It would, obviously, be possible to offer counter-myths to set against the mythologized Family. One such myth might usefully be that of Pandora and her box. It has seemed to me, ever since it happened, that the imposition of the Emergency was an act of folly comparable to the opening of that legendary box; and that many of the evils besetting India today—notably the resurgence of religious extremism—can be traced back to those days of dictatorship and State violence. The Emergency represented the triumph of cynicism in Indian public life; and it would be difficult to say that that triumph has since been reversed. Mrs Gandhi was much praised internationally for acting democratically by giving up power when she lost the 1977 elections; which seems rather like congratulating Pandora for shutting her box, long after the evils of the world had escaped into the air.
But it’s better to counter myths with facts. And the facts indicate that Family rule has not left Indian democracy in particularly good shape. The drawing of all the power to the Centre has created deep, and sometimes violently expressed, resentments in the States; the replacement of Nehru’s more idealistic vision by his descendants’ politics of power-at-any-cost has resulted in a sharp lowering of the standards of public life; and the creation, in Delhi, of a sort of royal court, a ruling élite of intimates of the Family, unelected and unanswerable to anyone but the Prime Minister, has further damaged the structure of Indian democracy. It is beginning to look just possible—is it not?—that the interests of ‘the world’s largest democracy’ and those of its ruling family might not be quite the same.
1985
ZIA UL-HAQ. 17 AUGUST 1988
When a tyrant falls, the world’s shadows lighten, and only hypocrites grieve; and General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was one of the cruellest of modern tyrants, whatever his ‘great friend’ George Bush and his staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher would have us think. Eleven years ago, he burst out of his bottle like an Arabian Nights goblin, and although he seemed, at first, a small, puny sort of demon, he instantly commenced to grow, until he was gigantic enough to be able to grab the whole of Pakistan by the throat. Now, after an eternity of repression (even the clocks ran slowly under the pressure of Zia’s thumb), that sad, strangulated nation may, for a few moments, breathe a little more freely.
Deferential, unassuming, humbly religious Zia, the plain soldier’s plain soldier: it was easy for a man as brilliant, patrician and autocratic as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—no stranger to despotism himself—to see such a fellow as a useful, controllable fool, a corked and bottled genie with a comical Groucho moustache. Zia became Bhutto’s Chief of Staff in 1976 largely because Bhutto felt he had him safely in his pocket. But Pakistani generals have a way of leaping out of such pockets and sealing up their former masters instead. The protégé deposed the patron in July 1977, and became his executioner two years later, initiating a blood feud with the Bhutto dynasty which could probably have ended only with his death. One of the more optimistic aspects of the new situation is that Pakistan’s remaining generals have no reason to fear the Bhuttos’ revenge if power should return to Pakistan’s long-denied democratic process.
Pakistan under Zia has become a nightmarish, surreal land, in which battlefield armaments meant for the Afghan rebels are traded more or less openly on the country’s black markets; in which the citizens of Karachi speak, with a shrug, of the daily collusion between the police force and large-scale gangs of thieves; in which private armies of heavily armed men defend and service one of the world’s biggest narcotics industries; in which ‘elections’ take place without the participation of any political parties. That such a situation should be described, around the world, as ‘stability’ would be funny if it were not vile; that it has been concealed beneath a cloak of religious faith is more terrible still.
It needs to be said repeatedly in the West that Islam is no more monolithically cruel, no more an ‘evil empire’, than Christianity, capitalism or communism. The medieval, misogynistic, stultifying ideology which Zia imposed on Pakistan in his ‘Islamization’ programme was the ugliest possible face of the faith, and one by which most Pakistani Muslims were, I believe, disturbed and frightened. To be a believer is not by any means to be a zealot. Islam in the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent has developed historically along moderate lines, with a strong strain of pluralistic Sufi philosophy; Zia was this Islam’s enemy. Now that he has gone, much of the Islamization programme may quickly follow him. Pakistan neither wants nor needs a legal system which makes the evidence of women worth less than that of men; nor one which bans the showing on Pakistani TV of the women’s events from the Seoul Olympic Games.
