A conversation with Dr. Fulstac Nahbang

Here’s something old from my attic -- one of my many attempts at fiction that I never thought would see the light of day. Perhaps it still shouldn’t. But I guess there’s no harm in letting something like this loose on a blog.

I wrote this fiction piece sometime in 2003 and then abandoned it. I had then been thinking of the pitfalls of nationalism, or indeed any sense of belonging that might make us overly zealous. But I also was thinking of what might happen if we were to reject everything that contributes, subtly or otherwise, to what we are: our nationalities, communities, and religious beliefs. I wanted to write something about the tension between these two extremes - the extremes of strong attachment and identification, and total rejection - and this fictional conversation (it's an attempt at satire as well) is what I came up with. Needless to say, this is all very experimental.

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“Dr. Nahbang, thank you very much for agreeing to be on this talk show.”

“My pleasure.”

“First, I’d like to ask where your name comes from. Fulstac Nahbang. It is a very different name.”

“It comes from nowhere. My name is made from a random permutation of letters, but with some care taken on the placement of vowels so that it is pronounceable. It has no origin, and it is as I’d like it to be.”

“Did your parents give you the name?”

“Yes. Their point was to not give it any particular racial or national feel. They obviously did not do a good job as many people ask me if I am African or Jewish or from Eastern Europe. Somebody once came to me and told me he was sure I was from Nigeria. This person had the peculiar hobby of guessing nationalities from names.”

“Your profession is a unique one – if I am not wrong you would call yourself as someone who cures your clients of the ills of nationalism?”

“Yes, that would be true, but I don’t restrict myself only to nationalism – there are other ‘isms’ that I am also capable of addressing.”

“How did you get into this profession?”

“I did not have to get into my profession; I was made for it. My ancestors for the last four generations or so are unique; they never married within their own communities. My maternal great grandmother was an Australian aborigine, and great grandfather a Swede; my paternal grandfather was a Navajo Indian and my grandmother Vietnamese. I don’t belong to any particular country or race. And nationalism, or, for that matter, any form of identity - religious or tribal or territorial or racial - is absent in me. The only identity that I care about is my lack of identity. All this and my interest in human psychology naturally led me to my profession.”

“How do you feel being one of a kind?”

“Lonely, because I feel there should be more of my kind. The greatest troubles in the world are because there are not more of my kind.”

“That’s quite a perspective…When did you seriously begin to form such a philosophy?”

“It was around eight years ago. One of my friends, who works at a law enforcement agency, sent over a convict with some psychological problems to me, and asked me to analyze him. This convict had a strong hatred of immigrant workers in his country. He had sent many death threats and had a history of assaulting immigrants. The source of his xenophobia lay his strong pride for his country, and in the belief that his country represented a certain race, and that that purity of race had to be retained. It was an easy and straightforward case for me. My law enforcement friend was pleased with the progress he saw after I’d treated him, and sent me more patients with the same problems. I was very good at solving their problems, as I view things from my own unique perspective: I lack identity and I view the quest for identity to be the cause for all troubles.”

“But don’t you think that violent reactions have their roots in economic problems?”

“It is a chicken and egg story. You could look at it the other way as well. Sure economics is intertwined with everything but the economically powerful usually claim to have some sort of value system –which comes presumably from their worldview, religion, race, anything. And they are chauvinistic about their value system and routinely – explicitly or implicitly – claim the superiority of their value system over that of the economically underprivileged.”

“How do you diagnose your client or patient? - if I may refer to the person that way.”

“It depends but let me give you an example. I had someone the other day who wanted to know how patriotic he was. I had him wear thin pads over his forearms and showed him maps of his country, pictures depicting its history and its present glories. At the end, my surround sound system played the most stirring rendition of the national anthem – I have a huge stack of CDs with national anthems and spend quite some time selecting the most soulful one for each nation. The pads over the forearms are connected to an instrument that detects how many goose bumps he’s had. That gives me a preliminary assessment…I also checked his pulse rate and heart beat.”

“Don’t you think that patients, since they are aware that they’re being diagnosed, might not respond…”

“No matter how dampened one’s responses may be, there is enough inadvertent reaction to make a judgment. My instruments are calibrated well enough to take this into account.”

“How about treatment – if a certain client wishes to be rectified of his or her problem?”

“Again, there are a variety of methods. One of my techniques is to let the client go through a rehabilitation session. One aspect of the session usually involves having a client in a room with the walls being projected in very different colors. Sometimes we show them flowers of various colors from all around the world– all these are treatments if somebody has a problem with respect to skin color. Then humans in all shades and colors from different parts of the world are shown; we take care that a variety of physical features – high cheekbones, flat noses, blue eyes, thick lips – are thrown into the mix. For those with religious problems, we have a collection of holy books and pictures of animistic practices from all over the world; we lock a patient in a room with these books and images for two days. This often yields very good results.”

“Are you typically busy? How many patients do you meet everyday?”

“Many, after the word spread that I treat patients who are too attached to their own countries or specific ideologies. I am always busy. I get patients who are not a social threat, but nevertheless want to get diagnosed. Maybe it has become fashionable in social circles, particularly those who consider themselves to be liberal or secular or think they are above petty things like nationalism. What is interesting is that they themselves are unaware of precisely what worldviews they hold and when they come to me, they get to know themselves better. Most of them want to be something – so that they can fit into a group – but have conflicts internally that fetter them. Since all of what I do remains strictly confidential, they feel free to speak their hearts. And some truths are bitter.”

“How is it that you are so popular? I mean how do people know about you?”

“Well, I am here on this talk show and though it might not have a wide reach, it still gets to enough people to sustain me. I get my advertising done through alternative radio stations like yours – I would like to call them liberal but it goes against my belief since such labels go a long way in creating categories. Every province or region in the world has some sort of alternative media, and they’ve been generous enough to give my work some exposure.”

“You say every province or region in the world – do you travel that much?”

“I cannot settle down in a particular country; I have to keep moving from place to place. I fear that once I stay in a certain place, I’ll develop an attachment to it and that will undermine my unique perspective.”

