Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

by V. S. Naipaul

  Shahbaz’s father gave up the idea of settling in England. He began to prepare for a return to Pakistan. He started a business in the interior of the Punjab. When he was twelve or thirteen Shahbaz went in the school holidays to see this business of his father’s. They visited certain feudal families in the area. These “feudals” were great landlords who owned whole villages. The sons of some of those families had been students in England, and Shahbaz’s parents had looked after them. Shahbaz now saw that on their home ground the sons of these feudals didn’t act like Oxford or Cambridge graduates. They treated their workers and peasants like serfs. The peasants would touch the feet of their landlord in submission and greeting; it was more submission than greeting; and the landlord would not ask the peasant to rise. Shahbaz, fresh from England, wanted to weep.

  His last three years at the public school in England were very happy. He was on his own. At half term and in the holidays he stayed with friends or in paid accommodation. Once he stayed with a rector in Oxfordshire and he had a platonic romance with the rector’s daughter. Life was good for him; and though he was now more English than Pakistani or Muslim, though he hardly knew Pakistan, the poetry he began to write was all about poverty and beggars and cripples and people in the streets.

  When he finished the public school he went back to Pakistan, to Lahore, to do a degree. He took an interest in local politics; he was against the rule of the generals; he was a man of the left. But his true political life began when he went back to England. He went to a well-known provincial university to do a degree in English literature. The place was hot with politics. It was 1968; it was the time of the Vietnam movement; and, as he remembered twenty-seven years later, “very emotional.” Everybody was saying that the “system” was rotten and had to be changed. He said it; sexy Latin American girls said it. There was “a lot of smooching around.” University life was “a kind of carnival.”

  There were close Pakistani friends at the university. Many of them were doing English literature, like Shahbaz; it was one of the lighter courses, possibly the lightest, and at this time it was very political and restricted. It was encouraging Marxism and revolution rather than wide reading. So Shahbaz and his Pakistani friends in their Marxist study group read the standard (and short) revolutionary texts, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara. And while they read certain approved Russian writers, they didn’t read or get to know about the Turgenev novels, Fathers and Sons (1862) and Virgin Soil (1877), which dealt with conditions not unlike those in feudal Pakistan, but questioned the simplicities of revolution.

  Shahbaz said, when I asked about Turgenev, “The fiction I was not relating to my political development.” As though his ideas about Marxism and revolution, however formulaic, were personal to him, part of his development.

  There were similar Pakistani study groups at other universities in England. They came together and began to have meetings every two weeks in Cambridge or London. In London they linked up with Indian leftist groups. Earl’s Court in London was the leftist area, with bars and restaurants with a leftist tone. Leftists from all over the world met there, and in this international atmosphere there were discussions and all-night parties. It was “exhilarating.”

  A cousin of Shahbaz’s was part of the larger London study group. She had been to Cuba and had cut cane there for six weeks and had met “Fidel.” Shahbaz was half in love with this cousin. She was a good-looking girl, and her stories of the equality in Cuba and the medical services made him love the idea of the collective even more. He became impatient for the revolution. But then, after the university, the beautiful cousin began to regress. She went back not only to having peasants cut her canes in the Punjab; she went back at the same time to a mullah-like passion for Islam. Shahbaz said, as though he was speaking of a medical condition, “She went through a complete regression.” To round off this regression, she even married a “creep.” Now in Lahore, on those social occasions when they were in the same room or place, she didn’t recognize Shahbaz.

  But there was someone else for Shahbaz, another Pakistani girl from his own university. With this girl he fell fully in love, and she was apparently in love with him. Shahbaz said, as though he was talking of making love or baking a cake, “We wanted to go back and make revolution together. It was marvelous.” This idea of the future supported Shahbaz right through his time at the university. But then, at the end, when it came to packing up and leaving home and going off to the guerrilla wars, the girl found she couldn’t follow Shahbaz.

  Shahbaz said, “She couldn’t make the political break with her family.”

