Yesterday while I was at a friend’s place, I saw bits of a French reality-television show called “L’ile de la Tentation”. From the goings-on I understood that it is about a group of young people who have been placed on an island to see what they do to each other. Given the word “temptation” in the title, maybe there are some constraints put in to spice up things: some will try to seduce the others, who must resist, or something of the kind.

The players of that game were a carefully chosen group of physically perfect young men and women. We live in a physically demanding age, where attendance to the gym is becoming as necessary a criterion for being a member of the middle-class, as is a university, or at least a high school education. Just ten or fifteen years ago, I remember, the gym was the haunt of the working class, a dark, smelly place where construction workers and stevedores lifted rusty weights in a menacing, don’t-brush-past-me atmosphere. Going there was like getting drunk in a tavern near the harbour, a daring exploit of middle-class adolescence. The focus was on brains, as long as you were not seriously misshaped. Nowadays, the parking spaces of gyms are full of Hondas and Toyotas ( valuable cars in Mauritian society) and the gym owner himself drives a BMW.

So, to come back to the “Island of Temptation”, watching bits of it flash past my eyes– the programme was so sliced up that it felt like bits of teriyaki flying around on the hot plate – I wondered about what next awaited our industrial civilisation, and how it had come to this triumph of the body and the image, of which “Island of Temptation” was the epitome: the eye watching bodies, with minimal thought involved. For something a bit more brainy, you can switch on to the sports channel where your eye watches bodies doing more complicated exercises.

When a civilisation falls, this could be due to internal or external factors, or both. Rome felt the pressure of the barbarians in the Germanic forests, but it was also affected by the cooling of the weather in the first centuries of the Christian Era. This caused crop failures which made it difficult for the Empire to feed its legions. Also to blame for its downfall was the lack of a stable succession system, so that every successful general was tempted to march down on Rome to seize power. The caste system destroyed the unity of Hindu civilisation, so that by the time it was invaded by the Arabs and Turks, the latter found a large number of ready converts to Islam among the low caste Hindus. We may compare this with Spain or the Balkans, for example, where there were not so many converts to Islam depite the centuries of Arab and Ottoman rule. China was a more unified civilisation than India and survived until the early 20th century, when it simply went out of history, like a product removed from the supermarket shelf upon reaching its expiry date (1). It is hypothised that the Khmers over exploited the water resources of their land.

Modern civilisation faces its own climatological challenges, about which I cannot say much. I am wondering whether we also face a cultural challenge. Is our civilisation bringing about its own demise, by hollowing out humanity, by coarsening his tastes, corrupting his soul ? The world becomes one great shopping mall, in which we roam endlessly, pushing on our trolleys laden with their grotesque piles of things which always makes the monthly shopping trip look like a looting expedition (2). Tired, we make a pause, sit in one of those food courts, place various foods on the table : pizzas, buckets of fried chicken, trays of hamburgers – we eat voraciously, our face and hands are soon covered with bits of cream and meat. On giant television screens everywhere, we see the inverted reflection of our fatty selves – perfectly shaped young people, dancing in powerfully erotic motions. We are obsessed with eating, they with keeping perfect body shapes: we are united in our cult of the body. In the end, our souls scream for purity, and we move on to some giant ashram, headed by millionaire gurus, whose acolytes teach us a mish mash of yoga and aerobic, teachings about “loving oneself” and “healing oneself”, vague , perfumed sayings which flatter the ego but cannot lead anywhere, because they always avoid the suffering which is part of any initiation. Yet, in the fringes of society, other gurus do preach suffering to the extreme: the religious fanatics. Just like the obese man cannot stop pleasuring his body, while his counterpart, the pop star, cannot stop tormenting her body, becoming anorexic, in the same manner, in the spiritual sphere, the New Age cults are an endless pleasuring of the soul, by aromatherapy, thalassotherapy, tantric sex, and other practices, and their reverse image is the fanatic cult, Opus Dei, extreme Islam and others, which demand endless torment from their disciples.

Thus, I sometimes imagine civilisation to be out of kelter: why all this ? Because contrary to earlier civilisations, which were based on agriculture, this one is based on industrial production and seems to hate the idea of frugality. That gives the grotesque touch to our modern society, this frenzy of consumption and drove me to this slightly exaggerated – for the sake of effect - description of our lives in the last paragraph.

But is this pessimistic picture true, I also wonder. Yes, most people are greedy and superficial – but then people were always like that. One just has to read Les Misérables to see that nothing much has changed in human nature in this respect. Surprisingly, you could even say that human nature is improving in some fields. For example, most people nowadays actively oppose wars. It is a great novelty: up till the 19th century, wars were seen as an unpleasant state of affairs, like an earthquake, something which happened from time to time and could not be avoided. There was sometimes the feeling that war was necessary, to whip up a nation’s manliness. There are photographs of crowds in Europe cheering their countries’ entry at war, in the first days of World War one ( one of them, taken in the town square of Munich, even captured the image of a young Adolf Hitler throwing his hat in the air along with the other men).

The old world – the world of before 1914 – was masculine in the unpleasant sense of the term, smug, disdainful, brutal, self-serving, fond of massive monuments, of busts of generals. There is something deeply unpleasant about reading of the colonial wars of the 19th century, the rebel natives charging on the battlefield, sword and musket in hand, to be mowed down by machine guns: it is no longer fighting, but more like organised bullying. A snobbish world of clubs, tea rooms and brothels, yet with its beauties too – masculine beauties again: of scientific discoveries, of explorers. Despite the machine gun, there was still opportunity for a real, man-to-man fight.(3)

Our modern world gives off a rank feminine smell. Our age is greedy ( shopping, shopping, shopping), lustful and obsessed with bodily matters, in general ( food, health, perfumes, slimming), superstitious ( women are fond of priests, charms, amulets, soothsayers. The shelves of the bookstores groan under the weight of books devoted to divination and “soothing yourself”) , gossipy ( the SMS, the People’s magazines) , superficial and narrow-minded ( nowadays, everywhere you go, you meet gentle , beautiful, dumb people). Its beauties are also feminine: its general peacefulness, its concern with nature and harmony.

