Monsoon Postcards: Indian Ocean Journeys

By David H. Mould

In Monsoon Postcards, journalist David H. Mould, notebook in hand, traverses the Indian Ocean—from Madagascar through India and Bangladesh to Indonesia. It’s an unpredictable journey on battered buses, bush taxis, auto-rickshaws, and crowded ferries. Mould travels from the traffic snarls of Delhi, Dhaka, and Jakarta to the rice paddies and ancestral tombs of Madagascar’s Central Highlands; from the ancient kingdom of Hyderabad to India’s so-called chicken neck—the ethnically diverse and underdeveloped northeast; and from the textile factories and rivers of Bangladesh to the beaches of Bali and the province of Aceh—ground zero for the 2004 tsunami.

Along the way, in markets, shops, roadside cafes, and classrooms, he meets journalists, professors, students, aid workers, cab drivers, and other everyday residents to learn how they view their past and future. Much like its predecessor, Mould’s Postcards from Stanland, Monsoon Postcards offers witty and insightful glimpses into countries linked by history, trade, migration, religion, and a colonial legacy. It explores how they confront the challenges of climate change, urban growth, economic development, land, water and natural resources, and national and ethnic identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780821446775

David H. Mould

David H. Mould, professor emeritus of media arts and studies at Ohio University, has traveled widely in Asia and southern Africa as a trainer, consultant, and researcher. He has written articles and essays for many print and online publications. Born in the United Kingdom, he worked as a newspaper and TV journalist before moving to the United States in 1978.

Book preview

Monsoon Postcards

Monsoon Postcards

Indian Ocean Journeys

David H. Mould

Ohio University Press

Athens

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

© 2019 by Ohio University Press

All rights reserved

To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

Printed in the United States of America

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19        5 4 3 2 1

Cover photo: Flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 2017. Courtesy Daily Star (photographer Amran Hossain)

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mould, David H., author.

Title: Monsoon postcards : Indian Ocean journeys / David H. Mould.

Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019012001| ISBN 9780821423714 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446775 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mould, David H.--Travel--Indian Ocean Region. | Indian Ocean Region--Description and travel.

Classification: LCC DS337 .M68 2019 | DDC 910.9182/4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012001

Contents

List of Illustrations

ONE: Traveling with a Purpose

TWO: Indian Ocean World

THREE: Land of the Merina

FOUR: On and Off the Road in Madagascar

FIVE: Inexplicable India

SIX: A Tale of Three Cities

SEVEN: The Seven Sisters

EIGHT: Joy Bangla (Victory to Bengal)

