revealed religion is arrogant and destructive. I'm interested in this ancient thing from the earth. Religious Africa. If one reads Virgil, there is a lot of mystery about Rome, the founding of Rome, Roman religion, its antiquity. And there is the same thing of course in this culture, African culture, the dark continent. They come from very far back. They are very mysterious things, I find these things wonderful. That was my initial interest in Africa, a reason for going there.”

In Naipaul’s view, the revealed religions – Christianity and Islam, principally – are more attractive because of their larger philosophical, humanitarian and social concerns that some of the old beliefs do not offer: “It can be seen that the earth religions are limited offering everything to the gods and very little to men. If these religions can be attractive it is principally for modern aesthetic reasons; and even so, it is impossible to imagine a life completely within them. The ideas of the revealed religions are larger, more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world.”

And in an interview with the Indian magazine, Outlook, he said: “The two great revealed religions, Islam and Christianity, have altered the world forever, and we all, whatever our faith, walk in their light. Over and above their theology, these religions gave the world social ideas – brotherhood, charity, the feeling of man for man – which we now all take for granted. They are the basis of our political ideas and our ideas of morality. Those ideas didn’t exist before. It may be that these two revealed religions have done their work and have little more to offer.”

II

Flagstaff is a small town in northern Arizona, eighty miles south of the Grand Canyon. It lies at the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, a range of high mountains. The tallest of these peaks, Mount Humphrey, is also the tallest point in Arizona at 12,633 feet. I tried to scale the peak with a friend this summer. We were unsuccessful. There was too much snow, and for most of the time we were lost amongst the firs and aspens of the slopes.

In those summer months, I came to know of a dispute surrounding the peaks. A ski resort development project was being planned but there were protests from twelve Native American tribes. The matter is still in court. The tribes hold the peaks sacred – though the peaks are not in any reservation – and consider any development activities as a violation of a religious place. And perhaps by hiking through the slopes of Mount Humphrey, by treating it as a recreational commodity, I too had defiled it in some way.

Sacredness of the earth, of a particular natural landmark; that a natural landmark could be pristine, undisturbed and yet, just by virtue of its imposing presence, be a place of worship, like a temple or a mosque or a church: such a belief can only come through a long association – for centuries or millennia – with the land and a spiritual dependence on it.

It was precisely this connection with the land that Naipaul missed, though not consciously, during the eighteen years of his life growing up in Trinidad. Naipaul’s ancestors were Brahmins of north India who had come in the eighteenth century as indentured laborers for work in the plantation colonies of Trinidad. Their sacred places were in India. In the Trinidad of his childhood, Naipaul felt “an incompleteness, an emptiness” for “the real world existed somewhere else”.

In Naipaul’s analysis, the New World is full of people – Europeans, former slaves from Africa, small Asian communities – whose sacred lands lie elsewhere. And from this idea, and from the experience all his travels, he arrives at the following abstract thought: “Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness – which is more than the idea of 'environment'– that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil.”

The Native Americans to whom the lands of Trinidad and the Caribbean had been sacred had been destroyed in the years after the arrival of Columbus. Naipaul grew up in a town called Chaguanas, named after an extinct tribe. Naipaul has considerable feeling for the tribe; in his Nobel speech, Naipaul said: “The people who had been dispossessed would have had their own kind of agriculture, their own calendar, their own codes, their own sacred sites. They would have understood the Orinoco-fed currents in the Gulf of Paria. Now all their skills and everything else about them had been obliterated.” In an interview with Tarun Tejpal he said: “I also knew even when I was a child in school that the land on which we were living, was the land on which 200 years before aboriginal people had lived and then been wiped out. They don’t exist. Not a single one of them. It was a terrible thing to understand, to come to terms with.”

Notes from San Francisco

I

I was in New York this summer. I landed at the JFK airport late in the evening, and was immediately disoriented. It was a hot and humid evening. A fog had descended over the city; planes vanished within seconds into a gray shroud. In Manhattan, visibility was limited to a block or two and the tops of skyscrapers weren’t visible. To add to the gloom, I suffered a bad bout of hemorrhoids right after I got off the plane. It took me more than a hour to make my way from the airport to my hostel in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and the city seemed depressing: subway commuters with tired, hollow expressions, the ominous emptiness of some stations and the dereliction of some neighborhoods. There was some cheer, though, in the excited conversations in different languages I heard along the way. They spoke of an alive, multicultural New York, of the hope that the famous city provided to many.

