India Journal: Headed for the Hills (Part 1)

Thoughts from Meghalaya state, in the mountains. My random thoughts from our visit. 

We arrived at the airport in Guwahati. Stepping out of the airport into the morning air, the experience immediately reminded me of a trip to Miami in June (friend’s birthday, we were not crazy). The air was heavy and muggy, the countryside a lush green. I thought that we were going to the “Northeast”, with an emphasis on north. However, I failed to look at my map. We were at about the same latitude as Delhi (and Shillong with Jaipur). The big difference lay in the fact that this place receives rain, a lot of rain, unlike arid Jaipur (until the arrival of the monsoon). 

Our trip took us south into the hills and then mountains of Meghalaya (we’d landed in Assam). The winding around mountains magnify the joys of Indian road travel, as you can imagine. I also note that we come upon road improvements here and there, as if it’s one never-ending project. Between the projects to widen the road, we travel over road that often badly needs elementary repairs. The sides of the mountains frequently collapse, as the engineers and builders seem to ignore that fact that this might happen. We later learn that this is significant earthquake country, and I shudder at the thought of those roads when a quake hits. There will be lots of red clay and heavy rocks where people won’t want them. 

Shillong is one of those three-dimensional cities with as much going up and down and over and across. It’s disorienting to a guy who thought the hill north of Shen on Highway 59 was quite the vista. (Well, I still enjoy it.) However, much more than the hills or the greenery, the multi-ethnicity of the city grabbed my attention. With Bangladesh and the “cow belt” of India to the south, and Assam and Bhutan to the north, into the Himalayas, one sees a real mix of people here. The diversity here is much greater than what I see in Jaipur, by far. Interestingly, English is the official language here, only one of three states in India where this is true. Shillong was a British hill station that allowed the Brits to escape the sweltering temperatures of the Indian plains to the southwest and the heat and humidity of the Ganges delta around Kolkata (Calcutta). This accounts for the strong linguistic presence of English here, but I assume that the linguistic diversity that accompanies the ethnic diversity also creates a strong case for English as the lingua franca (a bone the French). 

Dinner last night with C’s host colleague proved interesting. A member of the Khasi ethnic group, she strongly identified with the Khasi culture, and she’s also an active Presbyterian (among Brits, the Scots seemed to have the greatest presence in this area). It appears that the Khasi people may have a relation to the peoples of Laos. Our hostess traveled and worked in Cambodia and others countries in Southeast Asia, and she noted many similarities. She bears a physical likeness to those peoples. We in the U.S., at least among most whites, have only a loose sense of ethnicity and no sense of “tribe” in any formal sense. Here, these markers still play a role. Locals don’t feel a strong connection with the rest of India because of their different languages, ethnicity, physical isolation, etc. Indeed, I haven’t seen any written Hindi here, and very little spoken (although many visitors appear to have come from the south). 

In conversation, what’s the biggest problem or challenge for India? Here, as just about everywhere I’ve heard the subject addressed, the answer is “corruption”. The answer here points to an expensive new mansion built by the local Chief Minister (governor). 

During our stay, C and I experienced a bit of a joy ride—well, more like a Hitchcock ride. We’d gone to a different part of town for supper, and we needed to catch a cab back to the hotel. (Cabs are much more common here than auto-rickshaws.) After about 10 minutes of failing to hail cab, we finally got one. But once in, his slurred speech and hiccups indicated that he might be tipsy. He then proceeded to wind down the narrow roads with his lights and engine off. C reminded him of the lights and he turned them on for a while before turning them off again. I’m reminded of the scene in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest where Cary Grant careens down a winding mountain road, heavily intoxicated and without brakes. Ok, it wasn’t that bad, but still, an experience I wouldn’t want to repeat voluntarily. 

On our return trip to Guwahati, I saw something that I’d never seen before: a dead, bloated cow in the road, stiff-legs up. It’s noteworthy for two reasons. First, I’ve been surprised that we don’t see this all of the time with the number of cows that we have roaming streets and roads here (Jaipur) in the cow belt. Cows on the road are like other vehicles, and probably considered by drivers as no less rational or predictable than their fellow drivers. Second, I can’t imagine a dead cow allowed to remain anywhere to bloat in the middle of a busy public road. If live cows are a challenge, dead ones in the middle of road are no less—and perhaps are a greater—hazard than live cows. It reinforces my perception that a lack of public authority and service (like dead animal removal) is sorely lacking in most of the country. 

