The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  “My target,” Tripathi was saying, “was Shakuntala for contemporary audiences. I needed to show people that their cultural inheritance, when compared with Sophocles and Euripides, was no less a thing. Western literature, for me, was like a torch by whose light I could see my own. I was a man of classical tradition, of classical thought and art form. I felt we should strengthen this. What are our classics? Everyone has their own. What are ours? What is the meaning of contemporaneity for us? These were the questions that I was trying by my own lights to answer.”

  I felt my interest flag. Tripathi’s voice had a note of desperation. I liked his story so long as it was a story about a young man coming to terms with where he, and his culture, stood in relation to the tremendous power of the West; but as the problem gave way to glib solutions, I thought Tripathi sounded unconvincing. He had at every stage been forced into a defensive stance. He was making a case for his culture, and in doing so he was undermining what his story was evidence of: that it was not culture, but confidence, that mattered. What was it about the meeting of India and Europe that had shattered India’s confidence?

  “Somewhere I had this consciousness of there being a kind of colonial hangover, and I thought we must overcome this,” Tripathi said. “Slowly we were becoming alienated from our tradition. In the fifties and sixties, there was not the alienation there is today. But what I feared then has slowly proved true. And there is a great gulf now, especially where the urban middle class is concerned.”

  Tripathi was referring to the colonization of India by the Indians themselves, finishing off the job the British had begun. In many ways, they had been more successful. Their success was the reason why today this great cultural distance existed between Tripathi and me.

  Tripathi’s early and violent contact with the West produced in him a need to defend a culture of which he was still in possession. Subsequent generations would be far less intact and would have to make a gargantuan effort to regain culture—something like what Mapu had done. It would never be complete; nor, indeed, could it be asked of everybody. Life is hard enough without having to fight a crusade on behalf of one’s culture. And to what end? It is easier just to let it all go.

  Tripathi anticipated me. He now said, “To know the meaning of contemporaneity in the Indian context, this has always been my endeavor. Sanskrit for me was this force. It gave me a direction. It was a path, a beautiful path, by which I could understand myself, and the world, and the people of the world. It lighted the way; that is why I value it. I think of it as valid even today. If tomorrow it is no longer valid…” His voice trailed off. It was a prospect too terrible to consider. “But for now, in my view, at least, it is still valid.”

  But what did it mean to be contemporary? And what did it mean for an ancient language that nobody spoke to be contemporary?

  “To be contemporary,” Tripathi said, “is to understand all of one’s past, all of one’s inheritance, and, while joining this to the present, to look toward the future. This is what it is to be contemporary. It has no political meaning for me.”

  Since he mentioned politics, I asked him about the election outside, which seemed to encapsulate so many of the historical and cultural tensions Tripathi had gestured to. Tripathi had spoken of cultural death. What did he think of Modi’s politics of revival?

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I honestly don’t know. What I can say is that there is already a change in Modi over these past four months—a change in speech, in body language?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What we are on the inside will always show on the outside. We can hide nothing. It will always show on our faces. And if I am filled with hatred, that will show too. This is why I say that the external and internal—mind and body, thought and action—are one.”

  A Hindu answer, if ever there was one! But did he mean that he thought Modi now seemed less full of hatred?

  “I see a change. And let me tell you, anyone who wants to use the religion for irreligious purposes—to target minorities, say—will not survive.”

  I had one last question for him: “You said earlier that art saved you. What do you mean by that? What did it save you from? How did it save you?”

  Tripathi looked hard at me. “There are some caves not far from here. They are some twenty-two centuries old. In one of them is an inscription—it is still there today; it is by Sutanuka. She was a…” He struggled to find the right word, settling finally on the French danseuse. “She was a great beauty of the time. And she was in love with an actor from Benares called Devadatta. In a gesture of her love, she built him an auditorium, cut from the rock; it is very beautiful. The inscription reads, ‘I, Sutanuka, a devadasi, here build for my lover, an actor or artiste, Devadatta by name, this auditorium. Let poets come here, let artists come…’

  “Everything is broken,” Tripathi said, raising the ghost of Ozymandias. “It is from the second century B.C.…” He paused. “I have written a poem in Sanskrit. It is called ‘Sutanuka.’ It is in free verse, and it is unlike any of the standard Sanskrit forms. In it, I say, ‘You forever make me new, Sutanuka … I was fossilized. But you touched me. And now I’m not fossilized. I am vibrating. I struggle, I fall; but I always stand up. This is not me, this is you.’

  “Sutanuka is a metaphor for this whole art, this whole culture. There are many moments when I forsake all hope. I begin to feel I cannot accomplish anything. I become dull, dead, insentient. But, Sutanuka, you make me conscious again. You bear me along…”

  Before I could say anything, Tripathi quickly added, “There is a second poem. It is to Europa. ‘I have dwelt with you too,’ I say. ‘I have seen those same things in you. Where you are, the world is one. I call to you too, Europa.’ Sutanuka and Europa, one myth, one reality. Sutanuka is the Indian reality; Europa, Greek myth. I speak to them both. From both I draw sustenance. This is what I mean when I say that culture can make a man whole. But it must never be a narrow thing. The moment it narrows, it is lost. It has to have fullness; it has to contain past, present, and future…”

  Tripathi picked up a sheet of paper from the government-issue desk in front of him. He began to draw a diagram, a single point around which he made concentric circles, a pictorial representation of the telescoping that was a part of his daily practice. This space-time awareness was central to his organization of the world: to know where you are is to know who you are.