  The thought of their love kept Shahbaz warm through the ten long guerrilla years, in the deserts and mountains of Baluchistan and Afghanistan, to which, somewhat to his surprise, he found he had committed himself, in those exhilarating all-night discussions and parties in Earl’s Court and Cambridge and his own university. Ten long celibate years, because although a man might be in Baluchistan fighting for the Baluchis, he had to stay away from the women. Adultery among the nomads was a murderous business. A man thinking of adultery had to go to a woman’s tent, awaken her without awakening her husband, lead her out past relations and past the family flocks, make love to her, and then take her back, all without being discovered. This kind of adultery was like a guerrilla war within the guerrilla war, Shahbaz said; and, though the most successful adulterers made the best fighters, Shahbaz was content to observe it from a distance. All of this, though, and his own long celibacy, lay in the future.

  One of the things his Marxist student group used to discuss was the “nationality question” in Pakistan. Punjab was the dominant province; people in other provinces felt left out. Iqbal, the poet who had proposed the idea of Pakistan, had thought, with his convert’s zeal, that Islam would be identity enough and cause enough for people in the new state; and that historical ideas of clan and caste (like Rana’s Rajput pride) would disappear. Iqbal was wrong. Regional feeling was bubbling up, especially in the east; Bangladesh would soon secede.

  It was the idea now of Shahbaz’s Marxist group that Marxism and revolution would do what Islam had failed to do. Shahbaz explained the idea in this way: “You needed a revolution from below. From within all the nationalities. And the process of revolution would cement the nationalities.”

  Shahbaz didn’t think the idea was too abstract; it was taken from Marxist literature, and the group had spent a year and a half working it out. And they knew, too, where the revolution should start. It should be in Baluchistan, a big, near-empty desert province to the west. The population was small and backward, many of the people nomadic. There had been three uprisings since independence, and the people were still disaffected. It was a difficult area to police. It was, all in all, the place where, in the more abstract and scientific-sounding language of revolution, “the contradiction between the state and people was very clear.”

  The group was now dominated by a South African Indian. His family had moved to Karachi and had a shop there. He met the group when he came to London on a visit. He was very young, nineteen or twenty, but he said he had been a Marxist all his life, and he was full of revolutionary and guerrilla stories. He said that he and all his family belonged to the African National Congress; he himself had been underground in South Africa. He had done more, young as he was: he had been underground in Pakistan itself, in Baluchistan. That shut the Pakistani Marxists up completely. The South African had no formal education, and they liked it when he abused them for their privileged backgrounds.

  Shahbaz thought him inspiring and “charismatic” (that was one of Shahbaz’s words). He was a good-looking man, short and very stocky, with piercing eyes. He had no time for people’s personal problems. To him the cause was all. This was another relationship that was to end badly for Shahbaz. The South African was to try to kill Shahbaz. The piercing eyes that attracted Shahbaz turned out to be the eyes of a paranoiac. Twenty-five years later, when all guerrilla wars were over for him, and he was back in Africa, in Zimbabwe,
he committed suicide after trying to kill his son. This was something else that was in the future.

  One day in London in 1969 the South African was especially abusive of Shahbaz’s university Marxists. That was his way of bringing them to order. Then he said, “You guys should stop talking and start acting. If you are serious you should give up everything and make Baluchistan the focus of a revolution in Pakistan.”

  This was like the revolution from within the nationalities that the group had discussed. The primary aim of that had been the cementing of the nationalities. The South African was far more ambitious. He was aiming at total revolution, and he said he was following the precept of Lin Piao, Mao’s second-in-command during the Cultural Revolution. The countryside, Lin Piao had said, could be used to swamp the cities; the countryside was where you could start guerrilla war against the cities, which was where the state was.

  They were all awed by the South African’s vision. Che Guevara of Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia, Frantz Fanon of the French West Indies, the African National Congress, and now Lin Piao: it seemed to Shahbaz’s study group that, late though they had come to revolution, all the great and tried forces of revolution had begun to run unconquerably together for them and in them. They all began to dream of Baluchistan and guerrilla war.

