Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

I made a mistake a few weeks ago, one I intend not to repeat. I was about a hundred pages through Shantaram when I had the urge to Google some background info on the book. I started reading some reviews, many of which were persuasively negative. So rather than plough through another eight-hundred pages, I thought I would follow their advice and dump the thing and move on to greener pastures. I’d been somewhat sceptical about the book from the very outset anyway, having read that the author had fought for the wholly reactionary Afghan Mujahedeen. But the stubborn fact of the matter, contrary to the reviews and my own reservations, was that I had thoroughly enjoyed the first hundred pages and was instinctively inclined to ignore the reviews and carry on regardless.

In the end I followed my instincts and I was handsomely rewarded. Shantaram is a blinder. Flawed possibly, as any nine-hundred page novel is likely to be, but a spectacular work nevertheless. The lesson learnt: don’t bother with the reviews until after you have read the book in its entirety. Then make up your own mind. Lesson learned!

Roberts offers his readers four distinct but very cleverly interconnected dimensions to his personal story. Firstly we are presented with a nine-hundred page action thriller, which although not my usual genre, was damn good reading. Even if just fifty percent is factual and the other fifty percent artistic embellishment, Roberts has clearly had a mighty roller-coaster of a life. I know of no other work of fiction that so convincingly links Melbourne and Mumbai, and so if for no other reason, this is a story essential for our globalised, interconnected times. He even manages to weave Ned Kelly into the narrative, which only further endeared Roberts to me. Prison break-outs, prison torture, mafia vendettas, gun running, international criminal networks, double dealings of every conceivable nature, not to mention heroin cold turkey; Roberts has been through it all it seems. As an individual adventure story, Shantaram can have few rivals, but Roberts offers his readers so much more.

The second component of Shantaram that so impressed me was the breath-taking descriptions of life in Mumbai, from the bleakest slums to the rising affluence of the new middle classes and of course the official and unofficial corruption that permeates everything and everyone. Mumbai, like thousands of rapidly expanding cities in the developing world, is very much part of our present and future reality. Soon, not millions but billions of our fellow citizens will be trying to eke out an existence from cities very similar to Mumbai. Roberts has thrown open a window to that perilous existence and we in the west would do well to take note. The meaning of the ‘rule of law’ takes on a very different complexion in a country still reeling from centuries of colonial despotic rule, though anyone familiar with ‘The Wire’ would appreciate that corruption and gangsterism are by no means the sole preserve of the developing nations. The cities of the so called developed nations are just a tad more experienced in disguising their gangsterism. Think Murdoch’s criminal media empire as a fine example.

Sometime ago I watched a TV documentary about the slums of Manila. One of the central themes of the documentary was that despite the most grinding deprivation and government disregard, there was, in these diabolical shanty towns, a sense of community and basic humanity so often lacking in our more affluent western cities. Families would be sleeping a dozen or more in a single flimsy room with virtually no provision for basic sanitation and comfort. Yet amazingly, despite all odds, there appeared to be a sense of contentment and cooperation a million miles more advanced than our own often soulless, alienated cities. This sense of community and mutual responsibility is precisely what Roberts so poetically seizes upon in the slums of Mumbai. Roberts puts it thus:

‘They couldn’t understand that every time I entered the slum I felt the urge to let go and surrender to a simpler, poorer life that was yet richer in respect, and love, and a vicinal connectedness to the surrounding sea of human hearts. They couldn’t understand what I meant when I talked about the purity of the slum:’

These urban slums that are springing up around the globe, right across the continents of the former colonial empires, are a criminal disgrace, and yet I suspect there is a real and profound truth in what Roberts so eloquently describes. None of the negative reviews that I googled deemed to think this point worth mentioning let alone discussing. I’m a great enthusiast for urban living and I can imagine a future where ten billion of us could live quite contentedly and cooperatively in giant urban conurbations, but if we don’t learn the positives and negatives of cities like Mumbai and Manila, we are likely to create for ourselves an urban nightmare of Dantean proportions.

The third dimension, again ignored by the negative reviews, involves the very insightful background information to the seemingly never-ending war in Afghanistan. I still believe that Roberts got himself caught up on the wrong side of history, the side that would eventually see the Taleban regime consign women and girls to a feudal domestic imprisonment, one that would routinely see acid thrown into the faces of those that would dare to defy that barbaric diktat. I’m one of the few people I know that hold the position that the Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan but primarily came to the assistance of a beleaguered progress government that was under sustained attack from Pakistan and their CIA handlers. Roberts seems to concede part of this but in the end buys into the Mujahedeen nonsense about a holy war against the atheistic Soviet invaders.

