The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  In the meantime, I made a friend who showed me the other side of this temple town: the world of malls and gyms, of cinemas and college canteens. I met Vishal one evening as he was nosing his motorbike down the sloping street that led to the river. In the evenings, the riverside became a promenade of sorts. The crowd was young: knots of girls, laughing and gossiping as the boys circled. Vishal was a fixture on the river. He was a basketball player at BHU, tall and handsome, lightly bearded, with large solemn eyes. He took one look at me and asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his bike. In another country, I would have thought he was picking me up. But this was India; in small towns, such as Benares, it was still breathtakingly innocent. Vishal’s main motive for befriending me was a simple curiosity for the world beyond.

  “I’ve always liked being friends with foreigners,” he said, even though we spoke in Hindi and I told him I lived in Delhi. But soon I saw that he was right: in certain cultural respects, I was as good as foreign to him, the most obvious indication being that I lived in a world where men and women mixed easily. Vishal, though outwardly polite and well-mannered, was a furnace of stifled passion. He would stop me midsentence and ask in frank wonder how it was possible to talk to women.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how can you talk to them?”

  Once, as I was telling a story that had no sexual under-or overtones, a story in which men and women were simply present, Vishal interrupted, “And then did everyone just go home and have sex?”

  But, for all his inexperience, Vishal was a millennial. No less than any young person in London or New York—maybe more—he lived through his smartphone, which was a constant source of overstimulation. The combination of a restrictive society and a private world of images, graphic without precedent, had turned Vishal’s curiosity about the opposite sex prurient before it had even the most basic outlet. One afternoon I was alarmed to see this young man, manifestly a virgin, hooting with laughter over a video of a blond woman pulling a fish from her vagina.

  I saw this unevenness—of a society overwhelmed by outside influence—everywhere in India. An unevenness of personality, of appetite, it even manifested itself physically in the ugliness of the cities, in the outsize overpasses and the stunted towns, in the little blue-glass façades, which gave an illusion of modernity and were freely pasted onto shoddily constructed buildings, like a metaphor for how thin the relationship with the modern West could feel in India. “A century of ‘progress,’” wrote Coomaraswamy a century ago, “has brought India to a stage where almost everything of beauty and romance belongs to her past.” Since then, another century of “progress” had wrought many more horrors. In a country such as India, in a city such as Benares, one felt the aesthetic failure to digest the West as the symptom of a deeper failure.

  I was in a multiplex cinema with Vishal, in a mall, watching a Bollywood romantic comedy called Main Tera Hero, when Tripathi called at last. He asked if I would come and see him at once.

  We left the cinema midmovie. Vishal gave me a lift on his bike. It was just before 4:00 p.m. The city was desolate. Dust marionettes staggered over the scorching streets. We stopped at a paan shop where a teenage boy stood in front of an urn draped in a moist red cloth. He was singing a song from the film we had only just been watching: “I’m all shook up ever since I saw you; my heart has jumped out of my breast … Turn around! Your hero is here. Turn around!”

  4

  THE RAPE AND THE SEDUCTION

  MAPU HAD MENTIONED THE DEATH of Tripathi’s son, but another death in Tripathi’s life had occurred decades ago, and in an important sense, it had been the more traumatic.

  Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi was six years old when his brother was killed. The year was 1942. Gandhi’s noncooperation movement was in full swing. Tripathi’s brother, an eighth-grade student, the first of this family of Brahmins to receive a modern education, was taking part in a demonstration when he was shot dead by British Baluch troops. The bullet hit him in the forehead and he was killed instantly. The colonial government did not allow the body to return home.

  “From the hospital, itself,” Tripathi said, “my father took him to the cremation ground.” Tripathi said “hospital” and “cremation ground” in English, the alien language seeming to set him at a distance from the reality. “My mother,” he began again in English, “was not allowed to see the face of the son.” Tripathi’s eyes shone. “So, this,” he said after a long pause, “is the background.”

