Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  • • •

  The same issue arose again, in a very different setting, a few days after Mandela’s visit to the Premier mine. At a film festival in Cape Town, the German director Margarethe von Trotta showed her excellent 1986 feature film Rosa Luxemburg. Afterward she took questions from a small multiracial audience.

  One man rose to say that he had been deeply moved by the film. Luxemburg’s vision of social justice, her lonely fight against the madness of the First World War, had been such a noble and uncompromising one, he said. Was it still possible in the world today? Could such hopes of social transformation still exist? Had the ANC, in its long negotiations with the government, made too many compromises, negotiated away too many dreams?

  What made these words so poignant was that everyone in the theater knew that the speaker was one of the ANC’s key negotiators. His face, pitted with shrapnel wounds, is familiar to millions of South Africans. Albie Sachs is a veteran white anti-apartheid campaigner who spent many months in solitary confinement. When he then went to work for the ANC in exile in Mozambique, South African agents tracked him down and planted the car bomb that cost Sachs his right hand and forearm and the sight of one eye. A lawyer, he is now studying constitutions around the world for the ANC. He will be deeply involved in writing a new one for South Africa after the April elections.*

  Sachs spoke from the heart. And there are no easy answers to his questions. Except, perhaps, to say that today we live in a world of small steps. Paved streets, free schoolbooks, and flush toilets are not Rosa Luxemburg’s dreamed-of socialist commonwealth. But if the ANC can deliver them, it will touch the lives of millions. To those who’ve never had them before, it is out of such things, and of people’s belief in their right to have them, that democracies are made. And on that foundation, so harshly denied to most South Africans until now, much more can be built.

  1994

  * * *

  * Later in the year, he was appointed a justice of the Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court.

  India

  FIGURE 4. Coffeehouse designed by Laurie Baker, Trivandrum, India.

  ELEVEN

  India’s American Imports

  A FEW DAYS AFTER ARRIVING in India for the first time, I went to see a big Hindi-language hit movie called Dil To Pagal Hai, “The Heart Is Crazy.” The film was showing in a small, desperately poor town in the northern state of Rajasthan. Outside the theater, hundreds of people were arriving on foot, on bicycles, in pedicabs, on motor scooters carrying three or four men each, on packed carts drawn by camels or oxen with painted horns, and on wagons towed by farm tractors.

  Parts of the film’s plot are loosely borrowed from A Chorus Line. The director of a musical is loved by a woman in his troupe but he is attracted to someone else: the star of his new show. Various subplots, dance numbers, and smoldering glances fluff things out to several hours. In the end the director gets the new star and the other woman pairs up with the new star’s old fiancé, so everyone lives happily ever after. But the curious thing about this film was that although it was made in India, and the producer, director, and actors were all Indian, and the audience and theater could not have been more Indian, there was, on the surface, little Indian about what was on the screen. The film showed virtually no Indian clothing, food, signs, furniture, or anything else.

  There were no street scenes in India. There were, however, scenes in a European Disneyland-like amusement park, and in London, where one character is making his fortune. When he thinks he has won his woman, he makes the victorious downward jerk of the clenched fist that American pro athletes make after scoring a basket or touchdown. Interior shots showed a modern airport, film studios, a Japanese restaurant, and a luxurious hospital with private rooms. The musical numbers were American disco, not Indian. The stars used a conspicuously displayed variety of cell phones and new cars. They sipped bottles of mineral water, wore blue jeans, leotards, and mini-skirts and drank copious amounts of Pepsi—the company must have paid hefty product placement fees. But the West itself, paying no fee, was the real product placement, from the California-sleek furnishings of the characters’ homes to the distinctly unIndian rolling green pastures of the hero’s imagined dream landscape, through which the heroine runs in a gauzy white dress. So: an Indian film without India in it.

  Except that India was in the story. The spurned woman curses the gods for setting the man she loves on the wrong track. The other woman, who falls for the director, is escaping a planned marriage she is under great social pressure to make, for she is a poor orphan and her fiancé is what the government here calls an NRI—a non-resident Indian—prospering in Europe. Plus, although the film was as chaste as could be (no nudity, barely a kiss), the audience, except for our small, much-stared-at group of Indians and foreigners, was entirely male. Evidently local women don’t come to the late show.

  I began thinking about this curious blend of India and non-India as we left the theater and made our way through the camels and pedicabs and farm tractors, and the contradictions remained in the back of my mind for the rest of the five months my wife and I spent living in the country. You normally think of travel as a way of getting to know something unfamiliar. But travel anywhere for an American today involves getting to know a combination, often an uneasy one, of the unfamiliar and the familiar.

  For the Indians who watched this film, and the hundreds like it that their country produces each year, glamour lies in a dreamworld where everything is smooth and clean and electronic, where the artifacts that surround you are American or European. Consumer goods are always advertised in ways that emphasize their foreignness. In the ads in India’s slick newsweeklies promoting clothes, cars, cigarettes, and computers, there are no dark-skinned models. Either by birth, makeup, or the retoucher’s brush, the features of most Indian models are ethnically ambiguous—hair dark enough to be Indian, skin light enough to be white. The implicit message is: buy this object that the model is holding or wearing or riding in and it will bring you closer to America.

