Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  When the subject is not world revolution but the specific situation of Nepal, he can be shrewdly perceptive. A police officer in India told me that many of the Indian Communists he interviewed confessed to learning much from the Maoists in Nepal, who were not as rigidly doctrinal as Communists in India and Afghanistan. As Prachanda put it, “The situation in Nepal is not classical, not traditional. In the Terai region we find landlords with some lands, and we have to seize the lands and distribute them among the poor peasants. But in the whole mountainous regions, that is not the case. There are smallholdings, and no big landlords … How to develop production, how to raise production is the main problem here. The small pieces of land mean the peasants have low productivity. With collective farming it will be more scientific and things can be done to raise production.”

  It is not clear how much collective farming exists or what nonmilitary use the Maoists make of the taxes they collect. In fact, there is little reliable information about what goes on in the countryside. Few journalists venture out of their urban bases, and the Maoists aren’t the only obstacle. Most of the very few roads outside Kathmandu are a series of large potholes, and then there are the nervous soldiers at checkpoints. And once you move away from the highway, no soldiers or policemen appear for miles on end. In Shakti Khor, a village in the Tarai region populated by one of the poorest communities in Nepal, a few men quietly informed us that Maoist guerrillas were hiding in the nearby forest, where no security forces ever ventured and from where the Maoists often escaped to India. At a small cooperative shop selling honey, mustard oil, turmeric, and herbal medicines, two men in their mid-twenties appeared very keen to put in a good word for the Maoists, who the previous night had painted red antimonarchy slogans on the clean walls.

  In the other Maoist-dominated regions I visited, people seemed too afraid to talk. At Deurali Bazaar, a village at the end of a long and treacherous drive in the hills near Pokhara, a newly constructed barnboo gate was wrapped with a red cloth painted with a hammer and sickle and the names of Maoists either dead or in prison. The scene in the square appeared normal at first—women scrubbing children at a municipal tap, young men drinking tea, an old tailor hunched over an antique sewing machine, his walking stick leaning against his chair—but the presence of the Maoists, if unacknowledged, was unmistakable. When I tried to talk to the men at the tea shop, they walked away fast, one of them knocking over the tailor’s stick. The shopkeeper said that he knew nothing about Maoists. He didn’t know who had built the bamboo gate; it had simply appeared one morning.

  When I got back to Pokhara that evening, the news was of three teenage students killed as they tried to stop an army car on the highway. The previous day I had seen newspaper reports in which the army described the students as “terrorists” and claimed to have found documents linking them to the Maoists. But it now seemed clear that they were just collecting donations for Holi, the Hindu festival of colors. There were eyewitnesses to the shooting. The parents of the victims had exhumed their corpses from the shallow graves in which the army had quickly buried them and discovered that two of them had been wearing their school uniforrns. Like much else in Nepal, this would not appear in the newspapers.

  The bloody stalemate in Nepal may last for a long time. The army is too small and poorly equipped at present decisively to defeat the Maoists. In some areas it has recently tried arming upper-caste villagers and inciting them to take action against the Maoists. In the southern district of Kapilavastu, vigilante groups organized by a local landlord and armed by the government claim to have killed more than fifty Maoists in February 2005. Such tactics are likely not only to lead to a civil war but also to increase support for the Maoists in areas where the government is either absent or disliked.

  Though unlikely at present, talks may offer a way forward. The Maoists have shown themselves willing to negotiate and even to compromise; in July 2001 they dropped their demand that Nepal cease to be a monarchy. More recently, Prachanda hinted at a flexible stance when he called for a united front of mainstream political parties against the monarch. He probably fears that the guerrilla force might self destruct if its leaders fail to lead their more extreme cadres in the direction of moderate politics. But any Maoist concessions to bourgeois democracy are unlikely to please Gyanendra, who clearly wants to use the current chaos to help him hold on to his power.

