THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

[I was intrigued by the storm in South Africa over David Bullard in 2008. I am an Indian and I am dead against racism; but I was thrilled by a column for which he was accused of racism. So I got interested in how South Africans tackle race. I haven't been to South Africa for 52 years; and even then I spent a day in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town while my ship replenished itself on way to England. At that time, racism was official in South Africa; I remember separate benches and toilets in gardens. Although all that is gone, racism continues to live a clandestine life in South African languages; that is what fascinated me. This column was published in the Telegraph of 6 May 2008]

THE WHITE-WATER RACIST

When Harbhajan Singh was ticked off for racist abuse of Andrew Symonds, most Indians were befuddled. He is supposed to have called Symonds a monkey; in defence, he said he had only said “Maa ki…” at which the match referee laughed and reduced his penalty. Our colonial ancestors used to be quite well versed in the intricacies of racism; they had rigorous lessons from the British. Every schoolchild knows the story of Gandhiji being thrown out of a train in South Africa because he entered a first-class carriage (and he had bought a first-class ticket). But after our independence in 1947, we did pretty thorough racial cleansing. Whites almost disappeared from India – certainly racist whites. So we are somewhat uneducated in racism. We could do with some lessons from South Africa, where race remains a live issue although non-whites have been in power since 1994.

Let me start with David Bullard, who has just been sacked as a columnist by The Sunday Times of Johannesburg. He describes himself as follows: “Bullard’s meteoric rise to fame as a newspaper columnist and media celebrity came after a hugely successful and obscenely profitable twenty-four years in the financial markets trading bonds and derivatives. He is an opinionated sod who is as impervious to criticism as he is to bullets. He’s also old enough and rich enough to not give a damn what other people think. When he’s not driving fast cars, drinking expensive whisky, traveling down the sharp end of planes and eating absurdly expensive meals in swanky restaurants he enjoys the simple things in life such as reading “A Brief History of Time” and making critical pencil notes in the margin. He has had his teeth whitened, doesn’t dye his hair and has it on good authority that the halitosis is curable.”

On 7 April, he wrote a column in Johannesburg Sunday Times. He imagined a South Africa uncolonized by whites: a South Africa without cars, television, internet, cellphones, newspapers, magazines, shopping malls, cigars or wallpaint. The people live an idyllic life. They have enough and want nothing more. They have discovered fire and are developing the wheel. Despite this blissful existence, they miss something: they do not know what. Then one day, the Chinese arrive looking for minerals, land, water and labour. Then the South Africans know what was missing in their lives: someone to blame.

This summary does not capture Bullard’s style, which I found riveting. It was good entertainment – I would have been chuffed to write it. As to content, obviously Bullard was blaming black South Africans for blaming whites. This had local relevance. A local reader may disagree with him, and may think of counterarguments. It is not inevitable that if whites had not exploited Africa, the Chinese would have. Africa might never have been discovered; or it might have been too remote and might have been neglected by the whites, like Japan; or it might not been rich in minerals. There are so many alternative scenarios that can be imagined; none is more probable than another. It was possible to controvert or dismiss Bullard’s argument; but I could not see how it was racist.

Then, after being dismissed, Bullard wrote an apology which listed what his readers found offensive about the column. He called his subjects “simple tribesmen”; that was interpreted to mean they were stupid. He wrote that if a child was eaten up by a lion or a crocodile, its parents would mourn for a while and then have another; that was considered insensitive. He wrote that the huts were built so as to catch most of the day’s sun; that was taken to mean that blacks were lazy.

Bullard’s remarks may have been impolite or unpleasant. But I thought they were well within the kind of discourse that goes on in any democracy. They reminded me of some Indians’ habit of taking umbrage at their opponents’ remarks and asking for an apology. The Hindutwits are particularly good at this; Muslims also indulge in it sometimes. Children do it all the time – picking up fights over real and imagined insults. It is the context that defines racism. In particular, certain epithets from the Apartheid era are taboo as classic racism – boertjie or plank (white Afrikaans – that is, of Dutch descent – generally known as Boer), roeinek, bhulu or soetie (English South African), kaffir, bushcat, groenewald or baboon (black), boesman or bushman (tribesman from South-west Africa), hotnot, baster, gam, ghoffel or geelbek (mixed-race), meid (black or coloured woman, from maid), koelie or coolie (South Asian), skeepfokker (Australian) or kwerekwere (foreigner visiting an African ghetto). Indians had their own terms: for instance, gora for whites, bruin for coloured people, ravan or pekkie for blacks, slum for Muslims, roti for north Indians and porridge for Tamils. It was not only other races for which people had rude descriptions. The police also attracted many epithets: for instance, gatta, boere (because most policemen were Boers), or kerel (the Dutch word for boy).