  But what’s being imported here is not what we might like to consider admirable in America: informality and skepticism toward authority, for example, or schools that value individual creativity more than rote learning. Instead, cultural imports are mainly those things that someone can make money selling. Ideas travel slowly. The desire for objects travels at the speed of a TV transmission.

  Through India’s importing of such yearnings, the West, mostly the United States, has conquered the country far more conclusively than the British ever did. The British left some monuments and street names and, to the business, academic, and governing classes, the English language. But then they went home. Earlier conquerors left lighter traces: I saw squatters living inside sepulchers in an old overgrown Dutch graveyard in the port city of Cochin. But the signs of the new conquest are everywhere—on billboards, on movie and TV screens, in the armloads of gadgets that Indians who live or work abroad bring when they come home. No guns or tanks or ships are strong enough to keep this conquest at bay, for it is a conquest not by the sword but by religion: the religion of consumption.

  The new religion outdraws the old. The one other movie we saw while in India was a James Bond film. The theater was huge, just across the street from a small Hindu shrine that had few visitors. I tried to watch the film through the eyes of the shrine keeper. The religion Bond represents provides tough competition. Bond braves, unscathed, some of the classic elements that impede mortal beings: air (he flies a jet fighter and does free-fall parachuting), water (he wears scuba gear), and fire (through which he dashes unharmed while the villain’s lair goes up in flames). The chariot of this new god is a remote-controlled BMW whose electrically charged door handles and other secret weaponry make it impervious to harm. Additional devices—which look like Western consumer products such as wristwatches or cell phones, but have other powers as well—serve Bond as amulets, with a supernatural destructive force as strong as any thunderbolt hurled by Shiva
.

  This is the shape of the new conquest. For many an object to be desirable to the Indian consumer, it must have a Western aura, even if it is Indian-made. For example, the house we rented came equipped with an electric water purifier called an Aquaguard—something manufactured in India and sold by the millions. When running, the Aquaguard played music to remind you it was on, so you wouldn’t let the bottle it was slowly filling overflow. And what music did it play, in ovenlike weather, only six hundred miles from the equator? Two tunes, over and over: “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

  • • •

  For a week, as part of our work as Fulbright lecturers, Arlie and I are teaching at something called the American Studies Research Center (since then renamed the Indo-American Centre for International Studies), in Hyderabad. This institution gives courses of various sorts on American history and culture, but its heart is a superb library. It contains, we are told, the largest collection of books and periodicals about the United States to be found anywhere outside that country and one library in Europe. A reader can feast on the complete works of hundreds of American authors and on back issues of more than seven hundred magazines and journals. From poetry to architecture to national parks, you could find enough material here to write a doctoral dissertation on innumerable aspects of American life, and hundreds of Indians have done so. The Center was founded some thirty-five years ago by the U.S. Information Agency; it is now scrambling for money elsewhere, because the end of the Cold War means no more government funds.

  There is something unreal about this perfectly reproduced piece of an American university campus, complete with mowed and watered lawn, a green, carefully manicured island in the middle of scorched India. Thousands of yards of library shelves house such volumes as The Papers of John Marshall and Interior Department Reports, while across the road squatters are living in the bushes, and throughout this huge city tens of thousands of people are sleeping under tarpaulins or sheets of plastic or no roof at all—on the sidewalk, in vacant lots, at construction sites, and beneath freeway overpasses.

  I have a similar feeling of disjuncture when I lecture to the Indian college teachers at the Center’s American civilization course. Few have been to America, and almost all are eager to go. Many are leftists who believe—correctly, I think—that the way the United States is using the new global trade regime to reshape the world to its liking makes life harder for poor countries like India. But at the same time, America beckons: it is the source of travel grants, scholarships, and what appears to be cutting-edge culture. These teachers sit eat with us in the Center’s cafeteria and shyly launch conversations, usually on subjects about which I feel abysmally ignorant. “Can I talk with you about symbolism in John Barth and William Faulkner?” asks one. Another, from Nepal, speaks movingly about the burden of illiteracy and the oppression of women there, but as a scholar he is entranced by Thomas Pynchon.

  Am I jealous that these people have been able to make more sense of Barth and Pynchon than I have? Probably. But why are they attracted to the most abstruse and difficult of our writers? Is it because these seem the highest peaks to scale in the American cultural landscape? Do they see it as a path to getting a scholarship in the United States? Or is it because the complexity and sophistication of Barth and Pynchon are a substitute for the complex and sophisticated personal computers, video cameras, and other consumer goods that are beyond the financial reach of so many Indian college teachers?

