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Kathmandu International  Mountain Film Fest.

Third degree of separation

Anil's Ghost
Michael Ondaatje
(2000), Knopf, USD 25
(pp. 311)

-reviewed by Amitava Kumar

One day in June, the Toronto Globe and Mail carried a news photograph showing a man, naked to the waist, surrounded by police officers. The man’s hands are handcuffed behind him. A police officer is pulling at the man’s pocket with both his hands, and on the other side another policeman, of lower-rank with a submachine gun hanging from his shoulder, has his left hand inside the prisoner’s other pocket. The caption reads: "Police search a man shortly after a suicide bomber killed 21 people in Sri Lanka yesterday, including a cabinet minister, during a function to raise funds for families of slain soldiers. The assassination shattered the country’s first War Heroes Day."

When you look back at the photograph, you notice how the Tamil man’s mouth is open. When you look into the eyes of the police officers around him, you perhaps get a sense of the silence of that open mouth and its dryness. Will they take him to a prison and break his jaw so that afterwards he can’t even ask for water?

The photographer, in making the suspect the centre of attention, has not been able to hide his diminutive size. His skin is dark. The slim torso is arched because he is being pulled from two different directions. Inches above the man’s left nipple, is the circular, metal mouth of the police officer’s gun. He, the prisoner, could not be more than 20 or 22.

When you look at the photograph, if you have already read Ondaatje’s book, you might be reminded of the line about how "the victims of ‘intentional violence’ had started appearing in May 1984". "They were nearly all male, in their twenties, damaged by mines, grenades, mortal shells." When you look at this photograph, of course you need not have read Ondaatje’s novel to be reminded of another fact. That someone turned himself into a human bomb. The half-naked prisoner’s life—rather, what I immediately think of as his impending death—makes me also wonder about all the other deaths.

This is how Ondaatje imagines the possibility of all those deaths in Anil’s Ghost:

R---- wore denim shorts and a loose shirt. Underneath these was a layer of explosives and two Duracell batteries and two blue switches. One for the left hand, one for the right, linked by wires to the explosives. The first switch armed the bomb. It would stay on as long as the bomber wished. When the other switch was turned on, the bomb detonated. Both needed to be activated for the explosion to occur. You could wait as long as you wanted before turning on the second switch. Or you could turn the first switch off. R---- had more clothing on above the denim shorts. Four Velcro straps held the explosives pack to his body, and along with the dynamite there was the great weight of thousands of small ball bearings.

 

And, a little later:

At four p.m. on National Heroes Day, more than fifty people were killed instantly, including the President. The cutting action of the explosion shredded Katugala into pieces. The central question after the bombing concerned whether the President had been spirited away, and if so whether by the police and army forces or by terrorists. Because the President could not be found.

The devastation here is direct and graphic. Yet, what Ondaatje documents more effectively, more centrally in the novel, is the effect of the less public killings. Although that context is inevitably also broad and social, his novel is more of a record of the result of individual killings on individual psyches.

There are several individuals that Ondaatje brings into his canvas. Apart from Anil, who has returned to Sri Lanka as a human rights investigator, there is her archaeologist colleague Sarath, his doctor-brother Gamini, and an alcoholic miner, Ananda, who can recreate a human face from looking at and touching the bare bones of exhumed skulls. Ananda is the closest that Ondaatje comes to recycling his earlier character Kip, the Indian sapper from The English Patient, representing the tragedy and triumph of pure craft. It is precisely their ordinary mastery of a skill and their patience at it, that marks the horizon of thoughtfulness and even humanity for Ondaatje.

Ananda is the one who Anil and Sarath recruit to find out the identity of the man whose skeleton
they have uncovered. The face that Ananda recovers for them, however, is peaceful. Too peaceful. This is not the portrait of the murdered man. It becomes clear that Ananda is only trying to imagine the face of his wife who was abducted by insurgents and was never heard from again. And hence, the serenity of expression on the reproduction. And yet, despite this failure or perhaps because of it, Ondaatje finds in Ananda’s art the model for existence or at least survival:

As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.

There is another arresting passage in Anil’s Ghost:

‘American movies, English books—remember how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’

As ‘desi’ writers based in the West, we write books about home, wherever home might be in South Asia. Whenever we do this, we, too, have our return tickets in our pocket. Some will argue that this guilt so weighs on Ondaatje that when he recreates the horror of civil war in Sri Lanka, he doesn’t want to find himself capable of explaining the reasons for the brutality.

I am unable to decide whether Ondaatje wants to set himself apart from the older forms of Western cultural production or whether he recognises his own complicity and thenceforth the limits of his art. What I am clearer about is the knowledge of what follows from those two choices. We can never be just one or the other, we are always both—always setting ourselves at a distance and also, at the same time, remaining unceasingly caught in the trap of the dominant paradigm.

The Un-Understood Muslims of Nepal

-reviewed by Sudhindra Sharma

An eminent Indian journalist was quoted recently in the Kathmandu press as saying that whereas Nepal used to be understood in India in terms of the Himalaya, the Pashupati temple, casinos and honeymoons, with the hijacking of IC 814 and India Today’s leak of the so-called "Nepal Gameplan" intelligence report, the ‘Hindu kingdom’ has since come to be associated more with ISI and RDX. While this is indeed true, what is even more significant and more damning is the alacrity with which large sections of the Indian television and print media have jumped to portray the entire Nepali Muslim community living in the Tarai as being anti-Indian and (hence) pro-Pakistan.

Given the sudden barrage of attention on the Muslim community of Nepal, that too in a geopolitically significant context, it is important to look for and review the scholarly works which study Nepali Muslims. Two books published during the past few years attempt to do this—Shamima Siddiqa’s Muslims of Nepal (1993) and Mollica Dastider’s Religious Minorities in Nepal (1995). Unfortunately, neither author does justice to the topic and in the end their works will, if anything, fan the flames of antagonism in India against the Muslims of Nepal.

