Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Rearranging the chairs helps, but it is still like swimming in molasses to get a discussion going, to get anyone to speak up or to argue with someone else—especially me. In one workshop it is Day Two before a student finally says, “I think I disagree with your point about . . .” I let go an inner sigh of relief. The right to dispute the teacher: one American import I wholeheartedly like.

  • • •

  Something else American visitors import to India is their own expectations. You expect the unfamiliar, and you certainly find it. What strikes me, though, is not the occasional elephant in the street or the processions of brilliantly costumed people on a Hindu holy day. These I’m prepared for; they are the unfamiliar made familiar by postcards. More striking are the ways in which all kinds of things that in Western society are usually more hidden suddenly become visible.

  The vast yard where old cars are carefully taken apart—hubcaps in one pile, steering wheels in another, axles in another, and so on, right next to a big complex of butcher stalls where taken-apart animals are also sorted into their separate body parts. The gigantic switch with a six-inch handle, such as one imagines the on-off switch in a nuclear power plant to have, that controls the electrical line entering the vast fuse box that takes up many square feet of prominent wall space in the house we have rented. Our backyard pit for burning garbage. The vacant lot next door where our neighborhood’s unburnable garbage ends up. The fact that, yes, our house has a gas-burning stove as advertised, but we ourselves have to go to the gas dealer’s office (where the manager’s desk has an offering to the gods on a banana leaf) and collect the gas—contained in metal canisters that clank and rattle together ominously beneath our seat in a rickety three-wheeler auto-rickshaw on the way home. The way social ranks are laid bare: a person’s degrees and the universities they are from, one’s profession and title, are all displayed on the nameplate in front of one’s house and, in the case of a government official, on a little red sign on his car, such as: vice chancellor, kerala university.

  Living in India also lays bare the material expectations we import. I may think of myself as nonmaterialistic and deplore the Indian attachment to Western consumer goods, but I’m forced to realize how many of them I take for granted myself. Our standard of living in India is far higher than that of most people around us. We told house rental agents that we were just looking for something simple. But simplicity is relative. For we expect electricity, a telephone, flush toilet, hot and cold water.

  We are assured that the house we’ve rented will have all these things. And after a fashion that’s true. But it takes five weeks for the telephone to be installed, sometimes it goes dead, and we can’t use it to call abroad. There is hot water, but not in the kitchen. The electricity goes out for a scheduled half an hour every evening, and often for longer stretches during the day. The voltage is high enough to work the e-mail modem only before 9:00 a.m. The municipal water supply shrinks to a trickle in the dry season, and sometimes the pump to our backup well fails. When there’s water, the toilet flushes, but you can hear it gurgling into the backyard septic tank (which is, strangely, uphill from the well). So: all of these basic things exist, but most of them come and go unpredictably.

  This is a healthy lesson. For one thing, it connects us with others. If one or another of these services isn’t working, we share with neighbors, or do without for a few hours, or for a day or two. They take buckets of our water if they have none; they bring us candles if we have no electricity. At first I am frustrated when something breaks down—and my impatience makes me feel embarrassingly American, since a few houses away there are people who live by kerosene light and get water from a public faucet down the road. What right do I have to complain? Yet complain I do.

  Eventually, I come to be more relaxed. To learn that we can survive temporarily without phone or water or e-mail, makes us feel a little more hardy and self-reliant. But that’s only because we’re doing without things to which we secretly feel entitled. In this way, I’m much more American than I’d like to be.

  • • •

  Among the strongest American imports to India are fears. At the beginning I am afraid of getting sick, of being taken advantage of, of being robbed. We bring lots of medicines and vitamin pills; I examine all food suspiciously for signs of germs or spoilage. I fear being taken for a naïve tourist by shopkeepers. And it seems that people here are also afraid of robbery: windows throughout India are covered with bars, even on the upper floors of apartment houses. Thieves must be resourceful, I think, climbing up from below or rappelling down from the roof.