Boer is a wonderful transplant of Dutch, of special interest to me because of its affinity with German. Take, for instance, boekkie, which means darling or honey. If you are in love with her, you can say you are hard up. Bok means a goat, whence come Springboks – leaping goats – a name for the South African cricket team. Boekkie means a little goat, a kid. That would be the right word for a girl friend; so would tjerrie (cherie) or stukkie (from stuck, Dutch for a small piece). But if it is a non-girl friend, you can greet him, “Howzit, china!” China means a mate: china plate – mate – it is a typical Cockney derivation. On the same lines, “I must get some tom” means I need money; it comes from tomfoolery, which rhymes with jewellery. There are many words for something admirable or cool. For example, kief comes from gif, which means poison, but has come to be used for local marijuana, hence cool. Tit, lekker, befok and kwaai mean the same thing.

The English have their own slang in South Africa, though it is not nearly as colourful as Boer (“Dutch” is South African Englishmen’s slang for Boer.) They use “now” in peculiar ways. “Just now” means some time – not necessarily soon. “Now now” may mean recently or soon. If they say, “I am scheming”, they have nothing sinister in mind; they are only thinking.

I am not familiar with local African slang. But some words have become well known. For instance, an indaba is a conference, while dagga is marijuana. At football matches, one shouts, “Ladooma!” which I think means a goal.

This is a very superficial and amateur introduction to South African lingo. South Africa is known in India only for its lions and elephants. But its people are equally interesting. The mixture of Africans, English and Dutchmen has produced a fascinating mélange. Every community that has gone to Africa has turned into a tribe, and developed a tribal language. India may have been like that at one time, but now it has become too integrated and boring. For the true colours of tribal differentiation, one must go to South Africa.

PORTRAIT OF A TALIB

[While trawling Canadian press in 2008, I came across a gripping account of the Taliban by Graeme Smith, a Globe and Mail Correspondent. This is what I wrote about it in The Telegraph of 8 April 2008.]

GETTING CLOSE TO THE TALIBAN 

Indians know Graeme Smith well. He is the youngest captain of a test cricket team ever: he was 22 when he captained South Africa in the 2003 World Cup. He scored 277 against England at Edgbaston in 2003, and 259 at Lords in the next test, breaking Don Bradman’s record of 254 for the ground.

But there is another Graeme Smith – a Canadian reporter who has done an extraordinary video series for Toronto Globe and Mail on the Taliban. Canadian troops are fighting the Taliban along with other NATO troops, so it would have been unhealthy for Smith to go anywhere near the Taliban. But he engaged an Afghan who went and interviewed 42 Taliban fighters without their knowing they were being interviewed.

Indians are perfectly familiar with the Taliban; they were created by the Pakistanis in their madrassahs and sent to Afghanistan to fight the Russians in the early 1980s. Pakistan got much American money and arms for the service. This impression is correct but outdated. Today’s Talib fighter was barely born at the time of the proxy war against the Soviet Union; he remembers none of it. Of the 42 fighters, 12 had lost close relatives in the indiscriminate bombing that NATO specializes in, and 21 had their opium fields, the only source of comfortable living, destroyed. The Americans use helicopter gunships liberally in Afhganistan – more than in Iraq. They flew 2,764 sorties in Afghanistan in 2007 against 1,140 in Iraq. Air strikes killed about 1000 Afghan civilians in 2006 and 1500 in 2007; it is these killings, indiscriminate and unjust, that feed the Taliban. The other factor is opium. That may surprise, because the original Taliban government was very active in destroying opium cultivation. But the current generation of Taliban fighters often cites destruction of opium fields as the cause for joining. They justify opium cultivation by saying that opium is exported to and harms only kafirs.

Insurgency is most active in the south, around Kandahar; so Pashtoon tribes that inhabit that region are more heavily represented amongst the Taliban. Noorzai and Eshaqzai tribes were the source of 16 out of the 42 fighters. Only two were from the Popalzai, the tribe to which Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, belongs; one had lost relatives, and the other an opium field. When the Taliban took over in 1994-96, three tribes – Popalzai, Barakzai and Alokozai of the Zirak Durrani group – lost power; Hotak branch of Ghilzai, the tribe of Mullah Mohammed Omar, gained power. On the fall of the Taliban, the three tribes regained power, and the Ghilzai lost it.

