A Bridge of Ideas

Kumar stresses the potential of education as a unifying force

BATTLE FOR PEACE By Krishna Kumar Penguin Price: Rs 175 Pages: 152

Krishna Kumar’s Battle for Peace is a thoughtful extended essay that explores the apparent Manichean divide between the two countries, and the possibilities of a new way forward with skill and an Indian sensitivity. In a slim volume, Kumar covers considerable terrain: the Partition, the weltanschauung of Gandhi and Jinnah, a critique of narrow nationalism and modernity and the challenges of globalisation. It is in the education system of the two countries that Kumar finds problems, but also the potential for engineering real change. He writes: “A time will come… when nearly all of South Asia’s children will attend school… will they develop a mindful identity which might allow room for the thought that others who are different are not necessarily enemies? The future of South Asia depends on how curriculum designers respond to this question, on which alternative they choose.”

But surely education can only be part of a process of India-Pakistan reconciliation, which can only be state-driven initially. Fortunately, there is space, at least for now, with the leaderships in the two countries seeking a shift in the policies of the past. Will civil society, big business and academia make use of this opportunity to bring about a real change? And will those institutions of the state let this incipient peace process bloom? The reconciliation, were it to happen, would have to be grand in its design and vision, but incremental in its process and execution: several flakes that would come together and snowball into an unstoppable avalanche of peace. And one important flake would be education.

Hopeless in Kabul
Hosseini’s second novel exposes the sorry plight of the Afghan wife
By Sonya Dutta Choudhury

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS By Khaled Hosseini Bloomsbury Price: £5.99 Pages: 372

Hosseini’s first novel, the splendidly sentimental The Kite Runner, was quite the rage and deservedly so; this one, the story of two wives, is guaranteed to go the bestseller route as well. It’s dramatic, even soap operatic, providing an insider’s view of the plight of the girl child, and of the Afghan wife.

The book begins with the story of Mariam, consigned with her epileptic mother, to a tiny hut on the outskirts of Herat. For Mariam is harami, an illegitimate child of a rich businessman. When her mother hangs herself, Mariam is married, at 15, to 45-year-old shoemaker Rasheed of “crowded teeth… nails yellow-brown, like the inside of a rotting apple”, and dispatched to faraway Kabul, where wives are only valued for their procreating potential. And Miriam only miscarries.

Here’s when the pretty Laila, who lives down the street in Kabul, comes in. The rocket bomb death of her parents pushes her, pregnant and protector-less, into the wife-beating arms of Rasheed. The two women soon warm up to each other, their courtyard cups of chai and halwa together becoming one bright spot in the day. “Women like us. We endure,” Mariam’s mother had told her presciently years ago, and the their friendship helps them do exactly that. “There isn’t a court in this godforsaken country that will hold me accountable for what I do,” Rasheed declares, in perfect sync with a Taliban regime that will soon chillingly announce: “Attention, women, you will stay inside your house at all times… If you are caught alone on the streets, you will be beaten and sent home.”

Sadly, such tales are all too true, even if much of the history and politics in the novel seems plastered on. A Thousand Splendid Suns is pulp fiction at its emotive best.

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