The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  “Wasn’t there pressure on you to marry?”

  “No. From the time I was a very young child, I outright refused to be sent to anybody’s house.”

  “And your parents didn’t object?”

  “No, how could they? My elder sister had refused too. Sure, they poked fun at me. I was only a child after all. But they knew that I had come into the world to do something. They had faith. My father was an excellent astrologer, and he saw in my chart that I would never compromise with the truth. He said, ‘Let her do what she wants, because if we force her into a marriage, she will break it immediately.’ Marriage is full of compromises.”

  Instead, Urmila devoted herself to one of the great dual objectives of Indian life: she would study like crazy, and then she would meet God. With the double aim of developing both spirit and mind, Urmila left home as a young girl and came to Benares. She went to BHU, where she obtained degree after degree. She studied every branch of Indian learning, from linguistics to ayurveda, Sanskrit grammar, and the secrets of the Veda. But throughout this intellectual journey, one thing was clear:

  “I knew right from the beginning that the West had nothing to give me. Their language seemed far more impoverished to me than our own. Their script was an unscientific hodgepodge.”

  It seemed like an oddly regressive position for an otherwise brave and daring woman. When I questioned her further, I saw that it was not so much that the West had nothing to offer her, but that she was reacting against its power over Indian society.

  Urmila had begun our conversation by reading off her telephone a quote attributed to Macaulay. It was in wide circulation in India on WhatsApp and other social media platforms. The quote was fraudulent, but the emotion behind it was not: it was a perfect articulation of what India believed Britain had done to her.

  “‘I have traveled across the length and breadth of India,’” Urmila began, in halting English, “‘and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose we replace her old and ancient education systems, her culture’”—Urmila repeated this word three times, then concluded—“‘for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good, and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture … and they will become what we want them to be, a truly dominated nation.’”

  Urmila blazed in the triumph of the apocryphal quote. It was painful to watch, in part because it was so crude a portrait of Macaulay, who was a gifted writer. But more than that, it seemed harmful to India to accept, 150 years on, so oversimplified a description of what the contact with Britain had amounted to.

  “Was your turning away from Western learning, then, a way to protect yourself?” I asked.

  “No.” Urmila put her phone away. “There was no need to protect myself. I knew that what we had was much better. To study their things was a comedown; it was to diminish myself. Frankly, I felt sorry for them.” She laughed, a bitter, disingenuous laugh, unbefitting a woman who refused to compromise with the truth. If Western learning was as trifling as Urmila made out, her aversion to it would not have been so intense. In reality it had been a shaping force on her world, and her response was to reject it with equal and opposite force.

  We now came to the mistakes Urmila felt independent India had made: “It was Nehru. He cut us from our roots.”

  “Were you aware of this as you grew up?”

  “No. Because things were not so bad then.”

  “When did you become aware that things were going wrong?”

  “I think it must have been around the time of the war with China.”

  The war was in 1962. India had been independent for only fifteen years. It came at the end of Nehru’s life, and some say it killed him. He had been devoted to friendship with China, and they rewarded his dreams of an Asia united against Europe and America with a stealthy incursion into Indian territory. India was completely unprepared; in the end, Nehru, who had disdained American friendship, was begging Kennedy to bomb China.

  But Urmila had her own special complaint with Nehru:

  “Once I got older, I began to see what Nehru was doing. I began to see that he was degrading our things, and elevating theirs, now encouraging cow slaughter, now diminishing ayurveda. At the time of the China war, there was a man called Narayana Swamy. He was a prince of Mysore, and a very brilliant engineer. But with age, his eyes began to fail. The doctors advised he stop reading and writing altogether, or he would go completely blind. He decided to leave his work and go into the hills.” He went to Gangotri, the town at the source of the Ganges. “There, he began to meditate on the water of the Ganges. He used to wear these very thick glasses, and one day as he was gazing into the river, they fell in and were swept away. Now he thought to himself, ‘Well, Mother Ganges, if you have taken these, then there is nothing for me to go back to. In fact, I cannot go back. My eyes are completely gone. But at least nothing now separates us.’ So, he continued to gaze at the purifying water of the Ganges, and slowly, very slowly, his sight began to return. The vision that was gone came back! But since he had already left everything behind, he decided to go deeper into the mountains. There, from a spot at twelve thousand feet, he had a clear view into China. His sight in fact had become so sharp that he could see for miles and miles. Do you know what trataka is?”

  I did not. But later I learned that it was a form of meditation whereby if one focuses on a single point, such as a black dot or a flame, the energy of the “third eye” can be released.

  Swamy had inadvertently done trataka on the water of the Ganges. Now, with his third eye gently opening, he began to do trataka on the moon and the sun. His vision grew sharper; he acquired the gift of long-sightedness. He was able to look deep into China, Urmila said. There, hundreds of miles away, he could see the Chinese army plotting their incursion into Indian territory. In 1958, he wrote Nehru a letter, warning him about what was happening, and advising him to strengthen Indian positions at various points on the border. “But Nehru wouldn’t listen!” Urmila cried.

