The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  The boy in the story was Brahmin and seriously bright—“proud, pampered, overconfident.” He belonged to an orthodox sect of Brahmins in Mukhopadhyay’s village. The boy was initiated, like the rest of his family, at an early age. Their teacher believed in certain orthodoxies and practiced them. For example, he did not allow Brahmins to eat in the company of non-Brahmins. The guru and his followers went around the village chanting and singing, and for this they were ridiculed. Mukhopadhyay did not admire the boy’s guru, but Mukhopadhyay’s own guru had, and so Mukhopadhyay was prepared to believe there was some good in the man. Mukhopadhyay acknowledged this boy was talented, but restless. He had enrolled in Jadavpur, where he wanted, in part because of his religious background, to study Vedanta, one of the six branches of Hindu philosophy, known for its strict monism. One day at the university, the boy confronted Mukhopadhyay, asking him why he didn’t teach the subject.

  “Because I’m teaching logic,” Mukhopadhyay replied. “I cannot teach all the subjects. And besides, the department has not allotted it to me.”

  The boy said, “I have a great desire to study Vedanta. But I won’t study Vedanta with the teacher who is teaching it. He is not a Brahmin; and as such, he has no right to teach Vedanta.”

  So this boy ended up in Mukhopadhyay’s class, where he became a thesis student. There he met a girl, also a good student, shy and self-effacing and not Brahmin, nor even Bengali. Mukhopadhyay had taken a keen interest in the girl as well because he feared that unless she studied harder, she was not going to do well in the examination.

  “I used to call her occasionally and give her instruction,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Study this, study that, do not leave any question unanswered. So much so”—he chuckled—“that she used to tell others, ‘Even in my dreams P. K. comes to chastise me.’”

  One day, after passing the examination, she came to Mukhopadhyay’s house. She had an opportunity to study in America on a scholarship. She wanted to know from her guru whether she should accept.

  Mukhopadhyay said no, she should not. And that was that: she did not go to America. But some time passed and the opportunity arose again. Again, the girl sought Mukhopadhyay’s counsel. This time he said, “Go.”

  The girl was taken aback. “Sir, I thought you alone would rescue me. I thought you’d say no, and then I would have a reason not to go to America. I would tell my family that my teacher does not wish it. That is why I cannot go.”

  Mukhopadhyay now explained—such are the circles the guru runs around the unsuspecting disciple!—“That is exactly why I told you to go. There is a desire in you to go, and you are using me as an excuse not to, but you are not convinced.”

  Mukhopadhyay now gave his consent, but with two pieces of advice about how the girl was to conduct herself abroad. She was to try to learn about the people and culture she was going among, and not to confine herself to her own group, and she was never under any circumstances to speak of India abroad.

  The first bit of advice seemed unobjectionable, but why the second?

  “The reason,” Mukhopadhyay informed her, “is that you are an Indian. And the West has not brought you over to hear about their philosophy. They do not depend on you to promote their philosophy. But it is natural that they would expect you to know your own and to teach them. But as you and I well know, you do not know Indian philosophy. You do not know your country; you never cared to know your country; but the moment you go there, you will be expected to, and you will make a fool both of yourself and your country.’”

  The girl accepted this brutal bit of advice without question and left for America.

  In the meantime, the boy, who was a few months into his time at Jadavpur University, came to see Mukhopadhyay to tell him that he was also leaving.

  “Why?” Mukhopadhyay asked.

  “It’s not for me to study here.”

  “Why? What is the problem?”

  The boy said the coeducational environment in the college was disagreeable to him: “Mixing with ladies is not good for me because I’m a brahmachari.” That is, he was a traditional student, vowed to celibacy.

  “Good. That is a good decision. But may I ask you one question: What is your idea of being a brahmachari? Is it living with that clan of yours in the ashram?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then you’re making a very wrong decision. You are not made for that.”

  But the boy did not take Mukhopadhyay’s advice. He went away and became an ascetic, donning the saffron cloth and wearing his hair in matted locks. Occasionally Mukhopadhyay ran into the boy in his ascetic’s robes and told him again that he was making a grave mistake: “Asceticism is not for you. Your approach is very emotional.”

  “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “You are overrun by love and affection for your guru. But your guru will not be in his physical body long. He is already quite aged. Do you think you will find enough of your type in the ashram? You’ll simply go mad. You’ll have to leave that ashram.”

  Mukhopadhyay confided to me, “It was not at all suited for him. And besides, I knew that this boy had a great desire for fame and recognition. Which”—Mukhopadhyay laughed wickedly—“does not make one a very good ascetic, does it?”

  “No,” I said, in thrall to this strange story and unsure of where it was headed.

  After some time, the boy came back, in his saffron robes, and joined the University of Calcutta, where, once again in a coeducational environment, he completed the master’s degree he had abandoned and started teaching.

  The story had been presented to me as a lesson in the principle of tyaga, but so far there seemed to be nothing to renounce.

  Now, Mukhopadhyay said, almost as an afterthought, that the boy had also left India for the West; and there, presumably after his flirtation with asceticism was over, he had reconnected with the girl from Mukhopadhyay’s class, and before long the two were married.

