It didn’t occur to me for a long time that for nearly a year while I had worked for Nomura in New York, I had walked amidst where the twin towers had once stood. From my office, I would often gaze at the mason pits where the constructions for a much talked-about memorial were under progress. As I would try catching eye contacts with the colleagues on smoke breaks, I would often turn attention to the slowly towering structures of the new World Trade Centre.
Big cities have a remarkable ability to move on - things we hold on dearly to in our lives often become trivial non-entities in the eyes of others. Last month, when bomb blasts hit the Sultanahmat district, the thought that I could have been one of the victims while I had vacationed in Turkey sends chills down to bones - but an extreme sense of ignominy that it poses is equally disturbing.
Long summer days of my childhood spent poring over literature retained in colonial libraries after all were to turn largely immaterial to the further generations. The school-teachers of my days - fully-trained academics fallen short of limited quotas of the Indian public sector - were to only find their literary enthusiasms misplaced in the modern India. An old magic that I had adored as a kid had died out as I entered into my late teens. It surprises me in retrospect, how amidst dire Indian poverty a passion for languages had survived in the generation that had educated me.
I can thankfully relive some of those magical moments in London - where a civilization seems to have survived all calamities. London houses multicultural neighborhoods as heartily as it harbours the vigour of the 18th century - an era when colonists had acquired new lands in Asia. Long before the seeds of colonialism and terrorism were sown, the law-makers had shuttled back and forth from England to the exotic lands of Asia to understand the local customs and languages. This was the time when Ballantyne had become the principal of Sanscrit [sic] College in Varanasi. Gun-toting men of East India Company - who had wished to repeat the Dutch success - were equipped both with military discipline and an obsession with the Greco-roman antiquity.
The discovery of ancient India, therefore, much like the rest of the Asia, was to be understood in terms of Greek history. The claims like Siva being Dionysus or Sanskrit having come out of Greek seems ludicrous now - but given the impact that Greco-Roman heritage had had on Western culture, these theories don’t appear very far-fetched in hindsight.
Ruins of an old Greco-Roman city lie within a mile from the hotel room in Turkey where I had written this note. The hunt for locations where the classics had been staged or St Paul had lived still excites the traveller and the relics of Roman empire never fail to impress. The sheer extent of an agrarian Roman empire nearly dwarfs the industrial ones of last centuries. That Greek writing systems and administrative institutions were transplanted in a mixed-race society in 6th century BC Parthia and India - dares to revive hopes for modern universalism.
Amidst this glory of classical civilization though, the sparkle of an Ottoman past is also quite conspicuous in Turkey- as is the genteel decline which followed the loss of territories. A political quickfix from Mustafa Kemal surfaces everywhere - in almost Leninist “red” fashion as flags at universities and administrative buildings. This could create fear or strength depending on one’s political stance - but wary of the mixed results from militarism of Nehru and Bose in India, I only feel a mild caution in face of Turkish nationalism.
Like anywhere else with military attempts at modernity, the centuries of culture seems difficult to be shunned in a generation. Changing palaces (Abdul Mecit I) or ending sultanate had never been part of a plan to change the Islamic character of Turkey. The rural and urban divide is therefore stark in Turkey. The economic constraints on working classes from less developed hinterland seem to prevent them from enjoying the same education and life-standards as the city dwellers. While the economy has made impressive strides, the post-war industrialization does not seem to have advantaged the society evenly. Like elsewhere in Asia, bitter political rivalries make Turkey prone to corruption and extra-governmental control.
As I walk through streets in Canakkale, an obsession with cars, electrical gadgets, fast-food and plastic chairs offers a ambiance familiar from my childhood. It isn’t just the economic conditions that I can relate to, it is also the nostalgia that Turkey’s splendid Islamic architecture evokes. Its palaces, halls, mosques and offices built between 15th and 19th centuries carry beautiful Arabic calligraphy and remind of an era not yet influenced by Western advancement. The curiosity of someone who had spent his youth in the US (and having had a distant and circumspect appreciation of Islamic art ) seems misplaced in this overdose of calligraphy - particularly when the average Turk doesn’t seem to understand these taliq scripts.
A nostalgia feeds itself in solitude. As I walk through these mosques, a disconnection from past offers a familiar discomfort - but thankfully, the country’s success in modernization makes up very well for this slight unease. The sheer energy of ships, markets and traffic overwhelms. The country feels very much within Europe - but scrape through the surface though and you'll find middle-Eastern influences underneath. It is as if the modernity has been built out of Eastern history. To someone in India - institutionally trained to consider modernity as foreign (and thus destined depend on foreignness for modernity), this feels strange and yet desirable.
Turkish language itself is seems a great example of this melange. It is written in the Roman script - but is irreversibly intertwined with Persian and Arabic. The administrative and institutional words almost always rely on the Persian-Arabic vocabulary (adalat, ziraat, sehr) whereas the everyday language sticks to native roots (syntax, numbers). Similar to the French overload in English, the words from both Persian and Turkic origins are allowed in Turkish (Persian meshur and Turkic unlu are both Turkish words).
In this grand melee of cultures, one cannot lament for the calligraphy too much. In countries that have tried and have had some success with modernity, the merits of economic progress and public health seem far abound - but a feeling of disconnection from the past haunts. As I sip through the Turkish coffee, I remind myself that literacy itself is a modern, republican phenomenon (why cry over an extrapolated past). The average Turk in 19th century won’t have been able to read at all - so when modernity arrived, the medieval scholarship was set to disappear.