  “There is this point,” he said. “If we go a little wider, there is my village. Wider still, my state. My country, the world. There is no conflict between me and the world. It is but an enlargement of me. And that whole world can be collapsed back into this single point: me. This is our symbolism, this is what we call the mandala. It comes of use to us in our prayers. Every day we meditate on this idea. This is what spirituality can do, and this is what art can do…” It can make you whole, I thought he was going to say, but he stopped short. He was a theater man; he knew about leaving things unsaid.

  “It is not my job to convert anyone,” he added, “just to share my experience. If you like it, then well and good. If you don’t, then strive to find your own truth; but make your truth manifest and move on.”

  We were at the end. Observing the effect of his words on me—I was seduced—he said, with only a touch of intellectual vanity, “Is that enough for today?”

  IT WAS EVENING WHEN I walked back to the Alice Boner House. The dome of heat had lifted, and the town exhaled. The disorder did not seem so oppressive now. I was painfully aware on that walk of a great gap between the physical ugliness of India and the fineness of its internal life. I felt I was in a place where a vital connection between internal and external realities had been severed. People did not match their surroundings, just as Tripathi, working on an ancient text of Indian poetics, did not match the dreary government office where he spent his days.

  Everywhere one saw signs of beauty, such as talent and genius, fighting their way out from an encroaching ugliness: a shade-giving peepa
l tree, its trunk bandaged in red religious threads, evoked the memory of something old and attractive, even as it was engulfed in brown smoke and traffic; a temple tank, its litter-strewn surface a deep inviting green, sought to bring tranquillity to the slum neighborhood that had sprung up around it; a woman in a shimmering sari of pink and gold, dripping with bangles and jewelry, stood in open slippers in a verge of wet black mud. Then there was the riverfront itself, where amid the palaces and steeples, there rose a pink sewage pumping station, its cylindrical surface ornamented with a crudely painted mural of Shiva. The ugliness of modern India, standing in juxtaposition with the beauty of what history had bequeathed, was enough to make one believe in the intangible India of mind and spirit that people here so often spoke about. It was the only way to justify a present that dishonors the memory of the past.

  5

  THE CONQUEROR OF DESTINY

  THE ELECTION DREW TO ITS protracted climax in the middle of May 2014. Voting occurred in nine excruciating phases, staggered over several weeks. Benares was among the last to go to the polls.

  My final week in the city was unendurable. The white skies had arrived; the afternoons burned; the river in the evenings was swampy. The atmosphere was tense with the heavy presence of commandos and intelligence agents who patrolled the streets with sniffer Alsatians. One night, returning home, I came upon a street full of policemen and journalists.

  The electricity had gone out and the street was under a cloak of smoky summer darkness. In the revolving blue light of a police vehicle and the halogen white of a TV camera, I saw the bloodied face of a party worker who claimed to have been beaten up by members of a right-wing Hindu group a few hours before.

  I had not gone to Benares for politics, but politics intruded on my time there. It was present in the obvious form of a general election, which I wrote about in a weekly dispatch from Benares for a Delhi political magazine. But what interested me more than electoral politics was the underlying cultural crisis that was feeding the politics. Modi, for millions, represented a moment of awakening. People spoke of a second independence, in which Hindu India would shrug off the legacy of foreign rule, and the true soul of the country would find utterance. I wondered if the decay of old ways had brought forth this politics of revival, and I was interested in meeting someone in whom the mechanism could be observed.

  I first met Anand Mohan Jha on the riverside one afternoon in early April. He was with a boatman I knew. We got talking about the election, and the boatman, a wild wheeling figure who wore a red bandana and heavily tinted glasses, reminding me of the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now, said, “When Modi comes to power, we will send this government of the English packing, and everything will become Hindi.”

  Anand watched our exchange from an anchored boat nearby. He lay like a Hindi movie hero with his hands behind his head. He was dressed in tatty stonewashed jeans and a checked shirt. His arms were thin, his face small, dark, and impish. A pubescent mustache was shaved strategically around a mouth of large tobacco-encrusted teeth. He had a bit of sandalwood paste on his throat and a dot of orange on his forehead. He now rose, and enjoying the effect of his words, he said that if India was not careful, a new era of slavery would soon be upon her. This was the perennial fear of the Hindu right: the return of foreign rule over a weak and divided country. Anand said that it was here already, in a covert sense; soon it would be out in the open.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Why?” he repeated excitedly. “I’ll tell you why: because people are selling out the country for material gain. Our culture is being decimated. Many in my family have received degrees in commerce; but I chose to be nearer my culture. A great civilization, like ours, cannot be subdued without the complicity of men on the inside, working against us. Someone—I cannot say who—is controlling us, and there is but the difference of a syllable between vikas [development] and vinasha [ruin].”

