Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  So, during my months in Benares, I was able to live at a slight tangent to the chaos of the university. And I was able to do this, I now see, partly because of Rajesh.

  I got to know Rajesh early in my stay at Benares. A tall, wiry, good-looking man in his mid-twenties, he had continued to live in Benares after finishing his studies at the university. He was eccentric and moody. He would start reciting Urdu poetry one moment and then denounce its decadence the next and start enumerating the virtues of the farming life. “All these wine drinkers with broken hearts,” he would say. “You can’t compare them to simple peasants who do more for humanity.” He used to say he would rather be a farmer than join government service and do the bidding of corrupt politicians. On other occasions he would tell me about the good works honest civil servants in India could achieve and how he himself aspired to be one of them. There was also an unexpected mystical side to him. I once saw him standing on the ghats gesturing toward the sandy expanses across the river. “That,” he was saying to his companion, a slightly terrified young student, “is sunyata, the void. And this”—he pointed at the teeming conglomeration of temples and houses behind us—“is maya, illusion. Do you know what our task is? Our task is to live somewhere in between.”

  Rajesh revered Gandhi and distrusted Nehru, who he said was too “modern” in his outlook, but then he would change his mind and say that Gandhi wasn’t “tough” enough. All of these opinions he delivered with a faraway look; they formed part of monologues about the degraded state of contemporary India. “Where are we going?” he would say, dramatically throwing up his hands. “What kind of nation are we becoming?” He loved Faiz, the Pakistani writer whose doom-laden poetry he knew by heart; he was also fond of Wordsworth, whom he had studied as an undergraduate; he showed me a notebook where he had copied down his favorite poems, “The Solitary Reaper” among them. But I could never get him to talk about them. He did not listen much, and he did not like anyone interrupting his monologues. It wasn’t easy to be with him.

  He had been at the university for eight years when I met him, and at first he appeared to be another of the countless students who hung around the campus, mechanically accumulating useless degrees, applying for this or that job. I had come to him with an introduction from a mutual friend at my undergraduate university. This friend believed that “studious” people like myself needed powerful “backers” at Benares Hindu University—he used the English words—and that Rajesh was well placed to protect me from local bullies and criminals. Rajesh himself believed so and was more than happy to take me under his wing. “You are here to study,” he told me at our first meeting, “and that’s what you should do. Let me know if anyone bothers you, and I’ll fix the bastard.”

  Part of his concern for me came from an old, and now slightly melodramatic, reverence for “studious” Brahmins. He was Brahmin himself, but considered himself unequal to what he felt to be the proper dignity of his caste. The feeling was widespread in the region, where the traditional dominance of Brahmins was beginning to collapse in the face of a serious political challenge by assertive lower castes. The decline of Brahmin prestige and authority, intimately linked to their diminishing political importance, was symbolized by a famous family of Benares, which was once very close to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and had been pushed into irrelevance by the new, militant kind of low-caste politician. The members of the family still wore their caste marks on their foreheads; they still observed fasts, regularly bathed in the Ganges, were chief guests at temples on holy days, and would not accept food from low-caste people. But it was only this excessive concern about their public image, and an overdeveloped sense of uncleanliness and contamination, that remained of their Brahminness. No crowds of job seekers and flunkies gathered at their house anymore; the women in the family walked around the bazaars unescorted and unrecognized; visiting journalists went elsewhere for good copy.

  Rajesh felt the general change of status differently. He fasted religiously, went to offer flowers at the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god, every Tuesday. His regard for Faiz and love for Urdu poetry spoke of an older Brahmanical instinct for learning and the arts. But he also gave the impression that none of the old ways or values mattered anymore in a world in which Brahmins were forced to struggle to survive with everyone else. “Yes, I am a Brahmin too,” Rajesh would say, and then add, mysteriously, “but I have done things no Brahmin would have ever done.”

