Geography Of Rebels: From Calcutta To Shanghai

This reminds me of Calcutta

It is raining today in Shanghai. I am walking in the streets. I see a bougainvillea plant, its flowers red. My mind immediately goes to my childhood—afternoons ambling along the road near my house, looking aimlessly and without knowledge of plants. Sometimes, my mother would have a sprig of bougainvillea in an arrangement in our home, a lazy plant with a stem that would allow the flowers to lounge along the edge of the vase. My mother preferred the more violet coloured bougainvillea, but these were not often to be seen. When they were, she would cut a piece and walk along with it. She loved that entire line of purple, from lavender to mauve. I have an urge to lean into the bougainvillea plant in Shanghai and to cut a sprig, or at least to rub my face against it—as an homage to my mother. But the plant is on a wall, and I would have to reach up high to pull it down. So, I do not. I just stop, look at it, remember my childhood’s street and my mother, and walk along.

Wherever I go, I seem to compare places to my childhood city of Calcutta, or now Kolkata. When we lived in Beirut (Lebanon), everything reminded me of it—the houses, the port, the flowers and trees, the atmosphere, even the mix of populations. My father had been to Beirut in the 1950s, a trader for Indian coal from Turkey to Egypt. I have a set of photographs of my father in Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul. He is dressed in a dapper suit, photographed in places that I would later visit and where I would later live (including the AUB campus in Beirut, along the Mediterranean Sea). I printed those photographs and tried to find all the places in the city that he had visited, but the city had changed—even though its history remained in its neighbourhoods. What had changed it, of course, was the Civil War (1975-1990) that came between my father’s Beirut and my Beirut. ‘This reminds me of Calcutta’, became a refrain whenever I walked around Beirut—the markets, the old buildings, the smell in the air.

The grey European I still have in me

When the Brazilian modernist writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) went into the province of Amazonas in 1927, he was struck by the experience that he had. In one of his ‘O tursita aprendiz’ (‘The Tourist Apprentice’) columns for O Diario Nacional, Andrade wrote that the landscape “wrecks the neat grey European I still have in me”. That is an interesting observation because it means that his comparisons had Europe not as a norm, but as a basis for distinction, for an assessment. When he travelled in the safety of the steamboat, and after the harsh conquest of the rain forests against its earlier inhabitants, Andrade nevertheless imagined himself in an untamed landscape with a savage population ever ready to attack him. This was a story that he had read in a European novel, not something that he had previously experienced or anything that he would experience. His Amazonas was corrupted by the fantasy of the New World that had been given to him by colonial education. This poly-cultural imagination is what propelled Andrade to write Macunaíma (1928), his madcap novel, the magic of everyday realism in Brazil’s cultural maelstrom.

For me, the anthropology of comparison always begins with my own experiences in India as a young man, so embedded in me are those emotions and ideas. When I am in China, for instance, particularly in rural China, I compare the non-existence of social hierarchies with the wretchedness of the hierarchies of caste in the Indian case. And the difference between the two is not to me part of our cultural histories, because that would not explain the hideousness of practices in earlier China, such as the graded four occupations of the fengjian zhidu. The difference was made by the radical reconstruction of the agrarian social landscape by the Chinese Revolution of 1949 that abolished social distinctions and attempted to emancipate the agricultural workers. It makes no sense to compare China to the United States, which had a completely different social history, but it does make sense to look at China and India closely together because they share a common history of imperialism, a common anti-colonial struggle, and a common destiny to build the sovereignty of their peoples. And yet, there are major differences, which can only be accounted for by the fact that China had a revolution led by the Communists and that India took the capitalist path with some important social democratic adjustments to prevent mass starvation.

Comparisons are a dance between similarities and differences. One seeks similarities to make different places familiar, to see oneself in them and to seek a common humanity. But at the same time, the basis for seeking similarities is the recognition of the differences between societies and cultures. The bougainvillea in Shanghai reminds me of Calcutta and so it makes me happy. But it also reminds me that I am not there in Calcutta. Comparisons are wistful, emotional: a flower, a smell, or a sound. They are not always scientific, which is why it is difficult to always erase the default option of the comparison with the old colonial West, not with its reality, but with its self-image: concepts that are as alien to the actual experience of the West, such as democracy and affluence—class-bound realities that pretend to be universal. The Democracy Index would always favour the old colonial West, because the categories of democracy (free elections, free speech, free press) are built around the experiences in the West and do not rise from the actual experiences of the peoples of the former colonial world. That is why, when a NATOesque think tank, the Alliance for Democracies (with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as one of its patrons), did a large survey of the peoples of the world and asked them about their perception of democracy, only 50 per cent of the people in the United States said that they lived in a democracy, while over 85 per cent of the Chinese people surveyed said that they lived in a democracy. Why? Because the Chinese understand the word ‘democracy’ to include the eradication of absolute poverty, the safety and efficiencies of their cities, and the fight against corruption.