This is how Pakistan’s greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote of these matters in his poem Zalim (The Tyrant, translated by Naomi Lazard):
This is the festival; we will inter hope
with appropriate mourning. Come, my people.
We will celebrate the massacre of the multitudes …
Mine is the new religion, the new morality.
Mine are the new laws, and a new dogma.
From now on the priests in God’s temple
will touch their lips to the hands of idols …
Every gate of prayer throughout heaven
is slammed shut today.
Well, the tyrant has had his day, and has gone. How did it happen? The possibility of accidental death can, I think, safely be discounted. Nor am I convinced by suggestions of an internal army coup, or a ‘hit’ from across the Indian frontier. An assassination by members of the Afghan secret service is a real possibility; and there are many other more speculative options. The truth, if it ever emerges, will no doubt surprise us all.
The death of the US ambassador is, of course, a sadness; but his proximity to General Zia illustrates how much the late President depended on American good will and support. It is Pakistan’s tragedy that the United States, in its role as freedom’s global policeman, should have chosen to defend freedom in Afghanistan by sacrificing the human, civil and political rights of General Zia’s subjects.
What happens now? Seasoned observers of the Pakistani scene will not be throwing too many hats in the air. It seems unlikely that the army will be prepared to relinquish real power while the Afghan situation remains volatile. And although several leading generals died with Zia in the C-130 explosion, two of the toughest are still very much alive: Fazle Haq, for a long time Zia’s closest associate, his reputation tarnished by persistent allegations of his involvement with drugs traffickers, and Aslam Beg, who is perhaps the man most likely to succeed. It’s always easiest, when surveying the bleak Pakistani political scene, to foresee the worst. But this time there is another option: a long shot, but worth a mention.
If the US administration could bring itself to see that General Zia’s brand of ‘stability’ has left behind a legacy of profound instability; and if America were then to decide to back the democratic forces in Pakistan rather than the military ones, then a new stability centred on that quaint old idea, representative government, might become possible. I am talking, of course, about Benazir Bhutto and the coalition of political parties she leads, and which she must now work hard to preserve. This ought to be Benazir’s moment; it remains to be seen whether the obduracy of the Pakistan Army, the fissiparous nature of the coalition (now that its great uniting foe has gone), and the contortions of geopolitics conspire to deprive her of it.
1988
DAUGHTER OF THE EAST
‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ Benazir Bhutto muses, translating I helpfully: ‘I think, therefore I am. I always had difficulty with this philosophical premise at Oxford and I am having much more difficulty with it now.’ It’s not that she doesn’t think, you understand—actually, she thinks even when she doesn’t want to—but that the thinking doesn’t seem to help her be. ‘I feel that I have nothing on which to leave my imprint,’ she laments. One might think an autobiography the very place for such imprint-leaving, but alas, Benazir is curiously absent from her own book, Daughter of the East. The voice that speaks,
the marks that are made here, belong to an American ghost.
It is a staccato ghost-voice that hates verbs and is much enamoured of sound effects. Here it is, describing what the Pakistan Army did in Bangladesh in 1971: ‘Looting. Rape. Kidnappings. Murder.’ Here it tells us of Benazir’s solitary confinement: ‘Time, relentless, monotonous … Flaking cement. Iron bars. And silence. Utter silence.’ And here is the funeral of her brother Shah Nawaz: ‘Black. Black armbands. Black shalwar kameez and dupattas … Black. More black.’ And what were the people doing, ‘in the fever of their grief’?—‘Crying. Wailing.’
But even this is lyrical by comparison with the evocation of Benazir’s ear infection: ‘Click. Click. Click. Click.’ (Eleven times in all on page 61.) Or of the sounds of prison as heard from a lonely cell: ‘Tinkle, Tinkle. Clank, Clank.’ Or of Benazir’s choice of a husband: ‘Asif Zardari. Asif Zardari. Asif Zardari.’ Perhaps it is as well that Ms Bhutto’s phantom doesn’t attempt too much in the way of drama. When it does, this happens: ‘“No!” I screamed. “No!”’ (On hearing of her brother’s death.) And: ‘“No!” I cried in Eliot Hall, throwing down the newspaper.’ (On hearing of the Indian Army’s invasion of Bangladesh.) And, most tragically of all, when she dreams her father’s execution: ‘“No!” the scream burst through the knots in my throat. “No!”’
