Home Free: What are we entitled to hope for?
Last week I published an article in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn addressing the retired cricket star Imran Khan’s recent surge in popularity as an alternative to Pakistan’s discredited established politicians. The article elicited many more online comments than anything else I’ve written, which is a tribute not to me but to the urgency many Pakistanis feel about the topic, which is not really Imran Khan himself but the yawning chasm of national hopelessness that he aims to fill.
Nearly as striking to me was how many commenters scolded me for having compared Imran to Obama. I hadn’t even mentioned Obama by name. What I had written was: “Relying on a single charismatic leader to change everything for the better is a setup for embittered disappointment and disillusion. Pakistanis and Americans are very similar, not least in being idealistic; and I’m sorry to have to remind you and myself of how much hope we Americans put in a charismatic figure who promised definitive change here, four long years ago.” As far as I can tell, the readers who scolded me had no real reasons to offer for why Imran and Obama have nothing in common, only wishful assertions. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
There might well be real differences in the personal character and mettle of the two men. I think there are, in fact, and those favor Imran. He has been toughing it out in the political wilderness for more than fifteen years, through many changes of circumstance and regime, when he really didn’t have to. He has earned his credibility the hard way, above all through his tireless and successful work building and funding the justly famous Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital in Lahore. Obama had accomplished nothing comparable to that before becoming President of the United States, and he still hasn’t.
But what the commenters failed – willfully, I would venture, if understandably – to appreciate is that I wasn’t comparing the men, but the phenomena. The questions both raise are: Why do desperate societies feel a need to invest their hopes in a single charismatic would-be leader? What is the best result we can hope for, when that happens? What are the dangers? If (more likely when) the leader disappoints us, is that his or her failure, or our own? Above all, what are we entitled to hope for?
I write these days under two rubrics: twice monthly on Fridays in Dawn on topics directly to do with Pakistan, and every Monday on my own website (excerpted in Dawn) in a series called Home Free, which will also be the title of the book I’m working toward, reporting from the grassroots and commenting on the current and coming crisis here in the USA. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line where one ends and the other begins, and indeed one of my standing aspirations is that anything I write should, ideally, speak in some way to anyone who reads English, anywhere in the world. This installment is a case in point.
So these musings are prompted in part by what I see as the dangerous over-investment of hope many Pakistanis are placing in Imran Khan. Expecting too much from him is not fair to him or good for the Pakistani nation and society. At the same time, what’s been on my mind is how the Republican presidential primaries have been dominating mainstream news coverage in the U.S. for far too long now. What that shows is not only the infamously interminable quality of American elections in general, or even Obama’s all too real failure either to be the leader we elected him to be or to assert himself politically. Beyond proximate contexts and personalities, what I’m sensing is a greater than usual disconnect between the ostensible and the actual, as American society atavistically clings to the vestiges of its formerly functional institutions.
A litany of these reads like a roll call of the institutions that defined the America I grew up in, from once-prestigious book publishers and record companies to General Motors to the nightly news to Hollywood to Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. The truth we’re disinclined to face in our national politics is that not only have the Republican and Democratic parties become similarly vestigial and pointless, but maybe so has the presidency itself. What’s been lost along with all of the above is something intangible but that, now that it’s gone, we know to have been crucial. Call it community or share purpose, or at least a tacit agreement that we’re all on the same page. Also lost is a sense that we’re all in the same boat, traveling together to a destination that we believe to be worth the journey.
The veteran political writer Elizabeth Drew begins a new entry on the New York Review of Books blog, ominously titled “Can We Have a Democratic Election?”, thus:
Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of broadscale, coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and the previously banned unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president. The assumptions underlying that process—that there is a right to vote, that the system for nominating and electing a president is essentially fair—are at serious risk.
Drew’s questions are bracingly candid, but even she feels compelled to couch them in fairly conventional language, at a moment in history when the conventions we’ve lived by either have fallen or are fast falling away from beneath our feet. The answer to her main question clearly is no. We’ll have an election, and it will have a result, but – whether that result is a second term for Obama or one of the Republican buffoons who are mediocre and silly enough to want the job – it will solve no real problems and will leave at least tens of millions of Americans feeling disaffected, unrepresented and un-led. Just like in Pakistan. The question then will become: Now what?
So, to answer my original question: We’re entitled to hope for what we ourselves, individually and in collaboration with each other, and with clear vision and hard work, possess the capacity and willingness to accomplish. Whatever that is, we’re not entitled to ask either Obama or Imran Khan to accomplish it for us.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Home Free: What are we doing to ourselves?
