The fields gave way to a drab urban sprawl, then Benares thickened around us. There were open drains and paper kites wheeling against a polluted gray sky. The shops sold cheap clothes and kitchen things. A barrow with a pyramid of red gas cylinders blocked our way. The infrastructure crumbled; political posters and religious flags hung limp on that windless December day.
We crossed a black-watered drain, garbage eddying out in a paisley shape. Degraded as it was, it was a sacred boundary: the Varuna River.
Near the Taj Hotel the congestion eased. We entered an area of heavy trees and boulevards, bungalows and churches. This was the cantonment—an aloof and scolding memory of the British presence. A statue of Vivekananda was painted a garish copper color. In 1893, representing Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda had roused the West to the power of India’s greatest export: spirituality.
The statue of Vivekananda was one point in a constellation of statues that Modi had visited on his way to filing his nomination papers eighteen months before. It was a blistering morning of soaring white skies, and I remember him moving slowly through the city. Benares appeared deserted. The shopfronts were shuttered. I rode pillion on my friend Vishal’s motorbike. Only at intersections could I see the crowds snaking their way to where Modi was. Later, when people asked me how many people had been there, I found it impossible to say. The city did not have vistas enough for me to gauge the numbers; it was as if all of Benares had come to see Modi.
We now passed another statue that Modi had honored. It was of Sardar Patel—India’s first home minister, recently repurposed as a Hindu nationalist alternative to Nehru, less colonized, more muscular. A wreath of marigolds still hung from his neck. The flowers were shriveled, the petals a deep burnt red, a memory of heat and the passage of time.
“Are the good days here?” I said to my driver. “Good days are coming” was Modi’s campaign slogan.
“It will take time,” the driver replied, his mouth swollen with the thick granular remains of a betel chew.
The old city, the maze of shaded streets through which arteries had been forced, now began to close around us. We passed an old house whose façade had been ripped right off, and a full cross section of the house, with its many floors, its whitewashed walls, and its high-pointed alcoves—one with a clay urn still inside—was visible. A line of destruction, jagged and red, rose from the street and ran several stories high; it exposed a slim premodern brick that gave an idea of the building’s antiquity. In another country, one would almost think the city had been bombed, but these were the peacetime ravages of modern India—the handiwork of the Varanasi Development Authority.
Soon there would be a view of the water. During my months away in New York, I had spent hours looking out of my window imagining that first glimpse of the Ganges. The riverfront had been built over many times, but it enshrined the spirit of old India and spoke through the overlay of centuries. The city looked across the river into an empty sandbank, and I could not help but feel that only a civilization that gave the world the zero—shunya: the mathematical symbol for the presence of absence—would have shaped negative space in this way, erecting a city that gazed for eternity into a void.
The car turned a corner and stopped outside Alice’s house. I got out and walked some distance in anticipation of the famous view. To be back in Benares was to feel the full sensual power of my attachment to India. Soon, as with certain bad relationships, one’s reasons for leaving would return too; but in that moment, the intensity of the bond was what I felt most. I approached the vista, ready for it to go through me.
That December afternoon there was nothing for me to see. The view was shrouded in a thick fog, and the Ganges flowed tranquil and somber into a blinding wall of white.
I WOKE BEFORE dAWN TO the loud pealing of a bell. A solid one-note toll at 4:00 a.m., without let-up. I didn’t mind. It is the hour of Brahma, an hour conducive to those engaged in intellectual work. Despite the hour, and the cold of the December morning, the continuous sound of footsteps came from outside my window: people were making their way down to the river.