How did the world feminise itself ? By the development of an industrial civilisation, which thrives on consumption and therefore on the establishment of a powerful middle class. The values of the middle class are feminine: stability of the family, social ascent by the careful use of money, an obsession about keeping oneself away from the rabble and with rubbing shoulders with the upper class. The working class and the aristocracy, by contrast, are masculine in essence and are linked, beyond the great hill of the middle class, by ancient subterranean tunnels. A cruder virility, at one end, hard-drinking and wife-beating. At the other, the world of boarding schools and the stiff upper lip. The two classes meet in the Army, where one is the officer corps, the others are the grunts. The middle class hates sending its children to the Army.

When we think of the people of the Renaissance, we think of the citizens of city-states of Northern Italy and of the cities of Flanders, the merchants, who financed the great artists and thinkers of their times. When people of future ages will think of our times, maybe they will think of it as the age of the middle-aged urban woman. Working in an office, divorced, maybe, with a teenage boy slumped in front of the television. A bit obsessed with her thighs, which she thinks are too thick. Works out at the gym and does yoga too on Wednesdays. Waiting, waiting for something to happen. And sometimes, something happens, then goes away.

A strange picture- maybe the last picture of our civilisation, before the oceans drown us. Not a bad picture, rather touching actually, like most women are, when observed from a distance. And of course, we do feel concern for her. How will she fare, this silly civilisation of ours ? Man’s downfall is often caused by his pride, or by the trick of a woman. Woman’s downfall is often caused by greed, lust and fear. Who knows ?

(1) To be fair to India, maybe China was favoured by geography too, in that it did not have to face the Arab armies in that great wave of conquest after the Hegira, which has stupefied historians ever since by its speed and success. That tsunami took over the great Indian province of Sind. Later on, the Afghans and Turks conquered the rest of India, while China remained out of reach. Yet China was not so strong, despite its Great Wall –in the course of its history, it has been conquered by peoples such as the Jin and the Manchurians, who have not left their mark as extraordinary conquerors, compared to the awesome Turks, about whom the French coined the expression “Fort comme un Turc”. What would a Turkish China have looked like, one wonders. Its conquest would have been a historical event of enormous importance, like the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity. Confucianism would probably have survived. Buddhism would have shrivelled to a quaint minority practice. Maybe Islam would have been the world’s greatest religion, today.

(2) In 1999, during the race riots in Mauritius, we could see people coming home from having looted the local supermaket – they were pushing forward trolleys laden with whisky and French sausage, in a bizzare re-enactment of that essential ritual of modern society, the week end shopping at the department store. Together with the car and the computer, the trolley is one of the icons of our times. It is much less exciting than the latter, though – in fact it is a positively ugly object. Seen from afar, a man pushing a trolley looks like someone with a grotesquely extended belly – the very symbol of our obese civilisation.

(3) One of the most misquoted poems of that period is “The Ballad of East and West” by Kipling. Its first line (“ Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” ), is quoted by all those who love to flog the dead horse of colonialism, yet the full prologue runs thus:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

It is a poem which celebrates brotherhood in arms, and the admiration of one warrior for another, beyond the differences in culture.

Some further thoughts about India and the West: when I was about ten years old, people used to pass around a photocopy of an article written by one Mr Oak, an Englishman who said that India had once ruled a large empire in Central Asia. Like the other pseudo-historians of his type, he didn’t bother much with giving proof, apart from stating that the names of many countries of Asia end with “stan” ( “Kazakstan) which he said came from the sanskrit “sthan”, a place. I guess there were some other proofs of that type. I’m not sure if it was him or one of his kin who affirmed ( these people never propose anything, they always affirm) that the black rock in Mecca was a Shiva Lingam.

These kinds of pseudo-historians must be one of India’s biggest growth industries, given the rise of Hindu nationalism there. I remember my wife showing me an article in a Chinese newspaper, saying that archaeologists had found strong radioactive remains in the remains of Dwarka, (the sunken city off the coast of Gujarat, not the modern city). I was actually disturbed by the news until, on the following week, that newspaper carried an article about the remains of insect-like aliens having been found in Peru. Then I understood. While writing this paragraph, I ran a google search on Dwarka and came upon a Western occultist website which said that the sunken city had been proved to be 9 000 years old.

I don’t understand what comfort some people find, in writing books that talk of the vimanas having been real flying vehicles, and of the Brahmastra as a nuclear device. I think it just denotes a massive inferiority complex towards the West. Even more embarassing is the proposition put forward by Hindutva crowd, that the Aryans never invaded India, but started from somewhere near Punjab to conquer Iran, Russia and Europe.

Even if it’s true that the Aryans come from India ( nobody knows where they come from , but let’s just assume that somehow, a white race emerged on the hot plains of North India) what difference does it make ? What is clear is that they were a white people, who crushed the darker inhabitants of India ( who were civilised, given that the Vedas mention the Asuras holding great cities). And that they set up the caste system, which had a colour element ( Varna means colour). And the result of all this is a caste and skin colour consciousness which has poisoned the whole tree of Indian civilisation. Whether the Aryans come from the North Pole or from Chennai, that’s what really matters, to me: the deep fracture, the resentment I feel in Indian society , or Indo-Mauritian society, because of that caste and colour element.