If the worst smell emanating from this book had been that of rotten writing, however, it would have been possible—even proper—to be reasonably forgiving. After all, Ms Bhutto has had one hell of a life, and it ought to be an absorbing tale, even decked out in Joan Collins prose. Unfortunately, the politics stink, too. Daughter of the East, she calls herself, but in truth she’s still Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s little girl, still unwilling to admit that the martyred parent even committed the tiniest of sins.
The resulting omissions from the story are as revealing as the bits she puts in. She manages, for example, to get through her entire account of her father’s government without once mentioning the little matter of genocide in Baluchistan. She speaks quite correctly of the Zia regime’s torture camps, both in Baluchistan and elsewhere—‘Chains. Blocks of ice. Chilis inserted into the prisoners’ rectums’—but draws a daughterly veil over the Bhutto people’s very similar misdeeds. She fails entirely to mention Bhutto’s strenuous efforts at election-rigging in 1977, efforts which, by giving him a victory of ludicrously implausible proportions, gave Zia his opening, allowing him to take over on the pretext of holding new, non-controversial polls. Worst of all, she falsifies Bhutto’s role in the events leading to the secession of Bangladesh to a quite scandalous degree.
In Benazir’s version, the blame is placed firmly on the shoulders of Sheikh Mujib, leader of the then East Pakistani Awami League. After the 1970 elections, Benazir says, ‘instead of working with my father, … Mujib instigated an independence movement … Mujib showed an obstinacy the logic of which to this day defies me.’ You feel like using words of one syllable to explain. Listen, dear child, the man had won, and it was your father who dug in his heels … in the elections of 1970, the Awami League won an absolute majority of all seats in Pakistan’s two ‘Wings’ combined. Mujib had every right to insist, ‘obstinately’, on being Prime Minister, and it was Bhutto and General Yahya Khan who conspired to prevent this from happening. That was how the war of secession began, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this book.
It is depressing to find Benazir still being so daughterly. She is a brave woman, has had a hard life and has come a long way as a politician from the inexperienced days when she would issue Zia with ultimatums she could not enforce. In Pakistan’s forthcoming elections Benazir Bhutto and the People’s Party represent Pakistan’s best hope, and if I had a vote in those elections, I would probably cast it in her favour. But this book’s naïvety, and its willingness to turn a blind eye to unpalatable facts, are indications of the faintness, the hollowness of that hope. If Benazir is the best, you can guess what the rest are like.
Her book does, inevitably, have its moments, when, for example, she tells us how she mistook Hubert Humphrey for Bob Hope, or when she gives us the behind-the-scenes dope on the post-Bangladesh peace negotiations at Simla between Mrs Gandhi and Mr Bhutto. And by far the most powerful chapter is the one about the farcical trial and subsequent execution of Bhutto by that fearsome ‘cartoon’, Zia ul-Haq. But by the end it’s Benazir’s difficulty with cogitation that strikes one most forcefully.
On my beloved’s forehead, his hair is shining, Benazir’s ghost sings at the henna ceremony preceding the marriage to Asif Asif Asif. On his forehead, eh? Well, no highbrow he, by all accounts, and on this evidence, his arranged marriage looks like a perfect match.
1988
3
‘COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE’ DOES NOT EXIST
ANITA DESAI
KIPLING
HOBSON-JOBSON
‘COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE’ DOES NOT EXIST
When I was invited to speak at the 1983 English Studies Seminar in Cambridge, the lady from the British Council offered me a few words of reassurance. ‘It’s all right,’ I was told,’ ‘for the purposes of our seminar. English studies are taken to include Commonwealth literature.’ At all other times, one was forced to conclude, these two would be kept strictly apart, like squabbling children, or sexually incompatible pandas, or, perhaps, like unstable, fissile materials whose union might cause explosions.
