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by Amitav Ghosh Published by Ravi Dayal, New Delhi (1998) Rupees 125 |
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In 1906, two years after succeeding his half-brother Norodom, King Sisowath of Cambodia went on an extensive visit to Marseilles at the colonial exhibition, accompanied by the royal ballet troupe. France responded warmly to the charming dancers and the king's entourage. The sculptor Auguste Rodin was so enchanted by the dancers that he travelled with them and made evocative sketches of their fluid, graceful movements. Lamenting their inevitable departure, a moved Rodin said: "What an emptiness they left for me! I thought they had taken away the beauty of the world. I followed them to Marseille (sic); I would have followed them as far as Cairo." According to the chroniclers, one milestone of that visit was the signing of the Franco-Siam treaty, which saw today's Thailand returning to Cambodia the provinces of Battambang and Seam Reap, the latter being particularly meaningful for Cambodia's self-image, as the Angkor Wat temples are in Seam Reap. But as historian David Chandler has pointed out in "A History of Cambodia", Sisowath had little to do with the return of the provinces to Cambodia. He was in France more as a connoisseur. In fact, he was not vastly different from Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the ruler of Avadh in northern India known for his poetry and fine taste in art, who saw his kingdom being swallowed by Lord Dalhousie's empire-building in the 1850s, but did not prevent that by waging a foolhardy war. When Sisowath returned, he wrote a proclamation to his people, in which he praised French planning and management which he said he wanted to use to develop his country. The tone was humble and grateful, telling his people to emulate the good that France has to offer, while hiding the anger he felt towards the French who sent him a bill for the hospitality. Kings being kings, Sisowath soon forgot his development plans, and his exhortations sound didactic when read today. But as the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh perceptively observes in this slim volume of fascinating reportage from Cambodia and Burma, "For all the apparent servility of its tone, it makes no cultural or political concessions at all: the 'emulation' it calls for is entirely within the domain of technology and economics ...If this is the view that has come to prevail throughout South-east Asia, no one is likely to thank him for it." What has the 1906 dance tour got to do with today's Cambodia? Plenty, if one sees Cambodia through the eyes of Ghosh, whose novels include the acclaimed "Shadow Lines" and the part-anthropology, part-literature, "In An Antique Land". Ghosh sees a link which connects stories and lives in incredible ways. Ghosh picks up the thread of Sisowath's visit to France, and with rare ingenuity and empathetic understanding of modern Cambodian history, places it in the context of the return of civil society in Cambodia. Consider this: in early 1900s, a royal Cambodian ballet troupe performs in France. In 1950s, young Cambodian students, including Saloth Sar (later Pol Pot), study in France and pick up ideas that transform the Cambodian countryside into a vast graveyard. And in 1993, when civil society returns to Cambodia, the Cambodians demonstrate it through dance. Ghosh displays the irony of it all: of how the protagonists are linked; how the tragedy is, geopolitical realities apart, essentially a Cambodian tragedy. Travelling through the countryside with mine-diffusing sappers, Ghosh seeks out people whose memory plays tricks. They want to forget an immediate past but who yearn to remember, a more ancient past; they are fighting the tendency to forget everything. He meets Chea Samy, a dance instructor, who knew Sisowath's daughter, Princess Soumphady who had gone on the French tour. And when Ghosh reminds her about Soumphady, she responds with "a smile in an indulgent, misty way in which people recall a favourite aunt." But the same Chea Samy is the wife of a man whose youngest brother was Pol Pot. And it is Pol Pot's men who killed Chea Samy's dance instructor, who took over from Princess Soumphady, whom Chea Samy recalls meeting as a small girl. These coincidences--of evil coexisting with aesthetics--is what intrigues Ghosh. |
Ghosh is impressed by the phenomenon of a people who had been robbed of their education, names, profession and identity, who now pick up the small strands and clues that link them back to the source of their culture. Watching Cambodians responding, with tears in their eyes, to a dance performance, Ghosh concludes: "It was a kind of rebirth: a movement when the grief of survival became indistinguishable from the joy of living." The Czech author Milan Kundera rued the decline of Central Europe during the years of Soviet dominance of eastern Europe. Kundera used a Czech word to describe that anguished longing: litost. Ghosh doesn't have a similar singular word, but by revealing how a brutalized people are trying to reconstruct their society, by seeking inspiration from high art, he casts light on a similar human disposition. In another essay in the same volume, about Burma, Ghosh follows the well-trodden path of contemporary Burmese history. Ghosh meets Aung San Suu Kyi twice, and recalls an earlier meeting with her when she lived in Oxford with her family during more tranquil times. But what sets his reportage apart from other writers are the details. Ghosh presents fascinating vignettes about the ethnic Indian community in Burma: about how Indian families, now pauperized in Calcutta after leaving Rangoon in the late 1940s, waxed nostalgically about that golden land and the fortunes they had made there. Ghosh goes beyond--to the very heart of Burma's little-known wars--to the Karenni struggle. He crawls with the soldiers fighting the SLORC forces and discovers an ethnic Indian leader committed to the freedom of the Karenni region. While he intellectually realizes the futility of Karenni forces' struggle and the inability of the province to survive as an independent nation state, he admires the determination of the people fighting for it, and is conscious of the tragedy. These articles first appeared in Granta and the New Yorker. The volume would have been considerably enhanced had it included Ghosh's essay last year on the Indian National Army, which appeared in the New Yorker, as that piece, too, deals with southeast Asia. The link between those pieces and the INA piece is not tenuous. There is an Indian--and Indic--influence on southeast Asia, which is visible in the form of the popularity of dangdut music in Malaysia, the temples throughout the region from Vietnam to Burma and Indonesia, and the special role the Hindu epic Ramayana plays in the lives of southeast Asians even today. (When Jakarta burned in May, students in buses were singing songs extolling Anomon who had destroyed Dasomuko's Lanka; Anomon being the monkey-god Hanuman and Dasomuko being the Lankan king Ravana, from the Ramayana). However, Indian writers haven't shown much interest in southeast Asia's history or culture. Through his reportage, Ghosh is interpreting southeast Asian reality through south Asian eyes. That is an important development in post-colonial discourse. For instance, at the Khmer Rouge's torture chamber, the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, a guide once told me that she was perplexed that Asian tourists walked through the exhibits as though they were watching pictures at an exhibition. But western tourists, sensitized by the holocaust, were deeply moved and often wept. One possible explanation is that not enough Asians have told Asia's stories in an accessible manner to other Asians. Ghosh's essays contribute to that effort. The wounds in Cambodia are still fresh and raw, and documenting oral histories is a monumental task. It is reassuring to know that writers like Ghosh are reading the Pol Pot years with new, or different, eyes. They link strands that may remain oblivious to the journalist in a hurry and are possibly peripheral to the concerns of historians who want to count the dead and the tortured. But they weave a pattern that shows that the society's tapestry is far more complex; one that we are only beginning to understand. First published in the Far Eastern Economic Review |