  If he periodically evokes the prospect of terrorists taking over Nepal, Gyanendra can count on the support of India, the United States, and the U.K. In late 2001 the U.S. ambassador to Nepal, Michael Malinowski, a veteran of the CIA-sponsored anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, said that “these terrorists, under the guise of Maoism or the so-called ‘people’s war,’ are fundamentally the same as terrorists elsewhere—be they members of the Shining Path, Abu Sayaf, the Khmer Rouge or Al Qaeda.” The then Hindu nationalist government in Delhi, just as eager to name new enemies, also described the Maoists as “terrorists.”

  The present Indian government has a more nuanced view of Nepal. But it is worried about India’s own Communist rebels and their links with the Nepalese Maoists, and it believes that as Malinowski put it, “all kinds of bad guys could use Nepal as a base, like in Afghanistan.” Responding to fears that the army in Nepal was running out of ammunition, India resumed its arms supply this year, partly hoping to contain the Maoists and wanting too to maintain its influence over Nepal in the face of growing competition from the United States.

  There is no evidence that bad guys, as defined by the Bush administration, have flocked to Nepal, the Maoists are far from achieving a military victory, and the Communists in India are unlikely to extend their influence beyond the poverty-stricken districts they presently control. The rise of an armed Communist movement in a strategically important country nevertheless disturbs many political elites, who believe that communism died in 1989 and that history has arrived at the terminus of liberal-capitalist democracy.

  A European diplomat in Kathmandu told me that although Western countries hoped the political parties and the king would put up a joint front against the Maoists, they knew they might at some point have to support the king and his army if he alone was left to protect the country from the Maoists and keep alive the prospects for democracy. I did not feel that I could ask him about the nature of a democracy that is protected by an autocrat. Perhaps he meant nothing more by the word “democracy” than regular elections, the kind of democracy whose failure to contain violence or to limit systemic poverty and inequality does not matter so long as elections are held, even if, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, under a form of martial law, and in which the turnout of voters does nothing but empower and legitimize a native elite willing to push the priorities of its Western patrons.

  Such a form of democracy, which is slowly coming into being in Pakistan, could be revived again in Nepal, as the king repairs his relationship with the mainstream political parties. It is possible too that the excesses of the Maoists will cause them to self-destruct. Certainly the international revolution Prachanda speaks of will prove a fantasy. Yet it’s hard to wish away the rage and despair of people who, arriving late in the modern world, have known its primary ideology, democracy, only as another delusion, the disenchanted millions who will increasingly seek, through other means than elections, the dignity and justice that they feel is owed to them.

  TIBET

  A Backward Country

  In 1992 I left Delhi and began living in a small village in the Indian Himalayas. It was spring when I arrived. Every cloudless morning I got up and walked out onto the balcony of my cottage to see the white mountains toward the east straining high on their plinth of deep blue air. I could gaze upon these mountains for hours on end, especially in the long evenings, when the distant snow would refuse to disappear beneath the encroaching darkness, glowing an imperious red late into the night. My landlord often joined me on the balcony. One evening he asked me if I knew what lay beyond the mountains. I shook my head. “Tibet,” he said.


  When I finally traveled to Tibet in 2004, I remembered how surprised I had been by my landlord’s reply back then. How had I managed to lose sight of this basic geography—Tibet, the broad high plateau between India and China, bigger than even western Europe, and the source of most of the great rivers of Asia (the Indus, the Yangtze, the Brahmaputra, and the Sutlej)—something so immediately obvious in all the atlases I had? How could I not have known that the Indian Himalayas bordering Tibet, a bus ride away from my own village, were predominantly Tibetan in culture and Buddhist in religion?

  But then, Tibet was to me, as it had been to many others, a fantasy rather than a real place, a resonant cliché, “the roof of the world,” rather than a clearly defined area on a map.