I’m also puzzled by all the trouble people take in proving that our ancestors flew about in Vimanas and threw ICBM’s at each other. Why can’t they be satisfied with what we know of ancient India ? It seems there’s enough in it to have been proud of. Nice temples, nice music, medicine, speculative thought, mathematics, poetry ( from what I read in translations). Beautiful temples sprouting up in Indonesia and Cambodia, and the graceful dances there, playing scenes from the Ramayana. And Buddhism spreading out even to the steppes of Siberia.

We didn’t invent the printing press or the steam engine ? Too bad, but then, I don’t want to sound like I am saying “Sour grapes”, of course the inventions of West have brought tremendous benefits to humanity. But technology brings us diminishing returns. In its first phase, technological progress has made a hugely positive impact: running water, vaccines, the railway- this is the golden age of technology. But as it progresses, the returns become smaller. The car and television are proving to be mixed blessings. During this century, I’m afraid we’ll start seeing negative returns, especially if we keep fiddling with our genes and inventing thinking machines. In the 1950’s people thought of the 21st century as the time of space cadets venturing on to Mars, of plastic clothes, flying cars, helpful robot servants, and telepathic helmets – a sort of sequel to the American Golden Age of better houses, big cars and huge shopping malls. But by the nineties, we were having movies such as “Terminator”, “Blade Runner” and “Gataca”. Technology is becoming scary, while there’s nothing frightening about Sanskrit poetry or Carnatic music. In the arts, there is no progress ( T.S. Eliot is not “better” than Tennyson) but no diminishing returns either. So, I don’t see the point about the inferiority complex towards the inventions of the West.

The problem, maybe, comes from the way many Hindus try by all means to squeeze together mythology and history. They want to have the Mahabharata as the greatest battle in human history. They want to have Krishna as some kind of divine king , ruling over a Dwarka that would be an Indian Atlantis. They have an instinctive repulsion against the academic, conventional history of India because in the latter, there is no mention of Rama and Krishna, except as legendary figures. They feel that it is a Western conspiracy trying to disprove the existence of these two God-kings (1). I remember, once, talking to an uncle about Indian history, and I told him about the Guptas and Mauryas. Shaking his head impatiently at these unfamiliar names, he said : “Yeah, but all that stuff, how many centuries was it after Krishna ?” “Well… there’s no historical record about Krishna. He doesn’t figure in Indian history” I said “Doesn’t figure !” he said, and laughed contemptuously. “What do they know !” he added.

So, feeling hurt that the Ramayana and Mahabharata are not considered as historical texts, the Hindus start creating their own version of history. Since they will base themselves on ancient epics, they might as well take what is written in them as being literal truths. Hence the flying machines and atomic bombs.

Indian television series, based on the epics, give us a very interesting picture of how history and mythology get mixed up.

The first one, the Ramayana, which was produced about 20 years ago, was a no-nonsense series with actors immersed in the atmosphere of that profoundly serious epic.

Things started getting complicated with the Mahabharata, as they were bound to. The Mahabharata is a more human, political story than the Ramayana. In the latter, even Ravana is a somber, dignified figure, a sort of superhuman Don Corleone. In the Mahabharata, the boundaries between good and bad start to get blurred. Krishna orders the Pandavas to do things against their code of chivalry, to attain their goals.

Given the tricky, highly political atmosphere of the story, it was inevitable that the scriptwriters would be tempted to add in a modern touch here and there – the Mahabharata always “felt” modern, with its flawed, ambiguous characters. And they sure got carried away doing that: you had Bhishma and Drona agonising about “the nation” and “duty to the country”. It was so grotesque I stopped watching it after ten episodes or so. They had fiddled so much with the story that one couldn’t know anymore what was based on the text, and what was from them.

Not that this is bad in itself, because it shows that the story is alive, given that it is being rewritten to fit modern tastes. But to introduce modern ideas of nationhood in a classical text, and serve that to an audience which, for the most, believes the whole story to be Indian history, meant that there were really mixing up things in people’s heads.

The “Mahabharata” was shown about twenty years ago too, I think. During the next decades, if I do remember, things moved rather back to the realm of mythology, because we had stories from Krishna’s life, then we had “Maa Shakti” and “On Namah Shivaya”.

But then recently, we’ve had a new creature which maybe represents a new stage in India’s apprehension of its past. It is a television series called “Ravana”. Here, the fusion gets really complex because the scriptwriters have taken as point of departure that they accept that the Ramayana is an epic narration of what must have been a historical war (2).

So, they imagine a “real” Ravana and what “really” happened between him and Rama. There is an effort to give to the story an “India, 2000 BC” feel, in terms of décor and politics. It is a spectacular progress, because it acknowledges, for the first time, that there is “what is said in the epics” and ”what happened in the history of India”. It is a giant’s leap, even.

The only problem is that many people believe that this is “what actually happened”. Still, this kind of series could never have been made twenty years ago.

Despite all the grotesque impostures of Oak and the Hindutva crowd in general, I’m sure that there are a lot of people in India who are taking a honest, unbiased look at their history, which is a history they do not have to be ashamed of, even if, like in the history of any country, it has its dark moments.

