The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  The rope of turbans finds mention in Macaulay’s essay, too; but Macaulay tells a far sadder story, and it makes the history of this time hard to read. Chet Singh was doomed from the start; his autonomy was an illusion. Hastings had no intention of settling with him. “The plan was simply this, to demand larger and larger contributions till the Rajah should be driven to remonstrate, then to call his remonstrance a crime, and to punish him by confiscating all his possessions,” Macaulay wrote.

  Stories like this one abound in the history of India at this time. As Pinku retold it, I realized why this history was so difficult for me. It was because the people in the story for whom I had a natural affinity were not historical actors at all, but the playthings of history. They were men acted upon, and what made their situation more tragic was that they were unaware of the forces that encircled them. They protested; they revolted; they even seemed, at moments, to be winning a battle or two; but they never grasped the greater historical drama that enfolded them, which was the drama of the rise of Europe and the shattering of the old world everywhere. In this drama, India was but one theater. The Indian prince in the story is crushed, as were other local princes, in Africa, in Japan, in Persia. The British, though, were historical actors; they could see the whole picture. It gave their history a narrative drive, a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

  Chet Singh developed illusions about the strength of his position. The country was in open revolt, as it would be again in the next century during the great revolt of 1857. But nothing would come of this revolt, just as nothing would come of 1857. Macaulay writes, “The tumultuary army of the Rajah was put to rout,” his “fastnesses were stormed,” and “the unhappy prince fled from his country for ever.” A relation was appointed king, but henceforth the Raja of Benares, like the Nawab of Bengal—and many others to come—was to be “a mere pensioner.”

  History, it is said, is written by the victors; what we do not mention is how dull and shapeless the history of the vanquished can be. There is no arc, no larger theme, no internal life. It fails as a story even before it fails as history, and it is no surprise that it is excluded from textbooks. Pinku now provided an alternative theme, in which magic was used to explain away defeat. The British did not win because they were better or stronger or more organized: it was because Chet Singh was the victim of a curse.

  He had insulted an Aghori—a member of a tribe of ascetics who worship Shiva, dress all in black, and perform rituals with the remains of the dead—who was drawn to the palace by music from an evening of revelry. The ascetic sought entry, but was blocked at the door. Chet Singh heard the ruckus and came out. When his doormen explained what was happening, Chet Singh turned to the ascetic and said mockingly, “What will you do with all these fine things?” He ordered his men to bring the ascetic a corpse. They pleaded with their master not to offend this fearsome devotee of Shiva, but Chet Singh would not hear reason. A dead body was brought into their midst. Even before the shroud was lifted, the ascetic had pronounced his curse on Chet Singh: “Your line will vanish with you.”

  The Chet Singh story was a prelude to what would happen all across India as British power expanded over the next 150 years. Macaulay, writing in the 1840s, could clearly see what was happening. But to read another kind of writer was to feel oneself engulfed by a folkloric darkness. Take the Hindi writer Jaishankar Prasad, for example; he was born and died in Benares and had the advantage of writing more than half a century after Macaulay, once British ascendancy was complete. In Prasad’s famous story “Gunda,” which is about the Chet Singh episode, the writer seems unable to see how the confrontation with Hastings fits into a larger pattern. In Prasad’s account of the eighteenth century in Benares, we are simply told that Kashi is no longer the Kashi of ages past, no longer a place where scholars and men of learning gather, where Gautama Buddha and the Shankaracharya conducted their famous religious and philosophical disputes. The temples and monasteries are all broken, the ascetics scattered or dead, and the worship of Vishnu has fallen into occultism and black magic.

  In the time that has elapsed since Chet Singh was removed and Prasad writes his story, British rule has come to encompass a fourth of the planet, but all Prasad has surmised of this period is that it is a dark time, in which knowledge is subservient to brute force, and hoodlums hold sway. It will be up to another kind of Indian, those made on the fault line of the contact between Britain and India, to give India a truer sense of what has happened to her. These other Indians—men such as Tagore, Gandhi, and Nehru—were part of the class of interpreters Macaulay had sought to create, and they were all in their own way beholden to the British for the insight that had come to them.

  Clouds of dust blew over the maidan. It was the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Some Muslim boys in white skullcaps wandered by, wearing pajamas that were cut off above the ankle, an expression of their religiosity.

  We stayed a little longer, considering this place where history had done its work, then went to lunch at the Kerala Café. There, over a dosa and a soda, Pinku told me of his grandfather, who had been an important priest in the princely states of Chota Nagpur in eastern India. He wanted his youngest son, Pinku’s uncle, to follow him into his line of work. But it could not be. Pinku, with uncharacteristic vagueness, perhaps concealing a family secret, said that his uncle “lost himself in the world of friends” and died an early death. Whether this was a euphemism for alcoholism, or just a failure to follow in the family tradition, was hard to tell. Pinku’s father went into medicine, in an administrative capacity. Another son went to work for the government, and Pinku himself was “in private.”