  After the marriage, both of them returned to India many times. On one occasion, the first after their marriage, the girl asked if she might be permitted to visit Mukhopadhyay in his house.

  “You can come,” Mukhopadhyay replied pointedly, “but not your husband. Your husband is not permitted.”

  Why the one and not the other?

  “Her husband had enough learning and caution. So, if he had committed a wrong, then that wrong was done in complete knowledge. If this lady has done something wrong, for which she fears that she may not be able to come to my house, then he is responsible for that mistake, not her.”

  “The mistake being the intercaste marriage?”

  “Yes,” Mukhopadhyay said gravely, “the mistake was the intercaste marriage.”

  Mukhopadhyay had meant for the story to be a thought experiment of sorts. He felt an obvious and simple solution existed for the moral predicament the couple found themselves in—a solution, he described, that would “add glory” to each of their lives and glory to the system of which they were a part, and from which they had broken because of their unlawful marriage. Mukhopadhyay would have the couple announce before all that they were in love, but that as their “system” would not allow for its consecration, they had decided to forsake their romantic happiness and respectfully part. After all, life was short. Some thirty years or so had already passed; another twenty of youth and vigor remained; was it necessary to spend them enjoying the charm of an illicit union? Surely it was more honorable to sacrifice one’s selfish happiness for the endurance of the system one’s ancestors had devised.

  I was staggered.

  It was not merely the awfulness of what was suggested, but that Mukhopadhyay, the logician, seemed to have made an obvious error in logic. Did he not see that the “system” he wished to preserve was encircled by another, one that did not demand the sacrifice of personal happiness, but encouraged people to make the pursuit of that happiness the foundation of their lives? Would it not be better to acknowledge the limitations of one’s system than for these two young people
to stop their ears to the obvious appeal of the other?

  Mukhopadhyay said, “The point is that they are taking refuge in another system of morality. Their sense of morality is just a negative one. It is a system based on what it is not. Do they have any well-developed system? Have they any tradition? Have they ever thought about it? Have they lived it? Were they born into it? They are constructing a system that is purely negative. It is that which is not Hinduism.

  “You cannot first fall in love, and then because you find the system does not allow it, you deem it bad and reject it.”

  But you can, I wanted badly to say. That is exactly what the young couple had done.

  In his quest for autonomy, Mukhopadhyay refused to acknowledge that the shake-up of old ways had been a direct result of contact with the West. That contact could not now be wished away. In his desire for agency to be restored to India, Mukhopadhyay was prepared to defend all that Hinduism had not independently criticized about itself. But he was missing something important, for, as Sucharita, the female protagonist of Gora, points out, if Hinduism was “going to change by itself, then why hasn’t it changed until now?”

  The mood in the room grew somber. Mukhopadhyay could sense my disappointment. It was true: I was disappointed. His wish to damage the happiness of the two young people diminished him in my eyes. He seemed like a man with nothing to offer the world but the joyless severity of his dharma. Earlier, he had spoken of how Europe had misconstrued India by labeling it an exclusively spiritual culture, while claiming for itself a monopoly on science. “It was a left-handed compliment,” Mukhopadhyay said acidly. “They said, ‘No, no. India is a very great culture, but in a spiritual way.’ What they were really saying was, ‘You have no claim on scientific culture, you have no claim on rational culture. You’re a dreamy, irrational, spiritual people.’ And it was not true,” Mukhopadhyay cried. “We were, like any great culture, a total culture.”

  It was a valid point. But as much as the West had reduced India to a spiritual culture, India was also guilty of seeing the West as nothing but the source of material comfort. Mukhopadhyay had seen in the motives of Indians who went abroad to study something “insincere, dishonest, and extra-academic.” By this he meant they were attracted to the comforts of the West—“the glamour, the money, the ease of life. Only this and nothing else,” he said derisively. In a place such as India, where even the most basic amenities—of clean air, green space, a modicum of peace and quiet—were hard to come by, it was not difficult to see why people would be attracted to these things. But even if we were to follow Mukhopadhyay’s severe criteria, putting all thought of comfort out of our minds, his comprehension of what lay behind the appeal of the West was fatally limited. He saw it as a force that had remade his culture, robbing it of autonomy, but he was no closer to seeing why it had been able to exert such power. His own story, had he only been more open, might have provided him with an important clue. “This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery,” V. S. Naipaul said in a 1990 lecture entitled “Our Universal Civilization.” He went on:

  I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

  The knowledge of the existence of another system had reached the two young students in Mukhopadhyay’s class, even before they had left India. It was what allowed them to walk away from their own system—the system in which Mukhopadhyay would see them imprisoned.

  “We should wrap up,” Mukhopadhyay said. “I’ve already taken up so much of your time.” He meant, I think, that I had taken up too much of his.

  I got up to leave.

  “I am always ready to enter into all sorts of dialogues and discussions,” he said, “but I am not ready to let anyone walk over Hindu culture and society.”