NINE: Swimming to Bangladesh

TEN: On the Road and on the Water

ELEVEN: Improbable Indonesia

TWELVE: East of Boston

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

3.1 Richard Samuel

3.2 Cooking corn in cocottes on charcoal grills

3.3 On the market at Arivonimamo

3.4 Lala and Richard Samuel at family home

3.5 Richard Samuel and brother Lala at family tombs

3.6 Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo

3.7 His pride and joy, a Renault 4L taxi

6.1 The medieval fortress of Golconda

6.2 Hyderabad’s Old City

6.3 Mecca Masjid

6.4 Can you call Uber for a camel?

6.5 Two hours on the road and $10 in fares for a SIM card with no credit

6.6 The narrow alleys of NBT Nagar, Hyderabad

7.1 With few bridges over the Brahmaputra, most people travel by ferry

7.2 A river cargo boat moored at the ghat (terminal)

8.1 Vijai Kapil on a Royal Navy training course at Portsmouth (UK) in 1969

9.1 Rickshaws and vans push through the water in Chittagong

9.2 Three days of monsoon rains in July 2017

9.3 Roller-coaster railroad—the Dhaka-Dinajpur line at Kauguan in August 2017

9.4 Dhaka, the traffic jam that never ends

9.5 History under threat—the Water Palace in Old Dhaka

9.6 Selling garlic at Old Dhaka’s spice bazaar

9.7 The Buriganga River waterfront in Old Dhaka

9.8 Two porters in Old Dhaka

10.1 Getting his kicks on Route 6—Sujoy Vai

10.2 Traffic hazard—a slow-moving motorized van on the Dhaka–Sylhet highway

10.3 A nouka leaves the port at Barisal to carry passengers across the Kirtankhola River

10.4 The port and ferry terminal at Barisal in the delta region

11.1 On the tsunami tourism trail in Banda Aceh—Noah’s Ark

11.2 Old Amsterdam in the tropics

11.3 The Stadhuis (City Hall)

11.4 Pinisi at the port of Sunda Kelapa in Batavia

11.5 Sunset wedding on Jimbaran Beach, Bali

Maps

2.1 The Indian Ocean world

3.1 Madagascar

5.1 Country equivalents for India’s states by population

5.2 Country equivalents for India’s states, GDP per person, Purchasing Power Parity

6.1 The three cities of Hyderabad

7.1 The Seven Sisters—the northeast states of India

8.1 Bangladesh

11.1 The Indonesian Archipelago

11.2 Bali

one

Traveling with a Purpose

How do you like Madagascar? The waiter at Ku-de-ta—the name is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the country’s history of illegal power grabs—asked me the question he probably asked all foreigners at the restaurant.

His timing was bad. I was exhausted and dispirited. I wanted to say, Not as much as I did yesterday, but my French wasn’t up to the linguistic nuance and I didn’t want to make a well-meaning waiter feel uncomfortable. Instead I smiled, mumbled something affirmative, and reached for my beer.

We all face setbacks in our lives and are supposed to grow stronger because of them, but my colleague Andrew Carlson and I were feeling unusually fragile and insecure as we tried to process what had happened earlier that day in March 2016. We had made our first visit to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, eighteen months earlier to launch a large-scale research project for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. It was a wide-ranging study of knowledge, beliefs, and practices in health, nutrition, hygiene, water, sanitation, education, and child protection, key issues for the agency. Our six-person international team had worked with colleagues from the University of Antananarivo and the national statistics agency to design the study, conducted in three coastal regions. Earlier that day, we were informed by e-mail that, after more than a year of work and almost $500,000 spent, UNICEF had decided to reject the research report and shut down the project. We had been given no advance warning. The only reason given was a vague reference to inadequate data analysis. We were upset and confused.

When you’re feeling down, it’s easy to vent your frustration at your environment—the place, the people, the waiter at Ku-de-ta. But as Andrew and I enjoyed an exceptional lunch and rounded it off with a rhum arrangé (the flavored rum that is customarily offered as an after-dinner digestive), our mood mellowed. We were at one of Antananarivo’s best restaurants, savoring French haute cuisine at incredibly reasonable prices. Outside lay a picturesque, historic city built on sacred hills where every walk or taxi trip yielded new sights and sounds. I was looking forward to a weekend trip to the countryside with my Malagasy university colleague, Richard Samuel, to visit his hometown and family tomb.

This was my fifth visit to Madagascar, and I had become enthralled with the country, its people, and its culture. My bad mood, I decided, had everything to do with our shabby treatment by the UNICEF office and nothing to do with Madagascar.

The waiter brought the bill. You know, I said, I like Madagascar very, very much. He smiled, and I did too.

Itinerant Academic Worker

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited more than forty countries on five continents. Born and brought up in Britain, I’m grateful to my parents for introducing me to travel on family camping vacations in France and Spain. In the 1970s, when I worked as a journalist, my first wife Claire and I took budget trips to Mediterranean countries—Portugal, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Greece, and Turkey—traveling by bus or hitchhiking, camping or staying in youth hostels or fleabag hotels that didn’t rate a single tourist star.

I moved to the United States for postgraduate study in 1978, began university teaching two years later, and didn’t travel much for the next fifteen years. Since the mid-1990s, most of my travel has technically been for work, not pleasure. I say technically because I enjoy most trips, even though I work long days in sometimes difficult conditions. That’s because I am traveling with a purpose. By contrast, I’ve had vacations that didn’t give me much pleasure. I find beaches boring, resorts unappealing. I’m not a gambler or souvenir shopper, don’t play shuffleboard or mini-golf, and don’t like Las Vegas shows; I don’t think I’d enjoy a cruise.

