French Connections
(by Avijit Ghosh | The Telegraph | March 16, 2003)
For a few furious weeks in the monsoon of 1997, Patrick French was the most hated writer in India, a title that briefly belonged to Salman Rushdie and which, some might suggest, Sir VS Naipaul, now can proudly claim as his own.
A leading newsmagazine had published extracts from his book, Liberty or Death. Observations such as "If Gandhi is your hero, it can be a deflating experience to read what he actually did and said at crucial points in India's political history," prompted an avalanche of hate mails from horrified readers. One of them called him, "a shallow-minded attention-mongering idiot," another "a Pak-sponsored" foreigner. And, a senior historian dismissed him as "a sensationalist upstart."
It didn't matter. The book sold like televisions during a World Cup. French had conquered India.
Now, with his latest book, Tibet, Tibet, being launched in New Delhi on Monday, French walks another thin line. When he points out that "in recent years, the Dalai Lama has made several political misjudgements," one wonders how millions of Tibetans in exile will react. For someone who has been directly associated with the Tibet cause — he was a former director of the Free Tibet movement and also edited the bulletin, Tibet News — the book is remarkably un-pamphleteering.
French's Tibet is not the pristine, exotic paradise that attracted Tintin, Sherlock Holmes and Lara Croft. It is not the version which circulates among Hollywood's naive causerati in caviar and champagne parties. It is not the politically simplified entity which pop idols promote on MTV. French's Tibet is no Shangri-La. His Tibet is about people who live under a ceaseless shadow of fear, who have learnt to compromise in order to survive, and, who are even afraid to dream. French sees Tibet in tight close-up, warts and all. "Tibet is a tragic story," he says.
It wasn't easy writing this book. With his activist background, French was unsure if he would get a visa from London. So, in the summer of 1999, he went to Hong Kong and crossed over to China from the land border. But to go to Tibet, he became a member of a larger tourist group as everyone has to. "Once you are inside Tibet, the system is so chaotic and corrupt you can easily separate from the group," the 36-year-old writer recalls.
Travelling for three months in a mountainous region on crowded lorries, mini buses, tractor-trailers, motorbikes, and even hitchhiking; living in hotels where undercover agents paid regular visits dressed in double-breasted suits; and talking to peasants and Communist party officials, nuns and activists, with the help of interpreters, was perhaps, as complex a covert intelligence operation as the ones French examines in detail in Liberty or Death. "Each time, I had to interview somebody, I had to make sure that we were secure," he says. It was risky business. But he seems to have enjoyed it.
There is an impishness about French. Dressed in an all-white crumpled cotton kurta pyjama and leather chappals, he doesn't mind telling you that his wife doesn't read his books. That he used the names of Chinese secret service bosses as substitutes for the names of those he interviewed for the book. That he was once mistaken for Rahul Gandhi and mobbed by the crowd during a Sonia Gandhi election meeting in Andhra Pradesh. That he pulled a fast one on journalists saying he would be writing a three volume series on the life and times of former Congress president Sitaram Kesri. "That was a joke," he says.
And, one can still smile at the fact that he contested the British Parliament election for the Green Party in 1992. "I got 888 votes which by Green Party standards is pretty high," proffers the father of Tenzin, Abraham and Indira. The daughter, he insists, is named after the goddess Laxmi and not the late Indian Prime Minister.
French is pretty scathing about Hollywood's Tibetophile brigade. One of them is action hero Steven Seagal, now hailed as a reincarnation of a treasure revealer. "He is a looney, quite a weird guy. But then he being a reincarnation of Chungdrag Dorje, we have to bang our heads on his feet," he laughs. But Richard Gere escapes his ire. "Although he sometimes talks rubbish about Tibet, he is sincere and has put in a lot of effort in backing the Tibetan cause," he says.
The germs of the book were sown in French's mind one rainy morning two decades ago when Dalai Lama visited his school in northern England. The Holder of the White Lotus arrived with an entourage of Tibetan monks and Indian security personnel with automatic weapons. "Joy poured from him. I remember having an urge to be noticed by him, to be picked out. That was the beginning of my obsession with Tibet," the writer remembers.
For the son of an armyman turned civil servant, Tibet was everything his childhood in the measured and staid environs of south-west England was not. For a child, who dreamt of "being the dictator of the world", who at the age of 10 wrote a murder mystery play in five acts where corpses turned up in railway carriages, Tibet evoked magical images of monks in maroon robes and high yellow hats, where people were reincarnated.
Even when he was studying literature in the university of Edinburgh, Tibet stayed in his mind as "a powerful imagined memory." In 1986, he travelled through the borderlands of the mountainous region for three weeks. The same year, he went to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh and stayed in McLeod Ganj village for several months the following summer. Every day he would attend Buddhist teachings in the morning and study in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives later in the day. The painstaking research shows through in the book.
Those days French also wrote an unfinished novel, The Diary of a Personage, which, he feels, would have been "a mistake" to publish. His first book, the award-winning biography of the fascinating British explorer, athlete, spy and imperialist, Sir Francis Younghusband, came out when he was only 21 and just out of university. Younghusband too had a significant Tibet connection. In 1903, he wiped out Tibet's entire army and became a mystic later. The book's success — it got the Somerset Maugham Award — meant that French's struggle as a writer was over.
Once he had to work as a day wage labourer in London. Now, he earns fat advances, delivers 1,000 pound lectures and pens occasional articles for New Yorker and Newsweek. He is also a member of inter-governmental group, UK India Round Table — "I do my best to disrupt the Indo-British relationship", he once joked — and doesn't mind being the only non-fiction writer included in the London Sunday Times Hot 100 talents of the Nineties.
India took time to know him. And, for all the wrong reasons. Few knew that most of his remarks on Gandhi and Jinnah were taken from published sources. The book's USP lay elsewhere. By writing letters to relevant government officials, French had managed to get 92 bottle-green Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) files de-classified, thus adding another dimension and insight into history writing on the last days of the Raj. Instead, his second-hand observations on the political leaders grabbed all the attention.
In retrospect, French has this to say on the controversy: "When you are writing a book about a big sweep of history, sometimes you have to summarise things. Or, you have to give a slightly reduced version in order to make it intelligible. The risk of going the other way is that you (can) end up like a lot of Indian historians who write books with footnotes which are read by 10 other historians. But there is a risk in the approach I had in my book. Which is that you end up simplifying things too much." RIP.
The new book, Tibet, Tibet, avoids simplification of any kind. Shuffling back and forth in history as if riding a time machine, French brings out the dilemmas of the multi-layered lives that people are forced to live. Where the methods of control have changed from the physical violence of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies to a subtle use of fear now. Just as Communism itself has moved from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the past to the market economy and one party rule of today.
But French firmly believes that Tibet's fate is not in its own hands. "Nothing is going to change till China changes. Individual Tibetans may do well. But as a culture and as a nation, it will be very hard to go anywhere until the Communist rule comes to an end in Beijing," the writer says.
French's Tibet project is over. He is now working on a two-volume official biography of Nobel laureate VS Naipaul for which he has been in India since November last year. The first volume is likely to be released in 2007, the second several years later. Official biographies often end up reading like hagiographies but French insists, he has complete control over the text. He believes his subject needs to be understood in perspective. "To see Naipaul as a mouthpiece of the BJP is simplistic. After all, he did speak out against the Indian government's harrasment of Tehelka," he says.
Tibet, Tibet, may or may not, create a controversy. The second part of the forthcoming Naipaul biography carries the delicous smell of one.
Friends of Tibet (INDIA),
PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050
www.friendsoftibet.org