Monthly Archives: September 2004

by | 21 September 2004 · 8:42 pm

Taiwanese Investment in Africa

While China is investing in oil pipelines in Sudan, Taiwan is investing in garment factories in Lesotho. Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia reports on a global shift from Asia to Africa.

Most of the discussion about “global shift” over the last two decades has been about manufacturing moving to Asia. Many of my students have asked me when we might see a shift to Africa. Well, I can tell them now. The congested industrial zone in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, houses one of Africa’s biggest clusters of textile and garment factories. Nearly all are Taiwanese owned and export their wares to the US. Some labour and environmental activists have complained about the plants’ pollution levels and labour practices.

But for most people in the landlocked kingdom, a job cutting or sewing denim destined for US stores is a prized position with a common salary of more than $100 a month (higher than in some parts of Asia). Lesotho benefits from the US’s African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), that exempts some clothing made in the continent’s poorest countries from strict duties and quotas….

CGM, a Taiwanese-owned factory, offers a striking tableau of globalisation. The Chief Executive is Indian and the factory employs 8000 people in Lesotho. It uses cheap fabric from China, India and Pakistan to produce jeans and trousers destined for Levi Strauss, Gap, WalMart and other American chains.

via Foreign Dispatches via Simon World

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by | 21 September 2004 · 5:35 pm

Indonesian Presidential Election Run-off

The Swanker at Macam-Macam is back from hiatus with a post on the Indonesian presidential elections.

You can add the name Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to the pantheon of misfits, megalomaniacs and kleptocrats that have taken residence in Merdeka [‘Freedom’] Palace as President of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia, following:

– Megawati Sukarnoputri,

– Abdurrahman Wahid,

– BJ Habibie,

– Suharto,

– Sukarno.

The Christian Science Monitor strikes a more positive note.

With 155 million eligible voters, Indonesia directly chose its president for the first time on Monday, as well as electing local, regional, and national legislators. The voting was largely peaceful and, despite many complexities, conducted on one day (although official results are two weeks away).

Civic activism has taken root in Indonesia since the ouster of former dictator Suharto in 1998, despite attempts by Islamic political parties to gain power. Voters feel so independent in fact that it’s likely the current president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, may have been defeated in this election, according to early estimates. The candidate expected to win, former Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is popular for his secular leadership and record on fighting terrorism.

But even more positive coverage is at Agam’s Gecko, which I can’t resist quoting at length.

It was a fabulous day yesterday for Indonesians, and for their growing and strengthening democracy. The entire procedure — one of the largest scale exercises in democracy in the world — came off very smoothly. So much so, that it seemed to excite many of the mid-day commentators as the results came in. The fact that they could, in an election taking place across tens of thousands of islands spanning three time zones, be in a position to confidently declare the next president only hours after the polls closed in the western time zone, was taken as a point of pride in the efficiency and use of modern election techniques which have been implimented. It seems like they’ve had quite a lot of practice this year — parliamentary elections in March, first round presidential election in July, and yesterday’s presidential run-off between Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono….

Megawati just seems tired, I think she’s known for a while now that her term would be ending here. People are grateful for the measure of stability that she was able to maintain, and for moving some of the reforms along (such as these first direct presidential elections), but they are looking for a more energetic leader.

Best of all, this is a very fine answer to all those in other parts of the world who nervously wonder whether Islam is compatible with democracy. Indeed, if all those pundits and opinion-shapers of the mainstream media world would take time out from listening to their own voices, they might have noticed that a very important example was taking shape right under their noses. It still amazes me how little attention this country gets these days, considering that it is the most populous Muslim country in the world. And we can have any number of Agams of Tapaktuan telling anyone who would listen, that Indonesian Muslims are practically the most generous, tolerant and good natured people one is likely to find on this earth — it will never have the impact of just having our information gate-keepers giving it the attention it warrants.

In fact, and you won’t find this in any of the MSM [the universally reviled MainStream Media] coverage, there were some positively inspiring demonstrations of how to work the democratic process into the local cultural milieu. In many polling places, some in Bali and East Java that I saw on tv, every voter came dressed in the traditional clothing of the area — and in several examples that were covered by local media, the polling station officials and workers went all out to make it a special day, with ballot checkers and counters done up as traditional characters from mythological stories. One polling station in Yogyakarta was absolutely fantastic, with everyone in full costume from the wayang stories. When Arjuna hands you your ballot paper, and Gatokaca offers the ink pot to dip your pinky in while the gamelan chimes gently in the background, that’s pretty damn cool in my book. These were excellent examples of the Indonesian people saying, “This is democracy, this is what we struggled for, this is what reformasi was all about, and we want it. This is democracy, and this is our way of doing it.”