My trips have been as a teacher, trainer, researcher, project director, and some other titles I’ve forgotten. Unlike the typical business traveler, I can get away with dressing academic casual—a shirt and khakis. There are ties (mostly gifts) in my closet. On average, I wear a tie once a year. Not every year. Fortunately, the organizations that hire me are looking at my proposal, résumé, and experience, not my wardrobe.

In June 2010, I officially retired from Ohio University after a thirty-year academic career. There was no way I was going to take up golf, bridge, or bingo, enroll in classes in pottery or furniture making, let alone sit on the front porch drinking iced tea and comparing Medicare supplement plans. For me, to retire was to move on—to have the time and freedom to work in interesting places.

It’s often difficult to describe to strangers what I do. Sometimes, I dodge the question and tell them I’m a consultant. That’s a convenient but unhelpful response, because no one (not even those who use the word on their business cards) can easily describe what it means to be a consultant. It’s a catchall that covers a range of services—from training mercenary armies to appraising antiques. Oh, a consultant, that must be interesting, is the usual reaction. Sometimes, I reply. That’s when the conversation usually ends.

Recently, I’ve taken to describing myself, somewhat mischievously, as an itinerant academic worker. I can go wherever my academic and professional credentials take me. No regular classes to teach. No students to advise. No faculty meetings. No research expectations. It’s the academic open road.

The real bonus and joy of travel has been to write about the places I’ve seen, the people I’ve met, the experiences I’ve had. Since cameras went digital, many travelers record their memories visually, posting images on websites, social media, and sharing sites. I shoot some pictures, but mostly I take notes and ask questions. What are they harvesting in that field? Are those houses made of bamboo? What does that road sign mean? What’s the name of this village? What are we eating? Is that a wedding celebration? Did you see that elephant we just passed on the road?

I don’t want to suggest that all travel is interesting. Travel writer Thomas Swick put it well: Readers sometimes say to me, ‘You always meet the most interesting people when you travel.’ I tell them, ‘Not really, I just write about them when I do.’ Most of the time I’m wandering around lonely and aimless. In my own way, I am as guilty as the cliché mongers of perpetuating the idea of travel as a continuously fascinating activity—though all writers shape their experiences into an unrepresentative series of highlights; otherwise our stories would be too boring to read.¹

Traveling with me can be tiring, especially for those who want to sleep. I rarely do. In a bus or car, on a train, or on foot, I am constantly scribbling in my notebook or on whatever piece of paper I have handy—an airline boarding card, a restaurant menu, or even the background briefing paper I promised to read on the way from the hotel to the office. I write down what I see and learn because that’s the only way I can connect the dots later. Even in a place filled with new sights, sounds, and smells, what is interesting and unexpected on first encounter is more familiar the next time around, and less worthy of recording. The Antananarivo I first visited in September 2014 was a fascinating new place, unlike any other city I had ever seen. I described it as Paris with rice paddies. On my second visit three months later, it was interesting but less surprising; by the time of my fifth visit in March 2016, the city seemed less noteworthy. I made many notes on my first and second trips, but fewer on the later ones. However, even in places I’ve visited before, I always learn something new. Often, it comes in chance conversations—in buses, trains, taxis, and shops, at roadside cafes and markets. Indeed, the best insights are often gained by just hanging out with people. You strike up a conversation with the desk clerk or the passenger sitting next to you. You never know where it will lead.

Much of the time, I rely on colleagues to translate. I mean this in the broadest sense—not only the literal translation of words and phrases from another language but interpretations of history, society, and culture. I have also learned not to take what I am told at face value. In any country, there is no single, accepted history or vision for the future; instead, there are many perspectives, and they are constantly in motion, fanned by the winds of politics, nationalism, and identity.