  One morning, I saw clearly how the lines of transmission—parampara—can go dead from one generation to the next. Pinku picked me up outside Rakesh’s shop on a battered motorcycle, and we made an unplanned stop outside what looked like the ruins of an old house. The body of the building had fallen away. All that remained was a blue-washed back wall with pretty pointed alcoves. It was open to sky, and grass grew in a neat rectangle at the center. Behind was a row of unvarnished wooden columns and a sloping ledge of corrugated iron, like a parody of that most beautiful of Indian architectural features: the chhajja, a deep overhanging eave that casts a precise and lustrous shadow. There sat, on one side of this ruined house, an old man in a beige monkey cap. He gazed out at the busy street and looked to me like a watchman of some sort. I hardly noticed him until Pinku beckoned me over.

  He said, with an embarrassed smile, “My grandfather taught him Sanskrit.”

  The old man smiled back and chuckled. “And his great-grandfather studied under an ancestor of mine.”

  The two men paused at this enactment of parampara, the actual mechanism of transmission. It played out so literally as a sequence: one thing following the next, men doing what had always been done. But one day the line went dead; the sequence broke. It was so abrupt, both violent and involuntary, that a generation or two later those who were left holding the line, now Brahmin in name only, felt wonder at how it came to be that one was a tourist guide, and the other sat in a plastic chair, minding the ruins of his ancestral home.

  “I didn’t want to say it at the time,” Pinku said later over the roar of his bike and the rush of cold air, “but his grandfather was a very famous commentator. He wrote extensive commentaries on the Ramcharitmanas.”

  This was Tulsidas’s epic poem, said to have been composed on the Tulsi Ghat, where I had seen the boats depart for the water burial.

  A few days before, Pinku had taken me to see where Tulsidas supposedly lived. It was evening. The thick powdery walls of Tulsidas’s house were pierced with grille windows that overlooked the darkening expanse of the river. On the smooth floor sat a man, with a copper vessel by his side that contained the sacred Ganges water. He was reading by the light of a clay lamp. An incense stick sent wreaths of smoke up into the darkness. Tulsidas’s poem lay before him on a measure of red velvety cloth; he rocked slightly as he mouthed the words, and watch
ing him, I could not help but feel that what he was doing was not so much reading as praying.

  Tulsidas was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare’s. His work, as often happens in India, had passed out of the realm of literature and become a sacred object. It could now only be approached through piety, even though in living memory, there had been men who had written commentaries on the poem. I had read commentaries like these in Sanskrit, and they came out of a close reading of text, with a special emphasis on literary devices and tropes. They were more technical than our modern criticism, but clearly the result of an intellectual engagement with a text. They could not be written anymore. It is hard to say why. “Modernity,” writes Adam Kirsch, “cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us.” This intuition had taken hold in India. The door of tradition had closed. What lay behind, though not very old, was petrified, and Tulsidas was revered into silence, at once immortal and dead.

  Death in all aspects has been a constant preoccupation of my mind, particularly during this winter when working on my big Kali composition. It seemed to me that somehow, through this work the reality of death had almost become a familiar thought, almost like a friend. The terror of the utter loneliness of death had given place to the feeling of the great community of death, the only real community, the only condition in which all differences are obliterated and all are one, merged into the same substance.

  —ALICE BONER DIARIES, MAY 11, 1954

  Death came in and out of focus in Benares—now metaphorical, now real. One afternoon, in a boat on the river, we drifted up to a corpse. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but Pinku knew immediately.

  “Shava,” he said with distaste, using a Sanskrit word derived from the verb “to swell.”

  And this shava was indeed swollen, all gray and yellow, bobbing happily about in the river like a Dead Sea tourist. The afternoon sun struck the exposed head, knees, and feet. I could make out the tarsals and metatarsals, the interstices of the toes. As Pinku asked the boatman, who had until a moment ago been singing a boatman’s song about the Ganges, to steer the boat away, I caught a glimpse of the face. Half of it had rotted away, and the half that remained bore a broad and mirthless smile.

  Pinku explained that certain categories of corpses cannot be committed to fire. Fire was a deity, and sacred; therefore lepers, who are contaminated, cannot be cremated. Nor can ascetics, for they are symbolically already dead. The performance of their own death rites was a part of their initiation.

  THE KASHI LABH MUKTI BHAWAN is a place where people come to die. One morning, Pinku showed me some pictures from this house of death. They were of what seemed like a living corpse, the skin stretched so thin over the bones of the face—teeth grotesquely enlarged, eyes vacant—that I could hardly tell if it was a man or a woman.

  I was now less dismissive of death in Benares than when I had first arrived. The white man I carried on my shoulder at all times, at whose likes and dislikes I found myself guessing, had in part been silenced by my time in the West. I had been back in the West scarcely eighteen months, and already I had found myself craving India. It was not beauty, not charm, not home; it was a certain knowing quality about the people, a wisdom kept in trust among human beings and seemingly etched into the landscape. It was what Mark Twain, travelling through India in the nineteenth century for Following the Equator, had observed:

  You soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it that is beguiling, and which does not pall. You cannot tell just what it is that makes the spell, perhaps, but you feel it and confess it, nevertheless. Of course, at bottom, you know in a vague way that it is history; it is that that affects you, a haunting sense of the myriads of human lives that have blossomed, and withered, and perished here, repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, and age after age, the barren and meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this forlorn, uncomely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with it…

  “I want to go to this place,” I said to Pinku.