And they make it look like so much darn fun. All this in the wake of the horrendous terrorist attack in the heart of the capital less than two weeks ago. I think part of the giddiness that I noticed toward the end of the day, was sheer relief that none of the terrible possibilities that one could not help worrying about, actually took place. There had apparently been bomb warnings and phoned threats, those had been happening ever since the embassy blast on the 9th. There were definite worries on most minds, yet they turned out (early, most of them) to vote for their head of state, for the first time ever. They did it joyfully, and they made it their own. Yes, democracy is definitely compatible with Islam, no question about it….

AFTERTHOUGHT: So like, the next thing is trying to get our journalistic profession to actually learn how to say the name of the next president of the biggest Muslim nation. Would that be too much to ask? I mean, watching CNN the past few days, in addition to the BBC’s Rachel Harvey and her stupid persistent use of “Bang-Bang”, I’ve heard everything from “Yuhodio” to “Yuhohohodo”. It’s ridiculous! OK newsreaders, so it looks a bit intimidating with that one seemingly superfluous h. Don’t let it get to you, and just take five seconds to look at it. Take it slow: YUDHOYONO. You. Dough. Yo. No. Is that so hard? Or if you want to be a perfectionist: Yude. Hoe. Yo. No. Say it fast. Faster. Just like it’s spelled. You got it.

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by | 20 September 2004 · 10:52 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Gays in the Draft-era Military

The only long-term friend I made during my Army days was gay. And he wasn’t even in the Army; he was a sailor, one of my roommates at the Defense Language Institute. It didn’t strike me until many years later that a fair number of my fellow students at DLI must have been gay. What a shame it would have been if all their language skills had been rejected.

Gary was an ardent film buff from Tulsa, OK. He and I went to many movies in Monterey, Carmel, and elsewhere on the Peninsula, from Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic “War and Peace” to Russ Meyer’s graphic “Vixen.” We also spent a lot of time exploring local history, from Steinbeck to Robert Louis Stevenson.

One weekend when we had planned to hike over the top of the Presidio along a section of 17-mile Drive and down toward Carmel, he failed to return to our room on Friday night. When he finally got back Saturday, he gingerly confessed to me that he had spent the night with a gay acquaintance in town. I was the first straight person he had revealed himself to, and he seemed to think it would be the end of our friendship. But it wasn’t. The next day we took a long hike together, either all the way to Carmel or to a Carmel Valley movie theatre. I can’t really remember.

After he finished his Spanish course at DLI, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, with some time in Guantanamo. He would write long letters about the local scene there, but nothing quite so explicit as what he later wrote once he got out of the Navy and settled in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, where he found work in a factory that employed a lot of Spanish-speaking employees. Once there, his letters began to reveal much more about his active sexlife, including his bathhouse adventures.

By then, I was in graduate school in Hawai‘i, and my life seemed hopelessly boring by comparison, except when I did a spell of fieldwork. However, it was during graduate school that a lesbian friend recruited me to participate in a new gay rights parade right down the length of Waikiki. I only did it for Gary’s sake. There were hardly more than a dozen of us, and I got filmed passing right in front of a TV camera on the local news. When we got to the end, near the Honolulu Zoo, I spent a long time looking at the monkeys–with considerable empathy.

Later in the 1970s, I visited Gary in LA and we made a nostalgic trip back to the Monterey Peninsula, stopping at Hearst Castle en route. When we stopped at a public rest room after a hike around Point Lobos, Gary confessed he was pee-shy. He couldn’t use a public urinal if other men were around. I don’t know how the hell he survived 4 years in the Navy.

I finally lost touch with him in the late 1970s, after I began writing my dissertation and he began writing about his prior incarnations as Amenhotep. La-La-Land must have begun to take a toll on his sensitive mind. I hope his dangerously promiscuous lifestyle didn’t make him a victim of the early stages of the AIDS pandemic.