These two books have several features in common aside from their subject of Muslims as a religious minority of Nepal. Both authors are young non-Nepali scholars, one a Bangladeshi and the other Indian. Both works are the result of academic research, the Bangladeshi scholar Siddiqa’s done for Tribhuvan University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Kathmandu, and Dastider’s for the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School for International Studies in New Delhi. The books under review provide an insight not only into the individual authorships but also on the academic institutions that have produced and endorsed such inadequate works.

Shamima Siddiqa’s 15-chapter book is heavy on description, including the historical link between Islam and Nepal, lists of the Muslim organisa-tions in the country, Muslim livelihood, women and legal issues. The book also provides some district-wise information on Muslims, and then presents case stu-dies. Unfortunately, because the scholar provides scant analysis, her work ends up as little more than documentation. A major weakness in Muslims of Nepal, is that there is little here that could be called sociological or anthropological. At best, the book is descriptive ethnography, and at worst, it is a treatise on what the author considers to be
"authentic" Islam.

Siddiqa does not base her observations on the actual practice of Nepali Muslims. She relates cultural traits not according to the existing social millieu of Muslims living in Nepali hill and plain, but to the Quran—in the process she confuses what is practised with what should be practised. Her presentation is dominated by what may be called a scripturalist interpretation at the cost of a sociological-anthropological explanation. Additionally, her treatment of Islam tends to be unduly apologetic—ascribing all that is good in Islamic practices to the Quran, while what she considers as "incorrect" practices are explained away as later accretions. Claiming purdah to be a Zoroastrian institution is a case in point. In presenting her description of Muslims in Nepal, the author seems to be oblivious to the fact that she is imposing her own version of Islam—apparently orthodox Sunni Islam—on the lay Muslims of Nepal.

Rather than describe the subject people, Religious Minorities in Nepal looks at the relationship between a state that officially aligns itself with Hinduism and its religious minorities. Author Dastider sets for herself the ambitious task of debunking the myth of Nepal as a land of religious harmony. She writes that the Nepali state’s project to present itself as a land of inter-ethnic and -religious calm has quickly unravelled after the passing of the Panchayat era. While the aspirations of the Muslim minority had remained suppressed in the past, with the advent of democracy it has begun to assert itself. The six chapters in the book, among other things, discuss the process of Sanskritisation among the non-Hindu communities of Nepal, the distribution of the Muslim population and its social structures, and the status of Muslims amidst the dominant Hindu caste society. One chapter even tries to draw a parallel between the Buddhist and Muslim self-assertions in the post-Pancha-yat era. Dastider concludes with a call for a new framework to bind ethnic and religious minorities to the state.

State tolerance

Though her objectives are thus laudable, Dastider’s methodology lacks rigour. For example, the parallels she draws between the Buddhist and Muslim activism in Nepal are superficial. Compared to Islam, the Nepali state has had a relatively lax attitude towards Buddhism. The state has co-opted Buddhism in the project of creating a distinct Nepali ethos—one that makes Siddhartha Gautam a national icon, and another which forcibly introduces Buddhism as a denomination of Hinduism. There are, however, no common points of reference with Islam through which it could be co-opted in the creation of a distinctive Nepali nationality. Realising this, leaders of the Muslim community have maintained a much lower profile than their Buddhist counterparts even in the democratic post-1990 era. In their petitions to the government, they have remained squarely within what may be called "the limits of state-tolerance".

It is the role of social science to diagnose history, but there is little evidence of this in Religious Minorities in Nepal. The text abounds in statements which either belabour the obvious or are simply ludicrous, and the author clearly underestimates the level of sophistication at whic h the discourse on religion and ethnicity is taking place in present-day Nepal. Each of Dastider’s chapters evinces a definite pattern—a description of historical processes based on secondary sources followed by political commentary of more recent times in journalistic style, ending with a dash of pontification on what the state should and should not do. The
occasional insightful interludes present inferences drawn from interviews with key informants, who for the most part go unacknowledged.

The reliance on secondary sources written almost exclusively in English is jarring. Out of 97 secondary sources cited in the reference, only one happens to be in Nepali while out of the total 36 articles cited, not even one is in Nepali. (Though the Gorkhapatra daily is listed in the reference, it has no citation in the text). Dastider’s narrative is based neither on intensive field-based methods nor on historical archival material. By citing the works of political scientists and overlooking the significant contributions of other disciplinary traditions in studying religious minorities in Nepal, it is not surprising that the author’s work has ended up this shallow. An additional cavil: given that Shamima Siddiqa's book was already out in 1993, it is intriguing that Dastider has not acknowledged it in her work.

The methodological and substantive weaknesses outlined above perhaps reflect the academic standards of Dastider’s alma mater. Clearly, young scholars are not being guided well in what is considered one of the more influential political science faculties of India, if they are: 1. discouraged to learn the local languages of the regions or countries being studied; 2. not required to pay attention to field-based research or archival material; 3. not asked to go beyond secondary sources written in English; and 4. are not made to correct their built-in bias against disciplines other than political science and international relations.

These books go some way in introducing the Muslims of Nepal to be what they are, commonfolk like South Asian peasantry everywhere, and not gun-toting Islamic fundamentalists out to wreck and ruin. However more substantive and dispassionate studies need to be undertaken to bring to public visibility the exegesis of the Muslims of Nepal. At the same time, the weaknesses of the two books in their lack of academic rigour on the one hand and absence of intellectual humility on the other, would be something for scholars young and old to be aware of when they themselves contemplate research on people of another country or region of South Asia.