Swedes on the way to India. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Our 1974 journey to and in India. |
The first morning on the road. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Somewhere in Eastern Turkey. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Me in 1974. |
Swedes on the way to India. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Our 1974 journey to and in India. |
The first morning on the road. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Somewhere in Eastern Turkey. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974. |
Me in 1974. |
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 1:49 PM 2 comments
Labels: Afghanistan, bus trip, Greece, India, Iran, Istanbul, journey, Marco Polo, New Delhi, Silk Road, Stockholm, Sweden, the Hippie Trail, Thessaloniki, travel, Turkey
Copyright: Hans Sandberg, 1974.
This post was first published on Sandberg Hörna on September 30, 2014)
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 9:59 AM 0 comments
Labels: Afghanistan, bus trip, nomads, the Hippie Trail, travel
We also took a horse-drawn gaddi for half a mile along a dirt road to the village Gazar-Gah, to visit the Shrine of Khwaja Abd Allah honoring the Sufi saint and poet Khwaja Abdullah Ansâri. He lived 1006 to 1088 and the memorial was built during the Timurid period.
Riding a gaddi to the village Gazar-Gah.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.
The road to Gazar-Gah. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 1:33 PM 0 comments
Labels: Afghanistan, Gazar-Gah, Herat, the Hippie Trail, travel
September 30, 1974
Finally in Afghanistan! We have left SAVAK's reign of terror behind us. The Afghan border guards and customs officials wore tattered clothes but looked prouder than the Shah's well-uniformed soldiers.
Herat. There are no words for this city. It’s probably one the most beautiful cities in the world.
We didn’t see many cars, but plenty of gaddis, i.e. horse-drawn carriages adorned with bright red tassels and bells. They trot along wide dirt roads lined with trees. The city is full of life. We only saw a few advertising billboards which were gathered at one street.
We also saw terribly disfigured beggars. A 15-year-old boy comes crawling with his twisted body and stumps for arms and legs.
Women are completely veiled from head to toe. Not even the nose sticks out. The eyes and nose are covered by a cloth mesh. We are told that a man can have up to 9-10 wives here.
It is a primitive city. There are no multistory buildings or conspicuous class differences. But we so see some luxury villas at a distance on the way to Gazar Gah, maybe owned by landlords or hashish merchants.
The Afghans have been hospitable, generous, and independent minded.
About half-past five we went to a shop so that I could order an Afghan dress consisting of shirt and trousers made to measure. The fabric is woven in cotton and silk. The owner asked us to come back to the shop at half past six so that he could treat us to tea. Before then he was not allowed to eat and drink since it was Ramadan.
When we returned, he rolled out three red carpets for us. We sat down and he asked if we wanted green or black tea. Before he started eating, he went to the window, poured water from a jug, and washed his hands. He told us that he was married, had two children, and about how he had managed to afford the dowry of 120,000 Afghanis. His said that his father had chosen the woman for him. That was 4 years ago.
Later a student came in who ran the shop next door with his brothers. He and I discussed politics openly with each other. He said that there were many Maoists in Afghanistan. We also talked about Soviet, which seems to be the biggest threat to the country. The Soviets buy natural gas cheaply, refine it and then sell it back at a high price. He said that Soviet prevents Afghanistan from choosing its own trading partners. For example, they hindered Afghanistan from selling natural gas to West Germany. He also said that Soviet was behind the coup d'état in the summer of 1973, when Mohammed Daoud seized power.
One of the highlights of our time in Herat was the ruins of the Musalla complex with its five minarets and the Gawhar Shad Mausoleum built under Queen Gawhar Shad in the early 15th century. Her husband Shah Rukh, was son of Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty. Shah Rukh moved the Timurid capital from Samarkand to Herat in 1405. The Gawhar Shad Mosque was one of the great masterpieces of Islamic architecture and, according to Robert Byron, even more beautiful than her mosque in Mashhad, now part of the Imam Reza complex. Byron wrote in The Road to Oxiana that the buildings in Herat "were the most beautiful example of the use of color in architecture ever created by man to honor God and himself." That didn't stop the British colonial army from blowing up the entire complex with dynamite in 1885 in order to give them a clear view of an expected Russian attack that never happened. It was part of Russia and Britain's imperialist enterprise known as 'The Great Game'.