I felt better the next morning, and was able to take in details with greater neutrality, to enjoy them as a visitor would enjoy a new setting: dogs straining on leashes; shopkeepers out with the hose, cleaning the immediate area outside their stores; the bright mustard yellow of cabs; black plastic bags of trash piled up on the pavement; trucks parked awkwardly, congested traffic and frayed tempers; stalls selling hot dogs, bagels, gyros and kebabs; the subterranean rumble and rat-a-tat of trains beneath the roads; smoke or steam escaping the manholes and grates as if the city sat upon a cauldron.

II

San Francisco last week reminded me of my first evening in New York. It was dark when I arrived. The downtown streets and the tall buildings brought back the same memories, the feeling of being in a narrow space, of being hemmed in. I was very conscious of my presence, worried that the map in my hand and suitcase that I rolled along would attract attention, or that one of the many homeless – some crouched in dark corners, silent; others vocal in their plea for change, with cups in their hands– would do more than just be passive in their requests. I was trying to not to look at them, to avoid the vacuity or helplessness or rage or desperation I knew I would see in their eyes. I needn’t have worried; I had a different kind of encounter.

A very well dressed man – light gray suit and tie – came up to me. He was black, probably in his forties and said he was from someplace close to Los Angeles. “Do you speak English?” he asked, and when I nodded he told me his story. Outside San Francisco, he had been mugged at gunpoint and everything had been taken from him. He had his car parked somewhere, had left his family in the car and needed $8.73 for gas; he needed the money soon, or his car would be towed.

“No one I’ve talked to has helped me,” he said. “If you help me, and give me your business card, I’ll send you double the amount. Or I’ll treat you and your wife for lunch.”

He spoke well. If I had just seen him from a distance and not talked to him, I might have thought him to be a local politician, out on a vote-garnering trip on the streets. The story he told me was an echo of what I had heard in the past, in other places; the novelty was in the assumption that I had a wife and in the offer for lunch. The no-gas-need-some-money story, even the stranded-family detail, is somehow the most commonly used story; perhaps it is known to be successful. But the story in this case came from a man whose suit and cell phone and smooth way of talking seemed to lend an authenticity to his claim. “I am no drunkard,” he said and seemed to thrust the cell phone in my face. I was looking at his fingers, to see if they were clean or grimy; I was looking for a hint of impoverishment, of abjectness beneath the convincing externals he was presenting to me.

I muttered something about not being able to give him any money and started to walk away. He had an expression of disbelief and hurt that remained with me for that night. I assuaged the unpleasantness in me with the thought that a story of the sort he had given me could not have been true; and that if he was the person he said he was – well off enough to be clothed that way – he might have been able to help himself easily.

III

That night, I met Jim, one of my roommates at the hostel I was staying in. He was a thin man, with long hair, stubbled jaw and a gentle demeanor. He was returning from Mexico, from a business trip, and was on his way back to Minneapolis. He said he was traveling a lot these days, that he had spent quite some time in the past with his family and raising children, and now he wanted to be free and youthful again. “Like you,” he said smiling.

Jim’s background was in psychiatry. He said he had a lot of experience with convicts, addicts, and homeless people. When I said I had always been in schools and universities, he joked: “I am the opposite. I’ve never been in an academic setting; I’ve always dealt with the real world.” There was no rancor or regret in this comment; I felt there might have been a sense of achievement. I told him of the man who had requested money from me that evening, and my general discomfort on the issue. “They know how you’ll feel,” he said, “and that’s the target. That’s how they play themselves into your mind. It’s pathetic.”

Jim then told me about Steve, the other person who was sharing the room with us. He said that Steve talked a lot in his sleep and that might disturb me at night. He had talked to Steve and from what he had gathered, Steve was on medication of some sort, and had had brain damage as a child. I wondered if Jim had deduced all this information indirectly, given his background in psychiatry, and whether he was analyzing me as well. But Jim left the next day and I didn’t get to talk to him again.

It was a typical hostel experience: people constantly on the move; their personalities and features only momentary impressions; different roommates from one day to the next – two Australians in my case: one a burly, cheerful man who always asked me what the time was, and his friend, a grave, unsmiling man. And yet, despite the faint imprints that people left and the feeling of flux and inconstancy, the hostel, more than a hotel, has a communal feel. In a hotel, one can feel quite solitary.

IV

I went the next day to see Muir Woods, where one of the last stands of redwood trees is preserved. Redwood trees had always fascinated me, and my interest dated back to the days when I had seen in my high school geography textbook a picture of a tunnel through a tree and a car riding through this tunnel. A roadway through the trunk of a tree! The redwood trees at Muir Woods are quite big but perhaps the bigger trees – thirty feet in diameter and 250-300 feet tall – are at Sequoia National Park. I hope to see them some day.