A few weeks later I was talking to a literature don—a specialist, I ought to say, in English literature—a friendly and perceptive man. ‘As a Commonwealth writer,’ he suggested, ‘you probably find, don’t you, that there’s a kind of liberty, certain advantages, in occupying, as you do, a position on the periphery?’
And then a British magazine published, in the same issue, interviews with Shiva Naipaul, Buchi Emecheta and myself. In my interview, I admitted that I had begun to find this strange term, ‘Commonwealth literature’, unhelpful and even a little distasteful; and I was interested to read that in their interviews, both Shiva Naipaul and Buchi Emecheta, in their own ways, said much the same thing. The three interviews appeared, therefore, under the headline: ‘Commonwealth writers … but don’t call them that!’
By this point, the Commonwealth was becoming unpopular with me.
Isn’t this the very oddest of beasts, I thought—a school of literature whose supposed members deny vehemently that they belong to it. Worse, these denials are simply disregarded! It seems the creature has taken on a life of its own. So when I was invited to a conference about the animal in—of all places—Sweden, I thought I’d better go along to take a closer look at it.
The conference was beautifully organized, packed with erudite and sophisticated persons capable of discoursing at length about the new spirit of experiment in English-language writing in the Philippines. Also, I was able to meet writers from all over the world—or, rather, the Commonwealth. It was such a seductive environment that it almost persuaded me that the subject under discussion actually existed, and was not simply a fiction, and a fiction of a unique type, at that, in that it has been created solely by critics and academics, who have then proceeded to believe in it wholeheartedly … but the doubts did, in spite of all temptations to succumb, persist.
Many of the delegates, I found, were willing freely to admit that the term ‘Commonwealth literature’ was a bad one. South Africa and Pakistan, for instance, are not members of the Commonwealth, but their authors apparently belong to its literature. On the other hand, England, which, as far as I’m aware, has not been expelled from the Commonwealth quite yet, has been excluded from its literary manifestation. For obvious reasons. It would never do to include English literature, the great sacred thing itself, with this bunch of upstarts, huddling together under this new and badly made umbrella.
At the Commonwealth literature conference I talked with and listened to the Australian poet Randolph Stow; the West Indian, Wilson Harris; Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya; Anita Desai from India and the Canadian nove
list Aritha van Herk. I became quite sure that our differences were so much more significant than our similarities, that it was impossible to say what ‘Commonwealth literature’—the idea which had, after all, made possible our assembly—might conceivably mean. Van Herk spoke eloquently about the problem of drawing imaginative maps of the great emptinesses of Canada; Wilson Harris soared into great flights of metaphysical lyricism and high abstraction; Anita Desai spoke in whispers, her novel the novel of sensibility, and I wondered what on earth she could be held to have in common with the committed Marxist Ngugi, an overtly political writer, who expressed his rejection of the English language by reading his own work in Swahili, with a Swedish version read by his translator, leaving the rest of us completely bemused. Now obviously this great diversity would be entirely natural in a general literature conference—but this was a particular school of literature, and I was trying to work out what that school was supposed to be.
The nearest I could get to a definition sounded distinctly patronizing: ‘Commonwealth literature’, it appears, is that body of writing created, I think, in the English language, by persons who are not themselves white Britons, or Irish, or citizens of the United States of America. I don’t know whether black Americans are citizens of this bizarre Commonwealth or not. Probably not. It is also uncertain whether citizens of Commonwealth countries writing in languages other than English—Hindi, for example—or who switch out of English, like Ngugi, are permitted into the club or asked to keep out.
By now ‘Commonwealth literature’ was sounding very unlikeable indeed. Not only was it a ghetto, but it was actually an exclusive ghetto. And the effect of creating such a ghetto was, is, to change the meaning of the far broader term ‘English literature’—which I’d always taken to mean simply the literature of the English language—into something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist.
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