(1) Just to make it clear where I stand about Rama and Krishna, in case anyone cares to know: I don’t believe in the idea of God made Man, which means I don’t believe in the divinity of Rama, Krishna or Jesus. I think there was a stage , in most civilisations, during which people had a tendency to divinise powerful kings and seers. This is made clear in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in the chapter on Guan Gong’s death: “They ( the people) reflected on his extraordinary exploits as a warrior, and decided that he was no common man. They then started to worship him”. Valmiki’s Ramayana was written about 2 000 years ago. A few centuries later, the four Apostles wrote the Gospel. During that time also, the Romans were divinising their Emperors.

(2) No historian denies that the battle between Ram and Ravana, or the great battle of Kurukshetra ever happened. They probably did, just like the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. The point of the historians is that we do not know much about them, apart from the florid retelling in the epics. So, their actual historical significance is unknown. Ancient Indians were incredibly averse to writing historical chronicles, so that there are large parts of Indian history, especially the period before the Buddha, which are left in darkness.

Yesterday I saw “Night of the Hunter”, a strange, old film with Robert Mitchum in it, and I came up with two half-ideas, which is how I call loose associations which need to be explored further to see if they come to a workable proposition:

(i) the scene where the shadow of the preacher appears on the wall of the children’s bedroom– the way it fills the wall with a dark, overpowering, presence. I’m linking it to the end credit sequence in “The misadventures of the Baudelaire children” in which the cartoon figures of the children run through a décor which keeps taking the shape of the head of their evil uncle. Are these modern stories the faint memories of not-so-ancient times, when children were offered in sacrifice to gods and spirits ? In the 19th century, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution in Germany, two construction workers who found themselves unable to construct a certain building ( I don’t remember what it was) captured a child and offered him in sacrifice – to what ? When I was a small child ( that was thirty years ago, though it sometimes feels like a few minutes ago) my wet nurse would tell me not to go out roaming by myself because there was a bridge being constructed which kept crumbling, and the workers were looking for a child to offer in sacrifice ( there’s this thing about bridges, crossroads and house corners in many cultures, that they are places connected to another world).

(ii) An “American gothic style”. Both the architectural style and the Wood painting would be part of a dark current in American literature, films and paintings, obsessed with the other world. The locale is usually small-town America , mostly in the East Coast, or in the South, sometimes in the Midwest, but not in the West. It has its roots in Puritanism, Baptism and Evangelical beliefs in general. Themes and manifestations : the witches of Salem – Poe’s stories - Lovecraft’s stories ( “The Dunwich Horror” in particular) – David Lynch’s movies and “Twin Peaks” – Mothman, and “The Mothman Prophecies” – “Night of the Hunter” - “The Witches of Eastwick” (? For a lighter take on the idea). I’m surely saying something banal, and well-written about. But how come there is no catch-word for it ? The offshoots– according to me: “Out of the Body” by Robert Monroe – “Sybil” , by Flora Rheta Schreiber – the alien abduction hysteria ( successor of the Salem Witches hysteria)- that superhero with a flaming skull, who rides a motorbike – a certain haunting photograph I once saw, taken on a spot near a Midwest road where three persons had been killed in a accident. You see three crosses, slightly askew, lit by a light from a break in the clouds .

Objection number one to my half-idea: if such a current exists, why are American horror movies generally so gross, dumb and vulgar? Shouldn't it have given a feeling of genuine dread, the way Japanese horror movies are fortified by the old, powerful Japanese belief in ghosts ? Maybe because they come from Hollywood. It seems the “American gothic” style cannot cross the Rockies: too much sunlight, too much neon on the other side. These movies have yet given to a thankful world one priceless movie line, the queen of movie quotes: when, at the beginning of the film, the youngsters (a careful selection of the most superficial and annoying types, so that the onlooker can feel sadistic glee at their demise – hey, that chips in with my half-idea number one) move into the haunted house for a normal teenage night of sex, music and whining, and the heroine takes a thoughtful look at the porch, and says: “This place gives me the creeps” .

When I read “Out of the body” and “Sybil” at fifteen, I could certainly say: “These books give me the creeps”. Those endless Midwest plains, in which, in a wood house in a small town, a mad mother tortured her daughter- and she became a legion. I felt a trembling of reality. Again, in “Out of the body” ( forget about whether it’s true or not, just consider it as a story): that moment where Monroe, having started his astral travels, tells himself: “If I can go anywhere, then why not go to see the President?” But as soon as he starts wooshing to there, he bumps into….a cop ! An American cop, with the cap and the baton and the brass star, who tells him, probably in a low cop voice: “Why do you want to go see the President ?” Man, I loved that book for fabulously surreal moments such as these, where I felt like I was taking my hands off the bar at the Big Twister.

Do Stephen King’s books belong to that current ? He lives in a small town in Maine, and said in an interview that “The small town is the real America”. Well I don’t know, I haven’t read much of him.

Objection number two: in any culture, there is a current of interest in the other world, in spooky stuff. You’re just stating the obvious.Well, maybe, but let me go back to that feeling of “trembling of reality” which I felt when I read “Sybil” and “Out of the Body”. I felt something much the same when I read James E. McDonald’s 1968 testimonial on UFO activity to the US Congress ( Mc Donald was a Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona. He said that he saw a UFO while driving on an Arizona desert road in 1954, and he afterwards devoted all his spare time to investigating these phenomenon). He focused his research on US Air Force members who had seen the objects, either from the air, or on radar screens, or while they passed near Air Force bases. It’s pretty scarey, at first read, I must say ( it’s easily available on the Net) . But once you’re through with it, the memory of that report gives you a powerful, eerily beautiful feeling: the vast desertic spaces in which these Air Force bases are located, with what must be gorgeous sunsets. And on the middle of them, those Air Force men looking at something strange in the sky: and Mc Donald’s interviews, later on: I imagine those men, probably well-kept, straightforward men, with a close-cropped haircut, their eyes taking on a strange glint as they talk of what they saw. That’s where I mostly get my tingle from that report: the idea of those men, from the heart of our new, industrial, world, the American towns with their candy stores and comic books and big cars, from a busy pioneer world of engineers, businessmen and soldiers, describing something weird “ a wobbly oval shape, moving too fast to be a plane” : the trembling of reality.

