Lost in Translation

An Italian diplomat's hurried trip to Lhasa is a long way from a good read

A LONG WAY FROM TIBET By Carlo Buldrini Tara Press Price: $12.95 Pages: 226

There is a reason why this book is printed and published in India but the cover price is in US dollars and British pounds. An Italian writing on the Tibetan community in exile is not likely to make it to Indian bestseller lists. The community, along with its spiritual and temporal leader, the Dalai Lama, has been living in India for over 47 years now. A Long Way From Tibet is clearly intended for a foreign audience for whom phrases like "Free Tibet" still carry some resonance, even if it is among the loony fringe, naive idealists or fans of Steven Seagal and Richard Gere.

Carlo Buldrini spent 30 years as a journalist/diplomat in India, which is where his interest-personal and professional-in the Tibetans in exile took root. He gives us a history of the Tibetan issue, the genesis, case studies of people who were forced out of Tibet and then makes a pilgrimage to Lhasa to check the situation out for himself. The style is like someone in a hurry sending a telegram home.

This book has been translated from Italian and something has clearly got lost in the process. Buldrini reproduces an entire speech by the Dalai Lama, later the complete interview he was granted with the Great Man Who Smiles a Lot. Where Buldrini does spark interest is in his trip to Lhasa and the state of Tibetans. He discovers a city where porn shops are more prominent than prayer wheels. It is a classic lesson in subjugation. Force and ideology are nowhere as potent as vice. The book is part travelogue, part history lesson and worth reading only for scholars of Chinese-Tibetan history or if you have run out of reading material while marooned on an island.

AUTHORSPEAK: AITZAZ AHSAN

The Indus Man

Circa 1980. General Zia-ul Haq's iron rule. In one of Pakistan's jails, Aitzaz Ahsan, lawyer and member of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), was poring over The Discovery of India, another political prisoner's tryst with history some 40 years earlier. Triggered by Jawaharlal Nehru's book but not quite agreeing to his "romantic vision of the oneness of India", Ahsan went on a journey to reclaim the story of his homeland.

The 59-year-old's argument is compelling but controversial: Pakistan is not an aberration brought about by Partition. The distinction between the Indus region and the Gangetic region, as Ahsan refers to Pakistan and India, are primordial and natural. "The Pakistani is always taught that he is unIndian," says Ahsan. "But somebody had to tell him who he was." So Ahsan tells him that he is the Indus Man, liberal, tolerant, heir to a civilisation and a heritage that includes the Vedas. The Indus Saga: From Pataliputra to Partition (Roli), which was received with an uproar in Pakistan in 1996, is now published in India.

"Partition was really the recreation of the Indus region," says Ahsan, who was Pakistan's leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 1999. Unfortunately, it did not mean that all of Ahsan's Indus men stayed back at home and celebrated while Nehru and Jinnah unfurled two different flags. It was a bloody crossing from the banks of the Ganga to that of the Indus and vice versa. When Ahsan travels back to the Bronze Age, he treads on the slippery ground of the riverbank and history gives way to hypothesis. The Indus Civilisation was not just a cluster of settlements in Pakistan, as he assumes, but extended all the way to Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat. He even says fundamentalist priests ruled the Indus cities when that is still in the sphere of surmise. Perhaps the book's relevance is best summed up in Ahsan's parting shot: "It may inspire others to study the region in detail."

For all his journeys across centuries, Ahsan's concerns remain contemporary. "My party PPP is at the butt end of military tactics," he says. "Democracy is the only solution." That is for his next book, Divided by Democracy, cowritten with Lord Meghnad Desai. There Ahsan returns to his Indus man-the modern one who missed his tryst with democracy.

-By Charmy Harikrishnan