Be the Ink » William Dalrymple

On people, or: “I didn’t want to start with an issue”

Jcedens — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:13:48 +0000

Peter Hessler, former English teacher in China and author of several books on Chinese life and people, both historical and modern, is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and long-form journalist. In his interview in reception of his prize, he spoke on what it is to write about China and Chinese life, to him:

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

To me this exemplifies the kind of approach that public historians take to topics of history that have traditionally been very idea-based, politically oriented, and top-down in nature. We can look at a country or an issue or a group of people through these high-minded mechanisms, or we can study people themselves, and how they fit into the larger historical fabric. That is a much more important goal, and ultimately more meaningful.

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

Looking at one individual person’s perspective can lead towards a dangerous of generalizing based on not enough larger perspective, yes, but it is in knowing the balance, and in incorporating these people into history that we are best served by learning of the past. Genealogy is not real historical study, but it gets people engaged, and that is important. Someone is interested in feeling a personal connection to the past, and that cannot be ignored in our own, professional approaches to studying history.

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India. An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.

Tamil Tiger warfare via… Rambo: thoughts on the complexity of South Asia

Jcedens — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:12:53 +0000

Location: Woodstock, Georgia

Subject: the subcontinent; South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh)

Reading material: William Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (Oakland: Lonely Planet Publication, 2005)

Impetus: Class, History of Modern India and South Asia

Dalrymple's travelogue

The strange thing about getting my book list for this class back in January was that not only did I already know the book, I had bought it in high school off Amazon.com, after reading many positive reviews. Something had tickled me about India, and I was obsessed with the “travel essays” section of bookstores at this time (which, I should add, rarely carry Dalrymple’s book). When the material I was grabbing seemed mostly dull, and the enormous Lonely Planet country and traveling guides were mostly just a tease–with their lists of hostels, restaurants, and sites–I turned to the internet, and found The Age of Kali.

Back in 2004-05 though, I don’t think I had the background knowledge or the sensitivity to appreciate his collection of essays on various people, customs, and locations across the subcontinent. I was a teenager; one who had enough curiosity to buy the book, but perhaps not yet enough to read through the whole thing. I think I read the first two essays.

Roop Kanwar, whose picture was splashed across newspapers after she committed sati.

So upon seeing this book on the list of requirements alongside six others, I saw this as an unexpected chance to try again, nearly six years later. This time around it’s a breezy read, filled with tiny insights and often conundrums that only India could present to the outsider’s brain. How do we reconcile the actions of an eighteen-year-old young woman, married for less than a year, who jumps atop the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, therefore martyring herself in the classical Brahman practice sati? One such case embroiled all of India in a highly publicized legal debate from 1987, when Roop Kanwar walked calmly to her own death, to 1996, when the villagers involved in the funeral were acquitted. Was it devotion to her husband and to her religion that led her willingly to death by fire, or, in the easiest to rationalize theory, was she drugged by the villagers and her husband’s family (therefore, basically complacent)? Or, as some anonymous village sources told newspapers in the flood of reporting that came from their Rajastani village in the wake of the death, did she actually try to escape the flames, and was pushed back upon them by village men? As there was no evidence, and no witnesses who would argue the latter in court, all involved men were let off in 1996 when the case ended. And rightly so; there is no evidence against them, and though womens’ rights groups and western media might find it uproarious, we cannot assume she did not do it of her own accord and imprison men for crimes which they may never have committed. There is no easy answer; on one hand we must consider the alternative life Roop would have had if she did not perform the sati: she would have been condemned to shave her head, don a white sari, and beg for food for the rest of her life. She was only eighteen; that is an equally frightening prospect. The flip side is that she was relatively educated for the rural region where she lived, and she had lived in the city Jaipur for awhile. Dalrymple tells of the many urban Indians who abhor the idea of her decision being anything other than forced, for, what educated woman willingly does such a thing? (We must keep in mind that sati is an exceedingly rare practice, and in the several dozen of cases since 1947, occurs in rural India.) The point is, Roop could have been at once a devout wife, a scared widow, an educated and religious young woman, and a little bit on-edge–as most teenagers are. The combination may just have produced the event that occurred on September 4, 1987. There is neither easy answer, nor simple resolution. When Dalrymple visits the Roop’s village, nearly all the people he talks to claim they weren’t even there on the day of the sati.