  Growing up in a Hindu Brahmin family in India, I had inherited a religious idea about Tibet: It was the sacred homeland of great seers and sages, people capable of levitation and astral travel. Later, while reading nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travelers and explorers from the West, I came across similarly romantic, if more apparently rational, notions of Tibet: It was the isolated, inaccessible country that had remained untouched by the drastic transformations imposed by railways, roads, steamships, and industries in the nineteenth century, a civilization where religion and tradition were a living force and whose peoples radiated a serenity and gentleness long extinct in the frantically modern and aggressive societies of Europe and America.

  Living in the Himalayas, remote at last from the squalor of Delhi and the small towns where I had spent most of my life, I had little trouble entering this Virtual Tibet. It became more compelling as I began to travel to the Indian border with China/Tibet. In the cold deserts and high valleys, where monks and hermits lived in tiny caves cut into steep hillsides, dressed in cotton vests in sub-zero temperatures, I could easily believe in the miraculous powers attributed to lamas and other spiritually exalted people, the benign, medieval religiosity that many Western travelers found in Tibet and recently commemorated in such Hollywood films as Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun.

  There was little place in this vision for the hundred thousand or so Tibetan refugees in India, people who had escaped the country’s Chinese Communist rule. Expelled from their ostensible paradise of Tibet, they stood on the narrow, broken pavements of Indian hill towns, selling woolen jackets, socks, gloves, calculators, Walkmans, and wristwatches.

  I had read of how the Chinese, who first invaded Tibet in 1950, had killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans and destroyed many hundreds of monasteries and temples. I had read that the traditional society and culture of Tibet were gravely threatened. But I still didn’t know what to make of the Tibetan refugees and their oddly Westernized ways. In their jeans and American college sweatshirts, most young Tibetans didn’t seem the heir to a traditional culture, not with karaoke bars and video game parlors standing next to Buddhist temples in Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan community in exile.

  Our modern fantasies of a simple and whole past are fragile. Perhaps, that’s why we hold on to them so tenaciously. In Tibet, I sought to confirm everything I had imagined about it, and for the first few days at least, I was not disappointed.

  The magic began on the flight to Lhasa from Kathmandu when defying predictions of bad weather and low visibility, Mount Everest unexpectedly emerged, all sheer lock and ice, looming well above the thick cloud cover at twenty-five thousand feet, and then, after a long, snowbound mountain range, the Tibetan plateau revealed itself in all its purity and vastness.

  Chinese military officials supervised our arrival at Gongkar Airport. Their stern faces and green uniforms were the first reminder of the political status of Tibet. Outside, tour guides with Land Cruisers waited to attach themselves to tourists, and bilingual banners, on which Chinese ideograms dwarfed the elegant Tibetan script, proclaimed Tibet as part of the rapidly progressing Chinese “motherland.”

  But less than a mile outside the airport, the empty countryside began: barley fields next to a very broad river, whose still surface reflected with spellbinding clarity the deep blue sky, the surrounding bare hills, and, occasionally, the white massifs guarding the remote horizon.

  This was the Yarlung Valley, the cradle of Tibetan civilization, where the first known ruler of Tibet emerged in the seventh century, and from where the Tibetan Empire once spread as far as Afghanistan and Bengal. At Yambulagang, the site of the first known building in Tibet, yaks with smooth black horns and bushy white tails waited to carry us to the hilltop temple where monks pored over open manuscripts of rough paper, amid an overpowering aroma of rancid yak butter and sandalwood incense. After the blinding light of the valley, the chapels were dark and mysterious, crowded with gilded statues of the Buddha and Tibetan kings, the walls hectic with murals of the sharp-toothed multiarmed demons that the Tibetans revere as protector deities.

  In these first few days it seemed to me that many centuries happily coexisted in Tibet. On the small ferry that took us next morning across the Tsangpo River to the eighth-century Samye monastery, the oldest in Tibet, there were two yaks and a young monk wearing blue jeans and sneakers under his habit.