Happy New Year. There’s a lot to catch up on since I paused this column over the holidays in order to finish writing and otherwise finalizing my book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, which is now at the printer and will be published March 1. You can read an excerpt and/or pre-purchase Bearing the Bruise here.
The latest thing we’re all being forced to try to make sense of and/or pick up the pieces from is the video of four U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Last Friday I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling an itch in my brain, so I got out of bed and wrote “Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” If you want to know what I think about the incident itself, please read that article. This article is about some of the comments posted on that one, which brought home that some things that seem glaringly obvious to me are quite a bit less so to many of my fellow Americans.
“To call for these four guys’ heads over something so minor is ridiculous,” asserted one reader.
In response to my remark that I’ll remember the urination incident the next time I witness passengers in a U.S. airport breaking out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” another wrote: “You are free to think that, you are free to write this column … thanks to men and women in uniform. Your statement shows your ignorance of the service and sacrifice of people like myself who give of ourselves and willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to ensure our loved ones and people like yourself can be free. This also shows blatant prejudice of an entire group based on the actions of a few. May you continue to enjoy the freedoms earned by men and women that volunteered to ensure you never lose them.”
My response to such pro-military bullies and blowhards is: No, I’m not free because of the sacrifices of “our men and women in uniform.” I’m free because I’m free. You can’t give me my freedom, nor can you withhold it. It’s mine by right. That’s what America is all about – right?
I’m prepared to insist on that point because, even though freedom is mine by right, I can keep it only by exercising it. So I’m going to continue exercising it, because it’s not possible to be both completely free and completely secure, and I prefer freedom. Fetishizing “our men and women in uniform” leads to justifying, excusing, or explaining away whatever they might do in the heat of battle. But should they even be in battle in the first place? And, despite their bravery and training, “our men and women in uniform” seem somehow to have failed or neglected to protect me from the National Defense Authorization Act, which since December 31 provides for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. It’s fair to ask whether the Taliban are truly more dangerous to Americans’ freedom than the United States Congress or Supreme Court.
A commenter on Sebastian Junger’s fine Washington Post article “We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy” wrote: “It’s tribal. It’s not a police action. While these acts are deplorable, they are also understandable. In a warrior’s mind, they already dehumanized the enemy.” I can’t disagree with this; as Junger pointed out, “A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s [allegedly] okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.” We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?
How you see this incident depends on whether you’re willing to acknowledge that the corpses urinated on were those of human beings. One all too typical commenter on the version of my article published in the Huffington Post trotted out familiar tropes:
Radical Islamic men use their own children as suicide bombers, stone women to death because they have been raped and want to kill and destroy anyone or any society on this earth that does not agree with their violent way of living life under their extreme religious beliefs. So why should I have an issue with some Marines pissing on the dead bodies of those same men who would kill me simply because I exist? Well, I don’t have a problem with it. You truly reap what you sew [sic] in this world and when you want to destroy all others, you can’t afford to be offended by a little urine.
Wow. Does this writer know anything about the daily lives, culture, and history of Afghan people, or is he or she just guessing?
I’ll give the last word, for now, to Jafar Siddiqui, my fellow American whose “PenJihad” blog I quoted in my previous article. “Good article Ethan, but I disagree with your title,” he wrote.
How do you, or anyone else, know the dead men were “Taliban” or “insurgents” or even armed and posing a threat to the soldiers who killed them? … The dead men could very well have been the good guys and our guys were simply looking for a kill. Far too many of the people our guys kill “out there” … are not proven as hostiles but simply as “suspected insurgents.” Innocents, in my book.
I foresee the need to continue this conversation, and I’ll be doing just that as I drive around America this autumn.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?
I haven’t fully digested the disgusting news that U.S. Marines have been caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, so this post is not offered as a coherent think-piece. But what is there to think about, anyway? What is there to say, really, except that there’s absolutely no excuse? No excuse for the policy makers and officers, but neither is there one for the brutalized young perpetrators. Their lowly enlisted status doesn’t excuse them; we should offer them compassion, but not absolution, for the guilt they carry. The next time I’m in a U.S. airport and the passengers break out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” I’ll remember this incident.
In keeping with its maddening, self-regarding role as the American Pravda, the New York Times worries in a hand-wringing “analysis” that “the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war.” Well, how could they not have that effect? And why shouldn’t they?
Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American acquaintance of mine who lives near Seattle, where I live, writes a reliably candid blog called “PenJihad.” In his latest installment, aptly titled “Marines Urinating on Dead Muslims,” Jeff offers this challenge to his fellow American Muslims: “There is no action against the anti-Muslim hate-mongering climate in this country because we Muslims do not do anything to make ourselves politically significant so, why should anyone care about us?” This echoes my own 2010 article “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?” The question mark is important, because I’m not a Muslim, and I won’t presume to tell people who are more vulnerable in American society than I am what they should do. But I am an American, and I still believe, as I wrote in that article, that “Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today” – not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our politically rudderless and morally feckless society as a whole.
I happen just this week to have submitted to the “Books & Authors” section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn my long-overdue review of a powerful book, a collection of writings from Indian periodicals and websites compiled and edited by Sanjay Kak, titled Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Congratulations to Penguin India for publishing such a book. In one piece, “Kashmir’s Abu Ghraib?”, contributor Shuddhabrata Sengupta describes an appalling YouTube video tagged “brothers watch, sisters please do not watch” and popularly known as the “Kashmir Naked Parade Video,” apparently shot by an offending Indian soldier himself with a cell phone. There’s no need for me to describe the video; you get the picture. “At least in the pitched street battles, we see adversaries, albeit unequal adversaries, policemen, paramilitaries, soldiers one side, and the angry tide of stone-pelters on the other,” writes Sengupta.
Here, there are no adversaries. Prisoners are not in a position to be adversarial when surrounded by heavily armed men in uniform. What we see instead are unarmed captives, people who are in no position to threaten or endanger the security forces. That such people should be made to undergo a humiliation such as this is proof of the extent to which the forces of the Indian state in Kashmir have become brutalized by the experience of serving in Kashmir.
Ultimately it’s not – and shouldn’t be seen as – being about what Americans or Indians do to Muslims, but what any of us are willing to do, and be seen doing, to each other, and – framed more constructively – what we might still do to reclaim our humanity. I have some thoughts on that, which will need to wait for another time (soon). For now, here are some of the extremely hard questions that Sengupta raises:
While the making of atrocity images such as these have for long been a part of the apparatus of violence, the ubiquity of mobile phones as recording devices, and of internet-based social networking sites as vectors of circulation has taken the phenomenon to a new level. We have no clear understanding of what motivates the making of these images. Are they meant as evidence of a “job well done” – to be shown to superiors who actually sanction torture and humiliation but have no way of assessing their effectiveness or actual operation because of the legal difficulty involved in maintaining official records of “unofficial” secrets? Or, are they simply testosterone-fuelled perversities, operating in the same sphere as MMS messages of pornographic sadism?
Sengupta also asserts that
There is need for further research on questions such as whether or not the makers of these atrocity images are also consciously seeking each other out, both as audiences and as competitors, in a new economy of prestige linked to the capacity to represent and circulate one’s own cruelty. In other words, are the makers of the videos in Kashmir, or in the Jaffna peninsula, aware of, and in some senses seeking to out-do the actions of their peers and predecessors in Abu Ghraib? Also, is there an informal network of know-how, pertaining to techniques for torture and humiliation that lubricates the virtual matrix inhabited by the protagonists of the so-called “global war on terror”, that operates in much the same way as the networks that bring together paedophiles and sex offenders on online platforms in the darker parts of the internet? Finally, how and why do these videos leak out of these networks into the wider public domain? Are there weak, conscience-stricken, anonymous whistle-blowing links at the fringes of even the darkest recesses of power (as is evident from the centre of the WikiLeaks storm) that cannot bear the burden of carrying power’s dirtiest secrets?
But here’s something for Muslims to reflect on: a video of Pakistani soldiers killing captives in the Swat valley was briefly circulated on Facebook as one of Indians killing Kashmiris. Sengupta points out, all too rightly:
The irony of a Pakistani atrocity being briefly misattributed as an Indian one only underscores the fact that when it comes to the everyday operationalization of state terror, the security apparatuses of India and Pakistan aspire to the same low standards, which make it quite possible for those seeking to score a few cheap propaganda points on either side to – deliberately or otherwise – confuse one perpetrator for another.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the U.S. military and security apparatuses obviously aspire to, or at least achieve, the same low standard.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Choosing Haiti: Prologue to Bearing the Bruise
“In Bearing the Bruise, Ethan Casey offers up a heartfelt account of his travels in Haiti. As an eyewitness, Casey gives readers an informed perspective on many of the political and social complexities that vex those who seek to make common cause with Haiti, our oldest neighbor, as it seeks to emerge from decades of strife and one of the most devastating natural disasters in recent history.”
- Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health and author of Haiti After the Earthquake
The following excerpt, “Choosing Haiti,” is the prologue to Bearing the Bruise:
“Wee-eek up!” I heard from below my window. “Wee-ee-eek up!”
“Ki moun ou cheche?” I called. Who are you looking for?
“Ou menm! Paul Farmer wants to see you.”
It was only nine in the evening, but it had been a long day of hard travel. I forced myself to sit up and dress.
It seemed I came to Haiti anymore only when something bad had happened. This time, the occasion was the second abrupt and forcible ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been such a divisive central figure in Haiti’s drama since the late 1980s. On February 29, 2004, Aristide had boarded a U.S. plane at the airport in Port-au-Prince and somehow ended up in the Central African Republic. Farmer, the co-founder of Partners in Health, subject of Tracy Kidder’s bestselling book Mountains Beyond Mountains, and author of The Uses of Haiti, was not alone in calling it a coup. Others were pretending not to hear the hard questions Farmer and many Haitians were asking about the incident’s circumstances. Most Americans failed even to notice that it had happened. One American who had noticed was Dick Cheney, whose comment was characteristic: “We’re glad to see him go.”
Earlier that year, when the cable news channels had been carrying disturbing accounts of “rebels” mobilizing against Aristide in provincial Haiti, I was in Pakistan. The semester I had signed up to spend teaching at a university in Lahore ended in early February, and I returned to my home in a London suburb. Matters were coming to a head there as well after my long absence but, when I had a choice to make, I chose Haiti. I always chose Haiti. I quickly wrote and submitted the book I was writing on Pakistan, explained myself as best I could, then fled the suburbs again. I couldn’t not go to Haiti at such a time, or so I told myself; and if I had wanted to stay in the suburbs, I would have stayed in the suburbs in the first place.
So, at what turned out to be decisive cost to my personal situation, I chose Haiti yet again.
I was still groggy as the burly Haitian and I walked out of the compound and across the road. “You’re a writer?” he asked in Creole as we picked our way up a dirt path toward a small house hidden away on a wooded hilltop. His name was Ti Jean.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not as well known as Tracy Kidder …”
“Se zanmi mwen,” said Ti Jean. He’s my friend. I felt one-upped.
A tall man wearing little John Lennon spectacles stood at the entrance to the yard in front of the house. “I’m Paul Farmer,” he said, offering his hand.
It felt like meeting Kurtz at the end of the long journey upriver, but the air of mystery dissolved quickly. In the light Farmer was a bland-looking white guy in early middle age, younger than I had imagined. He wore a light-blue Haitian shirt with stitched palm trees and stylized peasant figures on it. In his small front room he had set out glasses and bottles of rum and Prestige beer on a low table.
They were wary at first, and I blundered by describing the events surrounding Aristide’s departure as “complex.”
“Haitian professionals don’t really buy that peasants and slum dwellers ought to vote,” asserted Farmer. “People who can express themselves in international languages are not on the side of a popular vote. They’re just not, sociologically. The poor happen to be ninety percent of the population here. Reporters, even of goodwill, don’t talk to the poor. That was the purpose of The Uses of Haiti: to say, ‘Look, these people are human.’”
Ti Jean claimed attention and deferred to no one, and he felt insults keenly. If you could communicate with him in Creole, you quickly recognized a shrewd and alert intelligence. “In the U.S.,” he said, “I’ve never seen a Haitian go into a store or a restaurant with visible firearms. But in Haiti, Americans go into stores openly armed all the time. When I see you writing, it doesn’t make me hate you. When I see Paul with a stethoscope, it doesn’t make me feel bad. But when I see an American soldier in Haiti, it makes me want to kill myself.”
“This must be a lot like what you got in the Islamic world,” remarked Farmer. “These are the people I work with, and this is how they talk to me. But Haiti is America’s oldest neighbor. You can only have one oldest neighbor, and for the U.S. this country is it. It’s not Iraq or any other country.”
Farmer later told me how Ti Jean had gone from being a manual laborer to being his right-hand man.