C has posted some wonderful photos, including a couple of great photos from Cherrapunjee, where we enjoyed a beautiful but rainy stay. The hotel where we stayed was new and in pretty good condition, but after taking in the gorgeous vistas, there wasn’t much to do. The opportunities of greater tourism are here, but it would require some planning and infrastructure.I hope to post some, too, but not now. Internet is down, even here @ home in Jaipur.

Better Late Than Never: A Review of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Only 38 years after receiving the assignment, I've completed it. I’ve now read A Passage to India. 

I received the assignment to read the novel for my Modern Fiction course taught by David (“First Blood”) Morrell. The book was near the top of the reading list, and in a semester that began with a mistake (I misread my transcript), I had to read more works than I had time for. In the words of the Panda, I “had to be strategic”. Fortunately, Professor Morrell told us about the echo, the Freytag triangle, and how this novel helped create the transition to modern fiction. Anyway, it was enough to do well in the course. Within the last year, of course, this omission began to haunt me. Shouldn’t I now read this classic? Well, I again procrastinated. I’d seen the movie years ago (and remember virtually nothing about it), but mostly I wanted to focus on reading about other aspects of India, both longer ago (Moguls and rajas) and the recent past and contemporary India. Thus, until recently, I’ve avoided reading about the British Raj. Now, however, perhaps for the mere fact that Indian Summer had been looking at me for so long (my books look at me longingly and pleadingly when I don’t pay attention to them), I decided to read Forster's classic. Then, when I saw a good edition of A Passage to India (Penguin, with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra), I bought it  and moved it toward the top of the pile. 

And so how was it? Outstanding. 

Forster’s novel creates complex and sometimes puzzling characters set in a society and landscape that he evokes with beautiful and insightful prose. The central characters, the Moslem physician Dr. Aziz and the British schoolteacher, Cyril Fielding, struggle and fight for every moment of friendship that can break through barriers of culture and personal insecurities. Indeed, the central incidents occur early in the novel. These events concern a visit to the Marabar caves and whatever happened (or didn’t happen) to Ms. Quested there, the subsequent trial, and its effects. These events take up the first two-thirds of the book, but the story continues beyond that attempting to appreciate the individuals and circumstances from which the problems all arose. 

Forster is hard upon the administrators of the British Raj. If anyone thinks that Forster is a cheerleader for the Raj, that person is sorely mistaken. Forster, who visited India on two different occasions (and who perhaps had an Indian lover) displays the vile racism that had developed among many of the Brits. Fielding is an exception, and yet even he must deal with ambiguities and misunderstandings that could frustrate even the most sympathetic of souls. The characters of Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Professor Godbole each have complex if lesser roles that create a true richness in the story.

Finally, I should remark on how Forster uses the landscape to help set the tone of the story. Writing as I am now from central India and having lived here the last 10 months, I know how heat, dust, random mountains, ravines and (often dry) watercourses mark the landscape and impress themselves on those who, like me, come from such different circumstances. Forster’s language, which creates wonderful conversations, takes a poetic turn when describing some of these landscapes and the attendant weather.  

So now, 38 years after I received the assignment, I can mark it complete. I get no credit for that now—other than the enjoyment and perspective that I received from reading a great novel about this complex land. This is now the credit I most want.

India Journal: Jaipur to Delhi by Road & Notes on Delhi

C and I traveled to Delhi by car from Jaipur a few days ago, our first such trip by road since we first arrived in India. Travel by car allows us to see aspects of this country that we don’t see traveling by plane. The outskirts of Jaipur seem to go on endlessly with unnumbered people and shanties. The roads crowded with all manner of modes of transportation, from foot traffic to camels to motorbikes, cars, and large trucks. The trucks, decorated in wildly garish colors and always in need of bodywork, inevitably have a message to “please honk” written on the back, as if the national pastime of horn-honking needed encouragement. The countryside itself is almost perfectly flat, except of the spine of rocky hills that rim Jaipur. The earth is a pale brown that seems little more than dust, although somehow crops issue forth from it at the appropriate times. Here and there we see “colleges”, which, given their distance from the urban centers, must act almost as monasteries to keep their students far from the paths of temptation found in the cities. How they obtain water, sewer, and the like, I don’t know. We pass a number of “flyovers” designed to by-pass the villages between Jaipur and Delhi, and not a one completed, although a few were marked by some activity. Sometimes public projects in India seem all activity and no accomplishment.