  However, we don’t get sick. The first time I leave our neighborhood fruit and vegetable stall after buying food, its keeper comes racing after me from a hundred yards away, with my change—because I had misunderstood him and left fifty rupees (about $1.25) on the counter instead of fifteen rupees. And after a month or two, it dawns on me that the window bars everywhere are not against thieves but against India’s vast population of aggressive, hungry crows, whose taste for human food scraps has been honed feasting on the omnipresent roadside garbage. It takes a few weeks more before I realize that virtually nobody in our part of India worries about street crime. The rare policemen I see are unarmed. Why does it take so long to let go of my fears? What’s most foreign, most unknown, is what we’re most afraid of, even when we seek it out. Maybe that’s why we seek it out.

  I can date the moment I let these fears go. It is about eight o’clock one evening, and I’m making my way home from a workshop for Kerala local government officials in a distant, unfamiliar neighborhood. The isolated building where the workshop took place is on top of a big hill. There are no taxis outside, no buses. The nearest place I have any chance of finding an auto-rickshaw that can take me home is a mile or so away, a traffic circle at the bottom of the hill. I head off down the road. There is no moon, and everything is pitch black. There are no streetlights. Either the electricity is having its nightly shut-down or the houses in this neighborhood don’t have any. Here and there, a far-off kerosene lamp flickers faintly, most likely in someone’s window; it is too dark to tell. Occasionally, a pair of very dim headlights zooms up or down the road, and I step quickly aside, but not too far, for fear of unseen ditches. I’m wearing dark clothes; the drivers of passing vehicles can’t see me. I should have brought a flashlight, worn a white shirt. I should have one of those red reflective safety vests. Dumb, not to have thought about this. In vain, I anxiously try to flag down what may or may not be a passing taxi that looms suddenly out of the darkness and then disappears. The driver can’t see the furled black umbrella I’m waving. The only way I can tell I’m on or off the road is by the feel of the asphalt underfoot.

  Partway down the hill, I become aware of the rattle of metal wheels ahead of me on the road, accompanied by a rhythmic clinking. Finally, I’m close enough to make out, just barely, the outline of a food vendor’s cart. The man pushing it, judging from the sound, is continually stirring something—I can’t see what—in a frying pan or wok. But standing upright on the front of the cart, his protection against being run over, is a candle. That’s all it takes. I realize that the candle can be my protection, too. Flooded with a sudden sense of safety, I follow twenty paces behind this mysterious, candlelit stir-frying the rest of the way down the hill.

  2000

  TWELVE

  Palm Trees and Paradoxes

  DURING THE FIVE MONTHS THAT I lived in Trivandrum,* the capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, I went for a run every morning. My neighbors were thoroughly amused at the spectacle of someone eccentric enough to voluntarily work up a sweat in their sauna-like climate. Laborers gathered at a roadside stall for a cup of milky tea laughed and called out “Where coming from?” Children heading down the narrow dirt lanes to school giggled and raced alongside.

  India overwhelms the senses, caress and assault together. It was all there for me each dawn: The bat trapped in the telephone wires. The beautiful vista over a prist
ine, green valley floor filled with coconut palms (which hid, I discovered before long, thousands of small houses). The border of garbage lining every roadside, dotted with bright plastic shopping bags. The luminous multicolored sari worn by each older woman, and the salwar kameez by each younger one—a long dress, sometimes embedded with bits of mirror that flashed in the sun, accompanied by a gauzy, flowing scarf. The strings of fiery-hot red peppers for sale at the roadside food stands. The massive, gated house of the neighborhood money-lender (36 percent interest for six months, compounded thereafter, with gold jewelry as security): “Maximum discretion. If a woman brings me her bracelet, her husband will not know. If a police chief needs money, he sends his servant.”