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by | 19 September 2004 · 11:40 am

Kyokushuzan Grabs Sumo Lead

The Japan Times reports

Mongolian magician [“supermarket of tricks”] Kyokushuzan bundled out Tokitsuumi on Saturday to take sole possession of the lead [at 7-0] heading into the second week of the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament.

Lowly maegashira Kyokushuzan kept both his perfect record (8-0) and his lead on Sunday, with ozeki Dejima (at 7-1) right behind him, and 5 rikishi just one loss behind (at 6-2).

It’s been a very, very unusual tournament. Top-ranked Asashoryu lost two in a row, for what may be a personal worst since becoming yokozuna. And there are more foreigners than ever in the top Makuuchi division. In addition to the five Mongolians–Asashoryu, Asasekiryu, Kyokushuzan, Kyokutenho, and Hakuho–there’s the Georgian Kokkai, the Bulgarian Kotooshu, the Russian Roho, and the Korean Kasugao.

UPDATE, Day 9: After fellow maegashira (and former ozeki) Dejima beat Kyokushuzan on Day 9, they both share the lead, at 8-1, with yokozuna Asashoryu, ozeki Kaio, and sekiwake Wakanosato right behind, at 7-2.

UPDATE, Day 10: After losing again, Kyokushuzan is tied with Dejima, Kaio, and grand champion Asashoryu at 8-2.

As usual, more at That’s News to Me.

UPDATE, Day 12: Kaio grabs the lead, at 10-2, after Dejima and Asashoryu lose, dropping to 9-3. Asa is having his worst tournament of the year.

UPDATE, Day 15: Ozeki Kaio (13-2) defeats yokozuna Asashoryu (9-6!) to clinch the tournament. Kyokushuzan ends up with an 11-4 record. The foreign rookies Roho (10-5) and Kotooshu (9-6) did as well as the sole yokozuna. What a strange, fragmented tournament full of upsets!

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by | 19 September 2004 · 11:23 am

Good Soldier Outlier: Language School Idyll

For two weeks after Basic Training, I visited my family at the Foreign Mission Board in Richmond as they were getting ready to return to Japan, then I flew military stand-by across the continent on July Fourth and reported for duty the next day at the Defense Language Institute, West Coast (DLIWC, “dillywick”) at the beautiful Presidio of Monterey, CA.

I’ll never forget what the sergeant who greeted us said after he formed the new students in ranks and marched us off to our barracks: “Not bad for school troops.” What a world of difference from our initial reception at boot camp!

Our barracks were cinderblock dormitories, with two or three students to a room, a mix of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. My first two roommates were sailors studying Spanish. (Spanish took 6 months, Romanian 9 months.) The Romanian class ahead of me consisted of a half dozen airmen, headed for listening stations in Turkey, and one sergeant in military intelligence. My class consisted of only three students: on my left, a soldier in military intelligence fresh out of Yale; on my right, an FBI agent from Chicago; and right between them, me, a 20-year-old college dropout. Most students at DLI seemed to be college graduates.

We spent 6 hours a day in class, 5 days a week, and were expected to spend a few hours afterward studying. But I found the classwork easy enough that I hardly spent more than 15 minutes after breakfast memorizing the daily dialog. We had few other duties, just keeping our rooms shipshape and regularly mopping and buffing the hallways. The TV lounge in the far wing of the barracks was where I watched the first moon landing, just 2 weeks after I arrived.

Somebody in the barracks, maybe it was the company clerk, kept a small boa constrictor in his room, and he would gather a crowd of spectators whenever he put a live lab mouse in the terrarium for the snake’s weekly feast. The Marines who took the crash course in Vietnamese at DLI had a far better chance of surviving than those poor mice.

I had a lot of time to read. Before getting to know the area, I spent a few long weekend afternoons at the snackbar on post, sipping a beer while wading through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, deciphering Mme Chauchat’s French on the basis of my high-school French. But once I had ventured out the back gate of the Presidio and walked straight downhill to Cannery Row, I read everything I could find by Steinbeck, nonfiction as well as fiction. This was before Cannery Row had been completely made over as a tourist attraction.

