Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Three: Leopold's Ghost




Opposite the Colaba Police Station and situated on one of the busiest streets of that section of Mumbai, one can find the café and bar called Leopold’s.  Founded in the 1870s, this café is one that tourists have been going to for many years and it has acquired a reputation as a great place to hang out, meet people, and drink a cool draught beer. 

Now, it is definitely still a bustling place, with the red tee-shirted waiters, immigrants from all the far-flung sections of India, scurrying back and forth to the kitchens with incessant orders.  But it is certainly also a place with a more somber feel.  Tourists are still present in abundance and seem to enjoy their food and drink, but they now surely have on their minds the fact that a few weeks ago gunmen stood outside the restaurant and began shooting anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way of their hale of bullets, announcing the beginning of the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai.  If the bloody images of the aftermath are not summoned up by the patrons instantly, and if they do not see the marks of bullet holes in the walls and in a half-shattered corner mirror, then a reminder of the event is to be found under the glass on each table placed between the menus; there a typed note reads – “If anyone would like to donate money to the families of the staff killed on 26/11 a collection jar is located at the counter.”  Many people have clearly responded to this call, as the jar was packed with notes of all denominations.

If its reputation alone had been insufficient to persuade many to buy the Leopold’s souvenir mugs on sale in the restaurant, further impetus in recent years came in the guise of Gregory David Roberts’ revealing quasi-autobiographical bestseller, Shantaram – available for sale in the café.  This work very loosely chronicled and fictionalized the story of Roberts’s experiences living in a Bombay slum after he escaped from an Australian maximum-security prison.

Leopold’s played a starring role in the book, as a source for much of the action that would occur in the narrative.  It was where the author would make connections with tourists, for whom he would supply drugs and other items they requested; it was also where he made the initial contacts that would then lead to his dealings in the Bombay underworld.  From this starting point he would rise to be a trusted worker for the fictional character, Abdel Khader Khan, and would then become involved in a mission taking him through Pakistan and into Afghanistan to supply and support the Mujahadeen in their war against the Soviet Union.

It was no doubt the restaurant’s notoriety as a place for tourists to frequent, rather than as a fictional site in the emerging battle for the freedom of Afghanistan from Soviet dominance, that led the terrorists on 26/11 to target Leopold’s.  But there is a distinct irony in its selection by the terrorists, in light of this storied past.  The global connections moving into and out of Leopold’s in the 1970s and 1980s have now been reprised in these horrific events fashioned in an equally global crucible. 

The restaurant itself is hidden behind pillars from the main thoroughfare, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Road, and in-between those pillars people can be seen avidly selling their wares – silver necklaces, tablas, shawls and scarves, taxi-rides, and the like.  When the firing commenced, the bustling street on which, generally, almost no quick movement is possible must have cleared out in an instant with people scattering their goods and diving for cover.

After their killing spree in Leopold’s, the gunmen then headed down towards the back entrance of the Taj Mahal hotel, a mere hundred yards away.  What followed during the next twenty-four hours was covered very closely by the international media, who stationed themselves in front of the hotel and in the shadow of the Gateway of India, that monument to the British Raj, built to commemorate George V’s visit of 1911 to the subcontinent.

A battle of words between India and Pakistan has escalated in the weeks since the terrorist attack, with India accusing its neighbor of harboring the groups that organized this assault, and with the latter making accusations of its own, and mobilizing its troops.  In light of this, it may have been tempting for the Americans and others unfamiliar with the history of the South Asian subcontinent to wonder whether or not the Gateway monument represented an imperial promise of something better than the political squabbles and low-intensity (and even outright) warfare that has occurred between India and Pakistan since Independence from the British Empire.

This would be a mistaken assumption, however, and it is worth noting that much of the conflict arising in the period since the founding of these states emerged out of the process of colonial governance itself.  In order for the British to rule the whole subcontinent with the limited number of soldiers and officials at their disposal, a process of divide and rule was essential, both for revenue generation and for maintaining simple control.  Dividing the Indian peoples occurred at every level, with British scholars interpreting Hindu scriptures to show that the caste system designated different people in accordance with the kinds of roles they played in society – Brahmins (intelligentsia), Kshatryas (warriors), Vaishyas (farmers), and Shudras (workers), with Untouchables (now dalits) at the very bottom.  But the most critical area of dividing India’s populations occurred in the relation to religion.

Any syncretism or coming together that might have occurred prior to British arrival among the different religions – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, Jewish – and any shared practices of worshippers and celebrants (i.e., during festivals) would be frowned upon by the British.  Festivals like Mohurram, a Muslim festival in which Hindus had participated, and which often turned into anti-British riots, were reframed so that they would only appeal and be restricted to Muslims.  In response, Hindus established their own festivals like Ganpati, and the seeds of much later enmity and strife were sown.

Echoes of these divisions were to be found last week in the Times of India newspaper. (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Pakistani_textbooks_build_hate_culture_against_India/articleshow/3898659.cms). In an article, entitled “Pak Textbooks Build Hate Culture Against India,” The Times focused on passages from different textbooks, claiming numerous outrageous things about both India and its colonial past. 

These claims included the notion that the Hindus of India were only too pleased to collude with the British in colonizing the sub-continent; that the Indians had fomented almost all the conflicts between the two countries; that the Hindus were intent on taking back Pakistan into a Greater India; and that Pakistan had triumphed in the various wars that had occurred between the two nations.  If the passages are indeed to be found in Pakistan texts, and it seems unlikely that The Times of India would be wrong about this, then there certainly is much concern for future peace in the region, and given that both sides have nuclear capabilities, these fears must be troubling indeed.

In his novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid provides some explanation for why Pakistanis might fear India.  This is most clearly embodied in his narrator’s claim that India and America are working together to undermine Pakistan, using the post-9/11 situation as the pretext for doing so.  Clearly, the manner in which the United States responded to terrorism by launching wars against two Muslim nations, and put considerable pressure on the Pakistan government to take on al Qaeda and the Taliban, to the extent that the government of General Pervez Musharraf became untenable and collapsed, is sufficient for many Pakistanis to feel that they are being mistreated and now maligned by an unsympathetic American government.

Pakistani fears are matched by Indian suspicions.  While the text books in India may not be as biased as Pakistani ones appear to be – and this may be worthy of some scrutiny – it is clear that the Indians have their own penchant for blaming everything on Pakistani saber rattling.  The conflict in Kashmir is complicated and intractable, and it certainly cannot be reduced to Pakistan’s meddling and incitement of insurgents, in the way that many Indians claim.  Moreover, India’s long experience of homegrown insurgencies is a salutary reminder that not all terrorism originates in Pakistan. But, many Indians firmly believe that the idea of Pakistan as a separate Muslim nation, was itself largely one created in Cambridge, England, in the 1930s, and promoted by the British Government to provide a counter-weight to the more radical Hindu nationalism.

In King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild has outlined the way in which the imperialist interventions of the Belgian King, Leopold II, doomed the Congo to close to a hundred years of torment and instability.  The Gateway monument and all it has represented has cast its own shadow down onto the Taj hotel, the Oberoi-Trident Hotel, the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, and even Leopold’s café, to create its own ghosts that will need to be exorcized fully before peace can truly take hold in this most politically unstable of regions.  And the fact that the two waiters reported killed at Leopold’s, Peer Pasha and Hidayat Khazi, were both Indian Muslims, only demonstrates that the simplistic connection of causes with religions is the ghost from the colonial past that will have to be combated first.