  In 1960, Swamy wrote again to say that the situation had deteriorated considerably, and that if something was not done now, it would be too late afterward. He wrote two, maybe three, letters. But Nehru ignored them all. “He was too obsessed with his own power,” Urmila said, “and with saving face.” Nehru had said India and China are brothers. He wasn’t prepared to be proven wrong, especially not by some ascetic on a mountaintop who’d developed the gift of clairvoyance. “But had he listened,” Urmila said, “we might have been able to stave off the Chinese aggression.”

  This was the reason Urmila had lost faith in Nehru: “I became aware of his total contempt for Indian culture and civilization.”

  Poor Nehru! He may well have disdained Hindu worship and ritual, but he cherished Indian civilization. And his fears for the scientific temper in India were real. He would have known that someone such as Urmila was by no means alone in her belief in magic, and that if India wanted the fruits of Western science, it would also have to assimilate the methods. He would also have been aware of a tendency in India to dismiss those methods and to falsely claim the discoveries of the modern scientific West as having already existed in premodern India. Aldous Huxley, traveling through India in the 1920s for Jesting Pilate, had been dismayed by the proliferation of a pseudoscientific literature. He saw intelligent men squander their time and energy on proving to the world that the ancient Hindus were superior in every regard. “Thus,” he wrote, “each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it.”

  Huxley felt that this literature was the direct result of British rule in India—“the melancholy product of a
subject people’s inferiority complex”—and that “free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit on such vanities.” He was only half right. There was indeed a pathos in India wanting to appropriate the discoveries of the West, and it may well have sprung, as Mukhopadhyay pointed out, from the harm British rule had done India’s self-image by labeling it an exclusively spiritual culture, but seventy years of freedom had not been enough to put an end to this baleful tendency. Under Modi, the pseudoscientific impulse had gained momentum, and serious scientific platforms were being overtaken by people wishing to prove that Shiva was the first environmentalist, that air travel had been mastered by the Indians seven thousand years before the Wright brothers, and that nuclear weapons had been in use at the time of the Indian epics. It would be easy to laugh except that beneath the boastfulness there lay real pain.

  Magic, like madness, could insinuate itself into a recognizable reality—it was a partial distortion—and there was something arresting in watching magic at work. The longer I stayed talking to Urmila, the more magic seemed to remake our world. My breaking point came in the middle of a story about Urmila’s guru, Vimala Thakar. She had been part of a famous land reform movement in the 1950s that was led by a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi’s, Vinoba Bhave, who had walked the length and breadth of India appealing to landowners to voluntarily give up their land.

  I had tried to sidestep the subject of magic until now, even though it had encroached many times. Urmila had told me of cows that adhered to the dietary restrictions of the strictest Brahmins: “If so much as the skin of an onion blew in from outside and landed in their food, they would immediately refuse the food.”

  I quailed, but she was indefatigable.

  “On one occasion, a boy who worked for us brought them what we thought were perfectly clean rotis, but the cow refused them. We thought, ‘That’s strange!’ But when we inquired further, we found that the boy who had brought them had recently had a death in the family.”

  I looked blankly back at her.

  “Don’t you see?” Urmila thundered. “That was why the cow refused them! An orthodox Brahmin cannot eat food from a house of grief. He has to wait until eighteen days have passed.”

  We carried on, despite that our hold on a mutually accepted view of reality was growing more tenuous by the minute. At last, Urmila delivered her coup de grâce. Telling me of her years of “spiritual enrichment,” when she quit the world and went to live in the Rajasthani hill station of Mount Abu, Urmila let it slip that Vimala Thakar’s grandfather had received initiation directly from Tulsidas.

  “Who lived in the sixteenth century?”

  “The very same! This is nothing special for us. This is something that happens all the time. It is written of in our texts.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Vimala saw it, and as far as I’m concerned, that is good enough for me.”

  “What exactly did she see?”

  “Her grandfather was a rich landlord. And he would often say, ‘If I am ever to be initiated, I want to be initiated by Tulsidas.’”

  “Did he mean it metaphorically?”

  “Not metaphor,” Urmila scolded. “Real!”

  “As in physically?”

  “Yes, physically! And so it was that one day he began to feel that the time for his initiation had arrived. He sent the four-year-old Vimala out of the room—”

  “She was four?”

  Vimala, as a girl, was always by her grandfather’s side. So when, one day, he asked to be left alone, she grew curious. No sooner had she been sent out of the room than she pushed a table up to the locked door and peered through the transom. She saw her grandfather, dressed in brand-new clothes, seated in meditation by a sacrificial fire. A few moments later, another man appeared in the room, though all its doors were closed. He was a tall, fair Brahmin. On seeing him, Vimala’s grandfather greeted him with full prostration. The Brahmin gave his blessings and the two men sat down in front of the sacrificial fire. The rite of initiation began. The man whispered something into Vimala’s grandfather’s ear. They sat like that for an hour, then Vimala’s grandfather rose and thanked the Brahmin, who left the room as magically as he’d entered it.