Romanian classes were known to take an excessive number of fieldtrips. One long weekend in August, our combined classes went to LA to attend a Romania Day picnic. When we tried out a few phrases of our new language, matronly ladies would praise us for maintaining the language–unlike their own kids. One evening on that trip, a group of us attended a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Perhaps the most memorable weekend trip, however, was not a class excursion. A group of us drove up to San Francisco in November to participate in a huge peace march, where I remember being a bit bothered by the number of North Vietnamese flags on display. That evening, we went to see the risqué rock musical Hair. We wore civilian clothes, but our short hair made it obvious we were military.

In some ways, DLIWC was the best school experience I’ve had: getting free room, board, and pay to study nothing but language for 9 months straight, and all in a beautiful setting like the Monterey Peninsula. Despite being in the military, it was a far more Athenian than Spartan existence.

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by | 16 September 2004 · 8:13 pm

Review of Living Dangerously in Korea

Korean Studies Review has posted online a review by Don Baker of Donald Clark’s book Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950 (Eastbridge, 2003), portions of which were excerpted on this blog back in June. Excerpts from the review follow.

In his title, Don Clark advertises this book as an account of the Western missionary experience in Korea over the first half of the twentieth century. He is too modest. This book is much more than that. Because he writes about how the missionaries responded to the various situations they found themselves witnessing, and sometimes caught up in, he has actually provided a history of Korea from 1900-1950, albeit one filtered through the eyes of Western residents….

Since Western missionaries, including Charlie Clark, remained in Korea after the annexation of 1910, Clark is able to provide a different view of Japanese rule than is usually found in Korean accounts. First of all, he points out that most of the missionaries (with the conspicuous exceptions of Hulbert and Allen) were at first ambivalent about the Japanese takeover, hoping that a colonial government more modern than the Confucian government it replaced would open up more space for missionary activity. However, they soon found out that the Japanese were not enthusiastic about the spread of Christianity in Korea and in fact raised barriers to it….

A more serious problem for the missionaries in the 1920s was the rise of resentment by some Korean Christians of the missionary domination of Korean Christianity. Koreans wanted control of Christian schools such as the Chosen Christian College (now Yonsei University) to be turned over to them faster than the missionaries wanted to relinquish control. Clark tells us that such prominent Korean Christians as Paek Nakchun and Yun Ch’iho resented what they considered “missionary paternalism” in this and other matters. However, such disputes paled in comparison with the issue that confronted both the missionaries and Korean Christians in the 1930s. When the Japanese demanded that Christian schools permit their students to participate in Shinto rituals, both the missionary community and the Korean Christian community were split over how to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s while remaining faithful to the laws of God. The issue was soon rendered moot for the missionaries by the rise of tension between the US and Japan which led to the expulsion of most of the missionaries in 1940. Korean Christians were left behind to resolve that moral dilemma for themselves.

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by | 16 September 2004 · 5:53 pm

Phillip Knightley’s "Interesting if True"

Granta 53 (1996), entitled News: Scoops, Lies and Videotape offers online an extract of the lead contribution, “Interesting if True” by veteran journalist Phillip Knightley. Here’s the tail end of it.

The most glamorous round [= beat] at the [Melbourne] Herald was of course the police one. The chief police roundsman [= beat reporter] was Alan Dower, a tall, distinguished man with a military moustache and bearing, whose act at parties was to borrow a broomstick, pretend he was on the parade ground and carry out drill as ordered by an imaginary sergeant major. His deputy was Lionel Hogg, who could well have been a detective himself had he not opted for journalism. It was Hogg’s job to give an occasional lecture to the cadets on the mysteries of reporting. One sticks in my mind. ‘A little twist to the most mundane of stories can turn it into a front page lead,’ Hogg began. ‘Now take what happened to me last week. The police got a call to a restaurant where the chef had just beaten off an armed robber. I interviewed him and asked him how he had done it. He said he chucked a plate of food in the man’s face and the guy ran away. That’s a pretty boring story. But I noticed that the restaurant was a Hungarian one. So I asked the chef what the plate of food had been. He said that in the excitement he hadn’t noticed. So I wrote a lead that said the chef of a Hungarian restaurant had foiled an armed robber by chucking a plate of Hungarian goulash in his face. It made page one.’ We thought about it for a second or two; then one of the cadets said, ‘But, Lionel, that wasn’t true.’ Hogg laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but it should have been.’