  The next year Shahbaz graduated. He told his parents then that he was going to a film school in Yugoslavia. He came secretly back to Karachi, spent a night there, and went by train and bus to a small town in Baluchistan. They were met by a Baluchi tribesman. He took them to a training camp in the mountains. The South African was there, and someone from the London group.

  Baluchistan here was like Iran, desert plateau and bare mountain, with very little water, very little vegetation, and extremes of temperature. This was where Shahbaz was to spend ten years. For the first three years he and the others were learning the language and trying to start social services for the Baluchis.

  But I felt that the narrative had become too fast here. I felt when I considered my notes that certain things had been elided. I telephoned Shahbaz; he didn’t make difficulties. I went to see him again. I wanted to hear more about those very early days in Baluchistan. I wanted to hear more about the first day.

  Shahbaz said, “I took the train from Karachi. I was met at the other end by two tribesmen on the platform. They were more urbane than the tribesmen I was to meet later. We took a bus for ten miles. We got off the bus and walked for two days. It was my first walk through mountains. Very rough terrain. I was dressed in shalwar-kameez and shoes, and a turban I was not used to. I was carrying a rucksack I was not used to carrying. On the way we made bread, and ate dry bread, and I spent my first night out in the open. It was summer. We just lay on the bare earth. It was exhausting. I got blisters. I was in pain. My whole body ached. When I arrived at the camp I was exhausted.

  “Five days before, I was at university in England. Now I was suddenly thrust into a camp of thirty to forty tribesmen, fully armed, speaking a language I didn’t know. It was like sitting in the movies. It was like meeting Martians. I had not mentally prepared myself for the shock of this meeting. That first night I was given a gun and put on sentry duty. Five days before, I was at university in England. They killed a goat to celebrate my arrival. We had meat that night with a lot of fat, very rich meat. It made my stomach run. And going to the toilet in the bush, as it were, was also initially difficult.”

  A reading of Turgenev would not have prepared him for Baluchistan, but it might have prepared him imaginatively, as a revolutionary, for this meeting with Martians.

  What Shahbaz had got to was a training camp. There was as yet no war; that was to come three years later, after the training. The Baluchi leader in the region, Shahbaz’s field commander, was a clan chief. There were tribes among the Baluchis, and clans within the tribes; rivalries between clans and tribes made it hard for Shahbaz and the other outsiders to have an overall picture of what was going on. There were five outsiders in the training camps. A few others were in the cities, to see to supplies and money matters.

  For the first three years Shahbaz and the others were “integrating.” (There appeared to be a technical term for everything a guerrilla did. This would have been reassuring for some beginners, who, now that they were in the field, in the vastness of Baluchistan, might have begun to feel small, and perhaps even idle.) So they integrated for three years. They learned the language and set up social services for the tribesmen. The tribesmen were nomadic. Life was not easy for Shahbaz when they were on the move. He lived on dry bread and slept on the ground, on a shawl spread over grass. In the summer they built shelters and slept in the open. In the winter they lived in caves with an overhang of rock. In the winter the outsiders slept in sleeping bags. Shahbaz also had a radio and a typewriter and books. He and the others had stored a lot of books in caves, but when the camp was moving about he could carry only two.

  Life was hard, but Shahbaz and his friends felt “incredibly creative.” They were among nomads. In England when they were talking about revolution they had talked about workers and peasants. These Baluchis were certainly not workers, and they weren’t at all like Punjabi peasants, who were the peasants Shahbaz knew. These nomads were people whom the modern world had never touched. That was why they had seemed to him like Martians at the beginning. He knew it was not the way a revolutionary should feel. But in this period of integration he had thought of what Mao had said: that the peasants were a blank page, and that whatever you wrote on that page the peasant became. That was how he had grown to think of his nomads; though, as an intelligent and fair-minded man, he worried that as a revolutionary he was being vain and perhaps even cruel, thinking that he could bring up these people any way he chose.

  Twenty years later he excused himself. He said, “You really felt you were on the cusp of change in the life of a nation.”