“But you must like some places more than others?”

“True, but I am not attached to any of them.”

“Please don’t feel forced to answer this question. But I am curious: Does your perspective have any implications about whom you marry?”

“I would have to marry someone who was as mixed as me. That’s what everyone in the world should be trying to do: mix yourself up so that there are no races and no countries. Actually – I wanted to say this earlier but it slipped my mind – my theory is that if aliens were to suddenly attack us, we would, to some extent, forget our differences and rally towards a common goal. I’d like to see the world in that state. In fact, in some of my rehabilitation sessions, I show clients a continuous staple of science fiction movies in which evil aliens attack the earth and diverse peoples unite. Such things can be quite motivating.”

“That’s quite extraordinary. Not to stretch the point, but what if such an invasion was to happen? Would you then encourage intermarriage with an alien?”

“We’ll get to that when it happens. There are more pressing problems now.”

“Indeed. Dr. Nahbang, thank you very much for agreeing to be on our talk show. It’s been a pleasure having you here; it’s been eye opening conversation and I am sure our listeners will agree with that. Thanks very much again.”

“My pleasure.”

Pictures from Chihuahua

For a few days last week, I was in the state of Chihuahua in Northern Mexico. Some pictures from my trip are below (click on pictures to get a better view).

The Pink Store in the border town of Palomes, just across the New Mexico border. The restaurant in the store serves an excellent lunch.

Potters Daniel Gonzalez and his wife in the village of Mata Ortiz. Mata Ortiz is renowned for its pottery.

Mexico's brand of potato chips.

An abandoned hamburger stall in the town of Nuevos Casas Grandes.

Mohsin Hamid interview

Jai Arjun Singh has a long but engrossing interview of the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, author most recently of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The interview covers diverse topics but I found most interesting Hamid's comments on writing while holding a full-time, routine job:

"...literary novels require a certain kind of mindset – a thought process, a psychological make-up which tends to fit very poorly with the work-world. And the reason for this is that the mind best suited for the construction of very large and complex internal universes (which is how the literary novel is constructed), such a mind tends not to be particularly gregarious.

"And even if they are competent enough to deal with the regularity of the 9 to 6 job – or, as it’s now become worldwide, the 9 to 9 job – there’s another problem. The very process of drafting, revising, questioning everything that you’re presented with, which is what the literary writer does, means that when you step into a standard working environment, you recognise it as a ridiculous, arbitrary environment.

"And you say to yourself, 'I don’t want to do this, it’s ridiculous.' You reject it as being just a pawn in the system."

The ballad of Juan Quezada

From May17-20, I will be traveling in the province of Chihuahua in Northern Mexico with a group led by archaeologists of the Arizona State Museum. We'll be visiting the ruins at Casas Grandes – I’ve put up a picture of the aerial view of the site – and also the village of Mata Ortiz, known for its pottery (example in the picture).

The tradition of pottery in the region dates back at least to the 13th century, when the Native Americans there built the Casas Grandes structures. With the decline of this culture, however, the tradition lost its impetus. But Juan Quezada of Mata Ortiz has dramatically revitalized it in the last few decades. Nearly 40 years ago, Quezada, as a poor farm boy, found centuries-old complete pots in a cave high in the mountains. He managed to replicate these pots through a process of trial and error, which took many years. Today not only is Quezada internationally known, the village of Mata Ortiz teems with artisans who have learned pottery skills from him.

PBS Frontline has a short 7-minute documentary on Juan Quezada and other artisans of Mata Ortiz. Macarena Hernández, the reporter in the video, begins by describing the rugged terrain of Chihuahua rather romantically as the "the land of magic and myth". The general tone of the documentary is dramatic and reverential. What I do like though is the ballad that runs in the background - the ballad or corrido sung in praise of Juan Quezada. That’s what gives this post its title.

As with all the travel I do, my hope is that there will be something I can write about Casas Grandes and Mata Ortiz. But then again, nothing might come of it!

Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi

Amit Chaudhuri reviews Ram Guha's India after Gandhi: The history of the world's largest democracy. Unfortunately, the book comes out only in August in the United States. An excerpt from the review:

"It's in the nature of nations to be addicted to their own histories. Older, pre- national communities, one imagines, occupied themselves with mythology. The secular nation, agog, rehearses its history, the very reasons and outcomes of its existence, to itself. What's common to both activities is the endless familiarity of the subject-matter to the audience. It's safe to assume that very few people in a group of devotees listening to, say, the Indian epic Ramayana being read out would not have heard it before. It's equally prudent to assume that almost all the Indian readers of Ramachandra Guha's capacious history of democratic India would be familiar with a great deal of the story. What is it, then, that gives myths and national histories their appeal?"

The complete review is here.

And here's my own review of the book.

Romila Thapar and the history of India

I had twice started Romila Thapar’s Early India: From The Origins to AD 1300 with the hope of reading the book from cover to cover. Both times I abandoned the book early. Partly because I realized that the history of the Indian subcontinent is not something that can be consumed whole at one go, but mostly because Thapar’s is a very dry history: paragraph after paragraph with valuable information drifts dully by; there are no pictures to aid the reader; and the maps, all of them lumped at the end of the book, are not well tied to the text.

But despite all this, Thapar’s scholarship, the depth and reach of her knowledge shine through. There are many who rant against her – one only has to read through the reviews on Amazon of her book to get a sense of the grudges, most of which are of the political kind. And Thapar can’t be absolved of the charge of promoting her own motives either; the first chapter of her book, Perceptions of the Past, is overtly political.

But since it is the sort of book with too much good information to ignore, I found myself drawn again to it a few weeks ago. I decided to be deliberately unsystematic this time: I skipped chapters and boring passages, and read only sections that interested me. It has worked better. I’ve realized that there are surges and ebbs in Thapar’s writing. And I've stumbled on some good portions -- portions I'd missed on my prior attempts -- where she’s been able to recreate the mood and sensibilities of a very long time ago, and point to broader patterns.

