(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, September 20, 2005)
The end of the Cold War almost killed spy fiction. John LeCarre turned his attention to pharma multinationals and dug up Smiley's old cases, other spy writers were forced into the parallel world of technogeek conspiracies.
I have to thank Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin for returning me to the illicit pleasure of that genre of books, where the CIA and the KGB faced off in intricate tangos and where codenames like NEVEROVA or RADAR were employed in deadly earnest.
When the first part of The Mitrokhin Archive came out in 1999, it was hard for those in intelligence to comprehend the range and depth of the information that Vasili Mitrokhin offered. Mitrokhin had worked for the KGB for 30 years in the foreign intelligence division. In 1992, he walked into the British Embassy in a Baltic country and offered to share his secret and very detailed notes. The first part of the Archives was hammered into shape by him and Christopher Andrew, the Oxford don and a leading expert on intelligence. Serialized in The Times in 1999, Part One covered the KGB's activities in Europe and the West.
Christopher Andrew writes, "For a quarter of the century, the KGB, unlike the CIA, believed that the Third World was the arena in which it could win the Cold War." Mitrokhin, who retained a taste for home-made cabbage soup and the habit of doing push-ups in the middle of meetings well into old age, died in January 2004. By that time, he and Andrew had shaped the second part of The Mitrokhin Archive; it covers the KGB's activities in the Third World.
Two chapters of The Mitrokhin Archives: II are devoted to India. In Nehru's time, "The Indian embassy in Moscow was being penetrated by the KGB, using its usual varieties of the honey trap. The Indian diplomat PROKHOR was recruited…with the help of a female swallow, codenamed NEVEROVA…" By the 1960s, the KGB had become, according to the authors, the main conduit for "both money and secret communications from Moscow" to the CPI.
During Indira Gandhi's first visit to the Soviet Union in 1953, the KGB "surrounded her with handsome, attentive male admirers". By 1969, the Indo-Soviet "special relationship" had grown; "encouraged by Moscow, the CPI swung its support behind Mrs Gandhi". The situation in the 1970s sounds like a bizarre free market for intelligence: "It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB—and the CIA—had deeply penetrated the Indian government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realizing their enemy would know all about it the next day." Andrew says the KGB was better at exploiting "the corruption that became endemic" under Indira Gandhi's regime, in an era when "suitcases full of banknotes" routinely found their way to her residence. (The suitcases themselves were not returned.)
The CPI had no cause for complaint: "By 1972, the import-export business founded by the CPI a decade earlier to trade with the Soviet Union had contributed more than 10 million rupees to Party funds." Nor was the media left out: according to KGB files, there were "ten Indian newspapers on its payroll" by 1972.
These are some of the revelations that have drawn such vigorous reactions—denial, counter-accusations and stout defenses of the dead—from our politicians. But the India chapters form only part of The Mitrokhin Archive; Andrew is equally illuminating about the KGB's role in Cuba, in Africa, their machinations with Allende, and the high cost that the special relationship with India extracted in terms of their ability to handle Pakistan. Most of Mitrokhin's information in Part One was accurate; there's little reason to speculate, as some have, that Part Two of the archives is either inaccurate or part of a darkly twisted plot by the CIA to discredit the shining legacy of two of India's most prominent political parties.
Ignore the hysteria; read the Archives as a window into the Cold War. As Andrew says, perhaps the most important aspect of this book is that it redresses the way in which we've seen the Cold War, where the CIA's role has always been the focus of attention. It turns out that the KGB's footsoldiers, spies, honeytrap specialists and bankers were equally busy. Until John LeCarre writes his next book, this is as close as you're going to get to cloak-and-dagger spy stories.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
The BS Column: Two Lives
(Published in Speaking Volumes, The Business Standard, September 13, 2005)
Some words of yours to me suggested
How, through the fog of peace and war,
A pulse beat on, that, strained and tested,
No loss could mute, nor sorrow mar…
The initial letter of each line in the dedicatory verse to Two Lives (Viking, Rs 695) spells out 'Shanti and Henny'. It's an old Vikram Seth trick; it makes you smile.