“Everybody has to have a hobby, right?” he said. “Well, mine is planting trees, more than anything else. Trees. But once a place is reforested, then you have to plant other things. So I started with trees, and I’m still into trees, but I also plant other things: perennials, small plants, house plants, whatever, but outside. Water plants, bog plants. And when I would go back to Boston to be on service at the hospital there, I’d be gone for a month solid. And so I’d ask my neighbors, ‘Would you mind watering my plants?’ And they’d always say, ‘Oh please, Doctor Paul, we’d be so happy to water your plants for you. You’re such a fantastic guy, great doctor, we’d be thrilled.’ And I’d come back, and everything would be dead.
“I tried various neighbors. And you get kind of sheepish thinking, well, you know, it’s not like there’s a lot of water around, it’s not like things to eat are coming out of these plants and trees. They’re ornamentals. And so I never really could feel too put out. I always felt kind of sheepish. And Ti Jean was at the time, as he would say, lifting sacks. He would wash the cars, the vehicles, the ambulances, and on Fridays go to a local market and carry back these huge bags of things. And I would just see him in the courtyard. His brother was a patient of mine; he was one of eighteen kids. I knew lots of people in his family. Whenever they were sick, you know. He’s obviously a pretty sharp character, and I asked him would he mind watering my plants. And I came back from being in Boston for a month, and everything was lush and verdant.” He emphasized the adjectives with relish. “I had been expecting the worst. And I said, ‘Wow, Ti Jean, man, thank you so much for doing this. I owe you big-time. I’d like to do something for you.’
“And he said, ‘I’d like a computer.’
“And I was completely floored by that, and I said, ‘What do you want a computer for?’
“And he said, ‘Oh, did someone ask you that when you asked for your first computer?’ And I said, ‘Ouch.’ And it just so happened I had just been given a new computer, so I had two. And I did give him a computer. And now his chief complaint these days is likely to be, ‘I told you I’m sick of Windows 98. I want Windows XP 2000.’”
“The masses have no one sticking up for them anymore,” Ti Jean insisted. “Even now, with Aristide in exile and all the repression, he would be elected again for seventeen years. You can call this a government. We call it a tchoul, a lackey. It’s not elected. They’re jobbeurs, Bush’s hired hands. Haiti is a small country. But it’s the first independent black country. That’s why Aristide was overthrown. Aristide is a black man who wants to stay black. Rich Americans and rich Haitians conspire to make sure Haiti will always be a tchoul state. On February 29, 2004, they restored slavery to Haiti. All Haitian people elected a president. As soon as all Haitians elected him, they blocked international aid. And then when they kidnap him, they restore aid. It’s like The Lord of the Rings.”
I asked Ti Jean whether he believed Aristide had been kidnapped.
“They kidnapped him from his house and took him in handcuffs to the Palace,” he said. “Paul Farmer doesn’t know this. I know this. I have a good source.”
Ti Jean walked me back across the road and left me with a lot to think about.
“Merci, Ti Jean,” I said at the door to the guesthouse.
“Ou merite-l,” he said. You’re welcome.
The literal meaning of the Creole clause Ou merite-l is You deserve it. But was it true? And I couldn’t know whether Ti Jean had meant it literally. I guessed maybe not.
Farmer told me later that, after that first meeting, he had said, “Ethan’s progressive,” and Ti Jean had replied, “It seems that way, but wait until we read his book.”
Special pre-publication offer: Purchase Bearing the Bruise using this button before March 1, 2012 for $14.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
Review: The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple
To most Americans, the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001 out of a clear blue sky not only literally, but figuratively as well. But like any event, that one had a history. And if we decline to know that history, it can only be because we are morally as well as intellectually lazy. Nothing could justify such an attack, needless to say. But there are understandable reasons that Muslims resent the West, and these are not flattering to the Western self-image. And if, rather than wallowing in self-pity, self-congratulation, and plausible deniability, we truly want to understand why “they” are angry at “us,” there can hardly be any better book to begin with than The Last Mughal.
The Uprising of 1857 was a crucial episode in the history of the British Empire, forcing as it did not only the transition from the East India Company to direct rule by a viceroy under the British Crown, but also the formal end of the Mughal Empire ruling from Delhi, which had already been for half a century little more than a convenient fiction. The British victory over the rebels – which for months was far from certain – also had consequences, both intended and otherwise, that led to much that has ensued more recently, from the horrendously bloody partition of the subcontinent at the moment of independence in 1947, to the seemingly inevitable rupture between the ostensibly allied U.S. and Pakistani governments that we’ve been watching unfold in slow motion over at least the past year.