I’ve been weaving my notes into narratives, trying to put places and people in historical and cultural context, since my travels to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the mid-1990s. I have also written articles for newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. The Central Asia stories, originally sent as e-mail letters to family and friends, formed the basis for my first offbeat memoir, Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia, published in 2016. It recounted my travels and work in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

This book has a broader geographical sweep, describing a broad and circuitous arc around the Indian Ocean with insights into the history, geography, politics, economy, climate, and belief systems of four countries where I’ve traveled over the last decade. My journey begins in Madagascar’s chaotic capital, Antananarivo, then wanders through the Central Highlands, the eastern rain forest, and the savannah and desert of the southwest, offering glimpses of the history, culture, and politics of a beguiling but desperately poor country. From Madagascar, I make the long leap northeast across the Arabian Sea to the Indian subcontinent. India defies all generalizations because of its social, ethnic, and religious diversity. My narrative begins in the capital Delhi, then broadens out in space and time, exploring the colonial legacy, the partition of British India, and the country’s demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. From the north, I move to the ancient kingdom of Hyderabad, and finally to the underdeveloped chicken-neck, the northeastern states of Assam and Meghalaya. Then I follow the Brahmaputra River south to Bangladesh, a country defined by its rivers and struggle for independence. From the traffic jams and garment factories of Dhaka, I travel to the rice bowl and commercial centers of western Bangladesh, to the tea gardens of the northeast, and to the delta region—the front line for climate change. My journey ends in Indonesia—at Banda Aceh, ground zero for the 2004 tsunami, the noise and traffic of the capital, Jakarta, ancient Yogyakarta, and the beaches and backcountry of Bali.

Ambivalent about Development

My first experience in international development work came in December 1995 when, at short notice, I took an assignment to set up a journalists’ training center in southern Kyrgyzstan, a region that had experienced ethnic conflict over land, resources, and political power. My US embassy liaison flew with me to the city of Osh, stayed a couple of days, and then left, wishing me good luck. I spoke only a few words of Russian and had few contacts. I hired a student as interpreter, found an apartment, visited local media, launched a search for a center manager, and enlisted Peace Corps volunteers to teach English classes in exchange for Internet access.

Four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan’s economy was still in freefall: factories and collective farms had closed, the currency devalued, pensions almost worthless, and power cuts frequent. Often I was the only diner in a restaurant where a sad-faced waiter apologized that most items on the menu were not available. In subzero temperatures, families squatted on the broken concrete sidewalks, their possessions—kitchen utensils, auto parts, school textbooks, old clothes, Soviet memorabilia—spread out on blankets. I don’t know who was buying because most passersby were just as poor as the sellers.

Before my work in Kyrgyzstan, the problems of the developing world had seemed remote and abstract to me—a wire service report on the latest famine or civil war somewhere in Africa, a TV charity appeal with images of suffering women and children. Now I was seeing them for myself. My experience convinced me that I had the skills and temperament to work effectively in an unfamiliar and challenging situation. A quarter of a century and two revolutions later, the Osh Media Center is still going strong, despite political and financial pressures.

Over the next twenty years, I returned frequently to Central Asia—to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. For my university, I took student groups to Hungary, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, and Thailand and managed an exchange program between Indonesian and US television journalists. I had two Fulbright Teaching Fellowships—in Kyrgyzstan (1996–97) and in Kazakhstan (2011). In Asia and southern Africa, I have worked for a veritable alphabet soup of international and government organizations. I have conducted workshops on training techniques for broadcast managers and worked with journalists to improve their reporting on social, economic, and environmental issues. For six years, I led a team that offered a global training course on communication for development (C4D) for UNICEF staff, with workshops held in Ohio, Johannesburg, and Hyderabad. The Madagascar research fiasco was followed by a successful two-year project to introduce C4D curricula at universities in Bangladesh and improve the research skills of faculty.

