The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  Tripathi now used an English word of the utmost importance: confidence.

  “Govind Malaviya found my brother’s confidence so affecting that he changed the rule in the university. He gave the order that the other traditional students be admitted too. And so, with my brother’s admittance, thirty other students who had come from tradition were admitted as well.”

  “What do you think was the source of your brother’s confidence?” I asked Tripathi.

  “It came,” he replied carefully, “from knowing his own tradition, his own treatises. If I know my tradition, why can’t I learn that of another? This was there within him. But afterward, he said to my father, ‘You’ve trifled with me, you know. I won’t now allow you to trifle with my little brother.’”

  Tripathi Sr.’s grief-laden decision to withdraw his boys from modern education had hurt one of them. Tripathi’s brother attended BHU, but he had to work twice as hard as the other boys. He was the only one of that group of thirty that came “from tradition” who was able to finish the course. He got his degree in six years. The university asked him to stay on and become a member of the faculty, but he declined. He said his father’s clinic in Allahabad had closed. He was duty bound to go back and reopen it.

  “So, he went back to Allahabad and started his practice,” Tripathi said. “He lived out his years in Allahabad and died a very successful physician, both of traditional and modern medicine.”

  The experiences of his two brothers, each violent in their own way, were precursors to Tripathi’s own.

  His father returned from the ordeal at BHU and immediately hired a tutor to teach Tripathi English, as well as the other subjects that a traditional education would have denied him: world history, civics, political science, English literature. He read with wonder for the first time of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, of Phoenicia and Sumer.

  “When my brother’s admission stalled,” Tripathi said, “my father thought, ‘Now nothing will happen without English. He already has traditional learning under his belt, now we had better teach him some English, though not at the cost of losing tradition.’ That was why I was put in private education.”

  Hearing Tripathi speak, I was reminded of the strange symmetry of our situations. I had been a private student of Sanskrit; I, too, had felt the need to play a Sisyphean game of catch-up. But whereas Tripathi had gone in one direction, toward the West, I had felt the need to go in the other, toward India. Tripathi recalled his friendship with a boy his age, who became a physics professor in Allahabad.

  “We used to play together, and because he had gone into modern education, he would say that our epics were false, that Ram was a mythical character—not a historical personage—that all this was mythical history. I would say, ‘No; he was historical, not mythical. These are not lies. How can they be lies? The Mahabharata is not a lie; it is true.’ And we would argue like this throughout the day.”

  They were children’s arguments, but as is so often the case, they revealed a deeper tension. Tripathi’s Brahmin family had come into the bright light of a world that had already made all kinds of judgments about them, but they for the most part had nothing to say back; they had prepared no counterargument.

  “I was reading world history for the first time,” Tripathi said. “I was beginning to understand that it was not just India that possessed history and culture, but other places, too, that there was a world elsewhere. At the same time, I could not tolerate anybody casting doubt on the authenticity of my own history.”

  Doubt, a word for which this strategic bilingualist switched to English, assailed him more profoundly in the years to come. The lines of stress that had become visible in childhood and adolescence acquired a political dimension. He would come to see that what had felt like one man’s experience was, in fact, the experience of an entire country. On leaving high school, Tripathi went to Allahabad University and, as he said, “straight into modern education.”

  The search for the guru in traditional India—“that special relationship of disciple and master,” as Coomaraswamy says, “which belongs to Indian education in all its phases”—is a religious search. It has been likened to the search of the soul for its appointed body. It is meant to contain an element of strife, of looking without finding, of a time spent in the wilderness. The search ideally ends in a mystical meeting, and like all things worth obtaining, it is extremely difficult at first, then extremely easy. What ensues is a relationship akin to that of a father and son, but is even deeper, for whereas the one is granted by birth, the other is part of one’s spiritual progress on earth. A young Brahmin I met later, a student of classical grammar with a diamantine mind, said, “The student is like the guru’s son. It is written.” Then, quoting Panini from memory, he added, “‘Lineages are of two kinds. Those of birth, and those of knowledge.’”

