Chris, and thoughts on Native American history

I recently finished writing a fairly long travel essay (8000 words) about the Navajos of the southwestern United States. It is based mostly on my trips to their reservation (see map) while I was in Phoenix, Arizona. (The Navajo reservation is the largest reservation in the United States, about the size of West Virginia).

The extract below is from the second part of my essay, and describes my meeting and short conversation with a Navajo student, Chris, at Arizona State University. It also describes some of my thoughts on the broader topic of Native American history. If you happen to like what you read and wanted to have the full piece, please send me an email – my address is on this page.

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In the spring of 2005, I attended a seminar by Lance Morgan, a member of the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska. Morgan had a Harvard law degree and was now an entrepreneur. His seminar was at Arizona State University and was on the topic of tribal trust land. More than fifty students attended the talk and nearly all of them were Native American. Many of them might have been Navajos as well given their high numbers (nearly a thousand) at the university.

It was at the talk that I saw Chris, a mechanical engineering student at the university. Chris was a Navajo and his home was close to the capital of the Navajo reservation, Window Rock. He was short, well built young man with a dark, lustrous face. From the questions he asked at the end of the seminar, it seemed he had an aggressive and forceful demeanor.

I ran into Chris again that evening at the student recreation field in the university. He was playing a keenly contested intramural softball game. Chris was the captain of his team, and I slowly recognized the other players of his team: they were faces I had seen in the audience during Morgan’s talk. All the players wore t-shirts that said “Go Fighting Whites”; each t-shirt also had a 1960s style picture of a smiling white man. There was clearly some political theme here but I wasn’t sure what it was. At the time, I thought it quite subversive since the message, in my imagination at least, seemed to be directed against the opposition team: a team of young, heavily cheered white college students. I later learned that the t-shirt was supposed to be a riposte to the stereotyping of Native Americans implicit in team names such as Washington Redskins.

Chris’ team lost the game. His team members were upset; their faces had a sort of suppressed anger and disappointment over their own performance. Chris called his teammates into a huddle in an attempt to rally them for the next game. “We fucking beat ourselves,” he said and pointed out they with effort could do much better in the next game.

I caught up with Chris a little later, and talked with him for a while as we walked away from the recreation field. I had meant to ask him about tribal trust land, but ended up talking very little about it. Instead, I found myself telling him of my visit to the Navajo reservation the summer before; it was then that I had first heard about Kit Carson, the American soldier who led the campaign against the Navajos in the 1860s that resulted in the brutal eviction commonly called Long Walk. Kit Carson had followed a scorched earth policy, which ensured that cornfields were rendered uncultivable, livestock killed and peach trees felled. Already starving because of Carson’s campaign and now deprived comprehensively of their means of sustenance, thousands of Navajos surrendered and were herded in the long march to Bosque Redondo. Navajos numbers dwindled to only a few thousand during this period. It was a precarious position to be in; as a community, the Navajos were a whisker away from being obliterated, like tribes in the other parts of the United States.

Chris felt deeply about what had happened at the time; he used the loaded word genocide to describe it. He also had thoughts on the calamities that the Native Americans in North America had faced. His view was that too many nations had manipulated the Native Americans. When he learned that I was from India, he said:

“India really had to deal with only one country – the British. We had to deal with many different European countries. The Spanish, the French, the British.”

I felt his assessment of India wasn’t entirely accurate: British colonization was really the last in a series that went well back in time; invaders had come from Afghanistan and Central Asia since the beginning of the millennium. And one could go even further back.

Chris also expressed surprise that India, with so many different cultures and languages, had been unified into a single country. The lack of unity among tribes was for him the principal reason why the Native Americans had been unable to combat European incursions.

We were walking all this time; I wanted to talk more with Chris but he was headed in a different direction. I did not see him again. My conversation with Chris had been brief, but I’ve always attached a lot of importance to it. For it was also around that time that I’d begun to form some of my own thoughts about Native American history, and I’d been wanting for a while to talk to someone about it.

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There was truth to what Chris had said: the lack of unity amongst tribes was indeed one reason that had led to their subjugation. But clearly, there had been also other unalterable factors, geographical and environmental, that had worked against the Native Americans.

I had always been stymied by how European colonization efforts had gone so differently in the different continents. I was especially surprised by how sub-Saharan Africa, which like North America five hundred years ago, had consisted of chiefdoms, tribes and small kingdoms, today had more than 500 million people, while the Native Americans, despite an upward trend in the last century, were a mere 3 or 4 million in the United States population of 300 million (see Note 1). Somehow Africa’s terrain, its climate and diseases had thwarted permanent settlement of outsiders, allowing native populations – despite their own high mortality rate to the same diseases – to grow quickly in the last hundred years (see Note 2) . In a strange inversion of this, European diseases had decimated many Native American communities, and North America, not too dissimilar in places from Europe in climate, had turned out in the long run to be very favorable for settlement.