In 1994, Seth finally decided to write about the life of the much-loved uncle he had stayed with as a student in England. Shanti Uncle's wife, Henny Caro, a German Jew who had survived World War II, had died five years previously; he was 85, frail, still encumbered with grief.
Seth was in between books. His precocious travelogue, From Heaven Lake, his poems, his salute to Pushkin, Golden Gate--all these were behind him. His "Indian novel", the one he thought might run to 200-300 pages and take two years to write, took almost seven years; A Suitable Boy ran to 1,300 pages. An Equal Music lay ahead.
Shanti was one of the early wave of Indian students abroad; his generation experienced poverty, homesickness, alienation and racism with a unique intensity. Shanti was training to be a dentist in Berlin, a calling that at first seemed prosaic to him, but that he grew to love.
As World War II drew closer, Shanti was a passive spectator—like other Berliners, uneasy about the new Chancellor but unable to guess what would follow. Shanti and Henny had already met. Mrs Caro was his landlady, and when she told her younger daughter about the lodger, Henny said: "Nimm den Schwarzen nicht' [(Don't take the black man.] As Seth records, "This was the beginning of a relationship that was to last five-and-a-half decades."
Shanti joined the army; in 1944, near Cassino in Italy, he lost his right forearm to a shell. He recovered, married Henny, taught himself how to operate one-armed; the two built a life together in London. When Vikram stayed with them, he knew that Aunt Henny's family had died in the war, but Henny never spoke of it.
Seth taped Shanti's unremarkable but touching story in a series of interviews. Henny was dead, he could no longer ask her the questions a biographer must ask. It was only when he found Henny's letters and papers in "a small cobweb-covered tan-coloured cabin trunk with wooden ribs and dull brass studs" in the attic that Seth knew he had the other part of Two Lives.
Two Lives is quiet, almost mundane. Except for the war that shaped them, Shanti and Henny are ordinary; he was a sharp dresser, she was attractive, he could be particular, she could be pernickety. But as their stories unfold, the initial disappointment with the lack of drama, with the necessarily muted voices of the dead, gives way to a quiet and deep involvement with the book.
It's not the passage where Seth writes with savage anger of the death of Henny's sister at Auschwitz that necessarily stands out, though that packs a punch. It's the quiet spaces, the way in which he captures the immense damage that evil can inflict on people just like us, the enormous grief and resilience of the survivors. It's the deep affection that Henny and Shanti clung to, when both had lost so much; the reticence that allowed them to live with the memories; the tragedy of Shanti's last years, where all the love and trust shared between uncle and nephew is tested in the bitterness that only families can create.
Indians fought in both of the Great Wars, but that experience has rarely been captured in our literature. As I read about Shanti's experiences in the war, it was like listening to family stories. So many Indian families have these stories tucked away; dusty medals in a drawer; a grandfather who was a jawan and whose son will go from his village to be a jawan, too; waterstained books from Cairo, marked with the regimental library's seal. But those stories have, with rare exceptions, remained in the realm of the private, like so many of our narratives.
With Henny, Seth records not just the horror of the death of her relatives in the camps, but follows her story as she comes to terms with the changing lives and loyalties of her friends back in the scoured terrain of post-war Germany. By giving Shanti a voice, Seth opens a window into the brown man's war. Two Lives can be frustrating because Seth's own voice is so muffled. But this book grows on the reader, because of the care with which Seth has tended his memories; and in the end, it's the very ordinariness of Henny and Shanti's lives that touches a responsive chord in us.
Some words of yours to me suggested
How, through the fog of peace and war,
A pulse beat on, that, strained and tested,
No loss could mute, nor sorrow mar…
The initial letter of each line in the dedicatory verse to Two Lives (Viking, Rs 695) spells out 'Shanti and Henny'. It's an old Vikram Seth trick; it makes you smile.
In 1994, Seth finally decided to write about the life of the much-loved uncle he had stayed with as a student in England. Shanti Uncle's wife, Henny Caro, a German Jew who had survived World War II, had died five years previously; he was 85, frail, still encumbered with grief.
Seth was in between books. His precocious travelogue, From Heaven Lake, his poems, his salute to Pushkin, Golden Gate--all these were behind him. His "Indian novel", the one he thought might run to 200-300 pages and take two years to write, took almost seven years; A Suitable Boy ran to 1,300 pages. An Equal Music lay ahead.