The Musalla complex in Herat. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.
(Translated from my September 30, 2014 post on Sandbergs hörna)
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 10:46 AM 0 comments
Labels: Afghanistan, Herat, Iran, the Hippie Trail, travel
November 20, 1974
We stayed a few more days in New Delhi, shopping in the tourist shops around Connaught Circle while we waited for our departure. I bought six meters of silk fabric, thick and dark blue with gold thread woven in, and several meters of white silk. This was for my Mom who eventually used the blue silk for curtains and made a shawl of white silk fabric.
*
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 8:04 PM 0 comments
Labels: Afghanistan, India, Khyber Pass, Pakistan, the Hippie Trail, travel
The year 1968 took us by storm, especially if you were a teenager. We had been awaken to the world's unfairness and now change was in the air. We followed the news about the Vietnam War, the May Revolt in Paris, Black protest movements in the U.S.A., and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And we took to the streets to protest.
We were born-again even though we didn't believe in God. I had lost my childhood faith when I was eight years old. I cursed God and hid under my pillow, but nothing happened. That's how easy it was to see through the supernatural, but it was different with the Jesus, the human. I remember saying prayers, singing psalms in the morning and thanking God for the food at lunch time. It must have been in second or third grade. We had an illustrated blue textbook that told stories about the twelve-year-old Jesus who debated the learned at the temple, and how he as an adult fed the poor when the fishermen came in with their catch. Maybe most of all, I remember how he cast out the merchants from the temple.
The step from Jesus to Marx was not as long as one might think. This maybe even harder to understand here in the US, where religious sects and churches had grown through competition with other beliefs or interpretations. Christianity was the largest faith in this diverse religious marketplace, but it came to be dominated by a branch that drew narrow circles around the groups that were to be included in the “brotherly love." It was a Christianity that took part in, or closed its eyes to, the genocide of the native population, to the slavery, the oppression of women, racism and lynchings, exploitation, and imperialist wars. It’s true that there were other branches who fought against slavery and for equality, both before and after Martin Luther King Jr., but the loudest branch was the one that today takes Trump as its savior.
We who were awakened in the years around 1968 actually had a lot in common with the early Christian church and later popular awakenings. The Christian socialist and theologian David Bentley Hart recently raised the question of whether the first Christians were not in fact communists. They sold their property and shared their wealth so that everybody had what they needed. The rest was owned collectively. They loathed private property, which to many modern believers are more important than the Golden Rule.
“The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity.”
(Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?, David Bentley Hart, New York Times, November 4, 2017)
Marx may not have been as radical as Chrysostom, but he shares the first Christians' dream of an equal society. He borrowed words from the New Testament when he in 1875 wrote that the society of the future would “inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that we let our hair grow and walked in Jesus sandals. The world I grew up in had taken shape after the second World War and its moral foundation had cracked in the shadow of the Vietnam war and 1968. This raised questions that the old generation and society could not answer, fundamental questions that were particularly challenging for us youths. Mark Lilla, an American author and professor, wrote about the process in a personal essay in 2005. He had grown up as a Catholic in Detroit during the 1960s and turned atheist at thirteen only to discover the Bible after having attended a Christian rock concert. He found faith after a night reading the New Testament and soon found himself among a group of born-again Christians.
“This group was my substitute family throughout high school in the early 70's. I spent most nights with them, at prayer meetings, or guitar practice, or just sitting around on the shag carpeting of their living rooms, Bibles open on our laps. Ours was a rolling theological seminar devoted to interpreting the biblical message, and an open psychotherapy session where we helped each other adjust to being born again.”
(Getting Religion, Mark Lilla, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, September 18, 2005)
He described how the Bible became his only path at age fourteen.