  Tripathi grafted this idea of the guru onto the modern university. The expectation might well have ended in disappointment. But, happily, it did not: Tripathi found his man.

  “Professor K. Chattopadhyay.” Then, as if the Western title didn’t capture his stature, Tripathi added, “Pandit Chattopadhyay.” Pandit, learned or wise, was like those other words of Indian learning—guru, Brahmin, swami—that have mysteriously, and with some slight alteration, made their way into English.

  Tripathi now spoke of Chattopadhyay, a Bengali, with a great reverence. It was as if he were speaking of a sage in the epics. Chattopadhyay was skilled in the Vedas. He had mastered Indian philosophy and history. He knew Pali, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Persian, and the old Persian of the Zend-Avesta; Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, of course; and in addition to the Indian languages, he knew Greek and Latin, German, French, and Russian.

  “When he spoke English,” Tripathi said, “it was Oxonian English. When a visitor came from abroad, it was not the English professor who was called to greet him, but Chattopadhyay.” When the great Basham came to their university, it was Tripathi’s guru who welcomed the author of The Wonder That Was India. “That is the kind of man he was, my guru. He taught me the Vedas, and history, and languages.”

  This description of the guru was too pious to be taken seriously, but even here, a modern story intruded, undoing the stylized portrait.

  “The most important thing about Chattopadhyay was that he had been a classmate of the freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose.” The two Bengalis—Bose and Tripathi’s teacher—had done their M.A.’s together. “Bose went on to join the Indian Civil Service in England, while Chattopadhyay came to Allahabad, via Benares, to learn Sanskrit. Then, something interesting happened.

  “Bose, after going off to England, grew disillusioned with the ICS. At that point he wrote a letter to my guru. ‘Chattopadhyay,’ he said in his letter, ‘I have resolved to dedicate my life to the freedom of India and I want you to join me.’ My guru replied, ‘Subhash, you have chosen your path. I, too, have chosen mine: I’m going to dedicate my life to providing an absolutely correct understanding of Indian and Vedic culture. British scholars have distorted it. I must answer these distortions. I will study the Veda and work on my culture. You fight for the political freedom of the country; I will fight for its cultural freedom.’”

  Chattopadhyay was echoing a sentiment that had wide currency at the time of Indian independence, namely that an India that was politically free but, as Coomaraswamy wrote, “subdued by Europe in her inmost soul” was not worth fighting for, let alone dying for. Some, such as Sarojini Naidu and Bose in this story, believed that once the British were pushed out, their influence would end too. Others, such as Coomaraswamy and Alice, sensed that it was after the British had left that India’s true reckoning would begin. The brutality of the colonial enterprise had made it easy to dismiss the appeal of the West. After colonization, India, like many other postcolonial countries, would be forced to contend with what was attractive about the other civilization, as well as confront the weaknesses of one’s own.

  “So,” Tripathi said, picking up the thread of his story within
a story, “Bose writes again. He says, ‘Chattopadhyay, once the country becomes free, and an independent nation is born, there will be several Chattopadhyays. Come with me!’ My guru replied, ‘Subhash, take this from me in writing: the fight for a country’s political freedom must run parallel to its fight for cultural freedom; the two must go together; one does not precede the other.’

  “I am the student of such a guru,” Tripathi said. “It is at the feet of this very great man that I have received my training.”

  Tripathi was a young man when he had an epiphany that mirrored mine at the Abhinavagupta Library. It happened during a performance of Oedipus Rex in Allahabad.