I felt it also one day as I struck through that motherlode of American mythology, the Kennedy Assassination. By the time I was through the first policeman’s report, and the second one, and what the other one heard through his motorcycle radio, and the gunshot from the grassy knoll – by the time the body had reached the Dallas Airport and the doctors’ reports were disagreeing about the number of bullet wounds – I felt my mind slipping, saw the great airport with the jets of those days, their wings quivering under the sunlight as they were being filled up with fuel – but it was not just the optical effect , it was as if I had reached a moment in the past where we slipped out of “normal” reality, into “another” reality in which the bullet wounds had shifted on the President’s body, and the motorcycle policeman’s radio said something else.

Another, more intense moment: while reading E.J. Hobsbawn “The Age of Industry”, I came upon the part where he describes the ways by which, during the Industrial Revolution, workers tried to find psychological relief from the unbearable conditions in which they were living and working. It gets pretty harrowing, which is saying much considering the previous chapters in which he explains how peasants were uprooted from a feudal system which was itself pretty harsh, but to which they were at least used to, and suddenly became workers in a young, naked and fierce capitalist system. He describes the growth of powerful evangelical churches, with their trances and self-mortification, and in a scene of bottomless horror, quotes a local American chronicler describing a mass prayer scene in that old pit of misery, the Appalachian mountains, “where hundreds of men, women and children roll on the ground, walk on all fours, yelp, growl, howl, foam at the mouth”.

But the time where I really felt myself going out of my mind, was one night when I was reading about Scientology on Wikipedia. I read about Xanu and the starplanes –there was even a painting of the scene, a 1950’s DC 8 flying through the stars, with the star and the two laurel branches on its tailfin – and I felt a fever swell up through my brain. The insanity of the whole idea was so monumental that , looking at that painting of the starplane, I felt I was looking at the true screaming face of madness. That’s what Cruise and Travolta believe in ? I had a fit of panic. Fortunately, my wife told me to go to bed, or I think I would have gone mad.

Tocqueville said that suicide was rare in America, but that madness was common. Visionaries must be common too, in that case. During the start of his seven months in Sri Lanka, Nicholas Bouvier noted with disquiet that he was no longer on the Eurasian continent, on which he had been travelling for so long, but on an island. “Islands are the place of metamorphosis” he wrote, “Where Circe turns man to swine. Whatever we bring in from the continent, is changed to mysterious shapes”. I imagine Eurasia as the Mother Continent of Thought, and America to be a giant island on the other side of the sea. There, three groups settle, the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Baptists and Evangelicals in the South. Forget about the amicable Quakers, those softening agents in the great washing machine of America. The Puritans and other fire-and-brimstone crowd start shooting their way through the wild ranges of that giant land. Others do come, Irish, Germans, French, but the Bible belt holds the country tight. From the smouldering imagination of those preachers –still doing very well nowadays, piling up fortunes with their media empires, even – America spouts forth new mythologies – the Mormons , astral travelling, alien abduction, split personalities – so that, even as the pioneers conquered new lands to the West, and even upwards, to the Moon, the American imagination boldly goes where none has gone before. Beam us up, Scotty.

Once I was passing by a village in Mauritius, and I saw something pretty odd. It was a ceremony to say farewell to an elderly British couple, who were involved in the co-operative movement, and had come to visit a local association. The man presiding the ceremony was well known as vociferous, aggressive leader of some Mauritian Hindu organisation. He heaped praise upon praise on the old couple, and put a garland of flowers around their neck. Then someone else put a garland around their neck. Then someone else, and yet another person. It went on for about ten minutes. They were garlanded about 30 times. Then the praise continued, effusive, lyrical. Then the tearful farewell.

Sometimes, I catch snatches of Bollywood songs playing on television screens, in bars or at people’s homes. The fashion these days, it seems, is to have white people participating in them. Blonde girls, preferably. It also looks like there is a great deal of emphasis on European settings – London, Paris, glamorous towns of the West. When I see this, I think back of that scene in the village.

I’m not sure about it, but I have the impression there is something a bit twisted in our Indian view of the West. Of course, you can’t realistically expect any culture to have an objective view of other cultures. It would be pretty boring if they did. Some people don’t like the idea of orientalism. But where is the fun, if one doesn’t have some stereotypes, within certain limits , about the Other ? Seduction is a drama, a role playing game.

But even if we make allowance for that, still, I do find , sometimes, something odd in the way Indians behave with Westerners. Abject servility sometimes, a strange moral contempt ( “their women are all sluts”) at other times.

Part of it, I guess, comes from the fact that most Westerners happen to be white. There was a big fat chunk of racism in Indian culture long before Vasco Da Gama set foot there. We may thank our Aryan ancestors for that. I guess it also explains the way some Indians talk about “the chinks” – there is some kind of impatience, or disdain, when they talk of the Chinese, rooted in a disbelief that yellow people can do anything good, and made worse by the fact that the whites are giving them so much attention.

I keep thinking of that article by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times on Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss” ( see my May post about it). What fit of fever made him write that monument of hypocrisy ? His article on R.K. Narayan (“The Great Narayan”) was wonderfully nuanced, and showed such a deep understanding of the social mentality which prevailed at the time when Narayan started writing. All that bla – bla about being “wounded by the West” was so childish, as if the (impressively talented) Mr Mishra had been refused some bauble, and had gone to sulk in the gloomy forest of Post Colonialism ( Ah , the dark valleys of Gender and Identity studies, in which roam so many of the frustrated spirits of our times).