  The office of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Eastern Division, was located in a little bungalow, painted in dull shades of red and cream and set some distance from a busy road. Once the head of Sanskrit at BHU, Tripathi, in his late seventies, was now spending his retirement as an adviser at the center.

  I entered a room that contained little save for a few pieces of government-issue furniture and a glass-faced metal cabinet that held a small but grand collection of Sanskrit books. Tripathi, dressed all in white, a tiny dot of vermilion on his forehead, glanced at me as I came in, then at a white plastic clock on the wall.

  “We’re on a war footing,” he said with a smile. His mouth was crowded with long, gapped teeth. He had a beautiful domed forehead, thin lips, and paper-thin skin. He sat opposite a younger man, an assistant of some sort, a fellow Brahmin. Between them lay a photocopy of a palm-leaf manuscript, a seminal text of Indian poetics highlighted in neon green. The two men worked together for many minutes in silence, with the grace and economy of movement that comes to those who do what men before them have always done. At 4:30, a secretary appeared with a plastic thermos, from which he poured tea into small clay cups called kulhars. Tripathi rose and ushered me into an interior room. He had a tiny knot of silver hair at the back of his head—the mere hint of a shikha.

  Gandhi’s speech at the inauguration of BHU had fired an early shot across the bow. He had only just returned from South Africa the year before, and his demands of the British were still modest. Three years later, in 1919, the British massacre of unarmed civilians in an enclosed garden in Amritsar made Gandhi think again. He came to feel that nothing short of full independence for India would suffice. In 1920, at a session of Congress attended by many thousand delegates, Gandhi’s resolution—noncooperation with the viceroy and a boycott of British titles and goods—was adopted in full. “The whole look of the Congress changed,” Nehru writes of that special session in his autobiography. “European clothes vanished, and soon only khadi was to be seen; a new class of delegate, chiefly drawn from the lower middle classes, became the type of Congressman; the language used became increasingly Hindustani … a new life and enthusiasm and earnestness became evident in Congress gatherings.”

  Through a program of celibacy, dietetics, and work, such as hand-spinning yarn, Gandhi raised an army of nonviolent soldiers impelled by the force of truth. The freedom movement went in fits and starts. The 1922 burning of a police station in a small town called Chauri Chaura, in which some twenty-two policemen were killed, led Gandhi to suspend noncooperation. In 1930, Gandhi restarted the movement through an inspired act of political theater. In opposition to the British salt tax, he and a band of committed followers marched two hundred and forty miles to make salt from God’s ocean under the open sky. The march to freedom gathered pace through the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, Europe was at war again. Gandhi and Nehru at first sympathized with the British war effort; when the Bengali freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose made overtures to the Japanese, Gandhi demurred: “Better the enemy I know than one I do not.” Still, by 1942, after the fall of Singapore, and with Calcutta well within range of Japanese bombers, Gandhi had called for the British to “quit India.” It was into this last act of the freedom movement that Tripathi’s brother was swept up.

  “I remember so vividly what happened,” Tripathi said, “the way people were running everywhere, the way the Baluch army went deeper and deeper into the city. There was such terror. I remember all that very well.”r />
  For Tripathi—and, I would learn, for his father—the killing was inseparable from the might of the colonial enterprise at large. Brute force and cultural power merged in their mind. When I asked Tripathi if he had felt his culture under siege as a young man, he said that the death of his brother was what first alerted him to the coercive nature of colonial power: “I understood it the day my brother was killed. What was his crime? Why was he killed?”

  Brahmins were in every part of India. Nehru was a Brahmin, from Kashmir in the north; the great mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was a Brahmin from the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu. There were Brahmins in Bengal—the writer Rabindranath Tagore was one—and Brahmins in Punjab. Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh, and Brahmins in Maharashtra. Brahmins made up only a very small percentage of India’s population, but they were part of an intellectual superstructure that existed everywhere. They were culturally specific to each region, but they also represented the underlying unity of Indian thought and spiritual life. Like Sanskrit itself, which served as a lingua franca in a nation as linguistically varied as Europe, the Brahmins were part of the solution to a problem India had always had to deal with: the problem of the one and the many.