  I remember my first visit to his room, which was in one of the derelict-looking hostels with piles of broken furniture scattered on the front quad. The stairs to his room were splattered with blood-red patterns made by students spitting betel juice. In the assorted shabbiness of his room—hght from a naked bulb falling weakly on scabby blue walls, unmade bed, discarded slippers, rickety table, cheap denim jeans hanging limply from a solitary nail in the wall, a bamboo bookstand tottering under the weight of old newspapers—I noticed a jute shoulder bag lying open on the ground, bulging with crude pistols. No attempt had been made to conceal the pistols, which seemed to belong as naturally to the room as the green plastic bucket next to them. Their presence made me nervous; so did the hint of instability given by Rajesh’s speech and manner, the long monologues, the unconnected references to Wordsworth, to India. I began to wish I saw less of him.

  But it was hard to break off contact, even harder to be indifferent to the innocent friendliness he exuded every time I saw him. He often appeared at the library, “checking up,” he said, on whether I was being my studious self or whether I was there to “ogle the girls.” I would try to avoid him by disappearing from the reading room at the time he was likely to show up there, but he would then appear at a later hour. He also took a surprising amount of interest in my reading, surprising because although he had done an undergraduate course in English, I rarely saw him reading anything more than the Hindi newspapers scattered around the tea shops on the campus. “Edmund Wilson! Again! Why,” he would ask with genuine bemusement, “are you always reading the same man?” He listened patiently while I tried to say a few explanatory words about the particular book or essay he had pointed to. He once caught me reading To the Finland Station, and I had to provide a crude summary, in fewer words than used by Wilson, of Trotsky’s main ideas. I couldn’t, of course, refuse; the thought of Rajesh’s instability, the pistols in his room always forced me to summon up a reasonably friendly response. It could be exhausting being with him at times. Why, I would wonder, did he, who seemed to have read little beyond Faiz and the Romantics, want to know so much about people so distant from us, like Trotsky or Bakunin? (More simply, why couldn’t he spend his time with other people in the university?)

  Rajesh was well known in student circles. There was a special respect for him among other upper-caste students from nearby villages; lonely and vulnerable in what to them was the larger, intimidating world away from home, they saw Rajesh as a sympathetic fellow provincial and older protector. Rajesh fitted the role rather well: He was physically bigger and stronger than most students on the campus; he had a certain reputation—a lot of people seemed to know about the pistols in his room—and it pleased him to be thought of as a godfather-like figure.

  A small crowd instantly gathered around whenever I went out with him to a tea stall and eagerly hung on to every word he spoke. He often talked about politics, the latest developments in Delhi, the current gossip about the size of a minister’s wealth; he would repeat colorful stories about local politicians, the imaginative ways in which they had conned the World Bank or some other development agency, the bridges that were built only on paper, the roads that existed only in files.

  Indeed, I often wondered—although he seemed content simply talking about politics—if he was not planning to be a politician himself; students with a popular mass base in the university who proved themselves capable of organizing strikes and demonstrations were often handpicked by local political bosses to contest elections to the local municipal corporation. Rajesh seemed to know p
eople off campus as well; I once noticed a couple of conspicuously affluent visitors who had driven to see him in a sinister-looking pale green Ambassador with tinted windows.

  But I was preoccupied, particularly with Wilson’s writings and their maze of cross-references that sent me scurrying from book to book in an effort to plug at least some of what I felt were egregious gaps in my knowledge. One of the books I came across in this way was Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, which I had read rather indifferently in a Penguin Classics edition sometime back. Wilson’s essay on the politics of Flaubert, collected in The Triple Thinkers, made me want to reread it. When I did so, I found Flaubert’s account of an ambitious provincial’s tryst with metropolitan glamour and disillusion full of the kind of subtle satisfactions that a neurotic adolescent sensibility would be especially susceptible to. I identified with Frédéric Moreau, the protagonist, with his large, passionate, but imprecise, longings, his indecisiveness, his aimlessness, his self-contempt. I cannot ever forget the sick feeling that came over me after I finished the novel late one evening at the library. I was only twenty, and much experience, and many more books, lay ahead of me. But I couldn’t fail to recognize the intimations the novel gave me of the many stages of drift and futility I was encountering and was yet to encounter in my own life.

