An eye to India

BY Malavika Karlekar| IN Media Practice | 14/06/2008

Foreign Correspondent - Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia edited by John Elliott, Bernard Imhasly and Simon Denyer, New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2008, pp. xvi + 405, Rs. 695.

How does one review a collection of writings on fifty years of a country from the `foreigners-eye view’? Does one bristle at the very thought, confident that everything will be `misrepresented’ or rosy-pictured? Or does one try and read them `objectively’. As a reviewer, I’ve tried to do the latter – though not always successfully, I may add. Brought out to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of South Asia (that was renamed the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in 1991), the book is a collection of "reportage, comment and photographs"; however, there are only a handful of the latter as compared to the seventy-nine in print (chosen from 400 submitted by invited members, both past and present. In their introduction, the editors have made it a point to stress that they have neither been able to cover all major events, nor the countries of South Asia in equal detail. The obvious authorial ploy of circumventing nit-picking. . .

Contributions are arranged chronologically from 1949 onwards and the last despatch is November 2007 – making it almost sixty years of reporting. Though the emphasis is on political reportage, there are pieces on wild life preservation, child labour eradication, the lack of communications at Independence, and so on.  The war with China receives a lot of attention and yet there are no pieces to set the stage for independent India, namely, the debates around the notion of a planned economy, the emphasis on industrialization and so on. Nevertheless, for those who were idealistic youngsters knitting balaclavas for the pathetically-clad troops on the Chinese border – or those not even born then – it is interesting to read James Cameron comment:  "It is heartbreaking that at the twilight of his great authority, Jawaharlal Nehru should be saddled with  this intolerable dilemma." And that too over a "meaningless stretch of empty mountainside" that is at the same time, "indescribably beautiful, difficult, remote and useless" (p. 40).  In his despatch in The Times of April 4, 1963 entitled "Tarnished Image of Mr Nehru", Neville Maxwell writes of the Prime Minister’s humanness but lack of follow-through and "where once his judgments were accepted without question, now they are often mistrusted and even scoffed at".  Clearly, not many Nehruites would agree with this assessment; but few with disagree that the war with China must have left `Panditji’ a very sad man.  Selig Harrison’s on-the-spot long despatch of December 1963 after a visit to the Cease-fire line dividing Kashmir is fascinating and informative. And then comes James Cameron’s piece "The Death of Nehru" in which he reflects on the man whom he had met a number of times but was at a loss to describe. A man who "shared with Gandhi the long luxurious reveries of self-examination and he could be merciless in his findings" (p. 58).  As with others who have lamented the fading of a great man he writes "if he was over-idolized, as he sometimes was, he was equally cruelly outraged at the end" (ibid.).

The luxuries of expatriate life have to be described and Selig Harrison’s amusing account (`but Madam, there are no fish knives!’) reminds us of the select band of Mugh cooks that some of us have known, and the description of the Muslim bearer who "acts as a built in grandfather, delightedly sabotaging parental authority" is charming if not a little precious. John Slee does an interesting interview with the `Lion of Kashmir’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) and Vikram Sarabhai’s prescience (1970) on the likelihood of our space programme picking up, is useful. However, as the despatches sail into the seventies, there are certain significant omissions: the Lal Bahadur Shastri era is ignored as are devaluation and the death of Homi Bhabha. The entire Naxalbari phase is treated in a somewhat cavalier manner whereas the countdown to the 1971 war with Pakistan is given full coverage: extracts from Peter Kann’s `Dacca Diary’ for The Wall Street Journal  make interesting reading and his descriptions of `crisis conviviality’ (what a marvellous phrase!) have today a distinct sense of déjà vu. Not unexpectedly, Kann got the 1972 Pulitzer for his writings.