  Anand was hard to place. His rag-doll appearance and his being in the company of the boatman, whom I knew to be part of a lower-caste community, made me think he was of the same background. But when he extended his hand and gave me his full name—Anand Mohan Jha—he could only have been a Brahmin from the neighboring state of Bihar.

  His talk against development, which was Modi’s slogan in the election, made me think he was not a supporter. I was soon to learn that he was not merely a supporter, but a card-carrying member of the Hindu right. Anand belonged to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which was the most powerful Hindu nationalist youth organization in the country. The ABVP, like its fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), sought to weaponize Hinduism to bring about a cultural renaissance. For these groups, politics was not an end in itself, but a way to conduct the cultural struggle by other means.

  As the election picked up pace, corresponding day by day to the onset of exquisite heat, Anand and I encountered each other more frequently. He seemed to become more and more embroiled in the election’s frenzy, here participating in passionate political conversations in tea shops, there handing out flyers for “cultural events” that were thinly veiled conduits for whipping up support for Modi. On the day Modi came to Benares to file his nomination papers, Anand was delirious with excitement. As a student in the Sanskrit department at BHU, he had been charged with showering Modi with flowers upon his arrival on campus. When he saw me hanging about, he exhorted me to come with him and join the jansailab: the deluge of humanity. The election provided a kind of release for Anand. I imagined him as one of the many young men who now roamed the riverside in the evenings wearing cardboard Modi masks, the eyes cut out in almond-shaped hollows.

  Anand made me nervous. I did not think I would speak to him at any length. I feared that to do so was to let myself in for erratic ruminations about the evil West and the virtues of Hindu tradition. He must have sensed my reluctance to speak to him, for one evening as I was packing to leave, he showed up uninvited at the Alice Boner House.

  It was the first week of May. The broad leafy avenues of BHU were alight with the burnt orange of gulmohars in bloom. A hot desert wind called the loo had begun to blow out of the west, bringing with it the full blast of stupefying heat. It robbed the sky of pigment and reduced the clouds to veined outlines. The wind emptied the city’s streets for most of the day and feathered the surface of the river with whitecaps.

  We sat downstairs on the veranda in the fluctuating light with nothing to keep us cool but a white pedestal fan. Truth be told, I hardly noticed the heat. I was in thrall to Anand’s story. He began to speak at sunset and spoke continuously for ninety minutes. When he was done, it was dark outside.

  “My name,” he said, “means ‘joy.’” It was given to him by his grandfather. Anand was born on the fifth day of the lunar month of Chaitra, which is auspicious; his birth came after a long period of adversity in his family. There were court cases, land disputes, an uncle with four girls and no boys. But soon after Anand was born, the cases were resolved in the family’s favor. A son was born to his uncle, and his grandfather, believing Anand to be the cause of this good luck, said, “He came and brought joy, so we will call him Anand.”

  Anand’s grandfather had two brothers. The younger had made good on the dream of an earlier time: he had secured a government job with the Railway Police and built a house of brick and mortar; he had raised his position in society and, with his deeds—his karma—improved his bloodline. He was one kind of model for Anand.

  The older brother was another, but he represented a more cautionary tale. He had become a bandit in Nepal, just across the border from their village in Bihar. He was said to have locked a police officer in his station and set the station alight. Anand, trying to elevate the older brother’s image in my eyes, described him as a Robin Hood figure: “He would steal from the rich and give to the poor. He was a great devotee of Mother Durga.”

  But the stain remained, and Anand lived with the specter of further degrading his bloodline, especi
ally because as he grew up, he found himself attracted to disreputable characters.

  “Astrologers believe that each person is the product of thirty bloodlines,” Anand said. “There are fourteen familial bloodlines that come through each parent; fourteen and fourteen, that makes twenty-eight; the individual parents add two, so thirty in total.”

  The idea of blood redeemed or degraded through deeds had a biological reality for Anand. When he spoke to me of more illustrious ancestors, such as a decorated musician who had performed before Nehru, or a famous astrologer, he was trying to improve my impression of his lineage.

  “We had once been an aristocratic family. We had land, and money, and jewels. There was only one other family—the Thakurs, I believe, was their name—who were our equals in the whole district. It was us, and them, and nobody else.”

  Anand’s village was organized along caste lines. “Our house is right in the front with the other Brahmin houses, almost as soon as you enter the village.” Then, stratum by stratum, Anand rattled off all the other castes and trades: from land-owning Brahmins to washermen, barbers, weavers, and oil pressers, the caste to which Modi belonged. “Right at the end, some four or five kilometers from our house, come the Muslims. Some ten or twenty houses, and that’s plenty, if you ask me.”

  The village was more than a place where people lived: it was a physical manifestation of caste. Hearing Anand speak, I thought I could hear the echo of voices older than his own. Recent events seemed to recede into a folkloric darkness.