  Shahbaz was a man of generous spirit. It was said in Pakistan that Pakistanis, because of their uncertainty in the wider world, always tried to bring their fellows down. Shahbaz wasn’t like that; he readily offered admiration to Pakistanis as well as to other people. Perhaps his isolation in England and his time in the English public school had given him both a need for other people’s approval and a capacity for hero worship. Just as he had surrendered to the South African in London, so now in Baluchistan he surrendered to the clan chief who was his immediate commander.

  The clan chief was illiterate, a shepherd from a family of nomads. He had fought in the 1963 Baluchi uprising against the Pakistan military government. Shahbaz was enchanted by his humility, his moderation, his calm, his gift of language. The clan leader had the illiterate’s unclouded instinct for the character and mood of people, and he knew in every situation how people needed to be talked to. He was a natural leader, and Shahbaz and the others had hopes that he would be the Mao or Ho Chi Minh of the Baluchi, and perhaps also Pakistani, revolution.

  So they began, as they thought, to educate him politically, to educate him, as Shahbaz was to say twenty-five years later, in the ways of the world and the politics of revolution. His response was all they could have wished. It was a proof—this time in far-off Baluchistan—of the rightness and universality of Marxist revolution. It washed away any doubt they might have about their mission. Shahbaz thought the Baluchi clan leader took to his education “like a duck to water”; though Shahbaz, if he hadn’t been so anxious for an admired man to respond well, to pass this critical test, might have paid a little more attention to the illiterate man’s sense of what was required of him.

  Shahbaz said, “We didn’t see ourselves as leaders. We saw ourselves as creating leaders for the people.”

  Shahbaz’s Marxism and longing for revolution was “emotional.” The South African was different. He wanted power, Shahbaz thought. Perhaps he wanted (this was my idea rather than Shahbaz’s) to be in Baluchistan what, as an Indian, he couldn’t be in South Africa, in or out of the African National Congress. And Shahbaz appeared, in his generous way,
to think that the South African’s wish for power was all right, because he was “leadership material.” Power, in this argument, was something the world owed the South African.

  There was another outsider whom Shahbaz admired and felt especially close to. This was a Christian boy from Karachi, the son of a senior air force officer. He had been part of the London group; and he had given up his accountancy studies to join the revolutionaries. He was emotional like Shahbaz; he was intelligent, and well read; he cried easily, like Shahbaz. He cried for the poverty and injustice he saw. This boy, as a Christian in Pakistan, had spent much of his life as an outsider; he might have been (though Shahbaz didn’t make the comparison) as much an outsider as Shahbaz had been for many years in England. This boy had a great sense of humor, and Shahbaz remembered his “fantastically loud laugh.” Shahbaz remembered him as very thin, very dark, very Bengali-looking.

  Shahbaz, when he spoke of this boy, became filled with the mood of elegy. This boy was killed six years after he had got to Baluchistan, in the third year of the insurgency. He had gone to a small town to meet someone he trusted, and was betrayed by this person to the army. He was captured with his deputy, a tribesman. The army said nothing at all about his capture; so the insurgents never got to know. They learned later that he was interrogated and tortured for many weeks and then thrown out of a helicopter. It tormented them that they didn’t know when he had been killed. Shahbaz, though he spoke of this boy in elegy, never thought to look for his family afterwards.

  The revolution began, after three years of preparation, with dozens of uprisings all over the wastes of Baluchistan. And, quite miraculously (for someone so emotionally attached to the idea of revolution), the area in which Shahbaz had been moving around (and having a hard time) became, in technical guerrilla language, a liberated area. The leaders of the revolution were clan chiefs, like the one Shahbaz admired, who had become guerrilla commanders. The war was scattered, reflecting the divisions of tribe and clan. There were five or six separate fighting groups in the tribe to which Shahbaz was attached. He was running a camp for one of those groups. His camp had from fifty to two hundred fighters. His business was not fighting. It was to educate the people in his area, to train them in medical skills, to adjudicate in disputes, and (curiously, for a public school man) to deal with matters concerning farming and the flocks.