  The Tripathis were Brahmins from Allahabad, a town 120 kilometers from Benares. It stands at the confluence of three sacred rivers—the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati—and hosts a great festival called the Kumbh Mela every twelve years. Allahabad was another of those places where the full palimpsest of Indian history is visible: the British Civil Lines behind a cordon sanitaire; a medieval Muslim town standing upon an ancient Hindu site of worship. The site of the confluence was, as Alice writes in her diary, one of those “sensitive points on earth” that are cherished by religions, such as Hinduism, in which the sacred landscape of India, its natural contours marked with myth, has a special place. “It is one of those seven or eight cities that are very old, older than history,” Tripathi said. “Not a single one of them has a past less than twenty-five hundred years.”

  This branch of Tripathis were physicians. The word Tripathi used was chikitsak, which implied they practiced traditional medicine. “We were physicians for twenty-five generations.”

  How was he able to go back so far? Most Indians could not go much further than the birth of a great-grandfather.

  “Those who are uprooted,” Tripathi said pointedly, using the English word—his use of English, I was beginning to see, was strategic—“they no longer have any of this. But for those who belong to tradition, this is their daily ritual.”

  “How so?”

  “We have a fifteen-day period when we offer libations of water to our ancestors. We can all go back at least seven generations. Beyond this, we also know where we originated, how we came to be where we are, and the age that we are presently in. This is something we do every day as part of our prayers. I am such and such, I belong to such and such clan, at such point of a time, in such an age, in such a place, that place which is part of a great continent…”

  Tripathi wanted me to know that he had moorings deeper than those modernity had given us, more organic notions of space and time than Google Maps could provide. They were threaded into ritual, and according to the older system, to know where you are was also to know who you are. But Tripathi must also have known that the older moorings were not as secure as they had once been; otherwise, we would not be having this conversation. The Tripathis, physicians for those twenty-five generations, lived in a town that had been invaded many times. In the sixteenth century, the old Hindu town of Prayag was renamed and made over to Allah, but none of this considerable upheaval had stopped the Tripathis from doing what they had always done. The line had held, until now.

  “Everyone came through India,” Tripathi said, “Huns, Shakas, Jews, Parsis, Muslims—and everyone was absorbed. India remained India. The Muslims had military power, but their ideas were no match for India’s. They brought change, of course, but India’s continuities remained intact. It was only with the coming of the British—and the West—that we were confronted with a challenge from a power that was not merely economic or political. Its thought content was powerful too,” he said, emphasizing the English words.

  The power of that thought content and the corresponding need to confront it with thought of one’s own was the reason BHU was founded. The great university at Benares, an ancient Hindu seat of learning, had been set up twenty years before Tripathi was born in 1936. The university, where Tripathi would one day head the Sanskrit department, had been established with the express purpose of assimilating the new knowledge that had come out of the West. This was part of the background to Tripathi’s life. What I did not realize immediately was the extent to which that life, especially in its early years, had manifested all the trauma, fear, excitement, and possibility of that time. When Tripathi came of age, it was not possible to separate British soft power from hard: he was able to put a face to the power that dominated him intellectually and culturally, as well as politically and militarily.

  The founder of BHU, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, was also an Allahabad man, a family friend who belonged to the same subcaste as the Tripathis. He had attended the same two-hundred-year-old Sanskrit school where Tripathi, aged ten, would go to learn the rudiments of Sanskrit grammar through the sutras of the ancient grammarian Panini.