Her detailed descriptions of the one of the important periods of Indian history, the time from 5th-2nd century BC, are particularly informative. It was at this time that almost all of the subcontinent was first brought together under a single empire by the Mauryans. Later empires would attempt to do the same; but it was only fifteen hundred years later that the Mughals managed to reunite a large swathe of the subcontinent.

It was also around 5th century BC that villages and small settlements began to coalesce into cities, which led to many social changes. Jainism and Buddhism and other counter-cultural movements emerged and challenged Vedic Brahmanism. The cities of Magadha and Pataliputra on the Ganges plain rose to eminence. Alexander reached the northwestern part of the subcontinent and replaced Persian rule with that of the Greeks; the Mauryans later took over the region. And it was in the intellectual climate caused by this constant shifting of empires and commingling of cultures that the city of Takshashila or Taxila prospered as a major center of learning.

And, of course, a mention of the Mauryans cannot be complete without a mention of Ashoka, whose earnest efforts at maintaining an “ethical” empire – I use the word ethical here as a loose substitute for the Prakrit Dhamma or the Sanskrit Dharma – are evident in the many edicts he left in the far-flung parts of the subcontinent.

Thapar brings together all these disparate elements well. There are a few light moments too: in the excerpt below Thapar writes of how the views 0f Greek historians and philosophers might have contributed to later ideas of India as a fantastic, exotic place.

“The Greek accounts [of India] remain a curious mixture of fact and fable, as much a comment on the Greek view of the world as an attempt to describe Indians. Greater familiarity with India in the ensuing centuries corrected some of their more incredible stories, but the attraction of the exotic could not be suppressed. The play on fantasies and marvels is of interest for what they perceived of India, but it also contributed to imprinting the idea of India with the mythical and the extraordinary in the mind of Europe over the centuries.”

Here’s an example of what Thapar is referring to – this is a description of India by Strabo, a Greek historian and philosopher:

“…there were men said to be ten feet tall and six feet wide some of whom have no nose but only two orifices above the mouth through which they breathe. Some were brought to court who had no mouths…they dwell near the source of the Ganges and subsist on perfumes and the savour of roasted flesh. Some had earrings reaching down to their feet and they could sleep in them. And then there were ants that dug up gold and left it on the surface so it could be picked up.”

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Finally, to close this post, here is the link to an article that discusses the political tensions that underlie Thapar's history writing. And here is an interview of Thapar from Rediff. Thapar's intentions have been questioned and her Marxist leanings targeted for some time now: here is the petition against her appointment as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in the United States. Wikipedia's entry on the controversial Aryan Invasion Theory is here.

Even a cursory reading of these pieces reveals just how vicious the debate on Indian history is.

Jhumpa Lahiri on the movie The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the The Namesake, talks about her feelings upon seeing Mira Nair's movie adaptation of her novel:

"I saw it for the first time privately in November 2005. I didn’t feel anxiety in the making of the film. I felt relaxed and curious. I was burning with curiosity as we were going to see the movie. I had no idea what to expect. I had seen shots and stills so I had a sense. But to see it, I was just overwhelmed and had a very emotional reaction. I didn’t cry when I watched it. I cried afterward. It was the totality of the movie.

One of the great gifts that Mira has given to me is, you know, when I write something, I give it everything that I can, but at the same time, I’m very removed from it, and when it’s done, it ceases to matter to me. I’ve never gone back to something I’ve written and been affected by it because by that point it’s so completely out of my system. I’m not going to go to my own writing to have those experiences, I’m going to go to others’ writing for those experiences.

So for the first time I was able to experience something I had written and have any reaction to it. It was the first time I saw something and it was her movie and it was different. But it was essentially something that I’d written that had percolated in me for years and years and had taken a long time to write and all that stuff and the characters and it was true enough to my book, and I saw it and I was moved."

Link through Amitava's blog. Also, Lahiri's Outlook interview is here.

Naipaul on travel writing

Naipaul writes in this article in the Guardian of how he conceived and wrote India: A Million Mutinies Now, one of my favorite books. I always find myself disagreeing with Naipaul when I read his non-fiction or hear of his arrogant, unsubtle opinions in interviews. But there is something in the way he looks at things and reaches out to people that repeatedly draws me to his work. His travel writing – especially his later work: A Turn in the South and India: A Million Mutinies Now – is built entirely from narratives constructed from what people have to say. Indeed more than half of these books are direct quotes from people from all walks of life: people in cities and villages, people involved in struggles for social justice, the elite, entrepreneurs, administrators, religious figures, politicians and many more. In this wonderful paragraph that summarizes his view of serious travel writing, Naipaul talks about people and narratives:

"Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative. The reader, once he has entered this book and goes beyond the opening pages, finds himself in a double narrative. There is the immediate narrative of the person to whom we are being introduced; there is the larger outer narrative in which all the varied pieces of the book are going to fit together. Nothing is done at random. Serious travel is an art, even if no writing is contemplated; and the special art in this book lay in divining who of the many people I met would best and most logically take my story forward, where nothing had to be forced."

Naipaul’s travel writing is unsurpassed for the sheer number of people he has spoken to, and whose thoughts he has meticulously jotted by hand; some of the conversations in his books run on for many pages. Such labor and perseverance! I had always wondered about how he had achieved this. In the article Naipaul explains his way of approaching people while travelling:

"I have often been asked about note-taking methods during the actual time of travel. I used no tape-recorder; I used pen and notebook alone. Since I was never sure whether someone I was meeting would serve my purpose, I depended in the beginning very often on simple conversation. I never frightened anyone by showing a notebook. If I found I was hearing something I needed, I would tell the person I wanted to take down his words at a later time. At this later time I would get the person to repeat what he had said and what I half knew. I took it all down in handwriting, making a note as I did so of the setting, the speaker, and my own questions. It invariably happened that the speaker, seeing me take it all down by hand, spoke more slowly and thoughtfully this second time, and yet his words had the rhythm of normal speech. An amazing amount could be done in an hour. I changed nothing, smoothed over nothing."