  No sooner was he gone, Urmila said, with girlish excitement, than Vimala rushed in, “like a little squirrel,” and began to quiz her grandfather about the strange man. Vimala’s grandfather was amazed that she had seen him and asked for a full description. He then showed her a number of pictures of different saints to see if she could recognize the man she purported to have seen. She rejected each one, but when they came to Tulsidas, she cried, “It’s him! It’s him.” Her grandfather was delighted, Urmila said. “He always knew that there was something special about the girl.”

  I had believed until that moment that Urmila’s lapses into magic could be controlled. I admired much about Urmila: her severity, her solitude, her vows of chastity, her utter commitment to the life of the mind. But now it was difficult to go on. Magic, like fiction, was a closed circle; it was true and consistent within its sphere, but to partake, one had to submit oneself to its laws, and I found myself unable to go the distance. It is easy to be indifferent to what doesn’t threaten, but in these altered circumstances, in Benares and later in the open country, where the great majority of people believed a version of what Urmila believed, I found myself jealously guarding the worldview that had come down to me from the West. Perhaps, as Nehru was, I could be accused of displaying contempt for Indian culture and civilization. I don’t believe I had any such contempt, but Urmila made me see the extent to which a break had occurred in me that was final, and that I could not accept India as a changeless emanation of the classical world. She showed me how much I valued what modernity had wrought.

  Before I got up to leave Urmila’s house for the last time, she asked whom else I had spoken to in Benares. I mentioned Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi and P. K. Mukhopadhyay. The first name brought an expression of distaste to Urmila’s face, the second one of pure delight. “Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi is duplicitous,” she said, “but P. K. Mukhopadhyay is a very fine man, absolutely transparent. A true Indian, very special.”

  I asked her to elaborate.

  “Indian knowledge and learning is both manifest inside P. K. Mukhopadhyay as well as integrated into his life and action. He’s a philosopher, but he also lives his philosophy. His mind, his words, his deeds, are totally transparent. There is no gap. If you’ve spoken to him, then you’ve done a very good thing. As for Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi, I know him inside out. He has lived with us, and that is why I have not the slightest bit of faith left in him. He is a theater man with a deeply flawed character. Anyway, let it go! Let him preserve his appearances. You’ve spoken to P. K. Mukhopadhyay, and that is what counts. Let us concentrate on the good and set aside the bad.”

  MY DECADE-LONG STUDY OF Sanskrit had given me an intellectual—I might even say theoretical—entry point into a culture whose reality colonization had set me at a distance from. I had not thought hard enough about the nature of that distance: of who I would be were it to collapse, and whether I wanted it gone at all. I had learned Sanskrit chiefly among people who regarded it as they might Latin or Greek, a dead language—an object of intellectual wonder, but not a sacred artifact in an unbroken continuum. All around me now were people who lived the Hindu continuum, and they helped me to recognize how much my distances were part of who, and what, I was. I wanted to be near India, but I did not want to surrender my distance. “The West’s India became our India,” Mukhopadhyay had said as a criticism of men such as Tagore. I saw now that I did not want to undo that refracted image of India—the country seen for millennia through other eyes. It was not just that I believed purity was illusory; it was that I believed in the creative possibilities—no less than the hurt—of seeing oneself as others see you.

  There were certain things about Tripathi that I had not wanted to acknowledge. He seemed to privilege the exuberance of an idea, or the elegance of a phrase, over
its veracity. His “solutions” to India’s intellectual and spiritual crisis were glib. But my real concern about Tripathi was what the rise of Modi would do to him. I was afraid that he would conflate the politics of revival (and revenge) with his own heartfelt wish for a cultural renaissance in India. I was afraid he would throw in his lot with the forces of Hindu nationalism, and that he would come out a diminished figure as a result. It was one reason I had not sought him out on this return to Benares. In the end, I did go and see him, for in a journey of this kind, the traveler, like the novelist, has no right to be afraid of what he might find.

  THE DAWN OF THE MODI era had brought material changes to Tripathi’s life. He was no longer in that dilapidated bungalow by the side of a busy road. The new offices of the IGNCA were in a large compound shaded with mango trees. There were government-style buildings in BHU colors—yellow picked out in red—ranged around mossy pathways of brick in a herringbone pattern. In one corner of the compound, above a sign that read TAYLIT, a flight of open stairs led up to a large first-floor space, carved up with glass and aluminum partitions into many discrete units. In this bright busy place, drenched in fluorescent light, the only reminders of the dreary bungalow that housed the old offices were the government-issue chairs, with their white plastic weave, and the green metal cabinets that contained Sanskrit books.

  I was kept waiting a few moments, then shown into a large office with an electrical heater and a garden view. Tripathi, dressed in a blue woolen kurta and waistcoat, a scarf around his neck, sat in a wicker chair, two acolytes by his side. He greeted me warmly with his smile of long, gapped teeth. His eyes were bright and luminescent as before, but when he began to speak, I was sad to see that an unfortunate change had come over the man I had known eighteen months before. Then, in the heat of that election summer, Tripathi had been full of humility and repose; he was frantic now, messianic, and distressingly pleased with himself.