Litchis and the mango

I am on a cycle rickshaw, riding through the narrow lanes of Delhi’s Shadipur working-class neighbourhood. With me is G.P. Deshpande (1938-2013), one of the funniest Marxists, the clearest-eyed commentators on world affairs, and a revered Marathi-language playwright. It is not so well-known, but GPD—as he called himself for his weekly columns in Economic and Political Weekly—was a scholar of China. In the 1950s, the Indian Ministry of Defence opened a School of Foreign Languages to teach a range of languages, including Chinese and Japanese. GPD studied Chinese and took an interest in Chinese-Indian politics. This was the highpoint of the Asian renewal. India had hosted an Asian Relations Conference in 1947 to build solidarity with the Indonesian struggle against the Dutch attempt to recolonise the islands; in 1949, the young Chinese Revolution hosted an Asian Women’s Conference and an Asian trade union conference. Senior Chinese diplomats—including Zhou Enlai (1898-1976)—visited India to discuss the new era in the continent and the world, an epoch that dramatically led to the Asian African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955.

On the cycle rickshaw, I was trying to convince GPD to write a short book on his experience with teaching about China in India. It was in that context that he told me a story. When Zhou Enlai visited Delhi in 1954, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) decided to hold a banquet in Teen Murti House for Zhou and to invite students from the School of Foreign Languages to come and impress him with their Chinese skills. The slogan in the air was Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai (India-China Are Brothers). GPD was one of the students invited to come. The students hung around Zhou, listening to him tell stories of the Chinese Revolution and about what they were doing to advance matters in China. It was time for dessert. Nehru walked over. On the plates were litchis and ice cream. Nehru began to tell Zhou about the perils of eating a litchi: the red skin must be peeled off, but then the white flesh must be carefully eaten because of the black seed within. Zhou did not say anything. He smiled and ate his litchi and ice cream. A few months later, a box arrived from the Chinese Embassy to Teen Murti. It was filled with litchis. Nehru must have got the point. Litchis, also known as litchi chinensis, originated in southern China, having a documented history that goes back to the 11th century. The fruit was introduced into India in 1789 by Chinese traders who came to Bihar through Burma.

When GPD told me this story, I remembered an exhibition I had seen in Beijing that displayed—without much comment—a mango made of wax with a portrait of Mao Zedong nearby. Later, I learnt that in 1968 Pakistan’s foreign minister Mian Arshad Hussain had sent Mao a box of Sindri mangoes—the only one in my opinion to contest the Alphonso as the King of Mangoes. Mao faced a crisis at Tsinghua University (Beijing), where two factions of the Red Guards had begun to attack each other during the Cultural Revolution. To break up this battle, Mao sent in thousands of workers known as the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team to stop the conflict. Mao decided to send the box of mangoes to the Team to reward them for their brave work (a few hundred people died in the conflict). The mango, which Mao did not taste, was seen as a sign of Mao’s selflessness, and rather than eat them, the mangoes were sealed in formaldehyde and made into icons. This was the start of the Mango Cult, with mangoes made of wax paraded around the country. A year later, the wax mangoes were used as candles.

A revolutionary flower

The bougainvillea did not need to be discovered or even named. A few years before he died, I spent an afternoon with the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) in Montevideo. We were in a café in the quiet of the city, when I noticed a plant in the corner from my childhood—the kalanchoe; when I pointed it out, Galeano, who was curious about everything, told me that we should ask about it. The woman who ran the café was interested in my discovery of the plant, which I was insistent had its origin somewhere in Asia. She was sure it was a plant from the Amazon, but we left it at that. After she had gone back to her work, Galeano said, “Fortunately, the plant does not care about human geography and perhaps does not care about its place of origin or the name we give it. It only cares about water and sunlight.” That is true. Neither the kalanchoe (which is said to originate in Malaysia) nor the bougainvillea care about geography and nomenclature.

It turned out, anyway, that these plants continue to play mischief with us. The flowers of the bougainvillea are not flowers, after all, but leaves, and the bougainvillea is neither native to China nor India. Its name comes from French naval officer Louis Antoine de Bougainville who captained the Boudeuse into Rio de Janeiro harbour in 1767 on his voyage around the world. The naturalist Philibert Commerçon was ill, but his lover—Jean Baret—who had disguised herself as a man to come on board, went out in search of herbs to heal him. She is said to have brought the plant on board, which was then named in honour of their captain.

(Views expressed are personal)

Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute For Social Research. his latest book is on Cuba: Reflections On 70 Years Of Revolution And Struggle, written with Noam Chomsky