  The sun was warm, dazzling when reflected in the water and on the snow peaks and sandy banks. A handsome old man in a trilby hat twirled a prayer wheel. Two young women sat silently, holding stylish parasols with one hand and rosaries with the other; they turned out to be pilgrims, like most people on the ferry. A young couple in jeans and embroidered boots sat on the floor with their lively red-cheeked baby.

  At the ferry beach, a ramshackle bus waited to take us across sand dunes to the monastery. I spent the long afternoon walking around the circular walled compound of the recently renovated monastery, which was designed originally to represent the Tibetan Buddhist cosmos and was once fringed with 1,008 gold-encrusted chortens (reliquary mounds). Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan architectural styles rendered distinctive each of three floors of the central building, whose wide assembly hall was full of the guttural chants of monks sitting amid riotously colorful silk drapes and shafts of sunlight.

  In one of the darker chapels, a young monk whispered to me in Hindi. In our brief hurried conversation—Chinese spies were everywhere, he said—he explained that he had left Tibet illegally in order to spend a couple of years in Dharamsala. Educated at Samye, he had not taken his vows until after his visit to the Dalai Lama. And now his younger brother was planning a risky journey to Dharamsala.

  To travel from Samye to Lhasa, past ruins of hillside monasteries and fortresses, was to enter a more fraught world. It was to confront the knowledge that had shadowed me at Yambulagang and Samye: that I was looking at ghosts of buildings almost entirely destroyed by Chinese and Tibetan fanatics before and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

  “Religion is poison,” Mao Zedong had told the Dalai Lama in 1955, early during the Chinese occupation of Tibet. After 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled to India, the Chinese had moved swiftly to undercut the power of the monasteries, which owned most of the arable land and loaned money to and educated poor villagers. At Samye, where the first Tibetans were ordained as monks, and from where Buddhism traveled to the rest of Tibet, Red Guards, fired up by Mao’s denunciation of religion and tradition, had pounded chortens and statues into dust. Some of the chortens have been restored, and with their mix of concrete and gold-leaf encrusting they embody well the tawdry kitsch produced by Chinese-led restoration efforts in Tibet. The destruction was most extensive in the region of Lhasa, where all the major monasteries—Drepung, Sera, Ganden—were reduced to ruins, and only the seventeenth-century Potala Palace, the traditional home of the Dalai Lama, escaped the fury of the Red Guards.

  The Communist leadership in Beijing now admits, if grudgingly, to “excesses” and “mistakes” during the Cultural Revolution, when tens of thousands of Tibetans were condemned as “reactionaries,” “rightists,” and “capitalist roaders” and imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Ambiv
alence now clouds the official memory of Mao, “the Great Helmsman,” who steered his country into famine and chaos. This is partly because in the early eighties the Chinese regime embraced the free market after scorning “capitalist roaders” for decades and decided that “to get rich,” as the late Communist leader Deng Xiaoping described, “is glorious.”

  It wasn’t easy, however, to get rich in Tibet. The hard ground and extreme cold precluded extensive agriculture—most Tibetans still depend on yak meat and barley flour—and little infrastructure for heavy industries existed outside Lhasa. The high altitude, an average elevation of thirty-five hundred meters, and low oxygen deterred many outsiders. The only thing that Tibet seemed to possess in great quantity was its religion and an exotic past that the Chinese discovered could be packaged and sold to tourists.

  Since the early eighties the Chinese authorities have promoted tourisrn in Tibet, despite occasional setbacks, such as the anti-Chinese riots and demonstrations in Lhasa in 1987 and 1989. They remain suspicious of the growing popularity of Buddhism among young Tibetans and even Chinese; in eastern Tibet in 2001 they partly demolished a monastic encampment that had attracted thousands of Tibetan and Chinese students of Buddhism. But they hope to attract visitors to the more famous old monasteries and temples and have rebuilt and renovated a few of them. They have also improved telecommunications, built roads and even a new railway that in a few years will link Lhasa with China.