  In the mid-1950s, when Tripathi was still at university in Allahabad, he came into contact with a journalist who had been a general secretary of the All India Congress Committee, as well as a student at Banaras Hindu University. At an anniversary celebration for Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, the journalist, an older man, was in the chair. Tripathi, a student in the Sanskrit department, had written some verses in praise of Malaviya. Once he recited them, the journalist offered him a prize of five rupees. But the journalist didn’t give Tripathi the money immediately. Instead, he invited Tripathi to the offices of the newspaper where he worked. There, over tea and samosas, the two men got talking. Tripathi’s father—the man who had been so instrumental to his education—had died that year, in 1955, and Tripathi was perhaps in search of a mentoring figure. In their conversations, the journalist learned that Tripathi’s brother had been killed in 1942, at a rally in which the journalist had also taken part.

  It was a tense year. Gandhi had watched with anguish as the British retreated from Burma and the Japanese stood poised on the borders of India. “Here is a mantra,” Gandhi said, addressing the All India Congress Committee in Bombay. “A short one that I give you; you may imprint it in your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is, ‘Do or die.’ We shall either free India or die in the attempt. We shall not live to see the perpetuation of slavery.” Later that day the “Quit India” resolution was passed, and within twenty-four hours the senior leadership of the freedom movement, including Gandhi and Nehru, was jailed. The arrests unleashed civil disobedience throughout the country. The British administration regarded the Indian protests during wartime as treasonous, and Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, put them down with brutal force. There were mass arrests, the burning of villages, and the use of machine guns by low-flying aircraft. The situation in Allahabad, where the Nehrus came from, and where his daughter, Indira, was courting arrest, was especially bad.

  When Tripathi’s new friend learned that Tripathi’s brother had been killed in the same movement, his affection for this young man grew immeasurably. “After that,” Tripathi said, “he would call me over many times, and when he learned that I was working on Sanskrit theater, it was he who first urged me to do Sanskrit theater in contemporary and modern ways.”

  Modernity, I realized, did not then have the connotation that it has today. It was not another wave of cultural domination flowing out of the West, nor a synonym for the westernized classes in India. Modernity represented a fresh start: the possibility of something culturally neutral after colonial rule. Modernity was Le Corbusier and Picasso, Nehru and socialism; it was the life of the kibbutz and Tel Aviv. It spoke of fresh beginnings.

  Tripathi, studying under Chattopadhyay, was immersed in Sanskrit theater, working on Kalidasa in particular. It was a vibrant time for theater, and some of the great personalities of the Calcutta stage would come through Allahabad, such as Utpal Dutt and Sombhu Mitra. “Top-rate people.” Tripathi said. “Dutt was a Marxist, and let me tell you—I’ve seen Sir Laurence Olivier play Othello, and Utpal Dutt, actor to actor, was hardly less than him.”

  The year was 1962. Tripathi’s journalist friend had heard that Oedipus Rex was to be performed in Allahabad, with Sombhu Mitra himself playing Oedipus, and his wife, Tripti Mitra, in the role of Jocasta. The journalist got hold of some tickets and took his protégé to see the play. For the young Tripathi, it was life-altering.

  He paused. His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew large in frank amazement as he recalled the night at the theater.

  “What impact,” he muttered. “Overpowering! I was completely lost in the world of the theater, in Sophocles’ world.

  “After watching that play, we walked for almost a kilometer in total silence. We didn’t say one word to each other. We walked like this for a long time, and then my mentor turned to me and said, ‘Is there anything in your tradition to parallel Oedipus Rex?’

  “I stopped to think; he pressed me for an answer. ‘No, no. Tell me. Tell me now.’

  “I said, ‘Yes, the Shakuntala of Kalidasa.’”

  Sanskrit drama was a sister of the Greek. The English philologist William Jones had been the first to notice a resemblance between the two languages that could not be accidental. Jones, a contemporary of the British governor-general Warren Hastings’s, had gone as a jurist to Calcutta at the end of the eighteenth century. There, he founded the Asiatic Society and first posited the “common source” for Indo-European languages that became the basis for the study of modern linguistics. No doubt with the European Renaissance in mind, Jones wrote:

  To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be still worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo: suppose Greece to have been conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country: substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans, for the priests of Jupiter, and Valmic, Vyasa, Calidasa, for Homer, Plato, Pindar.