The Taliban find refuge in Pakistan; they get medical treatment in Pakistan, and go there for R&R (rest and recreation), as the American troops in Vietnam used to go to Bangkok and Hong Kong. But their soldiers were not very complimentary towards their host country; they openly abused Pervez Musharraf. They had aggressive designs on Pakistan; they considered Peshawar and Quetta as parts of their own domain and wanted to annex them. One said that these areas were sold to Pakistan by Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan.

There is no doubt that the Taliban were originally created and trained by Pakistan; many of that generation continue in the present Taliban. Musharraf claimed to have severed relations with the Taliban in 2001, but ISI is widely believed by people in India and elsewhere to have continued secretly to support and finance the Taliban. But the current generation of the Taliban shows no sense of obligation to Pakistan. It seems to have changed its stripes in other ways too. A family in Kandahar was celebrating a wedding when four Taliban walked in with guns. The people in the wedding party were petrified; when the Taliban was in power, they could have been shot for revelry. But the fighters asked them to relax, saying they were no longer shooting revelers.

The Taliban are sophisticated users of communication technology; they distribute videos for propaganda, and send news to foreign reporters by SMS. But their view of the world is extremely naïve. They have heard of America, and identify it as the enemy. But in general, they believe they are fighting against Kafirs for an Islamic government; the content of Kafirs is extremely vague. Three of the fighters could not identify President Bush; he was called a Jew, King of America, and son of Clinton W.

Suicide bombings have been a matter of controversy amongst the Taliban. Some argued that wearing an explosive vest was cowardly, as it prevented the fighter from fighting his enemy face-to-face. In 2006, a Taliban faction even took out an advertisement in a Kandahar weekly blaming foreigners for suicide attacks and promising to stop them. But the Afghan interviewees were solidly in favour of suicide attacks, which they equated to their enemies’ air attacks. The Taliban are not very competent at suicide bombing; more than three suicide attacks were required to inflict a single casualty. But lack of competence does not reflect lack of faith; all the Taliban were convinced that suicide attacks were justified by the Quran. They did not know which part of the Quran. One told a story about a battle waged by the Prophet, where a wall could not be breached, so one fighter hauled another over the wall, knowing full well that he would be killed. But the story is apocryphal. Islam prohibits suicide; and it requires that a fighter must declare his intent to fight.

What struck me about Graeme Smith’s reports and videos was not what was there but what was not: Al Qaeda did not figure at all. This would surprise everyone who bought propaganda that the Americans invaded Afghanistan to stop Al Qaeda from attacking the west. The propaganda was persuasive in the aftermath of the New York bombings. But the Afghan mujahid does not care a hoot about a global war between Muslims and Kafirs. He is all for the expulsion of Kafirs from Afghanistan, but has no great ambitions of clearing the earth of Kafirs. He is ignorant and parochial. Graeme Smith thought, though, this might be local: that there may more Arabs and Pakistanis in eastern Afghanistan.

As Smith drove across the green fields of Pakistani Punjab, he thought that many valleys of Afghanistan could be equally lush but for the war. Everyone – Americans, Pakistanis, Indians, Russians – is intent on rescuing the Afghans from others. But this international rescue game has kept the Afghans poor and primitive, while they might have shared our good fortune.

We Indians must bear our share of responsibility for the Afghans’ plight; if we were not so keen on using the Afghans to spite the Pakistanis, their country would not be so war-torn. Pakistan has a young new leader in Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani. In all these days he has still not uttered the K-word. Maybe the time has come when we can make peace with Pakistan.

And yes – we should remove the ban on opium. Since Ambumani Ramadoss is determined to put an end to tobacco, we need another addiction. Let us take to opium in small doses; it will transform Afghanistan.

FUTURE OF TEA ESTATES

[This was a column I wrote in the Telegraph of 25 March 2008 after an enchanting trip to a tea garden in the hills of South India in 2001.]

WHAT THE BRITISH LEFT BEHIND

I have been to paradise – well, as close to it as I am likely to get this side of the earth. It was a 100-years-old bungalow called Stanmore in a tea garden off Valparai, some 50 miles west of and 4000 feet above Coimbatore. It is a 10,000-sq-ft single-story building with just three enormous bedrooms, a drawing room with ancient novels, and a dining room. A long verandah runs along one side where I spent most of the time, reading or surveying the green carpet of tea bushes spread over the surrounding hills as far as I could see. This is not the picking season, so for hours I saw no one at all. Apart from a station wagon maybe twice in a day, there were no vehicles in sight at all. So everything I hate about modern India – the traffic, the cacophony, the crowds, the chaotic energy – was banished. When Ranga’s dishes incited overeating, I could go for a walk down to a stream in the valley below and back up again; it took two hours. If I was too lazy, I just sprawled on a bench under a tree and read.