Three years ago, I wrote an unfinished – and forgettable – story and a small part of it had to with my fascination for redwood trees. The story was set in a fictional forest or wilderness where all the different landscapes of the world – plains, dense jungles, deserts, valleys and mountains with snow and conifers – co-exist. The characters in the story are students and researchers who roam the wilderness, discovering new plants, understanding the behaviour of animals, conducting geological and fossil studies and many other things. There are clearings in the wilderness, where the students and researchers retire to discuss their findings of the day. It was a romantic university setting, inspired from my awe of the universities in US and the myriad topics that academicians explored.

The protagonist is a student Avfed – the names of characters are arbitrary permutations of letters, but pronounceable – and he is looking for a particular plant that his boss has asked him and other students to find. In his quest through the wilderness he comes across a tree, very much like a redwood tree:

“One of his biggest delights had been when, late on the third afternoon, from a distance, he had spotted an exceptionally tall and large tree; the delight came from the almost certain belief that this was the Thick Trunk that everyone talked so much about. He hiked off his prescribed track to take a closer look. Many of Avfed’s friends had seen Thick Trunks and had related to him of how they had gaped in awe at their monstrosity, and had been humbled by their immense size. Avfed had always wanted to see one himself.

The tree was close now, and Avfed could now clearly see its form. Its size was enough to astound anyone. The breadth of the trunk was certainly more than thirty feet, and its height over a couple of hundred feet. It stood peerless for miles around it but it had similar awe-inspiring colleagues in other parts of the forest. Many experts had conclusively proved through fossil studies that the Thick Trunk had grown profusely in the forest thousands of years ago, but for some reason – the most common theory being that of climactic change – they had disappeared, and those that remained were relics of that bygone age when they had been dominant. Avfed roamed around the foot of the tree, and stared long and hard, up and down, all around the tree, attempting to absorb its immensity.”

V

I went to Muir Woods on a tour bus. I sat next to Anthony, a Nigerian immigrant from New Jersey, who had been in the US for the last eight years, and ten years before that in Canada. He was tall and had a brooding look. Just after we were on our way he said: “We are the only two single people on this trip.” It was a complaint. “I asked my son to come along with me but he doesn’t want to travel; he doesn’t like these things.”

I enjoyed his company. Anthony works in software engineering now, but he has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Lagos. In the last eighteen years, he had been back only twice to Nigeria. He has sisters who live there. He didn’t like the political situation in Nigeria, and said everything was corrupt.

He then told me of his interest in Bollywood movies. He liked the movies from the sixties, seventies and the eighties – he recalled Karz, Mother India and Sholay. He didn’t like the recent movies: “They are too American. You’d rather watch Hollywood.”

The bus dropped us off at the entrance of the park and we had an hour to get back. It was a moist day. There was a drizzle, light enough to be almost unnoticeable, but constant, and the ferns and other plants around the redwood trees were refreshingly green and glistened with drops. Such a fecund, sylvan setting, coming after months of living in the parched flatness of the Phoenix valley, was a surprise to me.

VI

The African-American Historical and Cultural Center is at the Fort Mason Center, northwest of downtown San Francisco and close to the Golden Gate Bridge. They have a smaller building, a sister concern, at the intersection of Fulton and Webster. I had my directions wrong and thought the smaller place was the main center (I never made it to the main center). The place had a small gallery of paintings by an artist: the theme was Black Indian –Indian as in Native American: two titles I remember said Black Seminole and Black Ute – and the paintings were surrealistic amalgams of black faces and Indian head attire and piercing, all of this done with liberal splashes of color and haphazardly written statements. They were intense and striking.

The walls were of the center had dark colors. Upstairs there were offices; and a seminar was in progress. I left the place, a little disappointed as I had expected more – more on African American history, exhibits on the cruelty of slavery and segregation, views and biographies of great civil rights leaders. But when I left the place, I saw at the entrance an unexpected resource: San Francisco Bay View and San Francisco Metro Reporter, both newspapers with a strong African American focus. The former explicitly stated it was a National Black Newspaper and the latter said it was a news journal dedicated to the people but discussed, at least in the copy I had, news that had to do with blacks. I realized then that while a museum on African American history that I had expected to see might be restricted to the past, the articles in these newspapers might throw more light on how that past and the unique experience of the African Americans weaved themselves into the present.

The San Francisco Bay View had a direct, blunt and accusing style; there was a rage in its sentences. The Metro Reporter had a measured tone; its bent was political. Through their articles that I read I could imaginatively enter, to some extent, contemporary African Americans issues and the discussion on them. I knew little of these issues and the papers were informative: the themes were the poor treatment of Katrina refugees in San Francisco and California, clemency pleas for Stanley “Tookie” Williams, and elegiac yet positive and forward-looking opinions on the legacy that Rosa Parks had left behind.

