The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  What bothered him most was the unthinking quality of his world. There was, on the one hand, a total absence of “commitment,” a word Mukhopadhyay seemed to use as a substitute for “dharma”; on the other, there was an unwillingness to make any sacrifice for one’s beliefs or ideals. “A culture,” Mukhopadhyay said, “is the projection of the image its people have and bear about themselves.” But the culture he grew up in had grown unsure of itself. His people were not ashamed of being Brahmin; they were in fact quite proud of it; but he found to his dismay that they were neither willing to deny nor defend their beliefs. If there was a shared experience of being Brahmin at all, Mukhopadhyay said, “it was in the absence of Brahminism, rather than in its presence.”

  The village Mukhopadhyay grew up in was scarcely fourteen miles from Calcutta. Half its residents were daily commuters to the city. It had been founded in the early nineteenth century—the foundation stone was laid by the British governor-general Lord Bentinck himself—and it had an old public library. Intellectual life was vibrant enough for one of the residents to write a two-volume history of the village. Mukhopadhyay drew this portrait of the place where he grew up to make a more general point about Bengal: that it was “far more socially advanced” than any other part of India.

  “They were very educated,” Mukhopadhyay said of his people. “During my forefathers’ time, the Mahabharata was already being translated for the European people into English.”

  If Bengal was as socially and intellectually developed as it was, it was because Bengal of any place in India had had the longest sustained contact with the new learning out of Europe. The Bengal Renaissance, of whose fruits Mukhopadhyay was justly proud—the library, the translations, the men who wrote two-volume histories of villages—was the result of an intercultural meeting with Europe, and nowhere did India come closer to “digesting the West’” than in Bengal. Yet Mukhopadhyay felt that the relationship with the West had done more harm than good. Why?

  “We all wanted, we young boys, to be modern, to be viewed as modern, to talk modern, to be recognized as modern; but a large part of what we understood of modernity was a negative concept, the critique of what has gone before.” To be modern, Mukhopadhyay said, was simply to turn one’s back on old India. “It had no positive meaning.”

  “I narrate one incident: When I was a student of the first year of college, one of my friends came and told me that a friend we had in common had thrown away his sacred thread. When I heard it—something must have been building in me—I just met that boy and said, ‘What have you done? Thrown away your sacred thread?’

  “He said, ‘Yes. So?’

  “‘And you are proud of it?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘Why did you do it? Because you think to be modern you have to do it?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “I said, ‘Then what is the good of being modern? Modernity then is very old. If now you are to be modern, then you must be extramodern.’

  “‘What do you mean?’ the boy said.

  “‘Challenge this modernity and wear this thread! If throwing away the thread is modernity, then to wear it morally, consciously, aggressively, will be even more modern.’”

  As a young man, Mukhopadhyay found himself caught between those who blindly adhered to tradition and those who were apologetic of Hinduism, men such as Tagore and Vivekananda, who had, Mukhopadhyay felt, internalized a foreign criticism of their culture and pretended it was their own. “The West’s India,” he said, “became our India.” Mukhopadhyay craved intellectual autonomy. There was something demoralizing in forever feeling acted upon, in forever taking one’s cues from a foreign culture.

  “I think I can now reconstruct what I was feeling,” Mukhopadhyay said. “What pained me was that people took things in an oversimplistic way.” The sacred thread was the symbol of an ancient organization of life. It could not be treated as if it were a mere garment, to be put on or discarded on a whim. “Whether you become a Brahmin, or not a Brahmin, you should be very serious about it. This is what I felt.”

  The young Mukhopadhyay struck me as so serious that I felt obliged to ask him how old he was at the time. He replied that he would have been around nineteen or twenty.

  I now understood something he had said earlier. In describing his numerous troubles with his teachers as a young man, he had said that “99.9 percent” of those teachers had developed a great love for him, though they disagreed with him. The statement had struck me as odd because Mukhopadhyay seemed so prickly and difficult, so painfully oversensitive; he seemed like a hard person to love at first. But now, as I began to discern the intellectual integrity that underlay the irascibility of this Bengali Brahmin, I understood what someone would later say to me about Mukhopadhyay: “He is a very fine man. His mind, his words, his deeds, are totally transparent. There is no gap.”

  Bengal’s universities in those decades following Indian independence were convulsed with strikes and boycotts. Every form of protest was rife on campus. There were Maoist rebellions and student-led insurgencies. It was easy to be co-opted into a system of thought, and Mukhopadhyay seems to have guarded his intellectual independence by resurrecting the idea of dharma. When the Marxists came calling, urging him to strike, he told them that he rejected what he saw as a borrowed form of protest. It was for the union or factory worker to strike, not the student. “They have their way,” he told them, “you should have your way.”

  Small and testy as these early assertions of dharma were, they spoke to something deeper. The Brahmin was the eternal student. It may even be said that, of the four great stages of Hindu life—student, householder, retiree, and renunciant—the second, householder, the man who goes out into the world to earn a living and build a family, was but an interlude for the Brahmin between his young years as a student and the time when, as an old man, he would once again be permitted to give up the world and return to a life of study and contemplation. The Brahmin’s prerogative was to have his actions comport with his dharma. If Mukhopadhyay found himself at odds with the world around him, it was because he was trying to reorder the confusions of modern India through a strict adherence to dharma.

