When I was a child in the 1950s, I had a delightful book called The Golden Geography which tried to encapsulate every aspect of the globe — its landscape, its climate, its people and their occupations — in a small sketch with a brief caption. From a section called ‘This is Asia’, I learned that Arabs drank water from goatskins, that Indians usually lived ‘out-of-doors’ (a nice way of putting it) and that the Japanese had weird houses with sliding paper doors. Such apparently timeless images were imprinted on my mind and, without much scope for revising them, remained there a long time.
I was reminded of The Golden Geography while reading Pankaj Mishra’s wonderful book, Temptations of the West, because it is a sort of ‘This is Asia’ (or rather South Asia) for grown-ups. A native of the north Indian plains, Mishra writes lyrically of landscapes he has only been able to discover as an adult, of the ‘exhilarating revelation of beauty’ when he first sees Kashmir, of the yaks and monks and hillside monasteries he encounters within ‘the immense empty spaces’ of Tibet. He wants to begin with the stereotype, the ‘resonant cliché’ of a place — Tibet, for example, as ‘the roof of the world’ — before introducing other dimensions and examining contemporary conflicts in the area. The central purpose of the book is to understand those conflicts through travels in their territories and interviews with selected participants. Its title may seem a little misleading, however, because the struggles described are really contests between traditional societies and competing visions of modernity.
Mishra is a stylish writer, self-taught and well-read, a man whose education seems to owe little to his formal studies at the beautiful, chaotic and very violent university of Allahabad. He is also a good traveller, patient, inquisitive and only occasionally naive: it is not until he reaches Lhasa that he discovers — in embarrassing circumstances — that ‘massage parlour’ is a euphemism for ‘brothel’. Like V. S. Naipaul, he goes to the most uninviting places to meet the most unattractive and unpromising people: gangster politicians in northern India with bodyguards and Dobermans and Japanese jeeps; Afghan warlords who swear they are eradicating poppy cultivation while storing large quantities of opium in anticipation of a price rise; a Taliban apologist ranting at the West for condemning the destruction of the great Buddha statues of Bamiyan. Yet he understands the complexities of conflicts and usually finds some sympathy for the people caught up in them, the deluded fanatics as well as the losers and the victims.
The author is naturally less charitable to the inciters and manipulators of the conflicts. He starts his journeys, which span several years, in northern India, where he is particularly scathing about the Hindu fundamentalist politicians who attract voters from the new, paunchy, vodafoned middle class by pandering to anti-Muslim prejudice, by attacking Nehru’s vision of a secular state and by asserting that the success of the ‘Hindu nation’ requires putting Muslims and other minorities ‘in their place’.
Of the multitude of absurd religious disputes that plague the planet today, the silliest of all is about Ayodhya, which has already caused thousands of deaths, mostly of Muslims. In 1992 Hindu militants (supported by the powerful fundamentalist BJP) demolished the town’s mosque on the grounds that the Mogul emperor Babur had built it on the site of a temple erected to commemorate the birth of the god Rama. As Mishra points out, there is no evidence that Babur ever went to Ayodhya (if he had, he wouldn’t have built such an ugly mosque) and no ‘persuasive evidence’ that a Rama temple ever existed on the site. Nor, of course, is there any evidence for Rama himself, a figure as mythical as Adam and Jupiter. In any case, what can one think of a political movement in the world’s largest democracy that came to power in 1996 with a programme motivated by the desire to take revenge for what Muslims were alleged to have done in the Middle Ages?
In Kashmir Mishra is enchanted by the lakes and orchards and mountains but becomes desperately depressed by a conflict which Indian officials regard as a matter of law and order but which most Kashmiris, who would rather be independent or else part of Pakistan, see as an issue of occupation and repression. In our murderous ‘nowadays’, statistics alone seldom reveal the horror of a particular conflict: each one seems to have caused ‘at least 60,000 deaths’, often many more. But Mishra illustrates the nature of the Kashmiri situation with an incident which he personally investigated. Thirty-five Sikhs in a village are massacred; the Indian authorities claim the murderers are ‘Muslim terrorists’ from Pakistan; the army and police round up five ‘suspects’ (i.e. innocent Kashmiri Muslims), murder them on a hillside, burn their bodies and announce that after a long battle they have killed ‘five foreign mercenaries’ responsible for the massacre of the Sikhs. Nothing about the official story seems plausible. Why would Islamic militants want to kill Sikhs in Kashmir? More credible is the theory that Indian intelligence agencies instigated the massacre in order to persuade the visiting President Clinton to take a stronger line against Pakistan.
Mishra becomes no more optimistic as he travels through Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Only at the end when he visits Tibet does he start to feel some hope. He knows the Chinese have wrecked Lhasa and killed hundreds of thousands of people in the country, but he senses that the resilience of the Tibetans, their innate personal culture of warmth and humility and religion, will see them through. A peaceful and accommodating Tibetan approach towards a pragmatic and more accommodating Chinese regime is more likely to safeguard the cultural essentials than a revolt that would lead to massacres and demolitions. At the end of this long and fascinating journey through intransigence and fanaticism it is a relief to hear Samdhong Rinpoche, the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, one of the few people in the book who rejects violence. ‘What will we gain if we win political freedom but lose the culture that gives value to our lives? … Non-violence is an inescapable aspect of the Tibetan culture we are fighting for.’
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