Whatever ones views on these intricately entangled matters, Roberts makes an invaluable contribution to the debate. He takes his readers right into the heart of the bloody conflict and at the very least allows us to make a more informed judgement. Me, I think Roberts has got it arse up but I somehow admire his willingness to get his hands dirty in what is surely one of the dirtiest little CIA manufactured conflict of the modern era. In time scale, if not in casualties, the combined Afghan wars must be close to catching up to and even overtaking the misery that US imperialism put the long-suffering Vietnamese people through. And there is no positive end in sight. The Taleban, the barbaric successors to the Mujahedeen, will soon be back in power, the regional war lords will again be slugging it out for influence and favour, and most significantly, women will remain without anything remotely resembling equality and modernity. The western imperial powers will soon skulk away leaving the Afghan women, once again, at the mercy of a viscous feudal patriarchy.
Here is Roberts trying to make sense of things:

‘Jihad’, Ahmed said. ‘Holy war’ this is our holy duty, to resist the Russian invaders, and liberate a Muslim land’.
‘Don’t get him started. Ahmed’s a communist. He’ll be hitting you with Mao and Lenin next’.
‘Don’t you feel a little compromised? Going up against a socialist army?’
‘What socialists?’ he retorted. ‘What communists? Please do not misunderstand me, the Russians did some good things in Afghanistan’.
‘He’s right about that,’ Khaled interrupted him. ‘They built a lot of bridges, and all the main highways, and a lot of schools and colleges’. ‘And also dams, for fresh water, and electric power stations all good things. And I supported them, when they did those things as a way of helping. But when they invaded Afghanistan, to change the country by force, they threw away all the principles they are supposed to be believing. They are not true Marxists , not true Leninists. The Russians are imperialists, and I fight them in the name of Marx, Lenin, Mao’.
‘And Allah’ Khaled grinned.
‘Yes, and Allah,’ Ahmed agreed.

And there is the rub. Once you start mixing up Marx and Allah you’ll find yourself with all sorts of unexpected and unsavoury bed partners. It’s worth pursuing this passage because this war is still raging and if we don’t dispel a few accumulated CIA manufactured myths this arena of futile conflict might well go on for another bloody century. Roberts is no fool. He can see clear enough where it is all heading, but foolishly, perhaps tragically, in deference to his newly found father figure, he ends up on the side of the oppressor rather than the oppressed:

‘Afghanistan is a prize,’Khaled began. There’s no major reserves of oil, or gold, or anything else that people might want, but still it’s a big prize. The Russians want it because it’s right on their border. They tried to control it the diplomatic way, with aid packages and relief programs and all that. Then they worked their own guys into power there, in a government that was really just a puppet outfit. The Americans hated it, because of the cold war and all that brinkmanship crap, so they destabilized the place by supporting the only guys who were really pissed off with the Russian puppets the religious mullah-types. Those long-beards were out of their minds at the way the Russians were changing the country letting women work, and go to university, and get around in public without the full burkha covering. When the Americans offered them guns and bombs and money to attack the Russians, they jumped at it. After a while, the Russians decided to cut the pretence, and they invaded the country. Now we’ve got a war’. ‘And Pakistan’, Ahmed concluded, ‘they want Afghanistan because they are growing very fast, too fast, and they want land. They want to make a great country by combining the two nations. And Pakistan, because of the military generals, belongs to America. So America helps them. They are training men now, fighters, in religion schools, madrassahs, all over Pakistan. The fighters are called Talebs, and they will go into Afghanistan when the rest of us win this war. But the next one, I do not know’. P668

Not so hard to see who the real imperialists are and who were trying to defend modernity, albeit in a ruthless militaristic way. Anyway, it’s the Yankees who are now crawling away with their tails between their legs, just like they did in Vietnam. Only this time the monster that the CIA created will soon be back in power and the whole thirty year war would have been for nothing. I think Roberts get it but he might have been a little more forthcoming with his readers about his own failings in this never-ending theatre of human folly.

And that leads us to the fourth and final component of Shantaram the search for meaning and purpose. It is here that our negative reviewers are at their least charitable, ridiculing Roberts for his continual attempts to draw philosophical lessons from everyone and everything he encounters. OK, at times he probably overdoes it and his treatises on love and life can get a bit tacky As for Karla, her endless little pearls of wisdom can get damn irritating. But generally I found Shantaram an honest philosophical endeavour, and in one way or another, we are all trying to do exactly the same thing; to find meaning where in reality there almost certainly is none, other than that which we choose to invent. Roberts holds on to his humanity throughout it all and for that he ought to be saluted. So it’s hats off to Gregory David Roberts and a five star recommendation for his wonderful Shantaram. And as for his mean-spirited detractors, they are welcome to carry on with their mean-spirited lives oblivious to the joys and sorrows of one of life’s true adventurers.

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