  “There was this mixture of confidence,” he said of his young self, “expressing itself as the desire to say something new, to express a new way of thinking, to respond, to not just accept everything…”

  Even as Mukhopadhyay was full of these feelings, his intellectual journey was stalled. His family had fallen on hard times, and it was almost impossible for him to continue his education. He only just about managed to pass his school examinations. But there was no money for him to go to college. He had wanted, as a young boy, to be a professor of English literature at Presidency College in Calcutta. These plans had now to be abandoned. “My intellectual ambitions,” he said with a wry smile, “were about to be nipped in the bud.” It was thought that Mukhopadhyay should go into “service” of some kind to support his family. “But I did not give up, and more importantly my father did not give up.”

  The poverty of the Brahmin family became a test of their commitment to the life of the mind. Mukhopadhyay’s father told the rest of his household, “If all the family is to go hungry and starve, then so be it. Since he has the desire for studying, let him study.”

  Knowledge for knowledge’s sake was the creed of the Brahmin. Power in India, Mukhopadhyay had said earlier, was of two types: the power that comes out of tyaga, “renunciation,” is called Brahminic power, and then there is martial power, or brute strength. The Indian scriptures had made it clear, through a contest between two sages, that the former was superior. “To be Brahmin means certain things,” Mukhopadhyay said with frustration, “certain virtues and qualities—it has nothing to do with being a dominant caste. This sort of verbal jugglery was very cleverly done for many years by the Western interests.”

  The ideal of the Brahmin is expressed in Gora too:

  If other countries yearn for generals like Wellington, or scien
tists like Newton, rich men like Rothschild, our country yearns for the Brahmin—such a Brahmin who is without fear, who detests greed, who has attained victory over sorrow, and who worries not for scarcity, for his mind is conjoined with the Supreme Self. He who is steadfast, calm, self-realized; India has a deep yearning for such a Brahmin. Indeed, her independence depends on her ability to throw up such a man, for in every section of our society, in everything we do, the Brahmin is there to remind us of the need to remain free.

  When I mentioned Tagore to Mukhopadhyay, he said waspishly, “Rabindranath was of that group of people who could not so much as drink a drop of water without abusing Hinduism.”

  But Mukhopadhyay emphatically agreed that the source of the Brahmin’s prestige in society, though he lacks financial and physical strength, is his autonomy. Though not always true in practice, he said that in Bengal, a Brahmin family that accepted a donation or a gift was considered to be lower in rank, whereas one that did not accept any such gift or donation was ranked very highly. “These people were not greedy,” Mukhopadhyay said, “not hankering after fame, not after money, or favor. This was their strength.”

  Mukhopadhyay’s father, after his wife died, lived with Mukhopadhyay for fourteen years, “He was alone with me, and I had the opportunity to observe him closely. He really had very little desire, or demand, for anything. He did not ask for any service, any help, any care.”

  This was the man who had stepped in to reassert the Brahmin ideal of learning above all else when his son’s university education was imperiled. No sooner had Mukhopadhyay entered higher education than he embarked upon the quest to find his second father—his guru—and it was even more intense than Tripathi’s had been, every bit an intellectual romance. Mukhopadhyay’s future guru had taught him philosophy as an undergraduate and had impressed the young Mukhopadhyay with his confidence. “He was the only one who did not ask me to take his subject as my major,” Mukhopadhyay said. And this more than anything else, if only out of childish pride, won Mukhopadhyay over. “It was how I came to philosophy,” he said with a girlish laugh. For his M.A., Mukhopadhyay thought, “Enough is enough: I’ll take my admission in English literature.” Destiny had decreed otherwise, but before the mystical union between disciple and master could happen, there were crossed wires and missed meetings, hurt feelings and chance encounters. Mukhopadhyay nearly enrolled as an English student at the University of Calcutta. By a stroke of pure luck, like a man narrowly prevented from marrying the wrong woman, Mukhopadhyay got his future guru on the phone that day. The young Mukhopadhyay was instructed to come down to the recently established Jadavpur University; he did as he was told, and there his guru was waiting for him.

  “When I went there,” Mukhopadhyay said, “he just took me with him, straight to the administrative building, met the registrar, and said, ‘I want this boy to be a student of philosophy in this university. Arrange everything. It may not be possible for him to pay immediately the fees or admission.’ I returned back home a student of the M.A. class in philosophy. All Providence!”

  It was amazing to see a transformation in Mukhopadhyay as he spoke. For a moment, the stern moralist became giddy with excitement. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found my teacher. That was the turning point in my whole life. He made me whatever I am. When I published my first book, I dedicated it to him. One has many teachers, but I say, ‘No, I studied under them; they are not my teacher; my teacher is this one person alone.’”

  Just then, the doorbell rang and the green metal door of Mukhopadhyay’s small flat swung open to reveal two young men dressed in full saffron robes. At the sight of Mukhopadhyay, they fell to their knees; each placed his right forearm on the floor, palm up, crossed it with his left, then touched his forehead to the ground before him. I was stunned. Who were these young men? What connection did they have to Mukhopadhyay?