  And the sounds: The soft chant of a Hindu prayer meeting coming through an open door. The muezzin’s amplified dawn call to prayer from the mosque. The hymns on Sunday from the Salvation Army hall down the street. The calls from a man selling squawking ducks out of a box on the back of his bicycle, from a woman selling fish from a flat basket on her head, and from the “ironing man,” with his wheeled cart and clothes iron, heated by charcoal. The whump! whump! of coconuts dropping to the ground while, forty feet above, a harvester clung to a tree with his legs, a loop of rope, and one arm and wielded a machete with the other.

  All of these sights and sounds can be had elsewhere in India, but there was one thing that an early morning jogger could see far more of in Kerala. Even in the very poorest homes in my neighborhood—two-room mud houses without even a chimney, so that cooking smoke rose through the roof thatch—someone would often be sitting on the doorstep reading a newspaper. The newspaper would usually not be in English but in Kerala’s language, Malayalam. A written tongue since before Chaucer, it has its own alphabet of more than fifty beautifully looping letters. In a country where roughly half the population is illiterate, Kerala is the only state where more than 90 percent of adults can read and write.

  Equally impressive was what I did not see on my morning neighborhood jog. There were no children with the swollen bellies of the severely malnourished. There were no people living under miserable, makeshift tents of plastic sheeting or sleeping on the sidewalk, such as you see by the millions elsewhere in India. (In Trivandrum, a city about the size of San Francisco, there were also no sidewalks, which made pedestrian life challenging). And there were no beggars. There were a few in the city’s downtown, but not as many as you might see in Boston or New York.

  Kerala has the highest immunization rate in India and more than three times as many hospital beds per capita as the rest of the country. The average person born in Kerala today lives to be seventy-two, nearly a dozen years longer than someone born elsewhere in India. The infant mortality rate is less than a quarter that of the country as a whole. These statistics approach American and European levels; they are better, in fact, than those for black Americans. Only thirty years ago, Kerala had the fastest-growing population in India, but today the state’s birth rate is 1.7 children per woman. A generation from now, Kerala’s population will level off and begin to drop.

  Figures like these are all the more striking because Kerala has a per capita income that, on paper, is only about one seventieth that of the United States. Furthermore, a population roughly the size of California’s is crammed into an area smaller than San Bernardino County: a long, thin strip of coastal land laced with rice paddies and internal waterways. For doing so much more with less, the state has drawn praise from assorted radicals and greens everywhere, who are eager to find a juster, gentler way of development than the cruel gaps between rich and poor that prevail throughout most of the global South.

  Does Kerala provide some answers? To explore these issues, my wife and I lived there when we went to India as Fulbright lecturers. The state turned out to be far more complicated than the rosy picture of it gleaned from our reading beforehand. The statistics are real and indeed indicate an achievement. But Kerala, we found, is also a place of many paradoxes.

  • • •

  The first is that credit for Kerala’s accomplishments is strangely divided between a strong labor movement and communist politicians, on the one hand, and some feudal monarchs, on the other.

  Despite at least one infusion of CIA campaign money to the opposition, over the past forty years Kerala has had several long stretches of rule by coalitions led by one or the other of two communist parties (the old Indian party split into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions in the 1960s). Kerala’s communists are somewhat like those in Italy: however unsavory their past affiliations overseas, they’ve won a reputation at home for good government and for being noticeably less corrupt than other parties. Besides near-universal literacy, the changes they have brought to Kerala include public health clinics, shops that sell staple food at controlled prices, and South Asia’s most substantial land reform.

  However, the communists built their welfare state on foundations provided by an amazingly enlightened series of hereditary rulers. In colonial times about half of what is today Kerala lay in two princely states, which, to a greater degree than most of those elsewhere in India, were largely left alone by the British. Furthermore, Kerala’s royal families were markedly different from their counterparts. For example, in 1817 the maharani of Travancore, whose domain covered most of today’s southern Kerala, issued an edict declaring that “the state should defray the whole cost of education of its people.” At that time few, if any, European kings and queens would have embraced so radical an idea. Later in the century, Travancore was the first princely state to set up a legislative council and to begin a halting transformation into a constitutional monarchy.