I must admit to a weakness for bungalows. They were standard housing for the well-to-do in my childhood. The tall hall in the centre was cooled by currents rising and going out of the skylights, which also let in light. There was a verandah in front, from which one entered the hall; the back also generally had a verandah. Bedrooms were attached to the two sides of the hall. The dining room was usually at the back, often in the verandah. Beyond the back was an outhouse which housed the kitchen, pantry and the stables, or in later times, the garage.

But Stanmore was different. It was not meant for a district collector, but for a tea estate manager, who did not expect to receive a large number of people. So he did not need a large hall. It was quite small; it had a cosy drawing room on one side, and a dining room on the other. Then a passage led down to three bedrooms. Unlike an official bungalow, where the hall is the centrepiece, Stanmore had none; it devoted most of the space to the bedrooms. Each would be about 1200 square feet. Half of it would be the bedroom itself, a quarter would be a bathroom, and a quarter a dressing room. People a hundred years ago wore cottons; and the British had a lot of clothes. So they needed plenty of wardrobe space. Everyone wore hats, so there were hatstands in strategic places. I saw some other bungalows belonging to the group as well. One had jacarandas showering flowers in front; another had a bignonia venesta laden with orange flowers. If I had had the time, I would have tried out a number of bungalows.

Well, I did try out another bungalow some weeks ago; it is in Matheran, some 50 miles from Bombay in the Sahyadris. It is called the Verandah in the Forest; at one time it was known as Dubash bungalow. I cannot say whether this was the Ardeshir Dubash who made it rich in World War I from stevedoring, or the Nariman Dubash who sold the plot to Shah Rukh Khan where he lives now, or the Homai Dubash who was with me in college, or another one. But the Verandah is a two-story construction. The ground floor has three or four bedrooms. But it is the upper floor which is its glory. It has one long hall, with skylights, which is divided into half a dozen big suites with a drawing room in the centre and a dining room behind it. All open out on a vast, 25-feet-wide verandah in the front. It has beautiful colonial armchairs whose arms can be stretched out and brought together in front; one can put one’s feet up on the chair’s arms and doze off. If it is warm, one can withdraw to the back of the verandah; if it is cold, one can sit at the edge and sun oneself.

But going back to Stanmore, it is difficult to imagine today what an ambitious feat tea gardens were. For on the way to it, one passes through forests which are pretty impenetrable; all one finds in them even now is elephants, bison and langurs. The hills that grow tea today must all have been covered with such forest once. They must have been cleared with axes and machetes by armies of men. Food for them must have been brought on ponies. The British made a massive investment in the tea gardens, and in the process changed the landscape unrecognizably. A politically correct environmentalist would shudder at the thought, but I do not mind the sacrilege. I think the tea gardens look lovely; I would take a holiday in them any day.

Indian tea gardens are no longer profitable. They have largely lost the international market to newer competitors – Kenya, Indonesia and Vietnam. And the domestic market does not have much taste for quality; it mostly consumes tea dust, the cheaper the better. Most tea gardens have a resident labour force. Minimum wage legislation has made it expensive, especially in West Bengal. The workers have children for whom they would like to have jobs; but the tea gardens cannot employ more.

The gardens in Tamil Nadu have a different problem. Industry is booming in Tamil Nadu, which is experiencing labour shortage. There is so much employment in the textile factories of Coimbatore and Tiruppur that they have drained surrounding areas of labour. As one drives out of these cities, it is difficult to find a rice field any more; vast tracts have been put down to coconut because it needs less labour. And labour has been getting scarcer in Valparai as well.

It is these rising costs that are compelling tea estate managers like the Woodbriar Group to explore conversion of tea bungalows to tourism. I am all for it. But I did think that managers’ bungalows were not enough to turn tea estates into profitable tourist resorts. The tourist density would have to increase.

That in itself would not be a problem, since the current density is so low. But estate owners would have to keep two things in mind. One is unity of architecture. Our hill and forest areas are being ruined by ugly, storied houses built by hungry hoteliers. If the tea estates built such houses, they would ruin the ambience of the estates. They would be well advised to stick to low-rise bungalows, which blend so well with the landscape. And second, they should site new bungalows so as to preserve the ambience. This is not difficult. But it is important to realize that the attraction of tea gardens lies in the way they have refashioned nature; the less signs they show of the human hand, the more successful they will be in attracting human tourists. I look forward to the spreading of a new tea culture which would enable us to get away from the madding crowd, and to recapture a century-old way of life.