I began to wonder how things would have been had history gone differently, if the independent trajectory of Native American development had remained undisturbed. It was a probably a futile exercise but I was drawn to it. I imagined that intensive agriculture had somehow been adopted by most tribes, that their populations, unaffected by pandemics, had increased significantly; I imagined federations of tribes starting to coalesce into empires throughout the northern half of the continent; I imagined alliances and enmities, militaristic tribes and kingdoms forcing wars on their neighbors; I imagined social problems that have plagued civilizations in other parts of the world. But also I thought of unique cultural accomplishments, worldviews, of hundreds of different languages, customs and practices, not static or uninfluenced by other cultures, but continuously evolving yet retaining their distinctive character; I thought, in short, of what the world had missed.

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Note 1: The population estimates of North America before the coming of the Europeans remains a topic of controversy; estimates vary significantly. Charles Mann, in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, has a good discussion on the topic (I've also posted about the book here). The upshot of his book that there were far more Native Americans that lived at time of Columbus’s arrival than is presumed.

Note 2: Perhaps it was also crucial that Africa had not been as isolated from Asia and Europe before the fifteenth century as the Americas had been: West and North Africa always had links with the middle east and Europe; and the eastern coasts of Africa had traded with Asia along the sea routes of the Indian ocean.

Why Democracy?

While traveling in Washington DC for a few days last week, I attended an event at the National Archives, where short clips from different documentaries were shown. The theme was democracy and how people and cultures from different parts of the world interpret it. This is the website of the group that is organizing the documentary project - called Why Democracy? - and bringing it to fruition.

The clips I saw at the DC event were brilliant – I can’t wait for the release of these movies. Among the movies featured was Dinner with the President, an audacious and nuanced account of a Pakistani reporter's travels to different parts of her country. The reporter's goal is to get a sense of what people from all walks of life – including Musharraf, whom she meets at a dinner – feel about democracy and the current political situation. A preview of the movie is here.

Also in the collection is Iron Ladies of Liberia, about the new President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and her brave and intelligent mediation of political disputes; and Please Vote for Me, a hilarious yet disconcerting look at the election of a class monitor in a primary school in Wuhan, China. I was astonished by how expertly this movie (at least in the clip I saw) was able to encapsulate - through the actions of little kids! - the power play, corruption and grievances that entail the democratic process. It reminded me a bit of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Two themes from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

I’ve been reading Dostoevsky for the last month and a half. I finished Crime and Punishment, and am currently reading The Idiot. This post is about two of Dostoevsky's many themes in The Idiot. The first is about capital punishment – Dostoevsky himself faced a death sentence – and the second is about the essence of religious feeling. I found the expression of these themes in the novel powerful and moving, and I felt it would be good to provide some quotes and passages from the novel. All quotes in this post are from Henry and Olga Carlisle's translation.

I. The Death Sentence

In 1849, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for his involvement with a radical socialist group. Dostoevsky was in his late twenties then. He was about to be killed by the firing squad, when a last minute message repealed the death sentence. He was instead exiled to and imprisoned in Siberia for the next ten years.

Dostoevsky returns to this harrowing brush with death in his novel The Idiot – the second of his classic works, which was published after Crime and Punishment (this was in 1868, about eight years after his return to St.Petersburg). Many of his views are expressed through Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot, a young man of nobility but who possesses no wealth when the novel begins. The prince – one of Dostoevsky’s most fascinating creations – is an unassuming person with a heart of gold, but who is mistaken as an idiot on account of his guilelessness.

In the first part of the novel, the prince, just returned to St.Petersburg, speaks to other characters of his experiences abroad in Europe, where he lived for four years. One of these experiences concerns a trip to Lyons in France, where he had observed a public execution:

“In France, they always cut their heads off…It’s done in an instant. They lie the man down, and this broad knife falls through a machine they call the guillotine – very powerfully and heavily – the head flies off before you can blink an eye. The preparations are horrible. When they read the death sentence, dress him and prepare him, tie him up and drag him onto the scaffold – all that is dreadful. People crowd in, even women – they don’t like women to look on though.”

A little later, the prince talks passionately of how the idea of certain death can be more difficult than any other ordeal:

“Who could say that human nature can endure such a trial without slipping into madness? Why this ghastly, needless outrage? Perhaps there is a man to whom the death sentence was read and who was allowed to suffer and then told, ‘Go, You are pardoned.’ Perhaps such a man could tell us something. This was the agony and the horror of which Christ told too. No, you cannot treat a man like that.”

“…Think! When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.” [Dostoevsky’s italics].