These flashes of Indian anger at the West… in “A Sahib remembers”, P.J.O. Taylor describes how he once came upon an old manor deep in the English countryside, which turned out to be the castle of Maharaj Duleep Singh, the last king of the Sikhs. After being defeated in the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1848 ( I’m sorry if there are some slight mistakes here, as I can’t find back the book, but I think I’ve got the main facts right) , this king was sent to exile in England, where he bought the manor and married a German woman with whom he had many children. According to Taylor, Marahajah Duleep Singh was a good friend of Queen Victoria and accompanied the Prince of Wales in the latter’s infamous escapades to Paris. Yet, in his later years, it seems that the Maharajah fell out with the British royal family, on the delicate matter of his pension, and again proclaimed himself King of the Sikhs. He sent a letter to Queen Victoria, declaring himself her implacable foe ( “The poor fellow’s gone completely mad !” was the Queen’s reaction) and died somewhere on the Continent.

So childish… Indians can behave strangely, in the West ( of course, so do many Westerners in India). Once I saw an interview of Zakir Husain, the tabla player. It was made by an Indian channel, and there was a long interview of him in Hindi. I understand very little Hindi, but I could sense that his Hindi was very slangey, a fast-talking , urban style, with rapid-fire jokes and asides ( the interview was sliced by shots of Zakir in his Bombay environment). Then suddenly the scene changed to somewhere in the US. Zakir was giving a course in some American university, and he was sitting cross-legged near a fountain in a sort of Zen- Disneyland setting, surrounded by a group of wide-eyed Americans, long haired, with cloth handbags, and sandals, the Ashram types. Zakir was mouthing horrendous platitudes about Eastern mysticism, acting out the role of the guru for that awful crowd. He looked pretty scared of being found out and was looking around nervously at the students. Then, thankfully, the programme moved back to Zakir in Bombay, more relaxed, still fast-talking. The Muslim guy who gets paid to act as the Oriental sadhu for a crowd of wealthy hippies… it reminds me of a friend of a friend of mine, a young Frenchman of Algerian descent who fled the racism of French society and went to Australia. Once there, he found himself playing the role of that bizzare creature of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, the French lover, with a beret, a baguette and a Gauloise in the mouth, to a crowd of adoring Australian girls.

There is something murky in the way some , or many ( I don’t know) Indians view the West. Some racial fantasies , an obsession with Hitler, especially, because of the Aryan-and-Swastika thing. I even knew an Indo-Mauritian man who took himself for a German. Naipaul, cruel Naipaul dived his hands deep in that muck with his character Ralph Singh in the "Mimic Men", and the latter's fantasies of snow and white nomadic ancestors. (1) There is also an obsession with the sexual mores of Westerners. The West is seen as one vast permanent orgy.

It’s really sad, because you would have thought that an ancient civilisation like India would have taken a subtle look at the West (2). The way the Chinese look at the West seems to me pretty more dignified, if slightly boring. It’s a layman’s opinion, but when I was in China, the representations I saw of Western people in Chinese films and television series seemed to me rather more acceptable, if a bit stiff. The usual Western characters would be the well-meaning adventurer in the 1920’s Shanghai story, or the businessman in modern China. For example, there was a television series about a group of French experts working with the Chinese on the construction site of a nuclear plant. The French were shown as rather cold and severe, but then the Chinese side was sometimes unprofessional and prone to do things the easy way. The main idea was that problems are due to different cultural attitudes, and can therefore be solved by mutual comprehension and adjustment.

I have the impression that the Chinese view of the West has a more emotionally stable basis. It is true that there can be serious bouts of xenophobia in China, but these would be linked to specific events. For example, a few years ago, the clash between an American spy plane and a Chinese jet led to fierce anti American feeling for some time. But this died out after a few months. Maybe I am wrong, but I haven’t really felt the Chinese to be racially insecure towards white people. During the last Olympics, I heard some Chinese say that yellow people were not as big and strong as blacks or whites and could not beat them in contact sports. On the other hand, they said, yellow people were quicker and nimbler, which made them good at gymnastics and other sports requiring skill, such as archery. But it didn’t seem to be something over which they spent sleepless nights. In the streets of Beijing, there was none of that ogling at white women which is so shamefully common in India ( when it’s not worse). Among mixed couples, there were far more white man- Chinese woman couples than the opposite. But then I had the impression the Chinese men were not terribly interested in Western women. According to an article which appeared in a local English-paper magazine during that period, the perception ( not backed by any official study, as far as I remember, but more based on “conventional wisdom”) among Chinese men was that white women were rich ( at that time, foreigners in Beijing were generally wealthy expatriates, I think it’s changing now) and would not be interested in a relationship with a Chinese man, whose salary would be comparatively modest. Also, there was the perception that Western women were pretty independent and would not fit in the Asian family mold. (Interestingly, as an aside, my neighbour at one point in Beijing, was a Frenchwoman married to a wealthy Chinese businessman. I must also say that Beijing girls seemed , to me, rather independent in their lifestyle).