To work in development, you have to believe you can make a difference, however small, in people’s lives. It’s all too easy to become frustrated—by bureaucracy, ill-conceived project goals, and especially unrealistic timelines. Social and cultural change occurs slowly; no mass media campaign, however creative or far-reaching, will suddenly transform people’s attitudes and behaviors. It may take a generation for people to change the way they think about issues such as child marriage or girls’ education, and another generation to do something about them. Yet donors demand fast, measurable results that will show up as a good return on investment in annual reports and press releases. They account for the funds they receive on a yearly basis and have to report results. The annual report syndrome, as an eloquent critic of top-down approaches to development, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron, calls it, is one of the worst enemies of development because it forces a chain of lies and exaggerations from the grassroots level up to the implementers and funding institutions.²

The lies and exaggerations often begin earlier in the cycle, when government and international development agencies invite bids for contracts. In the United States, a relatively small number of not-for-profit and private-sector organizations, most of them in the Washington, DC area (earning them the sobriquet of Beltway Bandits), compete for lucrative contracts—not only from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) but from the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as from other agencies. Because all the bidders are staffed by seasoned professionals and have a host of consultants on their rosters, it’s difficult to pick a winner based on expertise. More often than not, the agency awards the contract to the bidder who promises the most for the least money and has lined up an impressive list of partners and collaborators. After winning the contract, the organization spends months negotiating a work plan; inevitably, goals and activities are scaled back, and partners dropped, because there isn’t enough money to do what was originally promised.

Although development agencies pay lip service to the idea of community participation, most projects are designed and implemented by professionals to meet donor priorities. In many sub-Saharan African countries, more people die each year from malaria or diarrhea than from AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, yet more money is earmarked for reproductive health than for mosquito nets and oral rehydration kits. Even when reproductive health is a priority, aid comes with conditions; USAID contractors are shackled by Congressional guidelines that specify the percentage of funds to be spent on abstinence programs, even if condom distribution has more impact.

The more we invest in development, the more we contribute to the growing of the cemetery of development. That’s Gumucio Dagron’s gloomy assessment. Newly built schools are closed because no money was allocated to pay teachers or buy desks and books. Water and sanitation systems are abandoned because no one knows how to maintain them. Gumucio Dagron offers a catalog of failed projects—abandoned hospitals, broken-down vehicles, and two thousand post office mail boxes rusting under the rain in a village of five hundred illiterate families who neither received nor wrote letters.³

I cannot be as pessimistic as Gumucio Dagron, but I have my own catalog of ill-conceived and botched development projects that have failed to make a difference in people’s lives. I’ve also seen well-planned projects that have helped lift people out of poverty, improved their health, and provided their children with education. In my experience, the best investments are in human resources, in helping people gain the knowledge and skills they need to make a difference in their own countries. That’s why I’ve gained the most satisfaction from education and training programs. Of course, not all my workshop participants apply what they have learned to become better managers, journalists, or C4D professionals, but some (maybe more than I realize) do so. And when they are passing on what they have learned to others, I know I have achieved something.

I continue to worry about the unintended consequences of development aid. We need to feed the hungry, but will massive food shipments depress prices on the market and drive local farmers off the land? International charities urge individuals to buy desks for schoolchildren so they do not have to sit on the dirt classroom floor. Would the money be better spent on population control, reducing average family size (and the number of schoolchildren)? In some countries, foreign aid accounts for almost half of the government’s annual budget and a significant percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Are we creating a culture of dependency, a neocolonial relationship between the donor and receiver countries, by making them continue to rely on foreign aid?

Put me down as ambivalent about development.

Postcards

I am from a generation that enjoyed sending and receiving postcards. I haven’t received many recently. It’s easier to post a selfie to Facebook from under a beach umbrella than to get out of your chair, find a shop, buy a postcard, write it, buy a stamp, and mail it. But I miss sending and receiving them. For me, the pro-forma "Weather lovely, wine cheap, pâté de foie gras gave me indigestion, wish you were here" greeting was never enough. I bought cards with the largest possible writing space and usually managed to cram more than one hundred words about my travels into the left-hand side.