  Tripathi remembered his father going to treat Malaviya at his house. Sometimes Tripathi, aged nine or ten, would be taken along. Tripathi recalled that once, when Malaviya was unwell, Tripathi was made to recite a Sanskrit verse that the great educator was especially fond of: “It is a verse about Krishna in the form of a cowherd, and a very difficult verse to recite, but I recited it very well. It made Malaviya-ji very happy, and he gave me his blessings.”

  “Do you recall the verse?”

  A look of childish wonder appeared on Tripathi’s face and he recited the verse in a soft, gurgling voice. It came back effortlessly and seemed grand—and out of place—in the drab government office where we sat on that hot April day.

  “I grew up with the language in my ears,” Tripathi said with pride. “And so, when people say it’s dead, I have no idea what they mean. It was certainly alive for us. I think I must have been fourteen when I began to compose verses in Sanskrit.”

  Writing came to ancient India out of the West a little before the beginning of the Common Era; as with all new things, it was met with a pushback. There was “a nostalgia for the oral,” writes the scholar Sheldon Pollock, “and a desire to continue to share in its authenticity and authority, with the same lingering effects of remembered oral poetry [that] mark other first moments of literary invention across Eurasia.” In old India nothing was considered learned until it came directly from the mouth of the preceptor into the ear of the student.

  As Tripathi spoke, I was given a glimpse of his enclosed and secure childhood world. Here is the little boy reciting a Sanskrit verse for an esteemed visitor whose life’s work is the founding of a university where East and West are to be brought under one roof. The year is 1945, perhaps 1946. Malaviya is at the end of his life; the Tripathis are still grieving for the boy who was violently killed a few years before. He had been the first among them to attend a modern school. Now, as a direct response to his death, Tripathi Sr. does something radical: he pulls his other sons out of the modern system and puts them right back into traditional education.

  It was amazing to contemplate the depth and scope of the hurt. In the father’s mind, the blame for the killing grew, acquiring larger and larger proportions. It did not stop at a local official, or the colonial government, or even the colonial enterprise; it grew to encompass the entire alien civilization. The terrifying “thought content” that must have offered wondrous miracles to the medical man had now turned up the dead body of his child. Rape and seduction came to be one in Tripathi Sr.’s mind. His response was retreat, a clean withdrawal into the old certainties.

  This family of Brahmins had tested the waters of a
brave new world and found they were out of their depth: the new knowledge was part of a killing enterprise. They thought the security of their traditional world still awaited them; they were soon to find out a door had closed behind them. Their embrace of the modern system had seemed voluntary, but it was in fact part of the inexorable triumph of that other system over their own. The truth of their position was revealed to them when it came time to send another elder brother of Tripathi’s into higher education. Tripathi Sr. thought it would be a good idea for his son to study ayurveda, and where better to do it than at the newly founded university at Benares?

  Tripathi Sr. was in for a rude surprise. Malaviya had died, but his son Govind Malaviya was vice-chancellor. Tripathi Sr. went to see him, taking his son along, believing admission would be a breeze.

  “I’m happy to have him,” Govind Malaviya said, “but he has to have studied science.” He meant Western science.

  Tripathi Sr. was aghast. “Govind,” he said, feeling the insult keenly, “we have been ayurvedic doctors for twenty-five generations. If my son is not to be admitted, who is?”

  Reminded of his kinship to the family, Govind Malaviya said, “Okay, call the boy.”

  Tripathi’s brother appeared.

  Govind Malaviya said, “Son, what have you read?”

  “I’ve read Panini’s grammar.” The boy named a few other Sanskrit texts.

  “You’ve read Panini’s grammar, fine. But have you read physics, chemistry, mathematics? How will you learn all this? And that, too, in English?”

  “What is there in the world that a man who has mastered Panini’s grammar cannot master?”

  “This was my brother’s response,” Tripathi said, recounting the story and beaming with pride. “It was said absolutely innocently. ‘When I’ve read that, then what is this science? This chemistry, this physics? I’ll read it all.’”