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Update: And here's a review of Naipaul's new book A Writer's People.

The price of pencils

I happened to win the second prize in a writing contest organized by Helen Chen (thanks very much to her for putting it all together) and sponsored by the Rochester Public library (in Minnesota). The contest was open to the public; it was judged by some writers who live in the region. The theme was family, broadly interpreted, and the entry had to be no more than 1200 words. My submission is below; it is a memoir from my days in Ahmedabad in western India.

It was through pencils that I came to know of the financial insecurities of my parents. I was in primary school, and we were allowed to use only pencils for our daily work. I was careless and lost so many of my pencils that my mother hid them in the closet; she scolded me severely every time she lent one to me. I learned to value pencils: each one sharpened unevenly with a knife and used until it was a stub that you couldn’t grip anymore. But I learned to value them even more after my father made it clear to me one afternoon – unequivocally and in dramatic fashion – just how much their price was and what that price meant to him.

That afternoon, I rode my bicycle to the stationery store to buy a new packet of pencils. I chose the usual bonded lead ones; the red and black stripes on them smelled wonderfully of paint over wood. When I returned home, the change I thought I had brought back was missing. It was only five rupees – just more than ten cents today, but money nevertheless. My parents weren’t happy. My father and I went back to the stationery store; something in his demeanor suggested that my folly had been a serious one. We asked the cashier, a dark man with glasses, if I had left behind my change. He searched the cash register perfunctorily and shook his head.

My father took me just outside the store.

“Where is the money?” he asked me.

I was trembling; I had no answer. My father scolded me only rarely but I had always feared his silences more than I feared my mother’s frequent reprimands.

“Where is the money?” he asked again, louder this time, and slapped me.

I began to sob uncontrollably. The stationery store and the shops around were busy with people who were now beginning to look in our direction. I was conscious of their presence; it worsened my humiliation and helplessness. My father slapped me again.

The cashier, who had been watching all this and who perhaps wasn’t too enamored of publicity of this sort, called us and said that he wouldn’t mind giving us the money. My father might have taken the money – I am not sure. Strangely for such an eventful day, I do not have any memory of what followed afterwards. The incident itself stands out in my memory, but nothing immediately before or after it has stayed with me.

_

It was only later – the passage of time having put distance and perspective on things – that I began to understand the anxieties that had swirled to a focus that afternoon.

We lived at the time in Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat in western India. My parents had emigrated to Ahmedabad from the south Indian city of Chennai, in Tamilnadu, a few years ago. For nearly three years we had been tenants on the upper floor of house owned a joint family, but my parents had always wanted a place of their own. Veedu, or home, was at the heart of their middle class aspirations.

My parents soon bought a cheap, small flat in an area slightly away from the city-center of Ahmedabad. But almost immediately after we moved into the flat, my father had trouble at work and lost his job.

And my parents began to have doubts about their decision to buy the flat: it was unsettling to them that the owners of the other flats in the complex included a chauffeur and a maidservant. My parents were Brahmins, and their caste had given them a high sense of their worth; they felt uneasy living among people of other, traditionally underprivileged castes, who, in the decades after India’s independence, had slowly begun to assert themselves. Had my parents been in Chennai, walking its familiar streets, speaking a language they knew well, their extended families in the area always a comforting presence; in Chennai, such social changes might have been easier to absorb. But in Ahmedabad they felt they were alone.

The only Tamils who lived in close proximity to us were migrant workers who stayed in a messy slum that sprawled adjacent to our flats; they lived in huts that were a haphazard patchwork of sackcloth, wooden poles, and tarpaulin. They too had made an uncertain journey like my parents from southern India. But their poverty meant that we would always avoid them. Their Tamil, my parents said, was the Tamil of the slum: coarse, rough and loud. And we couldn’t speak our Tamil loudly for we feared that if they heard us, they would come knocking at our door, asking for money that my parents were struggling, and mostly failing, to save.

These things – the feeling that the neighborhood wasn’t nice; our forced lowering of voices, to stay incognito from the Tamil migrants who lived in the slum– these things were seemingly minor annoyances, but they weighed heavily on my father. My father was the only one who earned; he felt acutely responsible for how things had gone. He had invested savings from his previous job in the flat but he was now out of work. He pedaled twenty-five miles every day on my bicycle to an industrial town called Naroda in search of part-time jobs; he came back dejected and sweating profusely.

The incident with the packet of pencils happened around this time; and to my father, my carelessness, the easy way in which I lost my change, was an insult; it mocked the situation we were in. And it probably also mocked his efforts in a very personal way.

_

Our troubles continued in years that followed: my father found and lost jobs and we hopped through other cities in western and central India, each move necessitating difficult adjustments. All this time my father never spoke to me of that afternoon. It was only much later – more than a decade and a half later, just three years ago in fact, when our position was relatively secure – that he brought up the topic.

“Do you remember the afternoon when I hit you?” he asked, his face and his voice full of regret. His intent in asking the question partly might have been to see if I’d retained any rancor from what had happened. Since I was aware of this, I tried brush the whole issue aside, so I could convey, indirectly, that I had not carried along harsh feelings.

Our conversation, because of the awkward nature of the topic, didn’t proceed further. And so I wasn’t able to express to my father that that afternoon in Ahmedabad was important. Until then, I had been only peripherally aware of the difficulties that my parents faced; I had shut them away as only children absorbed in their own worlds can. But from then on, my parents’ situation was mine; their hopes, concerns, excitements, disappointments were mine as well. In its own inadvertent way, the incident with the packet of pencils had brought me closer to their world. And if only my father were to know of this, the guilt of that day might weigh less heavily on him.

The necessary vanity of a writer

Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, says in an interview that writers have to believe in the importance of what they are doing, though such an idea is often delusional:

"... so much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all. If you think that what you’re doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you’re just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die every day and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activities, you’d probably never get out of bed. You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it."

The full interview, in which Mishra talks about many different things, is here. Mishra says he used to read a 350 page book in 5-6 hours - that makes me jealous. I feel good if I can finish one in two weeks. And while I am at it, let me confess that I am also jealous of how prolific this young man is.