  I’m left feeling that if there’s anything useful being imported from the United States at this particular spot, it is neither our lectures, nor John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, nor the judicial opinions of John Marshall and the other contents of the library. Rather, it is the example of how the library itself is run. Unlike those in most other libraries in India, and, indeed, elsewhere in the world, the stacks are open. The catalogue is well organized and up-to-date, and it matches the books on the shelves. The shelved books are upright and in their proper places. There are no dusty, moldering piles that have been waiting to be reshelved for months. And, above all, the librarians—who are all Indians, incidentally—smile. They make eye contact. They offer to help you find what you’re looking for. They don’t treat library users as unwelcome, lower-ranking intruders. Indeed, when we meet Indian academics who have been to Hyderabad to use this library, it is these things, not the actual books, that they marvel over. With reason: to my mind an open-stack American university library with a skilled staff is one of the great cultural treasures on earth.

  Was this the key part of American culture that Congress thought would be imported by India when it appropriated funding for this place during the Cold War? I’m sure not. They were doubtless thinking instead about the glories of free enterprise and the evils of communism. A paradox of the strange business of cultural imports is that what one country imports may be quite different from what another country thinks it is exporting.

  • • •

  One of the most pervasive of all cultural imports—something reinforced unconsciously by every minute spent looking at Baywatch or NYPD Blue, or at any newspaper photo that shows the West—is the idea of what constitutes a proper building. It is built of materials that are inflexible and permanent. They are usually costly and often brought long distances. These notions are American and European in origin, not Indian. More than half of India’s structures are made of mud, and in some parts of the country the roofs are likely to be palm thatch. If you own even a small plot of land, both materials may be plentiful, close at hand—and free.

  In the south Indian state of Kerala, where we are based for our five months, I visit a small settlement of “tribals,” as they are called, members of one of the many indigenous groups that live close to the land throughout rural India. The people in this settlement are from the Kani tribe, and they live beneath a rocky mountain ridge in a bamboo forest, raising and eating fruits and vegetables. To reach them requires walking a mile and a half from the nearest dirt road, along a forest trail.

  I’m being given a tour of this area by the president and several members of the panchayat, or city council, of the municipality that includes the bamboo forest. A hard-driving, energetic man, the president wants to show me the primitive conditions in which the tribals live, “so that you can really understand the need for changes.” But the visit has the opposite effect on me.

  At the settlement of half a dozen homes, we go to the house of Malian Kani, the chief. He gives me sliced pineapple and a coconut with a hole to drink from. Malian Kani wears only a loincloth. He doesn’t know his age, but the officials believe him to be between eighty and eighty-five. We find him with his two daughters and two daughters-in-law. A son arrives, returning from an expedition into the forest to gather firewood. Everyone is barefoot.

  Almost everything that surrounds us is made of the versatile bamboo, from the thatch of the roof (which lasts three years before it needs to be replaced), to the walls of split bamboo, to the woven mats that cover the dirt floor. On three sides, the house is open to the cooling breeze. The only furniture is a bamboo cot with another woven mat. More rolled mats are stored in a rack hanging from the ceiling, reached by a bamboo ladder. In the kitchen, bamboo racks of various shapes hold tin pots and plates and spoons. One of the chief’s daughters demonstrates a bamboo bow, used to shoot not arrows but small stones—to force away bothersome wild elephants. Even the settlement’s chicken house is made of bamboo, as are a trap for catching fish from a nearby stream, and a rat trap, whose spring utilizes the tension of a bent piece of the wood.

  All this bamboo has been cut within a few minutes’ walk. Gathering it cost no money, depleted no limited resource, required no fossil fuel, added nothing to global warming. To look at a house where everything has been so ingeniously made of one material is breathtaking. It is like looking at a visual piece of music: bamboo theme with variations. I am awed by the beauty. One of the local officials with me seems to experience an unexpected twinge of the same
feeling and says, “It’s a pity we have to change all this.”

  Under a new development plan, the panchayat president explains to me proudly, they are building houses for these people—solid, durable houses of concrete, with tin roofs. However, one of the Kani tells my interpreter that many of them don’t want the new houses the panchayat is so eager to build. Even in daytime, it will be dark inside, and under the equatorial sun the tin roofs will get broiling hot. If the panchayat insists on building these concrete structures, he says, the Kani will use them to store farm tools, and they’ll keep on living in the bamboo houses. But the next generation, will they continue? I doubt it. By then the imported idea of what a house is supposed to be will be irrevocably in place.

  • • •

  One of the things I do in India, in four different cities, is give two- and three-day workshops in nonfiction writing for students and working journalists. What am I importing? It is not anything uniquely American about writing techniques. The best students know what I mean when I talk about narrative strategy. And some of the published examples of good writing that I’ve picked for us to read and discuss are Indian. I think what I’m importing most effectively are some strong beliefs about chairs. Each time I arrive at a university for one of these workshops, the chair I’m supposed to sit in is on a platform, behind a table or podium, and everyone else’s chairs are lined up in rows facing me. Each time, I enlist the puzzled class in rearranging the chairs in a circle. I have noticed the same kind of thing in classrooms in Africa; there, also, the legacy of colonialism lives on in ossified form. And thus school classrooms in Africa or Asia are not like the British or French classrooms of today, which are sometimes as informal and non-hierarchical as American ones. Rather, they are like the British or French classrooms of a sixty or seventy years ago, or the British or French classrooms of someone’s imagination.