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BOOKS
Through Altered States
A passage to India and Pakistan--with reality as
baggage
By Sudeep Chakravarti
It isn't always
bad to have a bleeding heart. It's even better to have one that bleeds
sensibly. In his author's note, Stephen Alter writes, "... it is
important to admit at the outset that I am neither a scholar nor a journalist
but simply a traveller who bears a longstanding grudge against borders."
Alter ends up being both quite scholarly and
with more than a dash of journalism, as he elevates his book from the
usual ranting of a bleeding heart liberal (Why does it have to be this
way?) to a more practical tone (I realise there are powerful forces at
work and that we must work to ensure a better life for the people of India
and Pakistan). And that's why Amritsar to Lahore works. If the multi-track
system of diplomacy had a carriage with people with similar conviction,
who acknowledge the evolution of sectarian history from the early 20th
century South Asia, who, as Pakistan's sobered dragon lady Benazir Bhutto
said in a TV interview last week, "agree to disagree," then
this "Altered" state may come about quite naturally.
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AMRITSAR TO LAHORE
By Stephen Alter
Penguin
Price:
Rs 250
Pages: 240
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Alter breezily goes about his job with the precision
of a person quite fed up with the diet of pretense, arrogance of hindsight
and bombast of politics to peel away the layers of post-partition India.
It isn't superb history, but a refreshing recant of the politics of religion.
The Congress started playing with religion, and he says so. The BJP is
playing with fire, and he says that too. The mullahs and millions in Pakistan
come in for similar treatment as Alter mixes history, opinion, narration,
his mind's eye and his subjects' lives to throw up without much fuss why
India and Pakistan are messed up. This isn't the long-distance generational
angst of Sir Vidia Naipaul, or the more vivid-and delightfully irreverent-lens-eye
through which Salman Rushdie prefers to view this part of the world. But
simply, the outcome of a journey by an American who was born and raised
in India.
 Alter
writes about how as an American citizen he could have easily made a journey
to Pakistan, but didn't out of fear that his permanent resident status
in India would be jeopardised. So he waited for an opportunity-1997, the
50th anniversary of the independence of both India and Pakistan, a time
he felt both countries could easily accept travellers moving from one
state to another. Govind Nihalani, the filmmaker who made the acclaimed
Partition teleserial Tamas, has written about Partition as a state of
mind, a creation of insecurity and hatred-whether English, Hindu or Muslim-later
preserved and fuelled by politicians with the battered and unemployed
as kindling. Alter encounters much the same thing as he moves from one
state of mind to another, the stench of reality always with him as accompanied
baggage.
As he goes walkabout in the bylanes and bazaars
of India and Pakistan, Alter, a writer in residence at MIT, mirrors the
futility of borders with examples and arguments about how both India and
Pakistan are essentially countries where aspiration amounts to blotting
out the reality of poverty, decaying society and lurid politics. Here,
air-conditioning is as much to keep the heat out, as flies and the general
muck of disadvantaged humanity. Alter has always had a keen eye for the
detritus of history, as in early novels like Neglected Lives, a beautifully
scripted book of Anglo-India after British rule. But this work of, yes,
journalism, has more of a hopeful point: there is now an indelible border,
but nobody is really sure what to do with the damn thing.
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