The illustration of Mishra above is by Charles Burns.

Books this year

I've finished three great books this year. I enjoyed reading these books during nights and weekends as the temperature outside dropped to well below 0 F. The cold, unbearable at times, was a blessing in other ways: I had enough time to sit on my cushioned chair in the living room and read, or laze in the bedroom and read, occasionally looking out to see the snow, ever present and brilliantly white in the backyard.

But these are extraneous details; on to the books now.

1. In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India: Edward Luce’s insightful book on modern India, its politics, economic boom, social tensions, communal problems and lots more.

2. The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life: To understand a country, one has to sometimes understand the critical periods in its history. For the United States, one such critical period was the mid nineteenth century when it expanded westward, spurred by the idea of Manifest Destiny and the gold rush in California. Francis Parkman, in his travel narrative through the great plains of the Midwest, provides an invaluable glimpse of the time.

An excerpt from the book is below. At this point of the narrative, Parkman is somewhere near the Nebraska-Wyoming border in 1845, in the vicinity of the Dakota Indians. Note especially the description in the last sentence of how a procession of Anglo American emigrants and the encamped Dakotas chance upon each other, and how Parkman uses the encounter to make a startling prediction about the Dakotas - something that almost came to pass. To be sure, Parkman's condescension and his prejudices, which the book is full of and which reflect the sensibilities of his time, were part of the problem.

“Not far from the chief stood a group of stately figures, their white buffalo robes thrown over their shoulders, gazing coldly upon us; and in the rear for several acres, the ground was covered with a temporary encampment. Warriors, women, and children swarmed like bees; hundreds of dogs of all sizes and colors ran restlessly about; and close at hand, the wide shallow stream was alive with boys and girls and young squaws, splashing, screaming and laughing in the water. At the same time a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people who they and their descendents, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth.”

3. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus: Most of what we read, we already know: indeed, there is something reassuring in what is familiar to us. But books like Jared Diamond’s Gun Germs and Steel are unique in that they can turn things on their head and change our ideas of why history is the way it is; despite their simplifications – and Diamond is guilty of a few – they can give us new ways of looking at the world.

Charles Mann’s 1491 is such a book. Mann brings the American continent before Columbus's arrival to life as never before: summarizing new findings in archaeology and anthropology, Mann reinterprets what we know of the Incas and the other older cultures of the Andes; the Amazonians; the Mayans and the Mexicas of the Central America; the Massachusett, the Patuxet, and the Narraganssett of New England; the Cahokia cultures of the Mississippi, and many others. And along the way he also explains how disease silenced an entire content in such a way that one can only despair at what might have been. In the excerpt below, Mann writes of what this loss means to the world:

“Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery of by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!…Along with the unparalleled loss of life, this [exchange of ideas between cultures] is what vanished when smallpox came ashore.”

About a trip to Lothal

In Ahmedabad, when I was in my fifth standard, I went with my classmates on a day trip to Lothal. Our teachers had made an excellent choice: there could not have been a more direct way to introduce us kids to history. But I wasn’t interested; I was too busy, during the trip, in trying to get the attention of Palak, a girl who sat next to me in class. I remember playing either badminton or Frisbee with her outside the museum building in Lothal; it was the high point of my day. And on the return trip home, I remember looking through the tinted glass windows of our specially rented bus and working myself into a romantic thrall by playing in my mind, over and over again, a maudlin Bollywood song of the time - the title song from the Rishi Kapoor-Sridevi starrer Chandni.

Some vague memories of Lothal have remained: the ruins for which the site is famous; and the displays well preserved in glass cases at the museum. I am aware that even without the distraction of Palak I was quite incapable, at that age, of comprehending the significance of Lothal. But with the sort of thirst I have for history now, no excuse will do: I feel like kicking myself for not having been more attentive or exhibited some curiosity.

Lothal, of course, was one of the urban centers of what is today collectively referred to as the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished about five thousand years ago (the Wikipedia links provide excellent information on this). So I hope to do proper justice the next time I visit Lothal. And perhaps I’ll make it up also by visiting Harappa and Mohenjodaro - cities that were contemporaries of Lothal, and that are now in modern day Pakistan.

Other places I would love to visit: Takshashila (or the anglicized Taxila), also in Pakistan, where, roughly two millennia after the decline of the Indus valley civilization, the wily Chanakya and the brilliant Sanskrit grammarian Panini are supposed to have studied; and, to turn now to some cultures halfway across the world, I'd also like to visit the Mayan sites of Chichen Itza and Tikal, Machu Picchu of the Incas in Peru, and finally, closest to where I am now, the 11th century Cahokia mounds of the Mississipian Native American cultures near St. Louis.

The image above is a recreation of Lothal as envisaged by the Archaelogical Survey of India. Credit for the image also goes to this group and website.

Christopher Kremmer interview

There's an excellent interview of Christopher Kremmer, author of Inhaling the Mahatma, on Chandrahas' blog The Middle Stage. Here is an excerpt of some of Kremmer's thoughts on narrative non-fiction:

"It [narrative non-fiction] is a very post-modern form, and the writer needs to be open to the multi-faceted nature of truth. A building might look beautiful from outside, but at the back it could be a garbage heap. Look at people and things from different angles. Another thing is that you have to be prepared to reveal who you are. These are not objective books, in the traditional sense, so we need to know who is this person who is taking us through northern Afghanistan, or northern India. What’s their background? Why should be trust them? Because the books sometimes don’t have a strictly defined plot, the voice of the narrator is very important in holding it all together and making the reader turn the page. And characters. Don’t forget the absolute necessity for bringing people alive on the page. There has never been a good book that lacked humanity."

Zadie Smith on writers and writing

The British writer Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and On Beauty, has an insightful article in the Guardian on writers and writing. Writing, she says, isn't merely a matter of skill:

"A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere - for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the 'soul' would have done just as well."