“Then I discovered the strange new world of the Bible. That discovery might have led me to other books, but there was no one to guide me onto that path. So the Bible became my only portal into the realm of ideas — ideas about morality, justice, cosmology, psychology, eschatology, mortality. The Bible posed all the important questions, questions that were vaguely forming in my adolescent mind, but that now took on shape and contour. And, of course, it answered those questions.” (ibid)
For
us young revolutionaries The
Capital was our Bible
and Mao’s Little
Red Book our Small
Catechism. We too sat around in circles with the books that explained
everything in our laps. Lilla wrote that “all teenagers are dogmatists; a teenager with a Bible
is simply a more intense teenager” and related how he would wander around in
his school with a Bible at the ready, looking for sin and spiritual degeneracy,
thinking that he did his victims a favor. I used to walk around with Mao’s
Little Red Book at the ready, looking for bourgeois ideas.
Over time our passions ossified around Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism. It became our canon and Beijing became our Jerusalem, just as Mecca, Paris, Washington, and Moscow had been to earlier generations.
It was relatively easy to keep the faith when Mao
was alive. He was like a living God who hadn’t hesitated to send a flood against the party he had
founded, but ten years into the Cultural Revolution, we began to receive
conflicting signals from the Middle Kingdom and Mao’s meeting with Nixon was
followed by the Theory of the Three Worlds, which replaced the revolutionary
class struggle with an international alliance against the two superpowers.
Reactionaries and brutal dictators were now seen as allied in the struggle
against the Soviet social imperialism. And when Deng Xiaoping had established
himself as China’s leader a year after Mao’s death, the course shifted even
more radically. China’s peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on free
markets and foreign companies were welcomed to Special Economic Zones.
And as if that was not enough, Vietnam invaded
Kampuchea at the end of 1978 and installed a puppet regime which led China to
invade Vietnam in February 1979. Deng said that China wanted to “teach Vietnam a lesson.”
We didn’t immediately understand it, but it was the beginning of the end of Maoism. At first, we tried to patch-up our broken faith, but every time we thought we had the pieces right, the puzzle fell apart again. Everything was now open to debate. We had preached that wars were caused by capitalism and imperialism, but how could you then explain what was happening in IndoChina? And if Mao’s Cultural Revolution had not been able to prevent the corruption of socialism — was there any guarantee at all? We were convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a democracy for the people and a temporary dictatorship over the former oppressors, but had not the people been oppressed during the Cultural Revolution?
To a seventeen-year-old it was easy to live for the revolution. It felt meaningful to attend meetings, sell magazines, and lead study circles. The tiredness you felt when you came home from a long work session was not the tiredness of a wage slave, but the proud tiredness of a fighter. What others took as unselfish sacrifices was for the believer a pleasant duty. But when doubt set in, the many meetings and heavy tasks began to feel like sacrifices, colliding with other interests.
“…the spell that transformed costs into benefits will be broken and the more usual kind of cost accounting will reassert itself. … As a result, the citizen will feel that he has vastly and unnecessarily overextended himself into the public domain and that a ruthless cutting down is in order.”
(Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, 1982, p 126)
We had however invested so much in the revolutionary struggle that our first reaction was to persist and push harder than ever. And if a comrade slacked, the rest of us would step in. We read and debated even more in search of the correct analysis of the situation and the right path forward. We spent almost all our time at meetings and campaigns, why we didn’t see much of our families, friends or partners.
A decennium had passed since 1968, and the revolution we had dreamt of never came. The cultural revolutions and protest movements of the 1960s had been followed by a reaction that gave us Reagan and Thatcher.
Instead of saving the world, it was now about investing in yourself.
Some switched side and became conservative, many became social democrats, while others tried to deal with their disappointment. Yet others came to wrestle with understanding what had happened.
Posted by Hans Sandberg at 10:05 PM 0 comments
Labels: 1968, Albert O. Hirschman, Mao Zedong, Marx, politics, Religion, Vietnam, youth