After going through the small towns surrounding Delhi with their crowded roads lined with trucks, small vendors, animals, and people, one begins to see the high-rise glass towers that mark the growth of affluent Delhi. While in Jaipur we never see steel-frame construction, the height and design of these building suggests the use of steel and therefore provide a mark of affluence. One learns, however, that no matter the sparkle of the tower, at street level one is likely to encounter the shortcomings of Indian infrastructure and services, thus providing one more set of contradictions that mark contemporary India. 

As we enter into Delhi proper, we note the wide, tree-lined boulevards with orderly traffic. The orderliness and greenery contrast with the cities of Rajasthan and help provide Delhi with a welcoming feel. (Although a later walk educates us that the trees often serve as conduits for low-hanging electrical wires that force one to pay more attention to what is above than what is below as we walk). As with most phenomena in India, one needn’t travel far to find an antithesis to such greenery and order, but in this part of the city, it’s a plus. 

We’re lodging in the Hans, a concrete tower not far from other concrete towers and just a short way from the British-constructed shopping area of Connaught Place. Connaught Place seems like a perpetual construction project, and the shops, many of which are brand name and upscale, seem worn by it all. Dogs sleep in the heat of the day in the shadows of the archways as affluent, mostly younger Indians, peruse the shops, the dingy exteriors not deterring their desire to buy and mingle. Going out to find a place for lunch, I find the heat in Delhi stifling. Although the thermometer doesn't spike as high as it does in Jaipur, one feels a greater humidity and haze compared to the pure, bright blue sky of mid-day Jaipur (where haze appears at the beginning and end of the day but doesn’t linger). 

As evening settles in, I look out the window of our 17^th floor room and view the haze and adjoining gray, concrete buildings. The gray of the concrete has an added patina of dust, soot, and bird droppings that washes all sense of color from the scene. A couple of the nearby buildings don’t have lights, as they appear to have been abandoned after arising 15 or more stories into the air. Mostly low building and a few skyscrapers and high smokestacks, as far as the haze permits us to see, mark the remainder of the city view. 

A walk the following day, in the late afternoon, exposed C and I to what we thought might be an incoming rainstorm. The wind picked up, visibility decreased, and the shadows disappeared; however, instead of rain and relief from the heat, we found the wind blew in dust and grit, filling our eyes and mouths (until we wised up) with a fine grit. No rain ever appeared, while the city, back in our room, nearly disappeared while the terrestrial junk blew through. 

Tomorrow we leave for Shilong in the eastern part of the country, up in the Himalayan foothills. As a local friend noted, most want to escape Delhi in June, and now I understand why.

A Review of State Building: Governance & World Order in the Twenty-First Century by Francis Fukuyama

The first issue that I should address comes from the fact that that I have posted this book review on my “Steve’s View from Abroad” website. What has this to do with India? While a far cry from the failed states that are the primary focus of this book, India, nevertheless, is a state (or states, as it’s a federal system) that fails to function effectively in many realms. Anytime I speak about India, I almost always mention the lack of basic government services and the effect that this has daily life. Poor roads, poor drainage, poor sewers, poor water and air quality—I could go on (and did with some dinner partners just the other night). I believe that India will gain a measure sophistication and decent quality of life (which includes and transcends a mere increase in GDP) when Jaipur no longer has garbage strewn upon its streets; when the poor living in shanties have found decent housing; and when the middle class has initiated a “Progressive Era” for India to clean-up political corruption and to address its failing infrastructure. India is far from a world-class economy currently, but if it can reach a critical minimum of an engaged middle-class willing to fight the good political fight, it has a future. A lot of work—a lot—remains to be accomplished, but it can happen. 

So issues of governance drew me to this work as one reason, but the other is the reputation of Fukuyama himself. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, now much maligned, is a very interesting and instructive book. I read it many years ago to great benefit and delight. The benefit and delight came from understanding a train of political thought that I’d never grasped very well before. Plato, Hegel (via Kojeve), and Nietzsche were brought to life in a manner that I’d never before appreciated. The English tradition, with Locke, Bentham, Mill, etc. emphasizes rational, utilitarian man, homo economus. However, this older tradition, going back to Plato and Thucydides (although Plato wanted to crush all human instinct under reason), emphasizes thymos, our human demand for dignity and respect, the kinds of things that the English tradition, at least in economics, tended to downplay if not outright ignore. Fukuyama raised my understanding Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave, something that in a rush toward Marx, too much political theory ignored. For this education alone, Fukuyama’s book was very worthwhile. 

