Destroying symbols of hope

The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan should be seen as representing a larger peril - an attack on a composite and pacific culture symbolised by these giant images. RANJIT HOSKOTE traces the forces that led to this carnage of statues.

IN the wasteland that Afghanistan has become today, it is difficult to discern even a shadow of that country's vanished glories. Two decades of civil war have quartered up its provinces among rival militias, while artillery fire and aerial bombardment have reduced its cities to rubble. The alliance of arms dealers and drug smugglers has cast a dark net over what was once a vibrant staging post along the legendary Silk Route. Where wealth had once been weighed in jade, it is now measured in opium gum. Now, with the Taliban having consolidated its control, and the Northern Alliance unable to challenge it effectively from its isolation in the Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan seems unlikely to climb out of the loop in which it has trapped itself.

In every way, the Taliban charter reveals itself to be one of the harshest and most illiberal code of laws promulgated in history, compounded as it is of Pakhtoon tribal customs and a narrowly selective interpretation of Islamic law. Every expression of creativity and pleasure is anathema: music and the photography of human beings are banned; cinema houses have been closed down. Women are forbidden to work and must cover themselves from head to foot and be escorted by male relatives when they appear in public: women who worked as artists, journalists, translators, doctors have lost their jobs and their sense of identity. The ancient spring festival of Navroz, traditionally celebrated on March 21 with music and dancing, has been proscribed.

The Taliban has repeatedly been described, in public discourse in India and elsewhere, as medievalist. While the violence of its behaviour and its inability to tolerate difference do indeed suggest a pre-Enlightenment model of religious frenzy, the truth is that the Taliban is a tragic and uniquely modern phenomenon thrown up by the turmoil of the 1980s and 1990s. These unkempt militants have only their narrow doctrines to guide them through the frightening diversity of sensuous and intellectual experience that the open world makes available; they associate change with the death of their unquestioned patriarchal values, and find the woman without a veil as threatening as the Soviet helicopter- gunship.

It does, indeed, seem ironic that the new millennium should dawn in Afghanistan with so stark a reversal of the programmes of social reform and cultural renaissance that Afghan rulers in the earlier half of the 20th century, including Amir Amanullah and Zahir Shah, had embarked upon. The liberal's worst nightmare has been realised.

What the Taliban incarnate is the negative response of a largely rural, largely feudal society to those very programmes of modernisation, sweeping but ill-conceived, set in motion by the monarchy and continued by successive Communist regimes. This response, phrased in the idiom of Pakhtoon tribalism, achieved weapon-grade deadliness once it became a tool of the American obsession with encircling the Soviet Union, and US military technology was pressed into its service through the willing medium of the Pakistan state apparatus.

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And yet, it was in Afghanistan that the Kushans nurtured one of the world's greatest civilisations, a visionary model of dynamic cultural hybridity. Flourishing between the first and the fourth centuries A.D., it drew upon a plurality of cultures - Indian, Chinese, Persian, Greek, Roman, Scythian - borne to the Afghan highlands on the wheels of trade and invasion. It was from here that the idioms of Buddhist thought, formalised at the council hosted by the renowned emperor Kanishka in Srinagar, Kashmir, were disseminated into Central and Eastern Asia. The Kushans were descended from the Yueh-chi tribe, which was driven out of its homeland in north-western China after a fratricidal conflict in 165 B.C. and became nomad-warriors. The Kushans came, eventually, to rule over one of the largest empires in history. At its peak, under Kanishka, the Kushan empire covered a vast expanse bounded by the Oxus in the north-west and the Narmada in the south-east.

Diversity of expression was a hallmark of this multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. Its western centres were situated in the Gandhara region (now distributed over Afghanistan and Pakistan), while its eastern capital was Mathura (in present- day Uttar Pradesh). Two distinct and mutually independent regional styles developed at these two poles of Kushan culture: while the Gandhara style represented a melding of Indian religious themes and Graeco-Roman morphology, the Mathura style embodied a stylistic continuity with the prior Indic art of Bharhut and Sanchi.

In Gandhara, the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas achieved iconic form for the first time in the history of Buddhism. They were rendered as idealised, athletic human figures cast after the Hellenistic gods and heroes. The statues were carved from grey schist, or modelled in stucco and terracotta. The late Kushan sculptor emphasised the finely modelled features and the delicately draped robes of the transcendent figure, creating an archetype of serenity, which stood beyond suffering itself but was imbued with active compassion for those still enmeshed in the web of desire, frustration and mortality. It was under Kushan dynastic patronage, also, that poets like Ashvaghosha, physicians like Charaka and philosophers like Nagarjuna found the creative space to produce their masterworks. The last symbol of this past - which is anathema to the Taliban ideology - was Bamiyan, the valley of the Buddhas, set roughly west by north-west of Kabul.

