Temptations of the West

I recently finished reading Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West – How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond. It was a very enjoyable read, and one that was in line with what we try to write on this blog.

The book includes nine essays about places in the Indian subcontinent. Five of them are about India and one each about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet. Mishra writes about diverse trends in life in these places and finds a common thread in them, which he refers to by the book’s title. I enjoyed reading all these essays. But the ones on Allahabad and Benares were especially enlightening, after having a taste of life here.

One’s first questions, when one comes to Allahabad and Benares, are about how nothing works here. The banks won’t do what they should, post offices won’t do what they should, municipalities won’t do what they should, students won’t do what they should, teachers won’t do what they should, ad nauseam. Mishra had similar questions when, for example, he went to the University at Benares in 1988 and saw students and teachers doing everything but their job. The scene stood in contrast with the post-independence idealism at the universities and his own brahmin’s thirst for study.

Allahabad was even more intriguing for him. He was here at the university from 1985 to 1988 and now came again in 2000, during elections.

The long bone-rattling drive … to Allahabad on potholed roads, through calf-deep floods, past the tin-roofed shacks and rain-battered villages of mud and thatch—the cowering huts, so picturesque from the plane, now appearing frail, in danger of collapsing onto the sodden earth from which they had been so arduously raised , the low-caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow-dung, the men spinning ropes for the string cots, the sky low and grey over the flat fields and tiny huts and buffaloes placid in muddy pools—the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as fixedly as it would have done two centuries ago was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a globalized economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India.

He stayed in the “only four star hotel in town,” where they have Mexican and Italian food on their coffee shop menu, and slums and dingy lanes all around outside. From his perch high up in this eight-storey building he could survey Allahabad’s colonial design. He could even understand the chronology in it: the little pilgrim district of Prayag centred at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna and the railway strip dividing this from the Civil Lines, the university and the public library, both of which the British built after they came here in the nineteenth century. (One Colonel James Neill killed 6,000 “dirty Indian niggers” at that time.) This Allahabad, “Rudyard Kipling’s Allahabad,” had its differences cut and dried. With independence, this “romance had gone, but this distance hadn’t really diminished,” with the administrators immediately squatting on the British bungalow and perpetuate their difference from the “masses”. “Dignity, and how to hold on to it: that was what preoccupied these men, most of whom the civil service had rescued from a lower-middle-class shabbiness.” He goes on to describe sadly comical tales from his visit to such a city and the countryside around it.

Mishra also lays out many pages on the Nehru dynasty that came from Allahabad and half-returns to the original theme by telling of the bourgeois anxieties of the new upward mobile occupants of the Civil Lines. But now

the middle class that had depended for a long time on its close affiliations with the executive and legislative branches of the administration—and on its class loyalties, now weakened at a time when every man was for himself—the middle class in small towns and cities sees itself besieged. In this you could detect the beginning of the end of an India that thought itself safe in the cocoon of colonial privilege; an India that with all its inherited advantages had failed to create a democratic and egalitarian society.

The other three essays on India are about Bollywood, Hindutva and Kashmir—all three have the same skilful exposition in them. On the book’s blurb is the following testimony from the New York Review of Books for Mishra’s other book An End to Suffering:

With perfectly modulated lyricism, Mishra evokes a world few of us have seen from within. He is the rare writer who is at ease as a historian, philosopher, traveller, and memoirist, and the combination of roles allows him to produce a book that few others could even have attempted.

This surely applies to this book too.