Among Western women, the general perception was that Chinese men were a bit tied-up and conservative.
“They look better with long hair” was the usual statement made about them ( the typical Chinese boyfriend for a Western woman in China was the artistic type). Yes, there was also the stereotype of the nerdy Chinese man which worked against them. The latter cliché is interesting because it is one field where the traditionally even-tempered Chinese man could get seriously upset, if word about it spreads in China (any man, anywhere, would get cross at that kind of insult). Like many other stupid clichés, it comes from the US , that country that can never get it right when it comes to judging foreign people. They give arms and training to Muslim extremists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan , and then find it strange that they should turn against America ( What did you expect Muslim extremists to do against Israel’s main ally?) They have this idiotic belief that the French, the most militaristic, bellicose people in European history, are effeminate and bad at warfare (3) . In the past 60 years, they’ve fought three wars against yellow people. They won the first one, against Japan, but it was pretty tough fighting. The second one , against the North Koreans and the Chinese, was a draw. Everyone knows what happened in the one against North Vietnam. On top of it, they watch Bruce Lee movies, and a lot of them do Karate and Kung Fu. So, you would guess they know where these martial arts come from. Well, well, after all that, what do they come up with ? The stereotype of the nerdy yellow male.But that stereotype is so stupid that it won’t last for long.

On the whole, I think that the way the Chinese look at the West is healthier than the Indian view (4). I’m afraid we’re in for a few more years of blondes jumping around in Bollywood songs. Before the inevitable backlash sets in. Mother India giving us yet another lecture about her ancient civilisation , transcendental spirituality and impeccable moral standards (5).

(1) I guess some readers could object that Indo-Mauritians and Indo-Trinidadians are probably a bit more racist than mainland Indians, having lived in smaller, more densely colonial societies than in India, where Englishmen were thin on the ground ( 20 000, at the peak of their power). It is an interesting point. In his partly autobiographical novel "L'Etoile et la Clé", Mauritian writer Loys Masson creates the character of Ramdour, an Indo-Mauritian politician , probably based on some real person (s). Ramdour “hates everything which is thick-lipped” and openly desires a racial alliance between Whites and Indians. But then “L’Etoile et la Clé” was written in 1945. Also, a large part of the population of both islands is part-African, part-Indian, in spite of everything. Actually most Indians, anywhere, are racially mixed, that is true. I would say that the racial fantasies in both the mainland community and the diaspora tend to be the same: no thick lips, please. Fair and lovely, fair and lovely.

(2) For example, our parched lips ask for more of that wonderful chapter in Mr Anantanarayan’s novel “The Silver Pilgrimage” in which an ancient Indian trader tells of how he landed in a foggy island ( which, the reader quickly understands, is Elizabethan England) and gives us his impressions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet. Why can’t more Indians see the West the way Mr Anantanarayan sees it, as a civilisation, with its good and bad sides, instead of panting at it in a half-craving, half-disgusted manner.

(3) During the founding years of the European Community, a French minister somberly remarked that " in the course of the past centuries, France has been at war with every nation in Europe, except Danemark. The latter omission is probably due to negligence, rather than peaceful intention. It is time for peace in Europe"

(4) That doesn’t mean the Chinese mind is exempt of racism, far from it. There is occasional contempt in North China towards their darker skinned Southern compatriots. But the traditional insult made by Northerners against the Southerners ( normally when the latter are well out of earshot): “Nan man ren” ( Southern barbarians) is interesting: it seems that the Chinese tend to evaluate people on what they judge to be civilised behaviour, rather than the colour of the skin. They have a profound abhorrence, for example, about eating with one’s fingers, which they feel to be a revolting , primitive practice. I would say that it helps the Westerners, in the eyes of the Chinese, that they are fair-skinned. But that is only a bonus point and not the main criterion. Strangely enough, Hong Kong, which is ahead of mainland China in so many respects, seems to be beset by the problem of racism. Indians and Africans there complain of virulent racist behaviour against them. I wonder why that is the case- Hong Kong was a British colony, but it was not a slave society. It was a trading outpost and its Indian community is full of prosperous businessmen. Also, Hong Kong is one of the true economic and cultural hubs of the world. It is hard to understand – maybe, Hong Kong being a high-pressure, economically unequal society, with great difficulties for the common man to find decent, affordable lodging, and to make both ends meet, the average Chinese lets some steam off by picking on dark-skinned people.

(5) The reader will maybe have noticed that in the course of this, obviously amateurish, reflection on India's view of the West, I have not mentioned Nirad Chauduri's book "The Continent of Circe". I have not done so because I feel that there is a nuance between what I am proposing and what Mr Chaudhuri is saying. I am saying that many Indians seem to look at the West through the lens of some unfortunate racial and sexual fantasies. Mr Chaudhuri on the other hand, says that the whole of Indian civilisation is built on the wrong foundations, a thesis he defends with formidable learning and immense anger.

I’ve just read Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Sands, a pretty terrifying story of a man who is held prisoner in a sand pit by some villagers and is forced to dig out the sand which accumulates in the pit every day. He eventually becomes the mate of the young widow who is also trapped in the pit. I have a problem with giving a decent opinion of the book because I’m claustrophobic. Actually while reading the book I thought the house was on the side of a big, cliff-like dune with one side falling sharply on the sea. When I realised the man was in a pit, I felt pretty scared and started reading at a frantic pace because I wanted to know whether he would escape from it. No need to tell what happens at the end. The metaphor on man’s status in society is depressing, the more so when you realise that for a lot of people around the world, that story wouldn’t be seen at the metaphorical level, but as quasi-realism: workers in illegal coal mines in China, in clay brick works in Pakistan, in construction sites in India, for example. That’s where I find the end rather incoherent, because Jumpei, the main character, seems to feel a need to talk to the villagers of the discovery he has made about how to extract water from the sands. That is, he starts to feel part of the village. Yet somewhere else in the middle, he was angrily speculating that the Syndicate running the village must be making quite some money from selling the sand to construction sites, and the woman agrees with him on that point.