  “We can go,” he said easily.

  A few days later we sat in the winter sun outside the house of death. It was a lovely redbrick building with a deep porch and green jalousie windows.

  The old Brahmin manager, Bhairav Nath Shukla, was dressed in a yellow woolen vest and a lungi. He sat at a wooden table in the driveway of the great house, reading a Hindi newspaper, over which lay a small red-lettered religious text. His gray hair was cropped short, his face unshaven; the skin sagged from his thin bare arms, which he rubbed from time to time as he spoke.

  “There were once many such houses in Benares,” he said, “all of Kashi was like this.” Then, perhaps anticipating that we might find it an unpardonable act of blind faith for poor people to come to Benares to die in the vain hope of attaining nirvana, he quickly added, “It is a difficult road, and when it gets too hard, people get off and say it’s all a fraud.”

  Shukla was the caricature of Brahmin prolixity. He ran circles around Pinku and me.

  “What is this word ‘life’?” he said, when I asked him about his. “It is nothing in itself. Nothing if not self-realization. If you can unite the individual self with the Supreme Self, then that is a life. Otherwise, nothing. What is this body? A garment? A thing of veins and nerves. I may have this life now, but my soul has been coming along through the ages. Who knows where it will go after this?”

  I asked him for details: Where he was born? When he came to work at this house, and why?

  He was put off by the egotism implicit in the questions and answered with scorn: he was born in Gorakhpur, near the Nepal border; he had been the manager of this house for forty-five years; he came to Benares to study.

  He used an important word for “studying”: adhyayan. Mukhopadhyay’s students had used the same word. It provided the most basic description of a Brahmin’s vocation. What does a Brahmin do? He does adhyayan.

  I asked Shukla his age, but this was a step too far.

  “This body”—he smiled contemptuously—“is some sixty-odd years old; but this soul, who can tell? Will it find freedom? Will it not? Who can say? I must stay on my path.”

  I closed my notebook and shooed off a mantle of sun-drunk flies.

  The manager at the house of death felt himself encircled by an alien culture, whose power he thought emanated from science, medicine, and technology, and whose ultimate triumph would mean that every day fewer people would come to his house of death. “We are in a state akin to that of Trishanku,” he said, referring to the mythical king who, caught between the power of two great sages, was doomed to forever hang upside down in the ether.

  It was India’s incomparable metaphor for liminality, and a nice image to come from a man who specialized in states of purgatory. The body, he had earlier said, was a vestment; he now reused the image in a more interesting way: “I can understand the need for doctors, and engineers. And where there is necessity, I can see why one would have to don a shirt and trousers. But why not leave it there? Why not come home and change back into one’s Indian clothes? Why imitate their fashions? Why not be Indian at home, and Western outside?”

  INSIDE, A WOMAN LAY DYING.

  On the way in, Aryan Singh—“the outside guard” of many years—explained the rules of the place. He was not a Brahmin, and after Shukla’s abstractions, it was a relief to be given a few hard details. Dressed in a red shirt and a saffron scarf, blue Bata slippers on his feet, Singh said, “People come here once medical science has given up on them, and they have stopped eating and drinking. They are allowed to stay for fifteen-day installments, after which extensions can be granted until death. It is imperative that they have no disease.” He pointed to the rules and regulations, which were written in Hindi on a board fastened to the wall. I took a picture on my iPhone.

  “Ha
s it all come?” Singh asked in wonder.

  “Yes,” I replied, and we went in.

  In a large room, dark, cold, and musty, my eyes tried to make sense of what the darkness revealed.

  From a pale blue wall the god Ganesh peered down on a room strewn with empty bottles, cooking utensils, duffel bags, and newspapers. At the center of this tableau vivant was the dying woman. Her small nacreous eyes were visible over the top of a thick brown blanket, and despite their murk, the vacancy of ebbing life, they showed signs of recognition and curiosity, courage and fear.

  The woman’s son, a sixty-five-year-old science teacher from Bihar, sat by her side, reading to her from Tulsidas’s poem. The old woman’s hearing was gone, and the reading, like the small sips of water from the Ganges that were poured down her open lips, was a ritual act. It had been this woman’s long-standing wish to die in Benares; her son had made good on this wish. He had brought her here to die and be free. Her illnesses were over; she had stopped eating; only death awaited. What made the scene especially affecting, as Pinku pointed out, was that this man who loved his mother enough to do this great thing for her had now to welcome her death.

  “Think how hard it must be,” Pinku whispered in my ear, “to wish for the death of one’s own mother.”

  We got up to go. The old woman’s son began to cry. He said, “Give me your blessings, for I have no mother now.”

  Outside, the sun came in through the top of a courtyard, casting a pattern of dots and long bars across a whitewashed balustrade, mildewed and peeling in places. In a pretty semicircular transom, some colored glass pieces had fallen out. “Hare Ram, Hare Lakshman” played through the house.