The Hindu Business Line : Developing report

One is accustomed to many travelogues by authors and journalists from the West getting published from time to time. Yet, books from the East Bloc are never forthcoming. As a rare attempt to interpret India and other parts of the developing world through the eyes of a Polish journalist used to “depressingly dark cities” with “weak light bulbs” and “few cars”, the book does a commendable job.

But then, one should not approach the book with the expectations one would normally have of a travelogue. Instead, the late Ryszard Kapuscinski provides some rare insights into the business of news reporting for third world hamstrung by a shoestring budget

Neither should one be misled by the name, as Herodotus was not too familiar with India, and never knew of China. Congo and Senegal were, at best, unfamiliar territory.

The allusion here is to the influence Herodotus had on the reporting skills of the author.

A product of the openness that was ushered in post-perestroika, the book owes a lot to the dismantling of the iron curtain and the Berlin Wall — two events without which it would perhaps never have seen the light of day. The Cold War, non-alignment and the rise of Communism, as also global realignments in the post-War era were the developments intrinsic to the travels Kapuscinski undertook and hence shaped the book.

When Kapuscinski embarked on his first foreign assignment, he was presented with a volume of Herodotus’ The Histories by his boss. Herodotus ended up becoming the author’s guide and most loyal travel companion through all his subsequent sojourns abroad.

Rare glimpses of the ordinary

The miles of highway in battle-scarred Congo carrying the panic-stricken to nowhere, the careworn Algerians carrying out with their usual chores unmindful of a coup in the Presidential quarters, the manner in which Nasser’s guided democracy functioned with every citizen doubling as a potential informer, the passion of India’s linguistic wars in the 1960s, have us relive an important era of modern history as Kapuscinski plunges headlong into The Histories of Herodotus, as he tries to learn from the world’s first great reporter.

Kapuscinski shunts back and forth with Herodotus’ reportage of the ancient world alternating with his own accounts of the present. If Herodotus’ writings never missed out on the sufferings of the slaves and the ordinary plebeians as the colossi battled it out for empires, Kapuscinski gives us a rare glimpse of the ordinary Chinese worker during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution in China. The warmth of the author’s encounter with Sudanese students at a time that universities had been shut down by Gen Abboud in the 1960s in a bid to quell student radicalism provides another rare glimpse into the aspirations of the ordinary Sudanese, who would rather live their lives unconcerned with politics.

Deciphering India

Although Kapuscinski honestly admits to missing out on the shootouts, massacres and bloody internecine strife that global news reporting has always been about, we learn a lot from his encounters with the voiceless masses in Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, China, Congo and other parts of the developing world. Of course, the democracy he encountered in India was as confusing, as it was unique for a person hailing from a sparsely-populated nation subjected to authoritarian rule with few individual freedoms. As he tells us, “I doubted whether I could ever comprehend a country in which children started the day singing verses of philosophy.”

The babble of tongues, with a European language dominating every activity obviously confused the author on his visit in the 1950s and 1960s, but so did the violence that rocked the country in the wake of the language riots. The very make-up of the cities confounded him like none else. “The city seemed to have no suburbs, which normally prepare one gradually for the encounter with downtown; here one emerges all of a sudden out of the dark, silent and empty night into the brightly-lit, crammed and noisy city centre.”

“…I cannot fathom this need for a life of congestion, of rubbing against one another, of endlessly pushing and shoving — all the more so when right over there is so much empty space.”

Similarly, China taught him what an all-encompassing authority could bring in the lives of ordinary people, and shape their mental make-up. Kapuscinski’s interpretation of the Great Wall of China as the Great Metaphor of Chinese life makes for interesting reading. Likening the erection of the Great Wall with the Chinese desire “to fence oneself off… in the face of potential trouble”, Kapuscinski opines, “The worst aspect of the wall is to turn so many people into its defenders and produce a mental attitude that sees a wall running through everything, imagines the world as being divided into an evil and inferior on the outside, and a superior part on the inside. The keeper of the wall need not be in close proximity to it, he can be far away and it is enough that he carry within himself its image, and pledge allegiance to the logical principles the wall dictates.”

Kapuscinski’s studies of people, and comments on the typical Indian, Egyptian and Chinese personality are very interesting, and done with a bid to deciphering and understanding the local psyche. However, when the author remarks on the openness of expression of the Indian face, and contrasts it with the impassive Chinese persona, or the suspicious Egyptian visage, he fails to relate this with the political system that moulds each. After all, each individual is the creature of his environment; if the Indian is open and expressive, it is because he knows that he can afford to be so; whereas the Chinese or Egyptian is hampered by the totalitarian authority he is subjected to. The Chinese or the Egyptian can never be open, as human survival is at stake. This is what Kapuscinski should never have missed out on.

Politics, per se, the global realignments of the 1950s and 1960s, and non-alignment which actually shaped Kapuscinski’s travel plans as the East Bloc countries under the Soviet Union moved closer to India in the Nehruvian era, hardly find any mention here. Barring the passing mention of how the Polish Polit Bureau played a role in him getting to visit China to report on the people there, one never gets to hear much about the role of global communism in forging an alliance during that period.

There is no attempt by the author to relate the past to the present, even when he visits Iran in the throes of the Islamic revolution, and makes time out to visit the ruins and palaces of the forgotten rulers of ancient Persepolis that Herodotus has written so much about. The same applies to Kapuscinski’s chapters on Egypt ancient and modern.

The emphasis on gore and blood can be galling, especially where the selection of chapters from Herodotus’ Histories go. Besides, too many chapters related to Persian expeditions aimed at subjugating lesser peoples like the Ammonites and Scythians tend to distract the reader from the narrative.

Save for these inadequacies, the book does a good job in bringing us closer to life as it existed for the ordinary citizen in the developing world and the communist bloc during a much-eulogised era of modern history.

Above all, it makes us realise that news reporting is much more about the heart and soul, than of sound bytes and the printed word.

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