  The green metal door closed behind me with a clamor and a sharp squeak of the bolt. Just before it shut, I heard Mukhopadhyay softly say, “I don’t think I was of much help. I am a very conservative man.”

  LEAVING MUKHOPADHYAY’S HOUSE, I COULD think only of something he had said early on in our conversation. He had brought up Tagore’s play Achalayatan (The Petrified Place). It was a metaphor for the rigidity of Hindu society and the ossified world of tradition. “It is a place, a house, a system, which is unmoving for a long time, dead,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Fixed, rigid, static … This is how Tagore saw Hinduism.”

  Mukhopadhyay felt that even in delivering this searing indictment of Hindu society, Tagore could not help but acknowledge Brahmin glory. At the end of the play, when the lower castes tear down the entire structure of Hindu society, and all the priests have fled the petrified house, the head priest—named Mahapanchak—remains. He sits at the entrance of the house, a symbol of immovability. The others come and ask, “Who is this man? Let us remove him, let us kill him.” But the guru says, “Where he sits, you cannot even touch.”

  “He was so very firm,” Mukhopadhyay said, beaming with pride. “That itself is a glory, that itself is a beauty.”

  Mukhopadhyay, like Mahapanchak, had sought salvation in rigidity. As much as I admired Mukhopadhyay’s steadfastness—that iron resolve to make the word flesh—I felt he had tried to banish the threat to his culture by delegitimizing the appeal of the other culture. It was an act of sophistry—“verbal jugglery,” to use his own phrase—and it made him seem like a man afraid of life. When I asked him about the Modi election, and the spirit of revivalism that was sweeping through Hinduism, Mukhopadhyay gave me an evasive answer, seeming to imply that while he endorsed the new assertiveness that had come to Hinduism, he could not go along with the hate. He said, “It is my ambition to be a Hindu, without vengeance, and without apology.”

  WINTER

  7

  THE REVOLUTIONARY BRAHMIN

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS HAD GONE BY.

  We flew through a thin light-suffused mist. The land below was parceled out into small holdings—the dun quilt of India, with its furrows like the channels in a piece of brown corduroy. I glanced at IndiGo’s in-flight magazine, called Hello 6E. Sweetie, the air hostess, handed me a junglee chicken sandwich. She was dressed in dark blue, with a matching slim leather belt and pillbox hat; a pin on her sleeve said GIRL POWER.

  A golden oval of winter sunlight swept searchingly over the cabin. We landed among mustard fields, whose little yellow flowers were attractive against the pink and white of the airport’s boundary wall.

  The studied cool of IndiGo airlines had enforced a civility on the passengers, suppressed certain instincts that, now that we were on the ground and close to disembarking, returned with force. There was a small stampede at the front and loud talking on mobile phones. The South Koreans on our flight, who had come to Benares as part of a Buddhist pilgrimage to Sarnath, retreated in the face of these rough manners. I was reminded of an episode a few hours ago, on the ground in Delhi. A Frenchman had pushed past me in the line for the security check.

  “Are you going to cut ahead?” I said. “Would you do this in France?”

  He gave me a Gallic shrug, a tant pis of such contempt as only the French are capable.

  “You’re very bad mannered.”

  “Don’t teach me. These are Indian manners!” he said and vanished ahead into the crowd.

  Manners were the least of India’s problems. There was a deeper reckoning that had to be made. In Del
hi, a few days before, I witnessed this scene:

  A fashionable woman, lunching at a new restaurant in a mall, found her pasta was not al dente. She called over the waiter. He was happy to replace it, but she stopped him. It was not enough that he replace her pasta. Did he understand, she wanted to know, the meaning of the phrase “al dente”?

  He reached in again for her plate. No, she said, her cruelty now sublimated into gentleness. She wanted him to learn. Did he even know the meaning of the phrase “al dente”? No, he confessed.

  The waiter, for a moment, believed the scolding was about the food. Now he saw what was really happening. He could smell the woman’s wish to diminish him. Otherwise why ask what village he was from, what his training consisted of, whether he was qualified to be serving this food? The woman had seized on the phrase “al dente”—no doubt picked up on a holiday abroad—to crush him: to expose him for the servant she knew him to be.

  Mukhopadhyay was right: to be modern was to renounce India. The transition stripped uncolonized India of its confidence, as it stripped this waiter of his. It created a new class of interpreters, comprising people such as this woman, who were ready to impose a new tyranny of borrowed artifacts, a club to which ordinary Indians could only hope to belong if they left behind much of what was dear to them, from language and dress to culture and worship. The relationship between old and new had been severed: to be modern was to come empty-handed into an unfamiliar world.

  THE HERMETICALLY SEALED, BLUE-GLASS world of the airport fell away. The car sped out into sugarcane and mustard fields. There were clay houses with red-tiled roofs and low redbrick walls that enclosed empty plots of overgrown land. The walls were covered in advertisements for mobile phones and soft drinks, for bootleg educational courses and aphrodisiacs. A line of single-story shops selling streaming bright packets of pan masala and potato crisps appeared along the edge of a thinly tarred road.