And this is India through Dalrymple’s eyes and made vivid through his stories and reporting. Messy, multi-faceted, in-your-face, with plenty of moral dilemmas thrown at you…

L.T.T.E. soldiers in their distinct tiger-striped fatigues

In fact, one of the most intriguing, and possibly disturbing, revelations in Dalrymple’s tales is not in India, but in Sri Lanka; and then, specifically, the northern occupied region of Tamil Eelam. In 1990, when he visits, the country remains embroiled in the brutal civil war, between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil’s brutal homegrown army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The decades-long war ended, as far as we can tell now, in 2009 with a treaty and the vague promise of some sort of federal representation for long-disenfranchised Tamils. The linguistic and nationalistic origins of this war are a fascinating a sad subject, as the Tamils had been the favorite of the colonial British government, learned in English and given opportunities for more education (classic move by colonizing power, favoring the minority). Sri Lanka (Ceylon) enjoyed quite high levels of growth, literacy and education, and wealth in the aftermath of WWII, far greater than their neighbors to the north (India and Pakistan). In 1956, Prime Minister Soloman Bandaranaike would deal his country a blow (hindsight’s 20/20) with the Sinhala Only Act, which effectively removed the Tamil and English languages from governmental and all public sector jobs. In a single move, which was carried on by his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, millions of Tamils were out of jobs, and a generation of Tamil youth were disenfranchised. Marginalized by their own government and left with no say in national policy, the LTTE grew out of a natural vacuum of opportunity.

Dalrymple visits the terrorized city of Jaffna, on the northern Sri Lankan coast, which has been caught in the particular violence that raged from 1983-1990. After a particularly humorous bit on the utterly poor conditions of the hotel where he stays (which hasn’t seen a non-Tamil in eighteen months), he has the opportunity to talk to some of the gun-toting teenagers who compose the ground forces of the Tamil Tigers.

Up til now, we might write all this off as civil war, bloody and ruthless, but not posing any specific moral dilemmas to an outsider. Then Dalrymple meets Castro, a man similarly aged and the mastermind behind some brutal LTTE moves. And then he discovers a very strange source of their warfare inspiration:

I asked him to tell me more about the attack, and he happily compiled. He described the preparations, the spying and the intelligence work. He told me of the long, wet fifty-mile march through the monsoon jungle, the moonlit crossing of the lagoon and the silent belly-crawling as the guerrillas surrounded the camp and cut the wire. As he talked, I was aware of a growing sense of deja-vu. It all sounded a bit familiar, I said. Hadn’t I seen a film of this somewhere? He smiled.

‘You’re right. Our camps are all equipped with televisions and videos. War films are shown three times a week, and are compulsory viewing. We often consult videos like The Predator and Rambo before planning our ambushes. None of us are trained soldiers. We’ve learned all we know from these films.’

So, I thought: video-guerrillas. To Sri Lanka from Hanoi via Hollywood. It was an arresting idea: real-life freedom fighters earnestly studying Sylvester Stallone and Arnie Schwarzenegger to see how it was done.

Later I saw the camp’s video library: complete sets of Rambo, Rocky, and James Bond; all the Schwarzeneggers, including Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, and Commando; most of the recent Vietnam films; and, touchingly, no fewer than three copies of The Magnificent Seven. Moralists have often speculated the much of today’s violence is inspired by violent movies. If only they knew. Here in Sri Lanka the tactics of an entire civil war–tens of thousands killed, maimed and wounded–seem to be largely inspired by imported videos.