The breath of the river, which was just beyond, could always be felt pressing against Alice’s house. It was heaviest at this hour. A sluggish cross-weave of ripples ran over the water. The brightening of day corresponded to a quickening of activity on the riverfront. The first flecks of pink in the dark oily water brought the first bathers. The river, like the city, was endowed with mythical power—it ran between this world and the next—but its true power, for me, was in seeing how it threaded the sacred through the daily life of the city. There was something marvelous in the sight of one grown man losing himself in the sanctity of the river. Arms spreadeagled, he splashed it repeatedly, as if preparing it for his ablutions. Then he dunked himself and pirouetted with his hands raised. He dug at the water with folded palms and pushed it away from him. He scuttled off to the bank and returned with a small clay lamp in his hands. He turned and turned clockwise, the smoky flame trailing after him. When his compact with the river was complete, he left the lamp burning in the dark earth, a testament to the vows he had made: a small perishable memorial to how one ordinary man began an ordinary day.
The air was soon reverberating with the sound of bells and conches. A film song, crackling and morose, carried from a radio. The day did not so much brighten as it exposed. At the first sight of squalor, I felt something of the dismay of waking up in a house where a party has been held the night before. The squalor was so pervasive, so all-encompassing, that it seemed as sourceless and inevitable as the broadening of day itself. A mangy bitch, with flapping udders, licked clean the yellow remains of potato curry from a heap of used leaf-plates. White and pink plastic bags, like dead jellyfish, collected at the edge of the water.
THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CLASS IN India is small, powerful, and easily identifiable by its wealth, its speech, and what seem almost like racial differences. As Aldous Huxley once wrote of the British in India, they “are accepted much as paper money is accepted, because there is a general belief that [they] are worth something.” But were the currency to lose its value, then the Indian, “without any violence, merely by quietly refusing to accept” westernized India at its own valuation, could reduce the power of that class to impotence.
A few weeks before my return to Benares, the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the capital sentence handed down to my father’s killer. It was meant to be good news, a sign of the hardening resolve of the Pakistani state, but I could think only of the testimony my father’s killer gave the court, which had been translated into tortured English:
On the faithful day, I being member of Elite Force I was deployed as one of the member of Escort Guard of Salman Taseer, the Governor Punjab. In Koh-i-Sar Market, the Governor with another after having lunch in a restaurant walked to his vehicle. In adjoining mosque I went for urinating in the washroom and for making ablution. When I came out with my gun, I came across Salman Taseer. Then I had the occasion to address him, “Your honour being the Governor had remarked about blasphemy law as black law, if so it was unbecoming of you.” Upon this he suddenly shouted and said, “Not only that it is black law, but also it is my shit.” Being a Muslim I lost control and under grave and suddenly provocation, I pressed the trigger and he lay dead in front of me. I have no repentance and I did it for “Tahafuz-i-Namoos-i-Rasool” [protection of the honour of the Prophet]. Salman offered me grave and sudden provocation. I was justified to kill him kindly see my accompanying written statement U/s 265(F)(5) of Cr. P. C.
Pakistan was not India. India was a democracy. There was a credible state in India that had not been undermined by military coups every decade; India had a long tradition of press freedoms and the peaceful transfer of power. Hinduism, with its great pluralism, and none of the doctrinal strictness of the monotheistic faiths, could never serve the needs of politics the way Islam could. Yet the underlying shape of society was the same. Both places had the sam
e class of interpreters; both had a new middle class—untouched by colonization, but not spared globalization—that had awoken, as if out of a sleep, to the discovery that all power and wealth was concentrated in the hands of a godless, deracinated few. They awoke with rage to a world they had no hand in making, with a profound sense in both countries of being trifled with—a belief that Western ideas and norms had been used against them to maintain the power of a ruling class that was as good as foreign.
In the schism between the “real” India and the India of urban elites, the two sides were sometimes referred to as Bharat and India. The distinction was not unlike that of red and blue America, but in India added tension came because these divisions, which exist everywhere, were further imbricated by the legacy of foreign rule. Bharat was the Sanskrit word for India, and the name by which India knew herself at home, in her own languages, free from the gaze of outsiders. India was Latin, and the etymology revealed a long history of being under Western eyes: indos is the Greek word for the Indus River, which is in turn derived from the ancient Persian hindu, and hindu is a corruption of the Sanskrit word for river, sindhu.