In Smith's view, there's something incomprehensible involved in making a great work, and that something is linked to the writer's personality. The idea may be simple and elemental, but I haven't read anything elsewhere that expresses it in as nuanced and beautiful a way as she does in the sentences below:

"A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions."

Read the full article here. Other great articles on writing: Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture and Naipaul's article in the New York Review of Books.

The founding story of Tenochtitlan

Tenochtitlan, the populous lake city of the Mexicas in the 14th and 15th centuries, has always fascinated me. And much of that fascination has to do with the story of the city's founding, memorialized in the dramatic, aggressive image of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, and a serpent wriggling in the grip of its talons and beak.

In his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, which reexamines Native American societies light of new scientific and archeological evidence, Charles Mann writes of this founding myth:

"The Mexicas [one of the three groups that formed the Triple Alliance in the 14th century, in the region around what is Mexico City today] fled to a swampy, uninhabited island" on Lake Texcoco. "According to an account by Hernando Alvaro Tezozomoc, grandson of the last Mexica ruler, the refugees stumbled about the island for days, looking for food and a place to settle, until one of the priests had a vision in a dream. In the dream, the Mexica's patron deity instructed his people to look in the swamp for a cactus. Standing on the cactus [the prickly pear cactus, called the tenochtli, which inspired the name of the town], the god promised, 'you shall see an eagle, warming itself in the sun.'"

A slightly different version of this is in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler. And since Ostler is an expert on languages, it is worth looking at his translation of the story from Nahuatl, the language of the Mexicas:

"It was prophesied that they [the Mexicas] must settle 'where the eagle screeches, where he spreads his wings, where the eagle feeds, where the fish fly, where the serpent is torn apart.' In the distance, on a prickly pear cactus, they saw this vision, of an eagle eating a snake. A voice cried out: 'O Mexicas, it shall be here!' But no one knew who spoke. They knew that the reedy but defensible islands in the middle of the lake should be their home, Tenochtitlan, 'place of the prickly pear'. It was the year ome calli, '2 House', 1325."

Inspired by this vision, the Mexicas went on to build an astonishing city on the islands of Lake Texcoco: Tenochtitlan was a sight to behold. One can only imagine what might have survived to the present day if disease had not wiped out the Mexicas and other Mesoamerican societies in the wake of the Spanish conquest. In 1491, Mann describes the Spaniards' reaction upon entering Tenochtitlan in 1519:

"Tenochtitlan dazzled its invaders - it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gaped like yokels at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright from goods from hundreds of miles away. Boats flitted like butterflies around the three grand causeways that linked Tenochtitlan to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains across the lake and into the city. Even more astounding than the great temples and the immense banners and colorful promenades were the botanical gardens - none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate."

The Mexico City of today is built over the ruins of the lake city (the lake is now drained) of Tenochtitlan. And the image that guided the Mexicas to build the city now occupies a central place in the flag of Mexico.

The great movement west

The westward expansion of the United States in the 19^th century is one of the pivotal periods in its history. But knowledge of what "the west" meant in this context came late to me. For long I had thought that the west referred to the geographic west of present-day United States, only to the states of California and Arizona, with Texas being a permissible anomaly. But in the United States of the mid nineteenth century, the west referred to lands that lay beyond the Mississippi river.

At the Olmstead County History Center today, I got a more complete sense of how far east the expanding frontier had been. The history center is in Rochester, in southeastern Minnesota, about fifty odd miles west of the Mississippi river (the river forms the tortuous boundary that separates Wisconsin from Minnesota). The exhibits and buildings at the center inform its visitors of the pioneer heritage of the region; there is a recreation of the log cabin of William Dee, one of the region's first settlers in the mid 1850s. At the time, a settler’s journey to this part of Minnesota involved traveling by rail, then a steamship, and finally a horse-drawn wagon. But the long journey was only the beginning. For upon arrival, the settler faced great uncertainty: he was far away from what was familiar; he was in a new land and had little knowledge of how to work it; he had the difficult task of being the first to identify the skills needed to survive.

The nineteenth century movement west - and the subsequent settlement there - has been one of the epic successes of America; and the spirit of those pioneer settlers, of working against odds in a new land, is celebrated and venerated time and again.

A wrought iron marker titled "Our Pioneer Heritage", just outside the main building of the history center – with the flag of the United States on a tall pole nearby – expresses respect and awe:

"The great westward migration which took place in the nineteenth century marked more than a settlement of new land. It gave witness to the birth of a new and unique creed of men. Perhaps no Americans met the challenge of their era so well as did our pioneer fathers. Olmstead County shares in the great traditions of this pioneer heritage. From the shores of the Atlantic, from New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana came her first citizens, and here in the valley of the Zumbro, in the land of the north star, they built their homes and raised their families. The way of life we enjoy had its beginning here in the crude log cabins that dotted the countryside.

From the days of the frontier, from the era of the ox-cart and the covered wagon, from the days of the Indian wars, come reflections which make us feel humbly grateful for their sacrifice and courage."

The only discordant note here – in what is otherwise a paean – is the mention of the Indian wars; it is a hint that the land wasn’t as empty and new as it might have seemed. But the guilt of Native American dispossession was swept aside by the perceived inevitability of the expansion. Indeed, for many Americans at the time the expansion was something ordained; it was destined to happen. The term Manifest Destiny came to define this belief.

In John Gast’s allegorical representation of the idea of Manifest Destiny (American Progress, circa 1872, shown in the picture above), Columbia, the female national personification of America (just as Uncle Sam is the male one), is shown as a white beacon of progress, an angel-like figure, leading men westward. She is stringing telegraph wires as she travels; and marching along with her are covered wagons, trains, and pioneers with cattle. At the back of the painting are boats and ships on what is possibly the Mississippi river. And ahead of her, fleeing from the advance, are Native Americans and wild animals; one of the depictions is that of a fleeing herd of buffalo to the left-centre of the painting.

Orhan Pamuk's Nobel speech

In his Nobel speech, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of the brilliant My Name is Red, muses on writers and writing, and about a suitcase his father left behind. An excerpt:

"A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds."

Some books and links to books...