The other part of The End of History and the Last Man concerns the growing trend toward liberal democracy in the world, and here’s where people have come down hard on Fukuyama, considering him a failed prophet. However, I don’t recall (sorry, my copy not here with me) that Fukuyama emphasized that we would all become happy, bourgeoisie democrats. What I believe that he did—and on which he has not been rebutted—is to establish that no political system is more appropriate for human affairs than liberal democracy. As a practice, liberal democracy has not swept the field, but as an ideal (non-utopian), who stands as a contender? No other system, I submit, and for this reason, Fukuyama deserves more praise than the easy derision he has received. 

The criticism that The End of History and the Last Man has received hasn’t slowed Fukuyama, and he’s gained in prominence. I enjoyed his The Great Disruption and Trust, and well as a number of articles that he’s written. Meanwhile, the Panda (sometimes Hungry, sometimes Inscrutable), during her earlier visit India, was reading his most recent book, The Origins of Political Order (Part 1). She began it with some skepticism but concluded it with approval and assigned it to me to read (my copy awaits me in IC). Thus, when I saw this slender (179 p.) book, I took it up and read it in less than a day. It proved worthwhile, indeed. 

Written in 2004 after the invasion of Iraq and our incursion (if that’s the right term) into Afghanistan, it reflects on these experiences as well as the long list of “failed-states” that grabbed world attention in the years following the collapse of the Communism. Put simply, states (governments) serve crucial functions and when they fail (no longer function effectively), people suffer and often die. Fukuyama initially details the function of states and how these functions can vary. For instance, the state in the U.S. is much more limited than European states in the provision of services and policies. Think healthcare, for instance. While thoughts can vary in this regard, a certain minimum number of functions need attention. In addition, Fukuyama devotes a chapter to public administration, which proves to me, again, not only his mastery of a great empirical body of knowledge, but his ability to draw out some of the fundamental theoretical and practical aspects of a topic like public administration. 

Fukuyama discusses how public administration is an issue around the globe and identifies its unique problems. For instance, the agency problem, the scope of authority problem, and the motivation problem. Fukuyama criticizes the microeconomics approach to public administration and the institutional approach, at least to the extent that those approaches aren’t augmented by a sociological approach. Fukuyama notes that organizations, or more exactly, the individuals within them, are governed by group norms, personal relationships, leadership standards, and other non-economic motivations (without totally ignoring the economic issues). His example of the armed forces serves perfectly: men and women don’t fight and die for the great pay; they fight and die for each other. (By the way, this applies to terrorists as well. See Scott Atran’s work Talking with the Enemy.) Among our economics-envying social sciences, this may come as news. It shouldn’t, but at least in the current policy-making world, it does. (Economics, in the meanwhile, suffers from a perverse physics-envy.) Everyone should consider this from Fukuyama: 

            It has been a longstanding dream of the social sciences to turn the study of human behavior into a true science, moving from the mere description to formal models of causation with nontrivial predictive value, based on rigorous empirical observation. This project can be realized more readily in some spheres of human behavior than in others. Markets are susceptible to this kind of analysis, which is why economics emerged as the queen of the social sciences in the late twentieth century. But organizations constitute a complicated case. Individuals in the organizations look out for their narrow self-interests, and to the extent they do, the economist’s methodological individualism provides genuine insight. But to a much greater extent than in markets, norms and social ties affect individual choices in organizations. The effort to be more “scientific” than the underlying subject matter permits carries a real cost in blinding us to the real complexities of public administration as it is practiced in different societies. (123)

Agreed. Thus, theorists like Herbert Simon, James March, and Chester Barnard receive Fukuyama’s use and praise instead of more recent thinkers. In addition, I must note the fascinating account of Japanese public administration after WWII when American “experts” attempted to “fix it”. Amazing. 

Finally, Fukuyama addresses the issue of sovereignty, one in which the U.S. (especially the Bush Administration) and other countries often parted ways. To his credit, Fukuyama mentions Robert Kagan, whom I believe has been a critic of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. He cites Kagan’s appreciation of the differences between the U.S. and Europe on these issues. 

All in all, a short but powerful book. Having now experienced ineffective or marginally effective states (I’ll throw in Cameroon as well), I have a new and greater appreciation of the mundane but crucial work of government.