Shanti was one of the early wave of Indian students abroad; his generation experienced poverty, homesickness, alienation and racism with a unique intensity. Shanti was training to be a dentist in Berlin, a calling that at first seemed prosaic to him, but that he grew to love.
As World War II drew closer, Shanti was a passive spectator—like other Berliners, uneasy about the new Chancellor but unable to guess what would follow. Shanti and Henny had already met. Mrs Caro was his landlady, and when she told her younger daughter about the lodger, Henny said: "Nimm den Schwarzen nicht' [(Don't take the black man.] As Seth records, "This was the beginning of a relationship that was to last five-and-a-half decades."
Shanti joined the army; in 1944, near Cassino in Italy, he lost his right forearm to a shell. He recovered, married Henny, taught himself how to operate one-armed; the two built a life together in London. When Vikram stayed with them, he knew that Aunt Henny's family had died in the war, but Henny never spoke of it.
Seth taped Shanti's unremarkable but touching story in a series of interviews. Henny was dead, he could no longer ask her the questions a biographer must ask. It was only when he found Henny's letters and papers in "a small cobweb-covered tan-coloured cabin trunk with wooden ribs and dull brass studs" in the attic that Seth knew he had the other part of Two Lives.
Two Lives is quiet, almost mundane. Except for the war that shaped them, Shanti and Henny are ordinary; he was a sharp dresser, she was attractive, he could be particular, she could be pernickety. But as their stories unfold, the initial disappointment with the lack of drama, with the necessarily muted voices of the dead, gives way to a quiet and deep involvement with the book.
It's not the passage where Seth writes with savage anger of the death of Henny's sister at Auschwitz that necessarily stands out, though that packs a punch. It's the quiet spaces, the way in which he captures the immense damage that evil can inflict on people just like us, the enormous grief and resilience of the survivors. It's the deep affection that Henny and Shanti clung to, when both had lost so much; the reticence that allowed them to live with the memories; the tragedy of Shanti's last years, where all the love and trust shared between uncle and nephew is tested in the bitterness that only families can create.
Indians fought in both of the Great Wars, but that experience has rarely been captured in our literature. As I read about Shanti's experiences in the war, it was like listening to family stories. So many Indian families have these stories tucked away; dusty medals in a drawer; a grandfather who was a jawan and whose son will go from his village to be a jawan, too; waterstained books from Cairo, marked with the regimental library's seal. But those stories have, with rare exceptions, remained in the realm of the private, like so many of our narratives.
With Henny, Seth records not just the horror of the death of her relatives in the camps, but follows her story as she comes to terms with the changing lives and loyalties of her friends back in the scoured terrain of post-war Germany. By giving Shanti a voice, Seth opens a window into the brown man's war. Two Lives can be frustrating because Seth's own voice is so muffled. But this book grows on the reader, because of the care with which Seth has tended his memories; and in the end, it's the very ordinariness of Henny and Shanti's lives that touches a responsive chord in us.
Last Word: Hertopias
(Published in The Kolkata Telegraph, September 2005)
"Only catch them [men] and put them in the zenana." In 1905, that was the advice Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein offered in her vision of a feminist utopia called 'Ladyland' in Sultana's Dream.
Ladyland was a benign utopia, as these things go. It was unlike the female-populated utopia created by another pioneering writer, Charlotte Gilman Perkins. Herland was not a feminist vision of a perfect, manless world so much as a slightly rabid vision of a perfect, Aryan-populated world where the purity of the race was protected by an unbroken line of births through parthogenesis. In Gilman's book, three male explorers eventually break into Herland, with troubling consequences.
Over half a century later, Suniti Namjoshi explored the concept of a feminist utopia in Mothers of Mayadip, which took a dark, dystopian line. In Mothers of Mayadip, female infanticide has been replaced by the ritual killing of male babies. The vision of the perfect, free, female society has been marred by suspicion, conservatism and paranoia. Nor is Namjoshi convinced that a world without the tyranny of men amounts to the same thing as a world without men.