India and Bharat. The one implied an accretion of foreign influence over the ages, the other a pure mythical India, untainted by the historical present. These were the battle lines along which the culture wars were being fought, and they surfaced everywhere, from ideas of history to sexual mores to even how the society judged violence. Consider the epidemic of rape that was sweeping the country. Rape, it is often said, is not about sex but power. Modernity is power; and to men who feel disempowered by it, rape can become a crude assertion of power over a victim who is physically weaker, yet threatening for being modern. That is not how the head of the RSS—the fountainhead of Hindu nationalism—regards India’s problem with rape; he recasts it instead as yet another dramatization of the conflict between India and Bharat. When asked about an unspeakably brutal assault—a twenty-three-year-old medical student was gang-raped in Delhi in 2012 and later died of her injuries—he says, “Such crimes won’t happen in Bharat or the rural areas of the country … Where Bharat becomes India with the influence of Western culture, these types of incidents happen.”
ONE EVENING, A FEW DAYS into my return to Benares, I was given a first-hand example of how the Modi election had brought some of India’s oldest tensions to the surface.
Below the Alice Boner House was a wonderful bookshop. The owner, Rakesh, and I soon became friends. He was a treasure of a man who joked of the good old days in Benares when there were just “buffaloes and anthropologists,” and not the present influx of tourists and pilgrims. His bookshop, Harmony Books, was an extravagant and impractical undertaking. It would be too rarefied in Brooklyn. Literature was on the left, the likes of Czeslaw Milosz and Magda Szabó; art books were on the right; academic tomes in the back; and Sanskrit in a farther room. Watching my eye fasten on The Teleology of Poetics in Medieval Kashmir, Rakesh smiled and said, “They’ll sell one day.”
During what had become our usual end-of-day banter, a large man burst in through the double doors of the shop. The sight of Tiwari, the travel agent, brought an expression of dread to Rakesh’s face.
Tiwari was the kind of man the election had empowered. He was a loping mountainous figure, long armed and prognathous, and dressed in jeans and a green waterproof jacket. Rakesh’s shop, with its wide selection of imported books and daily stream of foreign visitors, was at once repellent and attractive to Tiwari. The two men were divided by politics and education, temperament and sensibility, but they were roughly of the same class. Tiwari was also a Brahmin, which still meant something in small-town India. He now entered Rakesh’s shop full of a story that was sending him into transports of rage and joy.
For many days now, a rumor had been circulating about two Muslim boys being beaten up on the riverside. They had apparently showed up with Pakistani flags on their bikes. If so, they were inviting trouble, but it was unlikely. Pakistani flags were not common in the Muslim neighborhoods of Benares. Now we were given a detailed account from one who had seen it all:
Tiwari had been running down to the ghat to see Brad Pitt. The actor was in town and, as Tiwari said, “I am, you see, a great fan of Brad Pitt. It was my dream to see him in person.” On the way, Tiwari passed the bikes—and, yes, the flags looked odd to him—but he didn’t think anything of them at the time. His head was full of worries related to an insurance claim. Besides, he was in a hurry to see Brad Pitt. Only on the way back from the river did he see Radhe, the wrestler, in a confrontation with two Muslim boys.
I had seen Radhe on the ghat. He was a friend of Vishal’s, a burly figure in a tight T-shirt. He was part of a group of young men who worked out at the nearby Chitvan gym. The mania for building bodies had come to India; gyms had sprung up in places that lacked even basic amenities. The new love of physicality, especially in this country that had historically prized the attainments of the mind over the body, was in part a simple assertion of crude strength, in part a nation shrugging off the depredations of socialism and Gandhism and partaking in the joys of the flesh. Radhe was forever making crude jokes to Vishal about the dim prospects of their getting laid.