A Review of Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tonzelmann

One of the benefits of reading history is that you don’t have to be an academic historian to succeed in the field. Indeed, from Herodotus and Thucydides to Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Parkman, and Henry Adams, up through many successful and worthwhile practitioners writing today, we have a wealth of non-academic historians who enlighten and entertain us with graceful prose. (I realize one might argue about Adams, since he taught Medieval History at Harvard for a while, but I don’t believe that his major works were written while in the academy or for the academy.) Our move to India led me to discover William Dalrymple, who writes beautifully about contemporary India and the Middle East, as well as having written very highly regarded histories set in India and Afghanistan. In fact, via a piece that he wrote for the wonderful Five Books site, I discovered Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. 

The title might prove misleading, since the “secret”, as the author notes within her work, was not so much a secret as a little-known or little-discussed (but not completely unnoticed) situation. The “secret” was that the wife of the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had a love affair with the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Of course, this love affair (the details of intimacy remain unknown) unfolded against the huge historic panorama of Independence and Partition. As Dalrymple notes in his remarks about Von Tunzelmann, in focusing on these three actors, she tells the immensely complicated story of Independence and Partition in manner that provides a sense of the immensity of the problems and undertakings without enmeshing us in details that would overwhelm most readers. In addition to focusing on the triangle formed by the Mountbattens and Nehru, she also deals deftly with other significant players such as Gandhi, Jinnah, and Patel in India, and with Churchill, Attlee, and others back in Britain. 

Von Tunzelmann does an excellent job of setting the scene for the momentous events of Independence and Partition by first establishing the biographies of the main players. Lord Mountbatten, for instance, is from a German family that married into the British aristocracy. Mountbatten, known to friends like such as two British kings and Noel Coward, as “Dickie”, appears in some ways the embodiment of an upper-class British twit. His naval career is in some ways a disaster (such as running a ship aground and having one sunk from underneath him), but it nevertheless leads him to the position of Allied Commander for Southeast Asia during WWII. While inept in some ways, and enamored of pomp, circumstance, genealogies, and medals, he’s also quite charming and persuasive. And, lest you think him a poor cuckold, his marriage to Lady Mountbatten, Edwina, is an “open marriage” from near the beginning. Both carried on rather open affairs and had a complex relationship, to say the least. Edwina, especially in her youth, couldn’t help reminding me of Princess Diana: a rather repressed young woman whose marriage to a much more sedate man seems to have released a rather marked free-spiritedness. But like Lady Di (after demotion), Edwina found a serious and very successful calling helping out in London during the Blitz and maintaining a very active, hands-on roll in India and Pakistan dealing with the human misery found here both before and after Partition. The third person of our triumvirate, Nehru, had morphed from a young, Indian-British dandy (Cambridge and all) into a national leader. He underwent an arranged marriage and never seemed very happy about it. His wife, an apparently pious woman in contrast to his militant (if publicly restrained) atheism, died relatively young, so that Nehru was a widower at the time he came to know Edwina in the mid-1940s. 

Von Tunzelmann keeps her narrative moving, weaving the personal lives of the Mountbattens and Nehru together to meet in the momentous years of 1947 and 1948 and then apart again. In addition, she keeps the big picture in focus. Her passing remarks and judgments, such as how Gandhi’s peculiarities, irrelevancies, and standing in world opinion alternately retarded and forwarded the cause of independence and Hindu-Moslem relations, leaves one wanting more, but not at all disatistfied. (Gandhi’s life and role in all of this, of course, fills volumes.) She also remarks on the irony that I noticed immediately upon coming to India: Gandhi’s likeness adorns all denominations of rupee notes. A rather ironic honor for an ascetic who thought all India should follow his austere example. 

Von Tunzelmann writes with a light but perceptive hand. She deftly manages the many facts, or where evidence lacks, caution and restraint marks her prose. She also displays a light sense of irony appropriately deployed. In this description of the Indian Assembly at the turn of midnight that marked Independence, she writes: 

            As the chimes sounded and the unexpected blast from a conch shell startled the delegates in the chamber of the Constituent Assembly, a nation that had struggled for so many years, and sacrificed so much, was freed at last from the shackles of empire.

            Yes, Britain was finally free. 

She’s not being cute or coy here: her narrative has established the draining demands of Empire upon the war-impoverished Brits such that most—except Churchill and a few other die-hards—realized and wanted desperately to unload the burden that India and Empire represented. 

If one enjoys reading a history that interweaves the personal into the grant narratives of empires, nations, and peoples, as many a great novel as done, then you can’t expect to find a more engrossing account of the extraordinary people and events portrayed here. An outstanding work. 

Interesting note: The cover photos on my copy of the book purchased here in India shows the Mountbattens standing together with Gandhi; in the U.S. editions, they are pictured on the cover with Nehru, who's laughing.