1. Democracy in America: Perhaps one of the best travel books ever written. Alexis Tocqueville, a French historian and political scientist, looks hard at the strengths, impulses, contradictions and problems of the United States in 1835.

2. The Oregon Trail: Francis Parkman's 1840s' account of his travels through Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas, and of his three week stay with the Oglala Sioux.

3. Chach Nama or Tarikh i Hind Wa Sindh: The story of the Arab conquest of the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind in the seventh century, analyzed superbly by Naipaul in Among the Believers.

4. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517-1521: Bernal Diaz del Castillo's eye-witness account of a different conquest at a different time and in a different part of the world. This account tells of the fall of the Aztec and their capital city of Tenochtitlan.

Writing about Africa

I

The book jacket of Half of a Yellow Sun is full of praises for its author, the young Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. There’s a quote from The Washington Post Book World heralding her as “the 21st century daughter of Chinua Achebe”. There’s an endorsement from Achebe himself: “She [Chimamanda] is endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers…She is fearless or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria’s civil war. Adichie came almost fully made.” But what interested me most was the writer Joyce Carol Oates’s blurb that the “novel is a worthy successor to such twentieth-century classics as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.”

At the Twin Cities book festival two weeks ago, where Chimamanda had come to read from her book, I asked her what she thought of Joyce Carol Oates’s remark; I was interested in the comparison to A Bend in the River. She smiled knowingly; she had been asked that question before.

Chimamanda said she liked some of Naipaul’s work but not A Bend in the River. And her Nigerian publisher had said to her that there was no way that Joyce Carol Oates’ remark could be on the edition of the novel that is to be released in Nigeria later this year. It showed how much Naipaul’s views are not liked in Nigeria, and perhaps, to make a bigger but not unreasonable generalization, in Africa as well.

After her reading, I was lucky to be able to talk with Chimamanda for more than an hour. At some point, I asked her about the character of Zabeth in A Bend in the River. Zabeth appears in the first chapter of the novel; she belongs to an African fishing community; she travels sixty miles, on foot and in barges towed by steamers, to buy items for her village from Salim, the narrator and protagonist of the novel (see this post for more). It was this sketch of Zabeth as a merchant woman, confident and self-assured of her trades, and the short but vivid description of the long journeys she made, that had drawn me into the novel. Zabeth’s character is perhaps the only African character in the novel that Naipaul allows to consistently maintain dignity.

My question about Zabeth did not seem to make an impression on Chimamanda. She was clear and unequivocal about how she felt: “Heart of Darkness was a long time ago, but I know the Africa of A Bend in the River. And I simply cannot consider something that denies Africa its humanity; I simply cannot consider it.”

II

Later, I realized how familiar those words were: for only a week or so ago, I had read the same sentiments in some of Achebe’s essays. In his famous analysis of the racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe questions “whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization [of Africa and Africans], which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art.”

Here is an example –a jolting one – of how Africans are thought of by Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, whose views, Achebe feels, are not different from those of Conrad’s. Marlow states in the novel: “Well you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their [Africans] not being inhuman.”

Achebe writes of Marlow’s comment: “A more deadly deployment of a mere sixteen words it would be hard to imagine. I think it merits close reading. Note first the narrator’s suspicion; just suspicion, nothing more. And note that even the faint glimmer of apparent charitableness around his speculation is not, as you might have thought, a good thing, but actually the worst of it! And note, finally, the coup de grace of double negation, like a pair of prison guards, restraining that problematic being on each side.” Achebe is exceptional at insightful analysis of this sort: very carefully, he unearths the notions that lie behind words, notions that, especially when they come from someone as famous as Conrad, can go a long way in advancing and sustaining misconceptions.

And to those who dismiss such criticisms of Heart of Darkness with the excuse that racism was not yet an issue when Conrad wrote the book, Achebe has this superb rejoinder:

“In the preface of his, famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, he [W.E.B. Du Bois] wrote: ‘The problem of the Twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’ The verb he used is interesting: is instead of will be. And he wrote his words not during the 1960s Civil Rights marches in America as the tone might suggest to some, but actually in 1903 – ‘at the dawning of the Twentieth Century’, as he himself put it, and only a one year later than Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This chronology is of utmost importance. Therefore the defence sometimes proffered: that Conrad should not be judged by the standards of later times; that racism had not become an issue in the world when he wrote his famous African novel, will have to clarify whose world it is talking about.”

Naipaul has often been compared, in a positive sense, to Conrad: the Swedish academy, announcing the 2001 Nobel Prize in literature called Naipaul “Conrad’s heir as the annalist of destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.” But Naipaul is also talked of in the same breath as Conrad because the criticisms of Conrad apply to him as well; in his writings Naipaul reduces Africa to a generic “bush”. In one particular passage of A Bend in the River, the protagonist and narrator Salim – whose own views are inseparable from those of Naipaul’s – writes this:

“I asked for a cup of coffee…it was a tiny old man who served me. And I thought, not for the first time, that in the colonial days the hotel boys had been chosen for their small size and the ease with which they could be manhandled. That was no doubt why the region had provided so many slaves in the old days: slave people’s are wretched, half-men in everything except their capacity to breed the next generation.”

A Bend in the River is viewed by many as a modern Heart of Darkness. Both are admired in the West, but for Africans, and critics like Achebe, they are both classic examples of superbly written books that give little consideration to Africa.

Finally, here is a scathing critique of contemporary writing on Africa in Granta 92: The View from Africa by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina. Wainaina’s sarcasm is razor-edged and there's a hint of it even in the article's title, "How to write about Africa". Here are some excerpts:

“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'…. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these…In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving… Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this… Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific… Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.”

VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River , and related thoughts

I

In Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, the protagonist and narrator, Salim, moves from the east African coast to start a new business – and with it, he hopes, a new life – in the African interior. Salim’s ancestors are from Gujarat in India but his family has lived on the African coast for many generations; they are a family of traders, with links to the Indian Ocean coasts of Arabia, Persia and India. In Salim’s words: “The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True Africa was at our back.”