Central Europe itself precariously cherishes such time-warps in its smaller cities - defending itself against Americanization and rising immigration. The fate of medieval scholarship in the middle East is no different from that of the Latinate aristocracy of modern Europe. The real conflict in the middle-East - therefore - isn’t that of East vs West, but that of modern urban frameworks with traditional rural frameworks. Our requirements of standard truths for citizens - lends itself to nationalists everywhere and instead of a Latinate/Sanskritic/Islamic aristocracy which relies on ancestral hierarchies, we survive on global markets, science, technology and engines of innovative machinery - essentially killing the market for classical paeans and religious cannons.
Although I feel annoyed that my tour-guide cannot stop ridiculing the feudal lethargy of the Ottomans and the interest in “petty” matters like clock towers at the cost of modernization of their armies, I can echo the youthful desire to overthrow Brahmins, Ming dynasts and feudalists of all sorts. To a radical modernizer, this seems a task unfinished in most of the developing world. I too find the rajput habit of shooting guns at wedding ceremonies in India rather ridiculous - a habit they share with Turks that my tour guide finds annoying.
The rural hinterland of Turkey is more religious than the coastal Turkey. The average Turk may not be taught Arabic - but the qurans which I saw in mosques were in Arabic. While at other places, this may point to ethnic strife, Turkey seems to move forward with this ambiguity. Sufi dervishes - once banned by Kemal - now perform at the shrine where they had started from. As the older past is decimated, it is difficult not to hope for a better connection with the past but although an attempt to revive the past may seem urgent to an Ottoman romantic, it is symbiosis and energy that Turkey seems to move ahead with.
It would be difficult to imagine anything else - Turkey is after all a country where the Hellenic heritage can be truly celebrated. It is home to Troy, Aphrodisias, Hierapolis, Ephesus besides having maintained the capital of Roman empire and of early Christianity for centuries. At its peak, the Ottoman empire extended into Bulgaria and modern Greece and however undesirable this may appear now, the conquest years have left Turkey closer to Europe than any other middle-eastern country. This is a place where synthesis of a new world where East and West can meet seems possible.
It is by far the only place I have been to where Western universalism plays within the realms of Eastern traditions. It is not a society so structured and dependent on metrics like the West, that an idea of a Turkic “race” has yet taken a stronghold. Islam, in fact, keeps the country anchored to Asia. Probably confused for a Kurd, I was expected to speak in Turkish on multiple occasions. In India, where I won’t be allowed in a mosque as a non-Muslim and my friends of white color (Turkish use the same word for them - firangi ) won’t make it inside most Hindu temples from before 17th century, the grandest of all mosques are open to all in Istanbul. At a time when most of right-wing politics in India survives on an 18th-century dual self-identity of a devil-worshipping cult and a great Aryan civilization - the self-image of Turks seems to have veered far away from the horse-riding Asiatics which European travelers of 18th century had talked about.
For someone still longing for colonial nostalgia, Turkey seems to have positively moved on. Turks don’t appear to be making money through enactment of an orientalist imagery. I couldn’t find very many equivalents of elephant rides or stylized begging in Turkey. While there were a few belly dancing cruises I could have opted for, the splurge of classics kept me unprepared for the wonderful possibilities. I kept trying hard to find an orientalist motif to my experience - patterned pottery, sheesha lounges, bare stomach nikab-ed women, jugglers, acrobats and tricksters of all kinds - but it was remarkably easy to cut through the orientalism. With its sense of controlled chaos, Istanbul appears not so different from the Georgian London I have read about.
That said, Istanbul does have its own mess. From the vantage point of the popular culture the West, Istanbul can be seen as a middle-eastern city with less rights for women, annoyances of catcalling, bad sanitation, general chaos and a crippling lack of “freedom”. But despite its chaos of the Egyptian bazaar, dumpsters, scamming taxi drivers and brutal police - the general feel and drive of the city imparts immense energy. Not only does the city seem to function, it outperforms in every way. The people seem content and happy. Women don’t dress as conservatively as we are made to think - while the mosques aren’t abandoned either. In remote outskirts of small towns (Canakkale and Selcuk where I had stayed), huts made of mud and bricks are easily visible - but people still get out in the evening and enjoy a borek or simit with a shot of coffee. Cafes are close to the mosques - where young women can sit relaxed up until midnight. The image of middle-east presented to us in the West may still bear some truth (my tourist guide tells me that holding hands can cause riots in rural hinterlands of Eastern Turkey), but Agean Turkey dismantles stereotypes in every way.
I had heard from people and read in books - that East and West shake hands in Turkey. As I walk through its streets, columns from all empires seem to appear out of nowhere. The conflict of modern vs traditional has been flattened - not so much through containment or crackdown on traditional Islam (as many continue to recommend) but through adjustments to the idea of nationalism and a common language. Collapse of massive empires often leads to strife, but the decline which Ottoman empire underwent hasn’t yet left Turkey in the kind of civil wars that had plagued the Balkans. The country had always been in conflict - my tourist guide tells me - but the microcosm of Istanbul welcomes all the world’s problems and possibly the clues to their solutions as well.