  I recommended Sentimental Education to Rajesh one evening and gave him a photocopy of Wilson’s essay. I didn’t expect him to read all of it; but he had been curious about Wilson, and I thought the essay was a good example of his writing. I didn’t hear from him for a few weeks. My life went on as before. I left for the library early in the morning and came back to a house reverberating with the exuberant jangling of sitars, the doleful twang of sarods, the hollow beat of tablas. I ate every evening with Panditji’s wife, sitting cross-legged on the floor in her dark kitchen, awkwardly inhaling thick smoke from the wood fire, over which Shyam dextrously juggled hot chapatis from one calloused palm to another.

  Later, back in my room, trying to read in the low-voltage light, I would hear the bells for evening prayers ring out from the adjacent temples. I spoke little to the Americans who, after their lessons with Panditji, came up to the roof to smoke opium. I already knew I could not share my intellectual discoveries with them. They hadn’t heard of Edmund Wilson; one of them, a Princeton undergraduate, straining to recognize the name, thought I meant the biologist E. O. Wilson. The cultural figures they spoke about, and appeared to miss in the often oppressive alienness of this most ancient of Indian towns, were then unknown to me; it was to take me a few more years to find out who David Letterman was. But the Americans were, like me, whatever their reasons, refugees from the modern world of work and achievement, explorers of a world that antedated their own, and I was sympathetic to them.

  Several weeks after I’d last seen him, Rajesh abruptly reappeared one afternoon at the library. He had been away, he said, on urgent work. Now he was on his way to visit his mother, who lived in a village forty miles west of Benares. Would I accompany him? I thought of making some excuse, but then I realized I needed some diversion, and I said yes. Besides, I was curious about Rajesh’s background, of which he had told me nothing until then. I could guess that he wasn’t well off, but one could have said the same for most students at the university.

  We left one cold foggy morning on the small-gauge, stearn-engined train that in those days ran between Benares and Allahabad. A chilly wind, gritty with coal dust, blew in through the iron-barred windows as the train puffed and wheezed through an endless flat plain, stubby fields stretching to tree-blurred horizons, coils of smoke torpid above ragged settlements of mud huts and half-built brick houses. The train was empty, and Rajesh and I stretched out on hard wooden benches, wrapped from head to toe in coarse military blankets, hurriedly sipping the cardamom-scented tea that seemed to turn cold the moment the vendor lifted the kettle off his tiny coal stove.

  We got off at a small station populated entirely, it seemed, by mangy dogs. Another half hour tonga ride from there, the horse’s hooves clattering loudly against the tarmac road. Mango groves on both sides. Here and there, a few box-shaped houses with large courtyards where men slumbered on string cots; cold-storage warehouses; tiny shuttered shops. At an enclave of mud huts, swarthy blouseless women swept the common yard with brooms made of leafy neem twigs that left the earth raked over with crow’s-feet patterns. Finally, at the end of a row of identical roadside buildings, there was Rajesh’s own house, brick-walled, one room, poor—but what had I expected?

  The door was opened by Rajesh’s mother, a tiny, shrunken woman in a widow’s white sari. She looked frankly puzzled to see me at first but grew very welcoming when Rajesh introduced me as a friend from the university. After the early-morning light, it was dark and damp inside the high-ceilinged room. There was a solitary window, but it was closed. In one corner, partitioned off by a flimsy handloom sari, was the kitchen, where a few brass utensils dully gleamed in the dark and where Rajesh’s mother busied herself with breakfast. In another corner, under a sagging string cot, was a tin trunk, leprous with rust. There were religious calendars in garish colors on the walls: Shiva, Krishna, Hanuman. I recall being unsettled by that bare, liglntless room and its extreme poverty, something not immediately apparent in Rajesh’s life in Benares.

