Indian railway reveries

It’s been a long ride. The Radjhani Express, one of India’s crack trains, was late in leaving Bombay yesterday evening – just exactly seven hours late. I was on it, bound for Delhi to meet a great Afghan friend. And, as this piece is written, I’m on it still.

“Seven hours late, sir, but late to the minute,” I was told. “Departure not at 1655 hours but at 2355.” The message seemed more proud than apologetic: No matter how delayed the hour, we’d leave at precisely 55 minutes past it.

Ever the anthropologist, I consoled myself by formulating a dubious generalization: That Indians across history have been A) masters of small interior concerns but B) victims of large matters beyond their control. Their satisfactions seem punctiliously detailed, obsessively exact. Their catastrophes, whether natural or human, overwhelm them from outside.

In this case, the problem is unseasonable weather. Trains as well as planes have been fogged in. Indian Railways’ reaction: Ignore the hours, but insist on the minutes. And as with time, so with people in this culture of micro-precision: Sharing my compartment is an Indian accountant. I’ve tried, without success, to find common ground in universal statements of traveler frustration. His response to inconvenience: total immersion in the fine print of “S.D. Puri’s Guide to Employees’ Provident Funds.”

Afghans are the reverse. On the one hand, they’re large-scale actors, acknowledged regional champions at provoking and enduring violent upheavals. Time and again, Afghan conquerors have looted India. For the past quarter-century they’ve murdered and pillaged each other. But make a train run on time, even “seven hours late to the minute”? There are no trains in Afghanistan. The only train in all Afghan history was four miles long and survived less than a decade.

In Bombay, halfway down the subcontinent, I’d visited an odd testament to Afghan destructive power. Tourist maps announce an “Afghan Church.” What could this oxymoron mean? Churches, like railways, find Afghanistan hard going. In 1973 I witnessed the bulldozer destruction in Kabul’s only Christian structure. It would have been tolerated had not the builder, a American Protestant missionary, insisted on a high steeple which dwarfed neighborhood mosques. Down it went, and there’ve been no Afghan churches since … except in Bombay.

The Church of St. John the Evangelist was consecrated on Jan. 7, 1858 as a memorial to those who died in the Empire’s worst-ever military defeat. 16 years earlier the British, intent on buffering India, had tried to enthrone a puppet ruler in Afghanistan. Results: the death of hapless Shah Shuja (whose name is invoked by modern opponents of “American employee” Hamid Karzai), a doomed 1842 British retreat from Kabul towards the nearest safe haven at Jalalabad, and the massacre of all but one (1) of 16,000 would-be escapees. An army doctor named Brydon straggled back all alone.

Hence this Bombay-Anglican “Afghan Church.” I was shown the old pews with notches for rifles, and taken on a plaque-by-tablet tour. Surrounding the altar is the main inscription: names of the officers and a mention of other soldiers “too many to be mentioned who fell, mindful of their duty, by sickness or the sword.”

Other wars filled other walls. Behind the altar is a list of officers killed “whilst gloriously leading on their men” in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1879-80). What’s left of three “Colours” (battle flags) from that conflict stand in narrow, dusty frames. These were once crucial symbols of regimental pride, defended to the last man and returned at all costs to headquarters. Age has turned flags to rags – drab, tattered, and indistinguishable except for their tarnished brass labels.

By the door are two later remembrances. One recalls “Captain Coville Warneford … treacherously murdered in the Aden hinterland, 3rd March 1904.” Aden is now in Yemen whose boondocks spawned the bin Laden family (see “Osama country” in this column, March 11, 2002). A second tablet is “in memory of Captain W.G. Palmer, 113th Bengal Infantry, killed in action before Kul-El-Amarah, Mesopotamia on 5th May 1916.” Mesopotamia is now Iraq. We Westerners have been involved in these various “hinterlands” for two centuries. Bombay’s “Afghan Church” testifies to what we’ve lost. What, if anything, have we gained or learned?

The Radhjani Express plods north towards Delhi. My CPA compartment mate ponders over his Provident Funds. Out the train window India stretches into a flat haze: mile after mile of laboriously cultivated land or scrub-tree jangal (from which our jungle). There are plenty of wells (few of them mechanized) and distant foothills never seem to get nearer. This ride, albeit tedious, illustrates why the sub-continent looked so good to wave after wave of invaders from northern deserts and mountains: India’s well-watered plains must have seemed to extend forever. Only 12 percent of Afghan land is arable.

Thus a succession of marauders from Persia and Central Asia, always by way of Afghanistan. All plundered; some also constructed. The grandest monuments of Delhi – which, fog permitting, I’ll reach around dusk – were built by Turkic-derived dynasties that called Afghanistan home. Babur conquered India, founded a line (the Moguls) of architectural brilliance, but then found the sub-continent too soft for his liking. He’s buried, as he ordered, in the rocky ground of Kabul.

The Afghan assessment of Indian character is perhaps best expressed by Kabul’s last truly successful ruler, Amir Abdur Rahman (d. 1901). By his time the British ruled Delhi and paid the Afghans an annual subsidy not to threaten it. The Iron Amir was, however, invited to meet with British officials in what now is Pakistan. Also present to greet him were various Indian princes. He found them “all dressed like women, wearing diamond pins in their hair, earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and other pieces of jewelry… The straps of their trousers were jeweled, and little bells were hanging in front of their trousers as low as their feet. They were sunk in ignorance, laziness, and indulgence. They did not know what was going on in the world nor what was in it. I pitied these poor things, upon whom I looked as effeminate men, and I pitied the poor subjects who were to expect justice and administration at their hands.”

And Kabul’s take on the British? My host-to-be in Delhi is the son of Ustaad (Master) Khalili, Afghanistan’s greatest 20th century poet. I’ve come to help translate that poetry from Persian to English. We’ll do “Last Rider,” Khalili’s saga of the 1842 Afghan victory over Great Britain. The poem’s vantage point is the enemy compound and refuge that only Dr. Brydon reached. It’s late in the day: “Dusk took the British fort to its slow bosom.” There’s been no news for weeks from Kabul. Suddenly a form looms in the dust, “wavering like faint shadows on distant water.” It’s Brydon, barely alive. Above him soars “an eagle with an army in its talons.” It’s Afghanistan, having grasped and killed that era’s superpower.

Now things are somewhat different. A new Afghan government, more threatened than threatening, is at least recognized worldwide. President Karzai has far more support than Shah Shuja 16 decades ago. The poet’s son (whose prominence far exceeds his role as my host) is optimistic.

Even so – and as Delhi approaches – one wonders what future Afghan poets will write of their post-Soviet, post-Taliban, post-9-11 world. Who will have wavered like shadows on water? Who will have whom in its claws?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, ” Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.