Hogg arranged for each cadet to accompany a night police patrol car crewed by three detectives so we would get a feel for police work. On my night we crawled around the darkened inner suburbs of Melbourne hoping that the radio would crackle to life with some exciting crime in our area, but the only message we got was an order to check out a man sleeping on a bench in a park near the state parliament building. He did not speak English, and the detectives were losing their patience with him, so I felt justified in intervening and with some schoolboy French discovered he was a crew member of a ship in harbour and had missed the last bus back to the docks. Instead of being grateful, the police became wary of me. Squashed between two of them in the back seat of the squad car, we maintained an uneasy silence until they spotted an old drunk urinating against a tree in St Kilda Road.

‘Dirty bastard,’ the driver said. ‘Teach him a lesson.’ The two detectives in the back of the car jumped out. One grabbed the old man’s hat and flung it far into park. The other began methodically kicking him in the backside as the old man staggered away mumbling protests and then fell over. The detective gave him one final kick and came back to the car. The exercise must have made them hungry because we headed off to the city centre and stopped at a late-night restaurant. The proprietor, a Greek, came hurrying up. ‘Oyster soup and steaks, Tony,’ one of the detectives said, ‘and put some bloody oysters in the soup.’ When we were leaving, I made an effort to pay for my share. ‘Put it away,’ one of the detectives ordered. ‘It’s on the house. We look after Tony, he looks after us.’

Did I write any of this? Did I tell the Herald readers that their police were less than perfect? I did not. Hogg had made it clear that we were guests in the squad car and that anything that happened had to remain confidential, otherwise the cosy relationship between the police and the Herald police roundsmen would be endangered.

Thanks to Rainy Day for the lead. I don’t believe that the standards of either politics or journalism have declined so much as the public trust in both has plummeted while public demand for transparency has risen.

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by | 15 September 2004 · 8:02 pm

Legal Reform in the Muslim World

The 13 September edition of the New Statesman has a cover story by Ziauddin Sardar on reformation in the Muslim world, starting from the peripheries.

The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small “r”. From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations….

[I]n July, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board declared that triple talaq [‘I divorce thee’] was wrong, promised to prepare a model marriage contract (which would require both husband and wife not to seek divorce without due legal process) and asked Muslim men to ensure that women get a share in agricultural property….

For the vast majority of Muslims, changes to Islamic law have to be made within the boundaries of the Koran’s teachings if they are to be legitimate. Without the co-operation of the religious scholars, who bestow this legitimacy, the masses will not embrace change.

This is where Morocco has provided an essential lead. Its new Islamic family law, introduced in February, sweeps away centuries of bigotry and bias against women. It was produced with the full co-operation of religious scholars as well as the active participation of women….

Elsewhere, the focus is not so much on Islamic law as on Islam as a whole. In a general election last March, the Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, argued that Islam was almost totally associated with violence and extremism and needed to be formulated anew. He called his new concept “Islam Hadhari”, or progressive Islam. It was pitted against the “conservative Islam” of the main opposition party, the Islamic Pas. For the first time, the governing coalition won more than 90 per cent of federal parliamentary seats. Pas, and its version of Islam (full implementation of the sharia, without modification; a leading role in the state for religious scholars; and so on), were routed….

While Malaysia has a top-down model, Indonesia has opted for the bottom-up route. The reformist agenda is being promoted by Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the two largest and most influential Muslim organisations. Established at the dawn of the 20th century, they command between 60 and 80 million followers in mosques, schools and universities throughout Indonesia.

NU, essentially an organisation of religious scholars, is usually described as traditionalist, while Muhammadiyah, dominated by intellectuals, is seen as modernist. Since 9/11, however, the two organisations have acted, in some respects, as one. Both are committed to promoting civic society and reformulating sharia. They are campaigning jointly against corruption in public life and in favour of accountable, open democracy. The newly formed Liberal Islam Network – intended to resist radical groups such as Laskar Jihad (Army of Jihad) and Jemaah Islamiyah, which was implicated in the October 2002 Bali bombings – follows a similar programme. Its membership consists largely of young Muslims.

All three organisations promote a model of Islamic reform that they call “deformalisation”….

Both Malaysia’s Islam Hadhari and Indonesia’s deformalisation emphasise tolerance and pluralism, civic society and open democracy. Both are likely to spread. Malaysia is trying to export Islam Hadhari to Muslim communities in Thailand and the Philippines. Meanwhile, Morocco is trying to persuade Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to adopt its model of family law.

via Arts & Letters Daily

Macam-macam also offers a lengthy backgrounder Islam in Indonesia in the wake of the recent bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta.