  During the morning Rajesh had become silent. Now he left the room while I sat in a straight-backed wicker chair and talked to his mother, both of us forced to speak very loudly to make ourselves heard above the hissing sounds from the kerosene stove. It wasn’t easy to express sympathy in that high-pitched voice, and sympathy was increasingly required of me as she began to tell stories from her past: She had been widowed fifteen years ago, when Rajesh was still a child, and soon afterward her wealthy, feudal in-laws had started to harass her. The house in which she lived with her husband and son was taken away from her, and they refused to give back what little dowry she had brought with her. Her parents were dead, her brothers too poor to support her. There was only Rajesh, who had worked since he was thirteen, first in the maize fields and then at a carpet factory in Benares, where he had gone to evening school and done well enough to enter the university. The years had somehow passed.

  But now she was worried. Rajesh, she felt, had reached a dead end. There were no more openings for him. All the jobs were going to low-caste people. And not only did Rajesh have the wrong kind of caste, but he also had no connections anywhere for a government job. She added, with a touch of old Brahmin pride, he had too much self-respect to work for low-caste shopkeepers and businessmen.

  How little of Rajesh’s past I had known! I knew a bit about those carpet factories; they had been in the papers after some human rights organizations petitioned the courts to prohibit them from using child labor. There had been pictures of large-eyed, frightened-looking childdren in dungeonlike rooms, framed against their exquisite handiworks. I was shocked to realize that Rajesh had been one of them. The tormenting private memories of childhood that he carried within himself seemed unimaginable.

  On the train back to Benares, Rajesh broke his silence to say that Ire had read Sentimental Education and that it was a story he knew well. “Yeh meri duniya ki kahani hai. Main in logo ko janta hoon,” he said, in Hindi. “It is the story of my world. I know these people well.” He gave me a hard look. “Your hero, Edmund Wilson,” he added, in English, “he also knows them.”

  What did Rajesh, a student in a provincial Indian university in the late 1980s, have in common with Frédéric Moreau or any of the doomed members of his generation in this novel of mid-nineteenth-century Paris? As it happened, I didn’t ask him to explain. I had already been made to feel awkward by the unexpected disclosures about his past, and the day had been somewhat exhausting. We talked, desultorily, of other things and parted in Benares.

  It was two years later, when I was in Benares again, that I next heard about Rajesh. The man who told me, someone I remembered as one of Rajesh’s hangers-on, appeared surprised that I didn’
t already know that he had been a member of a criminal gang specializing in debt collection on behalf of a group of local moneylenders and businessmen. That explained his mysterious absences from Benares, I thought, as well as the pistols in his room and the sinister-looking Ambassador with tinted windows.

  It was, the man said, a good, steady business; once confronted with the possibility of violence, people paid up very quickly, without involving the police. But then Rajesh had graduated to something riskier, and here, although shocked and bewildered by what I had been told, and fully expecting the worst, I could not take it in.

  At some stage, the man said, dramatically pausing after every word, Rajesh had turned himself into a contract killer. It was an extremely well-paid profession and a well-connected one. You worked for small time contractors who in turn worked for wealthy industrialists and also did favors for local political bosses who did not always rely on their own “private armies” (the local term for loyal henchmen) for certain jobs. You got to know everyone well after a few years in the business. You worked for all these important people, yet you were ultimately on your own. The chances of survival weren’t very high. Sooner or later the police came to hear of you. Fierce loyalties of caste and clan ensured that every murder would be avenged. It was what would one day happen to Rajesh, his onetime friend predicted. In a typical ambush of the kind often reported in the local papers, he would be on his motorcycle when four men would surround him at a busy intersection in the old city and shoot him dead. The prurient excitement on the man’s face filled me with disgust and anger.