This book, like Postcards from Stanland, combines personal experience, interviews, and research. It is not intended as a travel guide. It’s not an academic study or the kind of analysis produced by policy wonks, although it offers background and insights. Think of it as a series of scenes or maybe oversized postcards (with space for a few thousand rather than one hundred words) that I would have sent if you were on my friends and family list. Which you can be, if you send me your e-mail address.

two

Indian Ocean World

Historians visualizing the Indian Ocean, wrote the Sri Lankan academic Sinnappah Arasaratnam, have been like the five blind men in the old Indian fable conceiving of an elephant by feeling different parts of its anatomy. They have come up with partial views of sections of the Ocean, or of the Ocean viewed from sections of bordering land or from the perceptions of different people who traversed the Ocean.¹ But not the ocean as a whole. The Indian Ocean world stretches far beyond coastal areas—in other words, it is a region linked to, but not limited by, a body of water.

The ocean-as-world perspective is generally attributed to the French historian Fernand Braudel of the Annales school who used the Mediterranean Sea, not territorially bounded units such as kingdoms or principalities, as the framework for study. Similarly, the Indian Ocean world is a vast interconnected region, from interior Africa to the Middle East to China, whose boundaries have shifted in time and space as military, economic, and cultural empires have risen and fallen. It was built on commercial networks, including the slave trade, the movement of peoples and their cultural assimilation, and the spread of religions, particularly Hinduism and Islam. In his introduction to the essay collection Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, Michael Pearson concludes that ties and connections, elements of commonality, stretching all over the Indian Ocean mean that we can indeed write of an Indian Ocean World. With the rise of India and China and competition for sea lanes, oil, and African minerals and markets, the Indian Ocean world represents a strategic arena where the forces shaping a post-American world intersect most visibly.² Foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan describes the Indian Ocean as the coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century.³ The concept of an Indian Ocean world allows me to venture beyond coastlines and port cities to interior regions, linked to the ocean by rivers, colonial conquest, trade, migration, and culture.

MAP 2.1 The Indian Ocean world (map by Belén Marco Crespo)

What ties together four seemingly diverse countries—Madagascar, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean and its historic trade and settlement routes?

First, there is the monsoon. It has different names and comes at different times, but it always comes. The monsoon determines when you plant and harvest, when and where you travel, even when you get married, have children, or bury your dead. It is both a curse and a blessing. It brings death and destruction yet provides the water vital to survival. In northeastern Madagascar, the cyclones of January and February sweep away bridges and roads and leave communities stranded; six months later, farmers harvest cash crops of cloves, lychees, and vanilla. In Bangladesh in 2017, the first rains came early (in April), ruining the first rice crop in several regions. When I returned in August, the waters of the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Meghna, and their tributaries had left northern regions under water, washed away roads, bridges, and railroads, and forced as many as eight million people to abandon their homes. Yet when the waters recede, they deposit the alluvial soil that makes Bangladesh one of the most agriculturally fertile countries in the world.

Second, each country is the creation of a colonial power—the British, French, or Dutch. Even Madagascar, which makes the most geographic sense because it’s an island, was formed only when one ethnic group subjugated others, a conquest that was administratively consolidated by the French. In the others, European powers cobbled together tribes, ethnic groups, and independent kingdoms (maharajahs, sultans, and emirs) into colonies where unity remained fragile. At independence, British India and the Dutch East Indies were sliced and diced, creating new fissures. Despite half a century of nation building, the boundaries drawn in the colonial era remain a challenge to unity and identity.

There are common threads to the national narratives of colonialism, and to a historical schizophrenia in which the colonizer is both resented as the agent of oppression and exploitation, and admired for transforming the economy, building infrastructure, expanding education, and establishing political institutions. As Shashi Tharoor, a former UN diplomat and Indian cabinet minister, notes: Whether through national strength or civilizational weakness, India has long refused to hold any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder and exploitation.⁴ This ambiguous relationship to the colonial past has shaped national development and public discourse. As my Malagasy colleague Richard Samuel puts it: All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neo-colonialism. More than half a century after we declared independence, we have still not achieved it.