It took a writer of the calibre of Ursula K Le Guin to explore the finer shades of gender politics, which she did with particular skill in The Left Hand of Darkness. I liked the world she created, where the inhabitants were gender-neutral most of the time, but can become either male or female when their sexual cycle peaks. They may choose to be male in one season, female in another. The world of Winter is seen through the eyes of an androgyne, Gethen, which makes it even more interesting: our world of two fixed, immutable genders begins to seem deeply limited.
The interesting thing about feminist utopias is that even the authors who create them don't appear to want a world ruled by women. They want the opposite of the nightmare vision Margaret Atwood set out in A Handmaid's Tale, where she created a world of Wives, Marthas, and Handmaids, in subservient thrall to the men.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein was actually ahead of her time when she wrote Sultana's Dream. The women of her utopia don't view men as the enemy, but see them with affection as time-wasting creatures who must be shut up because they can't control their own appetites and urges. Once the men are behind purdah, women can get on with running things the way they should be. Back in 1905, Rokeya dreamed of a world where women had learned to harness the power of science, had pressed solar energy and rainwater harvesting into service. Her vision contrasted women's "sentimental" view of science with the masculine "military" view of science, to fascinating effect.
It's exactly a hundred years after it was first published in The Indian Ladies Journal and Sultana's Dream deserves to find a wider audience. For me, it's fascinating to think that a woman born in Bangladesh and brought up so conservatively that she had to learn English and Bengali in secret would have dreamed of a utopia that rivaled anything her colleagues elsewhere had come up with. Today, it's her gentle but empowering vision that we need, rather than Gilman's subliminally racist utopia or the fear-filled worlds of women driven into retaliation.
"Only catch them [men] and put them in the zenana." In 1905, that was the advice Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein offered in her vision of a feminist utopia called 'Ladyland' in Sultana's Dream.
Ladyland was a benign utopia, as these things go. It was unlike the female-populated utopia created by another pioneering writer, Charlotte Gilman Perkins. Herland was not a feminist vision of a perfect, manless world so much as a slightly rabid vision of a perfect, Aryan-populated world where the purity of the race was protected by an unbroken line of births through parthogenesis. In Gilman's book, three male explorers eventually break into Herland, with troubling consequences.
Over half a century later, Suniti Namjoshi explored the concept of a feminist utopia in Mothers of Mayadip, which took a dark, dystopian line. In Mothers of Mayadip, female infanticide has been replaced by the ritual killing of male babies. The vision of the perfect, free, female society has been marred by suspicion, conservatism and paranoia. Nor is Namjoshi convinced that a world without the tyranny of men amounts to the same thing as a world without men.
It took a writer of the calibre of Ursula K Le Guin to explore the finer shades of gender politics, which she did with particular skill in The Left Hand of Darkness. I liked the world she created, where the inhabitants were gender-neutral most of the time, but can become either male or female when their sexual cycle peaks. They may choose to be male in one season, female in another. The world of Winter is seen through the eyes of an androgyne, Gethen, which makes it even more interesting: our world of two fixed, immutable genders begins to seem deeply limited.
The interesting thing about feminist utopias is that even the authors who create them don't appear to want a world ruled by women. They want the opposite of the nightmare vision Margaret Atwood set out in A Handmaid's Tale, where she created a world of Wives, Marthas, and Handmaids, in subservient thrall to the men.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein was actually ahead of her time when she wrote Sultana's Dream. The women of her utopia don't view men as the enemy, but see them with affection as time-wasting creatures who must be shut up because they can't control their own appetites and urges. Once the men are behind purdah, women can get on with running things the way they should be. Back in 1905, Rokeya dreamed of a world where women had learned to harness the power of science, had pressed solar energy and rainwater harvesting into service. Her vision contrasted women's "sentimental" view of science with the masculine "military" view of science, to fascinating effect.
It's exactly a hundred years after it was first published in The Indian Ladies Journal and Sultana's Dream deserves to find a wider audience. For me, it's fascinating to think that a woman born in Bangladesh and brought up so conservatively that she had to learn English and Bengali in secret would have dreamed of a utopia that rivaled anything her colleagues elsewhere had come up with. Today, it's her gentle but empowering vision that we need, rather than Gilman's subliminally racist utopia or the fear-filled worlds of women driven into retaliation.
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