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Rosita Forbes, the intrepid traveller who braved the remotest regions of Central Asia in 1928 (at a time when few explorers, let alone women, would hazard that zone) described her first experience of Bamiyan as an epiphany. Reliving the moment in Forbidden Road - Kabul to Samarkand, she wrote: "After a while we came to a little valley seared with furrows. The fields were bare ... But on the nearer side a rampart of red rock climbed sheer to the snowline. It was porous with caves and split by the niches of giant Buddhas. Strange, flying formations rose above the honeycomb town, and the proud colour was slashed with green, rust brown and indigo."

These 53-metre-high colossi, carved from the living rock by nameless Kushan sculptors, were (until their destruction by Taliban militiamen two weeks ago) the largest statues of the Buddha in the world. Bamiyan's prosperity has long outlived the Kushan empire. Like the fabled cities of tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Yarkand, it was one of the most important halts along the Silk Route, the 8,000-km-long road that formed the main trade route between the Central Asian heartland and the Levantine seaboard between the 3rd and the 13th Centuries A.D.

Death had many appointments along the Silk Route, and enlightenment set traps there for the unwary. Pilgrims and merchants, conquerors and saints traversed the Route over the centuries; among them, Alexander the Great, Fa Hsien, Mohammed of Ghazni, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, Amir Timur and Babar. Passing through Bamiyan on his way to the court of emperor Harshavardhana and the university of Nalanda in 629 A.D., the celebrated Chinese Buddhist scholar, Hsuan Tsang, praised it as a centre of art to which sculptors, painters and master builders flocked; one of Buddhism's holy cities, it was peopled by thousands of monks and was the destination of pilgrims from every part of Asia.

Bamiyan was then at its zenith. Hsuan Tsang's Record of the Western Kingdom dwells on its glories: it was a busy marketplace, and camel caravans streamed through daily, laden with silk, jade and spices. Then, the faces of the Buddhas were masked in gold and studded with dazzling gems; but a history of violence has mutilated these images brutally, and no trace remains of the gold and jewels. Now, no trace whatever will remain of these towering presences, except their vast and empty niches; and the world will be the poorer for their absence, for they were symbols of hope and resistance to the oppressiveness of the lower nature.

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Bamiyan collapsed early in the 13th century, when Genghis Khan's shaman-warriors swept through the valley, razing the city to the ground and slaughtering its inhabitants. A Byzantine traveller, coming upon the ruins much later, spoke of them as standing proudly, like Rome, at the cross-roads of the world. By the time Rosita Forbes reached the fastness, only a cluster of wind-swept hovels marked the site. During the last five years, while the Taliban rampaged across Afghanistan, the valley was one of the last few points of resistance to its barbarism: a stronghold of the Shiite Hazaras, who have fought the Taliban, and suffered for their desire for freedom.

The Taliban's maniacal assault on the Buddhas of Bamiyan is symptomatic of a larger peril. What is under attack today in Afghanistan, and more widely in Central Asia, is the ideal of a composite and pacific culture, which these grand images symbolised. This ideal is threatened, not only by the religious fanaticism of forces like the Taliban, but by the values thrown up by a constant state of war, anarchy and economic instability. A new generation has come of age in Central Asia, which takes for granted the inexhaustible finances derived from the narcotics trade and the unlimited supplies of lethal weaponry that have been available since the early 1980s.

Cargoes of arms and drugs circulate freely over the Silk Route, which has attained a dubious reincarnation in the Central Asian republics since the Soviet Union's demise in 1991. And with the arms and drugs goes a brutalisation of sensibility, which renders individuals and communities susceptible to ideologies of hatred and violent transformation, demonologies that call for national regeneration through the destruction of real and imagined enemies. From this cauldron of ungovernable emotions emerge people like the Taliban, who reject the gentle arts of dialogue and encounter.

Their vision of society, history and culture poses a threat, not only to monuments like Bamiyan which memorialised the free play of creativity and a pleasure in the sublime, but indeed to those human impulses themselves. The real tragedy is that the Bamiyan Buddhas have been destroyed because they embody a vision of human life and values that the Taliban fear and hate. Like all bigots, the Taliban is deeply insecure, deeply fearful of that which is unfamiliar to their own thinking; like all despots, they recognise the emancipatory power of the imagination. The colossi of Bamiyan stood their ground, challenging the Taliban world- view: as Buddhist images, they enshrined the Great Teacher's insistence on compassion, loving-kindness and sensitive interdependence. And as Kushan images, they constituted the memory of an ecumenical society.

Once the carnage of statuary unleashed by the Talibans wreckers, many of them surely distant descendants of the Kushan sculptors, has ended, the finest Gandhara iconography will be found only in museums in New Delhi, Boston, New York, Berlin and London. But so long as the terror of Taliban rule continues, Afghanistan will be a stranger to the Kushan visions of diversity and dialogue that these images represent.

The Buddha himself had explicitly declined to be remembered in iconic form; the life of compassion was the only monument he required. He would urge us, today, to leave the icons to history and attend to Afghanistans living-dead, who need our urgent assistance: the children dying of hunger, the women going mad from isolation, the men forbidden to sing, a people being slowly strangulated because they have neither medicine nor art, neither conversation nor hope to sustain them.

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