William Dalrymple made his name at a young age as an author of travel books but, truth be told, he’s a scholar and historian at heart. I’ve tried to enjoy a couple of his earlier books, and I think part of what made them (in literary terms) only partial successes is that he was trying to shoehorn a scholarly sensibility into the format of personal, rather than historical, narrative. The Last Mughal is a much more assured and seamless accomplishment than either In Xanadu (Dalrymple’s first book, published when he was 24) or From the Holy Mountain (about Christian communities in the Middle East). These aren’t fair comparisons to make, but those are the only two other of Dalrymple’s books that I’ve read (though I now plan to read them all). The Last Mughal is a product of its author’s talent and interests in their full maturity.
It’s also clearly a labor of love, and a feat of both scholarship and narration. Dalrymple has lived for many years by choice in Delhi, and it’s with loving attention to the history and landscape of the city that he calls “the principal centre of the Uprising” that he narrates it, from the multiple points of view of its denizens both Indian and European. He also makes splendid use – along with colleagues Mahmood Farooqui and Bruce Wannell – of
20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers, that we found on the shelves of the National Archives of India. These allow 1857 in Delhi to be seen for the first time from a properly Indian perspective, and not just from the British sources through which to date it has usually been viewed.
The book’s title refers to Bahadur Shah, known as Zafar, the powerless, 82-year-old ruler around whom the rebels rallied in May 1857, and whose “catastrophic failure of nerve on the evening of 16 September” – his refusal to lead a counter-attack at the last moment at which it might have mattered – “marked the beginning of the end” of the Uprising. The Uprising had punctured British arrogance and when, after much death and destruction on all sides, the British retook Delhi, they wrought more of the same not only on those who had rebelled but also on their hapless civilian subjects, in an orgy of spite and vengeance. Dalrymple quotes a Major William Ireland: “Offenders who were seized were handed over to a military commission to be tried. The work went on with celerity. Death was almost the only punishment, and condemnation almost the only issue of a trial. The gentlemen who had to judge offenders were in no mood for leniency.” Another British officer, Fred Roberts, called his entry into Delhi “a gruesome proceeding”:
[N]ot a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen. Dead bodies were strewn about in all directions in every attitude that the death struggle had caused them to assume, in every stage of decomposition. … The atmosphere was unimaginably disgusting, laden as it was with the most noxious and sickening odours.
Thus at the very historical moment at which, with the legitimacy of both the Mughal court and the East India Company destroyed or severely compromised, the British Crown was required to begin ruling India in earnest, its representatives undercut their own moral authority, just when they needed it most. The more British credibility diminished, the shriller and more heavy-handed became their rhetorical, legal, and political approaches to the population they presumed to rule. And, rather than – with some exceptions – engaging in soul-searching to address hard questions of what had brought on the Uprising, they scapegoated not only the last Mughal emperor but the entire Muslim community of India and, indeed, of the world: “Harriott [the prosecutor in the emperor's trial] maintained that Zafar was the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort.”
“The Uprising in fact showed every sign,” writes Dalrymple,
of being initiated by upper-caste Hindu sepoys reacting against specifically military grievances perceived as a threat to their faith and dharma; it then spread rapidly through the country, attracting a fractured and diffuse collection of other groups alienated by aggressively insensitive and brutal British policies. Among these were the Mughal court and the many Muslim individuals who made their way to Delhi and fought as civilian jihadis united against the kafir enemy. Yet Harriott’s bigoted and Islamophobic argument oversimplified this complex picture down to an easily comprehensible, if quite fictional, global Muslim conspiracy with an appealingly visible and captive hate figure at its centre, towards whom righteous vengeance could now be directed.
Having literally obliterated much of the city that the Mughals had built, the British proceeded systematically to favor India’s Hindu majority over the already weakened and demoralized Muslims. This tactic has traditionally been called “divide and rule” and, looked at one way, it was demonstrably effective for ninety years after 1857 (albeit less so nearer the end). But, equally demonstrably, it is the wellspring of much bitterness that still ramifies throughout the subcontinent and the world today. Dalrymple writes that “as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two.”
The rest is more recent history, whose traumas on all sides are all too raw. The post-1857 response of one portion of India’s Muslim community was, as Dalrymple puts it, “to reject the West in toto and and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots.” The madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of Delhi, “therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.”
One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical and powerful fundamentalist counter-attack the modern West has yet encountered.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