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by | 14 September 2004 · 7:39 pm

Naipaul’s Magic Seeds

Sunday’s Guardian profiles Naipaul, who has yet another book out.

His latest, a novel, Magic Seeds, is the bleakly comic story of Willie Chandran who responds to the anxiety of his own displacement by trying to find ‘his war’. Chandran also featured in Naipaul’s last novel, Half a Life, in which he migrated from India to England to southern Africa, mostly in search of a sex life. Now he returns to India and joins up with a Maoist revolutionary group, lives in the jungle, wondering all the while what on earth he is up to….

Naipaul says he has always travelled with one question in his head: will this be interesting in 20 years’ time? His inquiry on the rise of Islamic states, Among the Believers, in 1981, has proved, in this respect, particularly prophetic. Most of the world still has not confronted its implications, he believes. ‘The blowing up of the towers: people could deal with it as an act of terror, but the idea of religious war is too frightening for people to manage. The word used is jihad. We like to translate it as holy war, but really it is religious war.’

Naipaul has always been clear about the iniquities of the world. ‘Hate oppression,’ he says, ‘but fear the oppressed.’ The thing he sees in the current terrorism is the exulting in other people’s death. ‘We are told the people who killed the children in Russia were smiling. The liberal voices were ready to explain the reasons for their actions. But this has no good side. It is as bad as it appears.’

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 14 September 2004 · 1:24 pm

Willie Chandran’s Identity Makeover

Willie Somerset Chandran, a youth from a starkly dysfunctional mixed-caste family in India, manages to attend university in England during the 1950s.

Willie was living in the college as in a daze. The learning he was being given was like the food he was eating, without savour…. He was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead….

At the college he had to re-learn everything that he knew. He had to learn how to eat in public. He had to learn how to greet people and how, having greeted them, not to greet them all over again in a public place ten or fifteen minutes later. He had to learn to close doors behind him. He had to learn how to ask for things without being peremptory.

The college was a semi-charitable Victorian foundatioin and it was modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. That was what the students were often told. And because the college was like Oxford and Cambridge it was full of various pieces of “tradition” that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn’t explain. There were rules, for instance, about dress and behaviour in the dining hall; and there were quaint, beer-drinking punishments for misdemeanours. Students had to wear black gowns on formal occasions…. The academic gown probably was copied from the Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe.

Yet something strange was happening. Gradually, learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see–and it was upsetting, at first–that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.

His mother’s firebrand uncle had agitated for years for freedom for the backwards [low-caste people]. Willie had always put himself on that side. Now he saw that the freedom the firebrand had been agitating about was his for the asking. No one he met, in the college or outside it, knew the rules of Willie’s own place, and Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry.

And just as in the college he had boasted in the beginning in an innocent, lonely way of the friendship of his “family” with the famous old writer and the famous Beaverbrook journalist, so now he began to alter other things about himself, but in small, comfortable ways. He had no big over-riding idea. He took a point here and another there. The newspapers, for instance, were full of news about the trade unions, and it occurred to Willie one day that his mother’s uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, who sometimes at public meetings wore a red scarf (in imitation of his hero, the famous backward revolutionary and atheistic poet Bharatidarsana), it occurred to Willie that this uncle of his mother’s was a kind of trade-union leader, a pioneer of workers’ rights. He let drop the fact in conversation and in tutorials, and he noticed that it cowed people.

It occurred to him at another time that his mother, with her mission-school education, was probably half a Christian. He began to speak of her as a full Christian; but then, to get rid of the mission-school taint and the idea of laughing barefoot backwards (the college supported a Christian mission in Nyasaland in Southern Africa, and there were mission magazines in the common room), he adapted certain things he had read, and he spoke of his mother as belonging to an ancient Christian community of the subcontinent, a community almost as old as Christianity itself. He kept his father as a brahmin. He made his father’s father a “courtier.” So, playing with words, he began to re-make himself. It excited him, and began to give him a feeling of power.

His tutors said, “you seem to be settling in.”

SOURCE: Half a Life: A Novel, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 2001), pp. 56-58.

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