Third, all four countries face daunting environmental and climatic challenges—devastating floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, urban pollution, saline intrusion, deforestation, and desertification. The benefits of economic development—from mining to cash crops, from logging to tourism—come with social costs. Governments, foreign and domestic business interests, international agencies, environmental groups, and local communities are engaged in high-stakes conflicts over land, natural resources, and water. The technocrats who decided to address the Madagascar government’s budget deficit by leasing more than half the country’s agricultural land to a South Korean conglomerate did not consult with the people farming the land, let alone offer them any compensation. In the furor that followed, the government was overthrown in a coup.

Fourth is the movement of people. Internal and external migration are most often driven by economic factors: historically by the global and national slave trades and the transportation of indentured laborers to rubber and sugar cane plantations; today by economic opportunities, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where remittances from migrant workers support families and boost domestic GDP. Some migrations are caused by natural disasters or climatic shocks. Yet the most disruptive population movements are occasioned by war, civil conflict, or political change—interethnic conflict in Madagascar, the 1947 partition of British India, Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, separatist movements and conflicts in regions of Indonesia.

Fifth is political change. Since achieving independence, and throughout the Cold War era, these countries have vacillated between autocracy and multiparty democracy, between state control of the economy and media and open markets and press freedom. Even in India, where political institutions are well established, strong leaders have emerged—Nehru and the Gandhi dynasty, and today, Narendra Modi. In other countries, where institutions are more fragile, the leaders of anticolonial resistance movements all too often became homegrown despots, amassing power and wealth for their families and associates and ruthlessly suppressing opposition, often with support from the West or the Soviet bloc.

Are We in Africa—or Asia?

It had been a long lunch at Ku-de-ta. Andrew and I decided to walk for an hour or so before returning to the hotel to try to figure out if we could rescue the UNICEF research project. We strolled to the ridge of the haute ville where a great stone staircase descends to the market area and looked west toward the hills and the rice paddies. Most of the people on the streets, with their dark brown skin color and straight black hair, were Asian in appearance. If it weren’t for the French-language signs, cobbled streets, and colonial-era architecture, we could have been in a hill town in Indonesia.

It was more than a millennium ago—somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, near where my journey ends—that a small group of people set sail in their outrigger canoes, heading west with the trade winds across the Indian Ocean and avoiding the monsoon. They stopped for water and supplies at harbors in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea before sailing south and landing on a large island, previously uninhabited by humans. It’s a journey that took years, maybe even generations, with trade and intermarriage along the way. They were Madagascar’s first settlers.

three

Land of the Merina

Of Kings and Drunken Soldiers

We’re on our way to Arivonimamo—the town of a thousand drunken soldiers.

Richard Samuel laughed at his own joke as he edged his dented Nissan pickup through the chaotic traffic of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, weaving around aging Citroën and Renault taxis, potholes, and hand carts hauling furniture, metal fencing, and sacks of charcoal.

The name of Richard’s hometown evokes the heyday of the Merina, the highland ethnic group that ruled Madagascar during the nineteenth century and is still prominent in politics and business. In an early campaign, the Merina king Andrianampoinimerina dispatched a thousand soldiers to capture a market town in the rice-growing region about thirty miles west of Antananarivo. Facing little resistance, the soldiers didn’t have much to do except get drunk on home-brewed, sugarcane rum and give the new garrison town its name. In Malagasy, Arivo means thousand and nimamo drunks.

Richard is proud of his Merina heritage and claims descent from "a former king (roi). In Madagascar, the word king" needs to be treated with caution. Until the French colonized the island at the end of the nineteenth century, the central highlands were a bit like medieval Europe, albeit with nicer weather. Local lords, supported by armed retainers, ruled the villages and their rice fields from fortified hilltop positions. To call them kings is a stretch; my colleague Luke Freeman, an anthropologist who has worked in Madagascar for more than twenty-five years, more aptly describes them as kinglets (in French, roitelets or petty kings).

Whether roi or roitelet, Richard’s ancestors were local nobility, their power measured by the size of their domain and the number of zebu—the humped oxen that are the mark of wealth in rural Madagascar—in their herd. Today, descendants of noble families still claim moral authority because of their lineage and, in some cases, their healing powers.

I have inherited, along with all the members of my extended family, the power to cure burns, Richard told me. "It’s