Hollywood warfare at its finest

I’m not an advocate for ending violence in movies, and I don’t think if that was attempted it would even prove effective in the least; we live in a very violent world. I also do not think that thirty years of the LTTE’s military tactics were guided entirely by Hollywood; Dalrymple is just reporting what he’s witnessed and making a strong point for his readers. But with the grain of salt, I still find a bit of horror in the idea of Rambo inspiring an actual rebel army of merciless killers. Kids, teenagers, adults in the western world understand the violence in these movies as not only staged, but to some extent, unrealistic. I’ve never seen a James Bond movie without that over-dramatized, glitzy, glamorous murder–all while wearing a great suit and with accompanying witty dialogue. To my eye it is so clearly imaginary. And so the idea of Tamil Tigers watching with rapt attention and invoking the ideas of battle choreographers is a lesson in my own morality–or at least that of my society’s.

Part curious, part shocking, this is a real case to consider when we think of the world that exists around us. I’ve read of plenty of the terrible violence, deaths of innocent people, and refugees who live around the world whose lives have been destroyed or forever changed by this civil war. And it jabs at precisely Dalrymple’s point, that we cannot take this region at face value, nor can we easily label it. We cannot lump South Asia’s innumerably diverse people into one large group, nor can we simply define what “Indian” means. Most importantly, we cannot transplant our own moral codes atop the functioning of thousands of years of history and define the subcontinent in our own terms; it does not translate that way. The reality is much, much more complex.

Discovering, India

Jcedens — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:17:14 +0000

A visit to the East, one of many rich, inspiring locales.

There are many places in the world counted as historically valuable and culturally rich, places that inspire, bewilder, and enchant every generation who discovers them in their own way. And the experience is different for each person, different for the native resident, different for the generation-removed–who is visiting a place their grandparents lived– different yet for the expat who has long-departed and again different for both first-time and long-visiting guests. And there is sometimes no rhyme or reason to explain why certain places have become such rich locales in history and in culture; sometimes, it seems, cities or regions were just lucky (or unlucky) enough to be a hot spot in the narrative of the world. Rome is one such place, an ancient capital that has accumulated layers of tradition and intrigue in its thousands of years, a place that inspires my father among millions of others (and next month, March 2010, he will visit it for the first time). Others are dotted all across the globe.

India encompasses several of those significant place-names, spots which have incurred a more colorful past and have somehow not only survived, but have continually accumulated layers of traditions, histories, and cultural idiosyncrasies. The Indian subcontinent in particular has somehow managed to retain aspects of its thousands of years and numerous empires, layering all the traditions of countless ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups to reach the diversity and density of its existence today. “India” today is also a relatively vague term, as Pakistan and Bangladesh share the same heritage and history as the nation-state that we think of as India in 2010. These three countries together form the subcontinent, and it really is just that, a continent, with the same linguistic and cultural boundaries as more dissected regions like Europe or the Middle East. A Bengali and a Rajput are as different culturally as a Russian and an Italian, but modern history has placed them in the same country. We must think of India as a continent when we approach its past and present.

This shows the lines drawn to create India, Pakistan, and Bangledesh, three countries that share a history and heritage, but are part of a continent in terms of diversity.

I am a bit of an expert in Indian geography, relative to the average person, as this spring I am taking two classes on the Indian subcontinent: Modern India and South Asia and the Politics of South Asia. By expert, I do not mean I can identify all the rivers, but I do mean I can tell you a bit about the physical features and people who populate each of the states. This has given me additional interest in the stories of Indian people I meet, as just being “Indian” is about the most vague answer there is (may as well just say you’re from Asia). Me new spatial concept of the region only deepens a love affair I’ve had for many years with all things India. At this point, I don’t even recall the origins of my interest; but by high school I was reading books on the country from the travel essay section at the bookstore and being invited over to my friend Karn’s house to drink chai and borrow Bollywood movies.