“So, there is Radhe,” Tiwari explained, “standing next to the bikes. And he has broken the flags on the bikes. There is an altercation going on between him and these two Muslim boys. ‘What?! You live in India,’ he is saying, ‘and you dare to put Pakistani flags on your bikes?’ The boys do not seem to know that the flags are Pakistani. They try to tell Radhe that their madrassa, which was promoting an Islamic conference, had asked they put them up.”
“What did the flags look like?” Rakesh discreetly inquired.
“They were red or something.”
Rakesh tried to point out that in that case—even if they had “only a little bit of red on them”—they could not be Pakistani.
“Whatever they were, they were certainly not Indian.” Tiwari continued, “These boys, they fought back hard. They were demanding to know why the flags had been broken. It was their bikes, they said, and they could carry whatever flags they liked. ‘Why are you getting so hot under the collar?’ Radhe said back.”
Tiwari, now full of animation, came over to me. The memory of violence excited him. He grabbed me under the arms and lifted me up, to show me what Radhe had done to the boys. Then he made to throw me to the ground. Laughter bubbled up in him. “The dispute was growing hotter,” he said. There was a mention of police. A crowd assembled around Radhe, threatening the boys with inciting communal tension, a bookable crime in India. Tiwari, by his own proud admission, now exhorted the crowd to beat the boys for what they had done. Then, before another word could be said, the first blow fell. Radhe, with his open-palmed broad wrestler’s hand, slapped one of them. Tiwari, the fingers of his own large hand splayed, showed me how. Phataaak! It split one of the boys’ lips in two. Blood was everywhere.
The boys were Muslim, and, significantly, of low-caste backgrounds. Everyone, regardless of whether they were Hindu or not, retained an idea of caste in India. The Syrian Christians of Kerala, among the oldest Christian communities in the world, still regarded themselves as upper-caste converts, while in Pakistan, which had had no contact with Hindu society for over seventy years, notions of caste, and even untouchability, still prevailed. The two Muslim boys worked for Sulabh, a nonprofit organization committed to the “Gandhian ideology of emancipation of scavengers.” Sulabh had tried to give Untouchables, who still did the majority of cleaning work in India, a modicum of humanity by providing its employees with bright orange uniforms and modern cleaning implements.
Sulabh’s good work had won it the contract to clean the stretch of riverside where Tiwari runs his travel agency. The two Muslim boys, in protest of the unwarranted violence against them, decided to go on strike.
Tiwari now told us how he brought their protest to an end. “I summoned them and told them that if they did not start working in one hour flat, I would call the p
olice and register a complaint against them for spreading communal tension.” The boys took fright. “I give you one hour,” Tiwari had said. He knew that the police, if they came, would be sympathetic to him. He chortled at the memory of the boys’ fear. Then, he did an imitation of them groveling before him and hurrying back to their work of sweeping the street that ran in front of his shop.
It is the caste system which cuts human beings off from each other by denying to them the possibilities of connubial and commensal intimacy and a more basic affinity as moral entities. It is the caste system which helps deaden the imagination to the state of mind of other human beings. It is the caste system, perhaps even more than the other factors like poverty and the crushing ubiquity of other human beings, which makes the upper-caste Hindus, from whose circles most Indian intellectuals are recruited, fundamentally and humanly insensate to the mass of the population who belong to the lower castes.
These sentences were written by the American sociologist Edward Shils in the late 1950s. Shils’s basic assumption still held: for those who grow up in India, caste either directly or indirectly creeps into the treatment of other human beings in ways that are almost so deep as to be unknowable.
Modernity should be the natural enemy of caste. Urban life, apartment buildings, restaurants, even something as simple as municipal water and housing, has the power to erase the connubial and commensal restrictions upon which caste rules depend. Democracy, too, ought to be the natural enemy of caste. The Shudras and the Untouchables, together, form a significant voting bloc. They cannot be ignored by any politician hoping for success at the ballot box. The subject of their number is so sensitive that the most transparent survey of caste that we have still dates from 1931, when the British conducted one and found that Brahmins accounted for only 6.4 percent of the population. The other lower castes, together, constituted an overwhelming majority.
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