The Picaresque Narrative

I was for a long time under the spell of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I couldn’t get the narrator Saleem Sinai’s voice out of my head, and every time I sat down to write a story, I found myself using the Picaresque narrative. The Picaresque narrative involves a narrator who usually a loser of some sort but describes in a funny, quirky way the circumstances around him. The narrator is also usually very egocentric.

I thought I could use Picaresque narrative in a rural Indian setting. My protagonist was the son of a Brahmin farmer in Tamilnadu who has failed to finish his high school education, is just lounging idly around the farm and the village, and is interested in the flower vendor’s daughter. The summer that year turns out to be exceptionally hot and monsoons are delayed.

I haven’t finished the story, and am thinking of abandoning it – the Picaresque style at the least – but the ideas are still there in my mind. Below are some excerpts. They are in no particular order; I’ve just put some of the sections that I like.

I

There was once a time when I liked sugarcanes because in the lands that my father farmed, there grew long shoots of them. I liked walking between the rows and rows of them in the fields, treading the dark, moist earth, or squatting, or sometimes sitting long hours teasing the earthworms that either disappeared deep into the soil or emerged from the depths. I used to pick the squiggly creatures up, place them on my forearms, and feel them crawl aimlessly on my skin so that I could feel the tickles and the goose bumps.

II

She, with textbooks and notebooks held against her bosom, and I would then walk to Selvam’s food stall on the highway, where we would exhort him to start cooking for us, despite his protests that it would be a while before the buses came. What could more mesmerizing, what could be a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than to watch Selvam vigorously knead the dough, pinch off portions from it and shape them into small flat, half-an-inch thick circular pieces, and lay them symmetrically on the large, black griddle? Ah, to watch him make his barottas and korma! To watch him stoke the burning sticks and branches below the griddle through the opening in the brick enclosure, to watch him swell his cheeks and blow at the fledgling fire!

III

For the next month or so, with the little money that I had to travel in local buses, I roamed farms around the village with my Kodak camera and rolls, most of the time sitting under trees on hot afternoons, watching the leaves wither and fall in the sapping heat, my ears alert for any slithers or rustles so that I could capture snakes on film. You may question as to what such endeavors could have accomplished for me; today, sitting at Selvam’s stall, I too shake my head and wonder what had possessed me then. Was it the sheer boredom and emptiness of those scorching days? Or was it, as I increasingly think it to be, just a stupor that I fell in during the relentlessly long summer months till the late-arriving rains came and poured sense into me? For chasing snakes was only one of the many strange things that I was involved in, each of which I have difficulty in explaining today.

If indeed dizzyingly high temperatures were what afflicted me then what of others in the village? Was I the only one who succumbed to the delirium of the heat wave? Were not others in the village equally freakish, were they not concocting rituals and superstitions and wandering through the village, exhorting others to join?

I admit that I was present at that most unusual of marriages but so were others; I made a plea that the marriage and the parade of the newly weds around town should bring rain and cheer to the village, smiles back on the faces of the farmers, but so did others. Yes, I helped with the wedding; yes, I washed the donkeys in the water tank, yes I dressed them in garlands, yes I smeared them with sandalwood powder yellow and red, yes I dodged their vicious kicks, yes I helped tie the knot that secured the beasts in the wedlock and joined the procession as it made its way around the village. I remember the media people taking a picture of us that appeared, as someone later told me, in the Sunday edition of The Hindu and, and as my cousin from the US told me, on the BBC website.

So what if we arranged a wedding of donkeys? Was it not for a noble cause, to bring succor to parched land? Is it really that bad to hope for rain, to believe that the monsoon will come soon? How is it a shame, or how is it different from other acts of devotion? Why do people go to temples and pray everyday? Why do they flatten their palms over the supposedly divine flames in the hope that they’ll receive blessings? Why do people worship idols of gold and silver and stone? Why are idols anointed in milk of cows when frail, legless and handless beggars can only look on helplessly at lactating gutters? Why do priests have to empty fruits and butter into ritual fires?

That was how I defended myself; I shudder to think of how utterly uncompromising I was. But it didn’t stop then for the Sunday after the marriage, I was involved in yet another plea to the heavens. This time, I collected stems of bitter-smelling neem leaves that were strung onto a thick fallen branch, but it took a while to find a frog – they might have never found one had I not learnt of their dwellings through long hours of sitting under trees, next to dry creeks and pools. I held the poor wriggling thing by its leg, jumped and pranced my way to the temple where a crowd had gathered, helped the priest tie the slippery leg with a string to the neem-laden bough, and joined the retinue that toured the village. We clanged the metal grilles of gates, collecting alms, and encouraging families to pray that the temperatures would subside and the monsoon would arrive soon.