Sometimes, I had the impression that he could understand the bleak, implacable logic of the villagers ( for some reason, it is vital that he and the woman keep digging out the sand, because that prevents the other houses in the village from being swallowed by the dunes): someone needs to be made to do that job, by hook or by crook. I even thought it was a pretty neat symbol of the way all societies manufacture an underclass, big or small depending on their level of economic sophistication, because you need that underclass to do the low jobs. That is well shown in the almost gentle manner in which he is brought back to the sand pit after being captured following his failed escape. Yet at other times, it seems that he and the widow suffer from special stigma which places them well below the pale of humanity – for example when the villagers encourages them to mate in full view of everyone. It’s hard to believe a few weeks after that incident, he wants to share his discovery about the water with the rest of the village, to the point where he doesn’t escape when the rope ladder is mysteriously left to hang for him.

Maybe I’m nit picking. On the whole, the metaphor about society does hit the reader like a well-aimed finger jab from a kung fu master: we are all instruments at the mercy of society, who must do the ( mostly dreary) jobs the collectivity expects of us, and in our spare time, we may, if we want, collect insects, or lay traps for the crows. If we work hard, we may be given a radio. Seen in that light, the complaints artists sometimes make, about society not recognising their avant garde works seem rather unrealistic: after all, society uses people for its own pleasure. It expects artists to be entertainers, comforters. Of course, they can choose the straight and narrow path of artistic integrity, and produce uncomfortable masterpieces ( like Woman in the Sands itself) but they can only expect meager, reluctant rewards in return.

The problem with this kind of harsh view about society, or about the value of existence, is that behind its grittily realistic tone, I have the impression there is a hidden current of melodrama. It can feel strange to associate the words “melodrama” and “existentialism” yet , to think about it, isn’t there something melodramatic about that story ? A man who gets trapped in a pit, who refuses to work and is not given water, then the escape, then the scene where he tries to rape the woman…of course the writer captures extraordinarily well the mental processes of the character, and writes beautifully about sand. But the texture of the story.. isn’t there something rather dramatic about it ? Not that it’s wrong in itself, but I just want to point it out because we always associate existentialism with impeccable gravity and profundity.

Now think of “L’étranger” by Camus , a book I’ve never liked too much ( though it’s much better than “La Peste”, that plague of a book). I never got the point about Meursault. I see him as the extreme edge of the Byronic trajectory, that exaltation of the lonely, misunderstood individual which started in the 19th century and then saw the said “misunderstood” individual lose his humanity as the movement gathered pace. Bardamu, in Céline’s “Voyage au bout de la Nuit” ( which I haven’t finished, so my judgement may be wrong) is plunged in a horrible world, of senseless war, of factory production, of colonialism, and has to fight hard to keep his humanity. But with Mersault, there is an inner emptiness, he is not entirely human. People are awed by this novel because they secretly envy Mersault’s coldness, they wish they were like that too, living yet indifferent to others, like the trees. I think towards the end, before he is hanged, he watches a tree through the window of his cell, and wishes he would be like it, calm, drinking the sunlight and the rain. He already is. My point is that where people see profoundness in “L’étranger” I only see style, style, style in that novel. Every sentence in it is maniacally well crafted. Sartre said that “ Chaque mot dans l’Etranger est une ile”. What I want to say is that when we think of existentialism, we are thinking of a grave voice telling us plain, profound truths. But if we take a closer look at works such as “Woman in the Sands” and “The Stranger”, we find in order to make their point, the writers go to such stylistic extremes that in the end, they are not so far removed from opera writers.

I was thinking about that yesterday when I saw, one after the other , “Autumn Sonata” by Bergman and “La Regle du Jeu” by Renoir. Yes, Bergman draws an intense , harrowing portrait of human relations, especially the mother-daughter link which is such a … minefield. Liv Ullman and Ingrid Bergman are really something. But when you think of the clichés in that movie: the selfish flamboyant mother who’s phoning her agent about a concert in Los Angeles… the psychologically crushed daughter who’se married to a priest and lives in the middle of nowhere… and then there’s the crippled sister who’se been spending her life in an asylum… and as if all that wasn’t enough, you had to have the little boy who died at four… come on man. It’s inverted Bollywood.

I preferred “La Règle du Jeu” to “Autumn Sonata”. Straightforward social satire, with a touch of humour, even vaudeville. As the characters twirl and masquerade in the chateau, from time to time, like a glacial draught blowing through the French windows, comes the reminder that the “rules of the social game” are not to be lightheardedly flouted. The childish lover’s death at the end has all the elements of a masked ritual sacrifice.

I think the problem with existentialist art is that in order to make its point about the absurdity of humanity it has to use pretty outlandish devices, people trapped in sand pits by a bizzare clique of villagers, a diva mother who abandons her crippled child, a strange man who goes to see a Fernandel movie after his mother’s funeral. There’s nothing wrong about all that, it’s covered by artistic licence. The writers of magical realism go much beyond that in their flights of imagination. But the thing is that, writers such as Marquez or Rushdie, or film directors like Renoir have no special claim to be privy to some Truth about life. Whereas with the existentialists there is some kind of gloomy gravity attached to them, and which you also note
hanging on people who like that kind of artistic style.These are people with something disdainful about them, as if they had discovered something which the rest of us are too shallow or too bourgeois to understand. And that’s where it gets funny, when you realise that their films and books, which are supposed to be earnest and profound, are in the end just as contrived as other works of art. Malvolio, in the end, does have to wear flame-coloured garters when he tries to seduce the Countess.