Many before me from western societies have also shared this sense of wonderment with its people, religions, textiles, history, and the interaction of them all; men were fascinated during British economic and later political influence, and many-a-hippie or Beatles fan may also have found themselves seeking enlightenment or finding a guru in their own relationship with India. Since classes began in January, I have rekindled my former addiction to chai, India’s sweet, milky tea. I have been writing journal entries for class that have me thinking about the place all the time. I’m listening to Bhangra music and my Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack more. I’m trying to grapple with the narrative of Pakistani politics since 1947′s partition, when the Muslim nation was left independent and without the structural foundation of government that India had; I’m trying to keep straight who pulled a coup d’état on whom.

Dalrymple's feast of a book, about the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857

A wonderful treat has been given to me, in this, my last semester of undergraduate studies: a whole sixteen-week period where books I’ve had on my list of “must-reads” for years are finally required for class. We are reading two books by William Dalrymple, a British historian and writer who has spent his career learning about India’s past and present. I bought The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters in high school after learning about it then, but will finally have the maturity and time to finish reading it. And I am currently in the middle of The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, which grippingly recounts the chaos the erupted when sepoys (Indian native who were soldiers for the British East India Company) revolted and the slowly-dying Mughal Empire came to its final demise, ushering in the era of British rule in India. His use of sources and the perspective of the many characters involved in the event make for a spectacular view inside Delhi during the event known neutrally as the “Indian Rebellion of 1857.”

Out of this book I have learned the Indian term “wallah,” which comes at the end of a word, such as “Delhiwallah,” and roughly means “person who is from…” or “person who does…” So if the cable guy is coming to your home in Hyderabad, you may tell you friend something like “The cablewallah is coming to install a satellite dish.” It’s little gems like this that only increase my respect and adoration of the culture. I would, personally, much rather be a retailwallah than a “sales associate.” Incidentally, if you have seen Slumdog Millionaire, you may recall the show host referring to Jamal as a chaiwallah, because he got the tea for people at the call center where he worked.

Delicious Thali dinner at Swapna Indian restaurant

On the subject of taste buds, one class assignment is to go and eat Indian food. After the primer our professor gave us, I was itching to visit the restaurant he recommended (Swapna), and went the very next evening. I went for the lamb tikki masala, wanting to try out the more interesting flavors of meat (rather than mostly-bland chicken) and keeping it in range for my first (official) time by keeping with a popular dish. With the appetizers and sauces and naan and the spices and flavors in each one, I tasted more than enough to have me coming back– very soon.

This fall, my Mom, does custom sewing, created a wedding dress for a young woman out of vintage saris, which were given to her upon the death of a close relative to their family. Though the bride is not Indian, she was wed on December 19, 2009 wearing a wonderful custom-built dress made from pieces of some gorgeous saris, in rich reds, oranges, and creams. I sometimes have the wish that I could wear a sari, as an American blonde girl in Atlanta, Georgia, and not draw any strange looks. Or even that I owned one just to wear anyway. Someday, I hope.

Although some of these things are part of a class, they transcend the classroom. For me, it is learning on a very personal level, as I find so many beautiful things buried in India’s varied culture. India, even while it is a place I’ve never seen, inspires and bewilders me. Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad, the coasts of Kerala, are all very different from each other and steeped in layers of history and tradition that a native of a relatively new-born country cannot naturally conceive of.

There are many spots in India that are rich with history, layered with thousands of years of traditions, and they have long-served as the meeting points between ethnicity, language, religion. Today they also serve as representatives to the outside world; some in history have looked disdainfully at the country, seen it as a place unworthy of respect, as the British had been increasingly doing in the years before the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. But there were generations of men before and after that saw much more than this. Perhaps they saw what we recognize today, those of us who have such great admiration and respect for a land that holds such an ancient, colorful past: India as a continent, an immense, aching, breathing, enlightened, beautiful place.

(Visit “More Ink” to check out some of my recommended books and films in or about the subcontinent.)