That’s probably how Dostoevsky felt. I’ve only quoted a few passages here, but there’s more in the novel. There’s a section forty pages later when the prince, talking to a different audience in St.Petersburg – that is what the first part of The Idiot is about: the prince’s encounter and conversations many different people in St.Petersburg – imagines the details how the man he saw executed on a guillotine must have felt in his final hours, minutes.

“Then three or four hours were spent on usual things: the priest, the breakfast, at which he was given wine, coffee and beef. (Isn’t that mockery? You think how cruel it is, and yet, by heaven, those innocent people do this out of the kindness of their hearts and are convinced they are being humane.) …Finally he is taken through the town to the scaffold. I think as he is being driven there he feels he has still an eternity to live…All around is crowd, noise, ten thousand faces, ten thousand eyes…”

Dostoevsky’s special achievement has always been his imagining of the inner workings of troubled minds – such as the imagining of the murderer Raskolnikov’s mind in Crime and Punishment. But in recreating what the man who was to face the guillotine felt on the day of his execution, Dostoevsky was drawing from his own experience, even though his planned execution was not a public one.

II. The Essence of Religious Feeling

Six months later – we are now in the second part of the novel; a lot has happened by now – the prince talks to Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son, one of the novel’s main characters. He talks of his travels in an unnamed Russian province. Because he was in Europe in his formative years, the prince knows very little about Russia. It is only now that he has begun to understand the country and how deeply religious it is. And in the series of anecdotes that the prince tells, I found one of Dostoevsky’s recurring themes – religion, and what it means to be Christian – beautifully expressed.

While traveling on a train to the province the prince meets an atheist, a very learned and well-bred man. But the prince notices in the atheist what he has seen in other atheists too - that they sidestep the question of God, though it might appear that they are addressing it.

“He doesn’t believe in God. Except one thing struck me: he didn’t seem to be talking about that at all, the whole time, and this struck me precisely because whenever I’ve met disbelievers before, and no matter how many of their books I read, it always seems to me that they are always speaking and writing of something else, though on the surface it seems to be that.”

Later, while the prince is staying at hotel in the province, he learns of a murder that had happened there the night before. Two close peasant friends had shared a room at the hotel. One of them wore a silver watch on a beaded ribbon, which the other, despite being a close friend, had not previously known about.

“The first was not a thief, he was in fact a honest man and for a peasant not all that poor. But he was so taken by this watch, so tempted by it that he finally could not restrain himself, he took a knife and when his friend’s back was turned came up cautiously behind him, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself, and bitterly and silently prayed, ‘Lord, forgive me for Christ’s sake!’ and he cut his friend’s throat with one stroke, like a sheep, and took his watch.”

At this, Rogozhin, to whom the prince is talking, laughs uncontrollably and says:

“One fellow doesn’t believe in God at all, while the other believes in Him so much he murders people with a prayer on his lips. No my dear prince, you could have never have invented just that. Ha, ha, ha! No, that beats everything!”

But the prince’s point – and Dostoevsky’s too – is a lot more complicated than the irony that Rogozhin finds irresistibly funny. The prince now tells Rogozhin of the following experience from his second day at the province:

“ ...as I was going back to my hotel, I came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby. The woman was quite young and the baby six weeks old. The child smiled at her for the first time in his life. I watched and suddenly she crossed herself with great devotion. ‘What are you doing my dear?’ (I was always asking questions in those days). ‘There is joy for a mother in the child’s first smile, just as God rejoices when from heaven he sees a sinner praying to Him with his whole heart.’ This is what that peasant woman said to me, almost in those very words, such a profound, subtle and truly religious thought in which the whole essence of Christianity is expressed – I mean the whole conception of God as our own Father and of God’s joy in man, like a father’s in his own child – Christ’s fundamental thought!”

And this is the prince’s final message – a sort of denouement – to Rogozhin:

“ …the essence of religious feeling doesn’t depend on reasoning, and it has nothing to do with crime or atheism. There is something else there and there always will be, and atheists will always pass over it and will never be talking about that.” [Dostoevsky’s italics].

It is a remarkable message and it resonates even today. The genuine personal connection that people all over the world feel with their faith, irrespective of whom or what they believe in, cannot be explained easily. But it is something special and indisputable; it is something millions of people draw comfort and strength from.

Great first lines of novels

Via an old post of Jai Arjun’s (I can’t locate it now), I came across this link that lists some of the great first lines of novels - you'll find many classics in this compilation.

Some of my own additions: Rushdie’s frenzied start to his famous Midnight's Children: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947.”

And here's my vote for the most cynical beginning ever to a novel: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” This is from - not too tough to guess - Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.

Finally, to digress from literary writing a bit, Jared Diamond, in his non-fiction work, Guns Germs and Steel begins with “We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe” and then goes on to provide an astonishing, readable synthesis of existing research to explain how these differences came to be.

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.”

____

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."

_____

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."