Salim decides to leave his family and move by himself to a town in Central Africa at the bend of a great river; the town, the river and the country, though very obviously Kisangani at the bend of the Zaire and in what was then the Zaire (the novel is set in the 60s and 70s), are never mentioned. Naipaul, presumably, uses this technique so he can make certain abstractions that might have otherwise not been possible.

The novel is essentially an account of the tensions of being an expatriate – rootless, and with nothing to return to – in a place that is coming painfully to terms with modernity. Naipaul’s spare and contemplative prose brings these tensions sharply into focus. His capacity for historical understanding and self-assessment is remarkable; and his insightful but sometimes sweeping generalizations of civilizations and peoples are there throughout the novel.

Here is Salim, writing of his family’s lack of understanding of themselves:

“My family was Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of northwestern India, from which we had originally come. When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people.” And later: “ Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.”

Whatever knowledge that came to Salim of the past achievements of his coastal community came, ironically, from the ruling Europeans:

“All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers; that our sailors gave the Mediterranean the lateen sail that made the discovery of the Americas possible; that an Indian pilot led Vasco da Gama from East Africa to Calicut; that the very word cheque was first used by our Persian merchants – if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.”

Of Europeans – and this is a classic example of one of Naipaul’s illuminating abstractions – Salim says:

“Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization It was their great advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves. Being an intelligent and energetic people, and at the peak of their powers, they could express both sides of their civilization; and they got both the slaves and the statues.”

II

People from many different tribal backgrounds live in the Central African town that Salim has moved into; they have come from villages around to make a living in the town. Even in periods when things are going well and business is booming there is always a feeling that collapse will come soon, that the town will go back to being a ruin just has it had at the time of the country’s independence. Salim writes, in this passage, of how different it is for the Africans of the region than it is for the expatriates in town from various countries:

“I began to understand how simple and uncomplicated the world was for me. For people like myself and Mahesh” – Salim’s friend of Indian origin – “and the uneducated Greeks and Italians in our town, the world was really a simple place. We could understand it, and if too many obstacles weren’t put in our way we could master it. It didn’t matter that we were far away from our civilization, far away from the makers and doers. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the things we liked to use, and as individuals were even without the technical skills of the primitive people [Africans of the region]. In fact, the less educated we were the more at peace we were, the more easily we were carried along by our civilization or civilizations.

“For Ferdinand” – an African young man that Salim knows in the town – “there was no such possibility. He could never be simple. The more he tried, the more confused he became. His mind wasn’t empty, as I had begun to think. It was a jumble, full of all kinds of junk.”

What Naipaul seems to be suggesting is that being part of a civilization or a heritage – however distant you may be from it or however peripherally you may be associated with it: just as the Indians, Greeks and Italians in town were – could somehow give you a certain dignity and a sense of your own importance. What he is also suggesting is that the backwardness of the Africans Salim is writing of is such that they have nothing to look back to. There’s a hint of condescension and snobbishness in this assessment; it is a feature of Naipaul’s writings; in other parts of the novel Naipaul’s prejudices are more directly stated (more on that in the next post). Presumably the backwardness or primitivism Naipaul is talking about refers to village ways, ancestor-worship and animist ways, ways that were mostly self-contained and had never been in any broad sense part of a larger empire or tradition. And the encounter of these backward Africans with modernity, with European achievements and colonization had left a wound; it had filled African minds like those of Ferdinand’s with “all kinds of junk”.

III

In some roundabout way, this idea of having a tradition or a heritage to fall back upon brought to my mind a documentary I had seen two years ago on PBS.

The documentary was on Chacoan society, which had flourished in the arid canyon-country of New Mexico from the eighth to tenth centuries and had then declined. The focus of the documentary was mostly on the achievements of Chacoans: their comprehensive knowledge of astronomy hinted at by the precise alignment of the roads, by the nuances in their architecture – multistoried buildings and plazas (the picture below shows an aerial view of one of these plazas) – and by the sophistication of the solstice marker on a rock of one of the buttes.



The program also featured short interviews with the team of archaeologists and researchers involved in the attempt to understand the religious and cultural sensibilities of the Chacoans. One of the team members was from a Puebloan tribe of the southwestern United States. He said that the Chacoan period with its achievements indicated something very important. “It shows,” he said, “that our people too were very intelligent.”

The Puebloans are descendents of the Chacoans, but they do not always react to their Chacoan past like this. There’s generally a lot more ambivalence: there’s a shroud of secrecy about the Chaco period, and a tendency to reject and disown it because oral histories suggest that it had ended violently. But the Puebloan man’s comment in the documentary that his people had had unique capabilities (strange that something like that had to be stated) was really a response to contemporary realities: so much today is defined by the West, and strong has been its labeling of other cultures, that claiming past accomplishments – the grandeur and ambition of which is absent today – becomes important.

I came across something similar recently in a program on the history of the Sahara; and what I heard was like an echo of what the Puebloan man had said.

A brief part of the documentary was on the kingdom of Timbuktu in Western Africa, in present day Mali. At its height during the first half of the second millennium, the kingdom had benefited immensely from the trans-Saharan trade in gold, slaves and other commodities. There had been a famous university and an extensive library. Today the town is an impoverished state. But from what was being shown in the program, it appeared that the library, or at least some of its books were still intact. There was a brief interview of a Malian man – probably a historian or scholar – dressed traditionally in a tunic and cap. He said: “This,” [the library with all its evidence of learning], “shows that we Africans have a past as well. Not all our stories were oral; we had a written tradition too.”

It was there again: the urge to talk back, redress prevalent attitudes; and the glories of the past and his knowledge of his own history had given the Malian scholar a strong sense of himself.

One of the most eloquent voices in this business of talking back, of arguing and pointing out the prejudices that lie behind Western perceptions of Africa, has been that of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Achebe, in many of his essays, systematically lays bare these perceptions that come cloaked and hidden in various forms. He does it with reasoned arguments, with wit and sarcasm.

But more of that in the next post – this post has already gotten too long and I've digressed a bit :)