  Jones introduced Sanskrit drama to the West. He had heard of the natakas, but he did not know what they were. The Brahmins deliberately misled him. They told him that they were “works full of fables” and consisted “of conversations in prose and verse, held before ancient Rajas in their publick assemblies, on an infinite variety of subjects, and in various dialects of India.” Then one day a “very sensible Brahmen” explained to him that these natakas were rather a lot like the productions the British put on during the cold season in Calcutta that went by the name of plays.

  Thus Jones discovered Sanskrit drama. He read and translated Shakuntala, a play that suited the mood of eighteenth-century Europe and whose fame grew far and wide. Goethe came to hear of it and fell in love: “Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole name combine? I name thee, O Sakuntala!”

  Tripathi, once again coming from the opposite direction to me, needed no introduction to Shakuntala, but his first taste of Greek drama, a classical culture consanguine with his—at once utterly familiar and utterly distinct—was electrifying. He was immediately able to see in the one ancient culture a shade of his own, but he could not enjoy the feeling free of anxiety. Goethe and Jones had been able to reach into Sanskrit culture, secure about the place of their own culture in their own countries: the Sanskrit drama that had come from half a world away was no threat to their own. This was not true of Tripathi’s India.

  This anxiety was what lay behind Tripathi’s mentor’s question. Tripathi had barely been able to digest the impact of this wonderful new experience before he was confronted by a simple and brutal question: Do you have anything as good as this?

  “Can you put it on?” the mentor asked.

  “I absolutely can,” the young Tripathi replied. “But I have only one condition. I must find my Shakuntala.”

  It was a turning point. From then on, coincidences attached themselves to the moment of intellectual discovery. In a popular weekly column in a Bombay tabloid called Blitz, the screenwriter K. A. Abbas reco
unted the story of a Soviet delegation that had recently arrived in India. They were asked what they would like to see and do during their stay. They instantly replied that they wanted to see a performance of Kalidasa’s great play. The Indian side balked and fell silent. The Soviet delegates did not know what to make of their hosts’ strange behavior. They thought perhaps that the play was not running, and that they were too embarrassed to say so. “If it’s a question of waiting,” the Soviets said at last, “we’re happy to wait. But we must absolutely see Kalidasa’s Shakuntala before returning to the U.S.S.R.”

  “They had to be told,” Tripathi said with a wry smile, “that Shakuntala was not staged in India.” Not in the way the Soviets, who took literature seriously enough to fear it, would have expected. They could wait a lifetime and never see a professional production of the play.

  “All this,” Tripathi said, “was recounted in great detail in K. A. Abbas’s column.” Tripathi’s journalist friend knew Abbas, and as the column had appeared at the same time as the search for Shakuntala, the journalist wrote to Abbas, asking that he send an actress from Bombay to play Shakuntala. “Why are you searching for Shakuntala in Bombay?” Abbas wrote back. “Surely, she is to be found in the valleys of the Ganges. Go, look for her there!”

  “That opened our eyes,” Tripathi said. Not long after, they discovered a young girl of classical Indian features who was ideal for the role, even though she knew little to no Sanskrit. “I spent two to three months teaching her Sanskrit,” Tripathi said. “She was a very good actress. I played the role of Dushyant myself. We rehearsed for many weeks. And then the play was staged.”

  It was a resounding success. Tripathi may have been too late for the Soviet delegation, but his production of Kalidasa’s play found many eager audiences at home. Other people put up the money for further productions, now a Muslim tobacco magnate, now the bishop of the Allahabad diocese. Famous actors from the Calcutta stage gave guest appearances. It was the beginning of Tripathi’s long career as an academic and impresario. But, as I listened, an overwhelming sadness rose in me. The air in the small government office was full of elegy.