  He was a specialist, he explained, in ancient Indian logic, and these young men of peasant backgrounds came to see him most afternoons for instruction in logic. This was the life Mukhopadhyay had vowed to live when his time at the modern university in Calcutta was over. I was entranced at first, perhaps for no other reason than the thrill of seeing the antique figure of the monk as a scholar still alive in India. But as I talked to these two young men—one from Bihar, the other from the eastern state of Orissa—I began to see that their idea of scholarship was very different from my own. We encountered some of the same problems I had faced in speaking to Pavan Kumar Mishra a few weeks before.

  Why had they come to Benares?

  To study, they said in one voice, using a Sanskrit word that suggested a ritualized form of scholarship rather than intellectual curiosity.

  Why did they want to study?

  Because these were the values and traditions of their forefathers, they replied.

  My interest waned; later Mukhopadhyay confessed that this kind of student had little to say for himself. The “studying” was almost a form of piety, one not driven by any spirit of inquiry. These young men, unlike their teacher, were still within tradition; they had not had their world shaken up by the bracing contact with modernity. Their idea of learning seemed to me to be exactly the kind of thing Mukhopadhyay disdained. It made me wonder if these young men were not attractive to him for the same sentimental reason they had been attractive to me: they represented continuity for men in whom a break had occurred.

  MUKHOPADHYAY AND I HAD AGREED early on to avoid abstractions and to speak in specifics about his life and experience. He eventually gave in, but at first he was appalled by this request:

  “You want me to speak about myself? But ahamkara [ego] is the most serious of all evils.”

  We moved chronologically, covering boyhood, adolescence, education, the search for the guru, and Mukhopadhyay’s first teaching job in the philosophy department at Jadavpur University. But something peculiar began to happen. As I listened, I grew worried about the direction of our conversation. The life we were discussing seemed to occur in a void. I could not follow its development: there were no landmarks, no milestones, no contours. There were, to be sure, intellectual thrills and battles; there were more vows, such as Mukhopadhyay’s vow never to go abroad. “I will go when it becomes as easy for an Indian to get an invitation there as it is easy for a European to get an invitation here,” he said archly.

  What I was looking for from Mukhopadhyay was something far more prosaic: love, marriage, children, career changes—those basic things that give a householder’s life shape. But try as I might, I could not extract any information of this kind. I began to lose all sense of time, and at last, just in the hope of reestablishing a basic chronology, I stopped Mukhopadhyay midsentence:

  “Are we still in your twenties?”

  “No, no,” he replied with irritation.

  He had mentioned turning points earlier. I now asked him for others.

  “Nothing other than this! What I’ve already narrated. There is nothing in my life which I can narrate that is of more importance. I live 90 percent of life mentally. I hardly mix with any people. I have never been a member of any clubs and societies, never had any affiliation to political parties, nor any literary group. I am very much a lonely individual. Very much. And most of the people are very uncomfortable with me, in my presence.”

  I thought he must have misunderstood my question, and asked again for a simple chronology.

  “I can give it to you, but this chronology I distrust most. Time gets its value from the event that occurs there. Otherwise, time is the same. It is what happens that makes the time specific.”

  “Until now I had some sense of your childhood, of the search for the teacher, of certain discoveries you made. What happens in the following years? Where did you live? What did you do?”

  He used to live in the teachers’ quarter, and he taught. “Outside teaching and study, hardly I had any life at all.”

  “And you taught in Jadavpur University for…?”

  “The entire p
eriod,” he said, by which he meant his entire life.

  “You were in Jadavpur until you came to Benares?”

  “Yes. In April 2003, my service was over. In May, I came here.” Because, he reminded me, he had made a vow to come to Benares forty years before. “And I did it. It was God’s wish that I could do it.”

  “Did you have a family?”

  “Yes. In the Hindu sense, I had a family. My father, my mother. That’s it. In the European sense, wife and children, no.”

  “You committed yourself entirely to intellectual life?”

  “It was so engrossing and time-consuming. I had little time to do anything else.”

  It was a devastating moment. I had not realized until then how austere his life had been. It did not merely seem featureless; it was featureless. The second of the Hindu stages of life—that of the householder—had been neatly removed. Mukhopadhyay went straight from student to renunciant, and I began to see that the turning point he had spoken of earlier was the only turning point. From there on, he had waited out the clock. When it was time to retire, he came to Benares to die, as he had resolved to do four decades before. It was terrifyingly bleak, but there was a kind of severe beauty about his life. It had special meaning for the Brahmin because, as Mukhopadhyay himself said, “One of the unique features of Indian culture is that here, for the first and perhaps last time, the quest for spirituality developed and flourished alongside the intellectual quest.”

  As much as I admired Mukhopadhyay’s fortitude and discipline, his resolve to live what he believed, I now doubted his understanding of the world beyond the confines of this small flat. He began to tell me a story from real life, which was meant to illustrate the principle of tyaga, at work. It was on one level a classic boy-meets-girl tale of two students who met in his class, fell in love, and married; but this was not at all the story Mukhopadhyay meant to tell.