As the tempo builds up for the Emergency, Lewis M. Simons’ "Mrs Gandhi Turns to Son in Crisis" for The Washington Post of 10 July 1975 not only rattled some of the skeletons in the Nehru-Gandhi cupboard (including Mrs G’s estrangement from husband Feroze) but also carries the little-known incident of Sanjay slapping his mother six times across her face! The family friend who is supposed to have reported this also said that Mrs Gandhi "  ‘just stood there and took it. She’s scared to death of him’ " (p. 99). Wow – but does not the ubiquitous yet anonymous `family friend’ (that great Indianism) lead us somewhat into the realm of rumour? Suman Dubey’s account of the lady on the campaign trail in Chikmagalur is interesting particularly today when Karnataka has shown the Congress Party the door. Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, the Bhopal gas leak, a profile of Zia ul-Haq and a discussion of India’s archaic telephone system take us into the eighties. But there is no Operation Blue Star – though a little on Bhindranwale - and no assassination of Indira Gandhi! Instead, the tension with Pakistan is played up and Barbara Crossette’s "In Kashmir Valley, Alienation Turns Deadly" (The New York Times, 15 June 1990) may set some people’s teeth on edge.  In another article, her description of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination (she was a few yards away from the site) reminds us how difficult it is to provide security to our politicians: "His security had been almost nonexistent tonight. A hundred times one of those hands that reached into the car to grab his arm or stroke his hand could have stabbed or shot him" (p. 181, The New York Times, 22 May 1990).

Mark Tully’s `Nehru Dynasty’ for the BBC of 25 May 1991 is a telling reminder of how moribund and leaderless the Congress party has been from the 1990s onwards: the attempts to make Sonia Gandhi ( "Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism" Tully reminds us) President of the party were rejected by her. Nevertheless, the clamour "all just goes to show the extent to which India’s only national party has become a fief of the Nehru family" (p. 186). Were things very different in May 2004? The road to globalization by India’s `financial architect’ (Manmohan Singh), the ailing Satyajit Ray being awarded the Oscar and then of course December 6 1992 and Babri Masjid, the Bombay riots of 1993 are well represented as are Sai Baba and Mother Teresa. How could they not feature in the country’s recent history? Kidnappings, beheadings and Laloo Prasad Yadav, the `wizard of Bihar’  as well as Benazir appear as important events and persona. In fact, the interviews in the book are often more interesting than the reports – little personal details such as Bhutto’s hacking cough as she tackled the dust and the crowd, her charm - `she is in Belgravia. They are in Pakistan’ (Julian West "Benazir Bhutto: `Power, Men and my Regal Style’, The Sunday Telegraph,  2 February 1997), Laloo sticking his feet out the airborne helicopter . . . Somini Sengupta picks up the threads of the Naxalite movement in present-day Chattisgarh and the declining female sex ratio remind readers of how backward some communities continue to be. And then the Gujarat earthquake, the Nepal palace massacre, an insightful despatch by the late Daniel Pearl of drug smuggling in Afghanistan and of course the little Orientalist touches of the Goddess Kali blighting those who wish to remove a tree to build highways bring us towards the end of this tour of India.

Jo Johnson ("Inequality Threatens India’s Economic Boom", Financial Times, 1 November 2007) rings down the curtains and one wishes that it had ended on a more optimistic note. Where is cricket and our all-time greats, the women’s movement – environmental issues are dealt with somewhat – and the reversal of the brain drain, to point to only a few other excitements of these years that have slipped through? And the interleaving of only a few photographs is disappointing, a point borne out by the powerful cover visual of the Ali Kadal Bridge on the Jhelum river being set on fire by militants. The brilliance of the flames is a backdrop to three persons on a boat on the river. One of them is a woman with a shopping basket, in the process of leaving the boat. Is she escaping in fear or merely alighting, her day’s business over? As the photograph juxtaposes the mundane with the horrific, it reminds us of the power of the visual in providing many readings of an event. And how do Pablo Bartholomew’s and Raghu Rai’s images feature in this volume of the work of foreign correspondents?  

Finally, as with all `eye-views’, this book is a mélange of the good, the bad and the ugly,  `big names’ rubbing shoulders with the less heard of… who, nevertheless, provide fine examples of reportage: Michael Hamlyn’s interview with Zia, or Olaf Ihlau’s of Sai Baba as well as Manjeet Kripalani’s on India at the Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai in 2003 being instances of the latter, who together with Neville Maxwell, Mark Tully, James Cameron and Barbara Crossette make Foreign Correspondent an interesting dipping-into collection, ideal for journeys and casual reading across generations. At a more serious level, it is useful not only for an understanding of how India has been perceived by contemporary observers but also provides instances of what courage at the job, good reportage and perceptive interviewing can mean.