  Other members of these royal families started schools and a university and studied medicine, both traditional and Western. One maharaja in the Travancore dynasty was a noted painter and another, who reigned in the early 1800s, was a polymath who spoke eight languages and was famous as the composer of many hymns and songs, some of which are still sung today. (Although a researcher recently claimed that it was a court musician who wrote the songs.) Because of their unusual enthusiasm for universal literacy, the maharajahs welcomed Christian missionaries, who started what are still the state’s best schools. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the literacy rate in Kerala was more than twice that of India as a whole.

  At the time we lived there, Kerala was once again under a coalition government dominated by the largest of India’s left parties, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose red flags flew everywhere. But the current maharajah, today without political power, still lived in a small palace in downtown Trivandrum, where I went to see him.

  A roof of traditional red tile kept out the broiling sun, and beautifully carved wooden grillwork around the tops of the palace walls let the breezes flow through, making the rooms comfortably cool without air conditioning. A generator roared in the background, providing royal independence from Kerala’s anemic electric grid. An elderly Mercedes was parked under a portico.

  His Highness Sree Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, the fifty-fifth maharajah of Travancore, was a slight, lithe, upbeat man with a small mustache. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, a dab of yellow paint, signifying devoutness, in the middle of his forehead, and a mundu. This standard Kerala male attire is a loose combination of pants and skirt that wraps around and between the legs. In a way I could never quite fathom, it can be instantly readjusted by its wearer to reach either just down to knee height, for coolness, or, as a sign of respect to someone you meet, all the way to the ankles.

  When a servant ushered me into the large reception room where the maharajah was sitting, he was still busy with his preceding visitors. He pointed cheerfully to a large portrait on the wall and called out, “That’s my doctor ancestor. Take a look at him!”

  After a few minutes, he motioned me over and showed me a genealogical chart of his forebears. “In 1809, we were the first to rise against the British, and when you are the first to get out of hand they are more severe with you. They start br
eaking up all your forts, disbanding your army, doing away with the police. And then they say, ‘You people are not very well behaved, so we will keep two British regiments here, for your protection, for which you will pay!’”

  The maharajah went on to describe his childhood, his face lighting up with pleasure every time he could get off a bon mot: “I’m a graduate of the University of Travancore, in ’41. But I never went to college. The college came to me!” Fourteen tutors, some British, some Indian, appeared at the palace regularly.

  Although he reportedly made and lost considerable money as a businessman while waiting to inherit the maharajah’s position from his elder brother, the activities he wanted to talk about were, in his family tradition, scholarly, religious, and philanthropic. Just that morning, he said, he had had a Sanskrit lesson and had gotten his weekly homework assignment. He said he was in the middle of writing a book of religious philosophy. “The Queen of England is Defender of the Faith. I’m an Attender of the Faith! I go to Padmanabhaswamy Temple every day, early in the morning, and that makes me fit for the next twenty-three hours.”

  Today there are no more tax revenues for “people of our breed,” as he put it, but the family’s wealth is still there, much of it in a group of trusts, which give money to schools and hospitals. Benefactions are carefully divided among Kerala’s different religious groups. Roughly 60 percent of the state’s people are, like the maharaja, Hindu; 20 percent are Muslim; and 20 percent are Christian. “When I was a little boy, every Christmas Eve, Christians would come to the house and sing carols. Only after that would they go on to the town. Then, on the birthday of the prophet, the imam would come, and only after that would he go to the town.” Does the maharajah feel in conflict with Kerala’s current communist government? Not particularly, it seems. “The other day, about a month back, they organized a youth festival. The education minister sent word to me, ‘Would you go and inaugurate it?’” He did so. But, with a laugh, he implied that his own family had originated most of Kerala’s social reforms. When I asked how many children he had—he is seventy-seven—he answered triumphantly, “Two! We thought of the limited family well in advance!” He was right: a history of the state I later read reported that a member of the dynasty had helped bring the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to Trivandrum in 1934.