“Exactly what I thought was going to happen is happening,” he announced to the room. “We are in a state of confusion. Things are very unclear. It is too early to say where they will go. But, I have been given the green light by the new dispensation to do what had not been open to me to do before, and I am determined now to dedicate what remaining energy I have to strengthening our thought.”
“How will you do that?” I asked.
He would tell me later, he said; the first order of business was to meet the West on equal footing. “These people who claim to defend freedom of thought are not allowing real freedom. They say their way is the only way, that the capitalist notion of development is the only model available to us.”
“How do they do this?”
“Through their monetary system, of course, and the pressure of their multinational companies.”
Tripathi said he had just read a fifty-page book on the monetary system, and he was appalled to learn of the methods of domination. He launched into a tirade on the harm Western civilization was doing the world through climate change and on the need for the Paris agreement. It was a cut-rate version of the banalities one hears every day on American college campuses and was not befitting a man of Tripathi’s sophistication. It made me doubt if that sophistication had been real, or an extension of my romantic idea of Tripathi. He now offered the “Gandhian model,” with its emphasis on village life as the model for social and economic organization, as an alternative to the domination of the West; but Gandhi’s solutions to the problems of modernity even a century ago—even to Nehru—had seemed impractical and woolly-headed. “Few of us, I think,” Nehru wrote in the 1930s, “accepted Gandhiji’s old ideas about machinery and modern civilization. We thought that even he looked upon them as Utopian and largely inapplicable to modern conditions.” Now, with the world as interconnected as it was, with Modi traveling the globe in search of foreign investment, Gandhi seemed less applicable than ever.
“He was the last original thinker in our history,” Tripathi said. “After Gandhi we have had no thinkers, only borrowed thinkers.”
It was a depressing thought, and Tripathi himself walked it back: “Sometimes I think that this fight that we are engaged in is one in which we are just going to keep losing. Maybe Heidegger was right, maybe the destiny of the world does lie in complete westernization.”
The remark reminded me of what Shivam had said: “Either we throw ourselves into this modernity, or we go back to what we were; what is intolerable is this limbo, this middle condition.”
Shivam, pointing at the death fires on the river, had said, “In the end the truth is only that.” I had not thought too much about the comment at the time, but listening to Tripathi now, I wondered if Shivam had been applying the Hindu concept of creative destruction to the decayed state of Hinduism itself. When I mentioned to Tripathi what Shivam had said, his earlier glibness fell away, and he was once more the man I had spoken to eighteen months before.
With pure unbridled passion, he said, “This is the voice of India. What you heard this boy of twenty say, this is the voice of the coming generation of this country. Either we become fully westernized, or we find a way to come back into the sphere of Indian thought.”
The last time Tripathi and I had met, he had shown me photographs of sixty-five little Brahmin boys being initiated into their vocation by a thread ceremony. They sat before sacrificial fires, each wearing two measures of yellow unstitched cloth, their heads tonsured, receiving their second birth.
“I, too, was once such a boy,” Tripathi had said. “I sat there in the same way. I must have been even younger when the mantras were whispered in my ear.”
One of the boys, a beautiful child with dark intent eyes, was to come and live with Tripathi to learn the Veda. Like all the other boys in the picture, he carried a little twig in his hands, a symbolic staff.
“What are these sticks they’re carrying?” I asked Tripathi.
“The staff of palasha wood.”
I was amazed. I was reading Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhavam at the time, in which Shiva appeared to Parvati in the guise of a student, bearing the staff of palasha wood. It was one thing to be told of the survival of the classical past into the present; it was quite another to be confronted with an actual object as proof. And it was so unselfconscious. It gave India’s history a unique character. India’s buildings were not especially old; there were no ancient Indian historians, no equivalent of Herodotus or Polybius, or of China’s Spring and Autumn Annals, but in parts of Hindu India, the miraculous vestiges of a living past, made up of custom and ritual, whose antiquity went back twenty-five centuries at the minimum, could still be observed. It was not so much written down as held in trust among ordinary people. These continuities would have solaced India through the centuries of invasion. As with the Chinese concept of tongbian—tong meaning a deep knowledge of past practice, and bian, a creative transformation of custom—there would have been a degree of novelty and invention within the construct of tradition, but the modern age, though less physically violent, had closed a circle around tradition itself. “The Muslim centuries were very violent,” an old Brahmin who lived and worked in a tiny room near Alice’s house once said to me. “They destroyed a great deal, but our spirit remained intact. What the British did was worse. They gave our very DNA an injection, and we were never the same again.”
I now asked Tripathi about his young student.
“He left me. He went back to his parents. The pressures of his environment were too great; he couldn’t tolerate it.”
By “pressures” Tripathi meant the forces of the new global world with all its appetites and distractions. The rigors of the old way of instruction, which had survived so much, could not survive this.
“There are one point three billion people in this country,” Tripathi said as I got up to leave. “I do not believe that such a vast country can be so easily subdued by an external or superficial force. It is a source of comfort to me that among this huge population there will be voices like that of this twenty-year-old boy you spoke of earlier. It is upon them that all my hope rests.”
THE STAGE WAS SET AND draped in purple cloth. The microphones blared. On the ghat were bright halogen lights and crowds. It was the end of the year, and it was fitting that I should spend it at the nucleus of worship and belief that was the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Golu had wanted me to witness the ceremony at the temple again, now that I knew the city better. We had arranged to meet at one of the checkpoints before the cordoned-off area surrounding the temple. From these enclosed streets, crammed with brassware and bangles, oblations and flowers, where knots of policemen stood as gatekeepers, he now appeared out of an alley, as if from the depths of an underworld.
On seeing that I was with Golu, the policemen waved me through. Golu was haughty and brusque, half priest, half mafioso. He cut through the torrent of believers, sluicing and eddying around us in a contrapuntal motion. I kept my eyes firmly planted on the back of Golu’s head, on his admirable shikha, plaited and oiled, as he led me through the streets where he had grown up, toward the linga he had handled all his life.
The worship of the linga was the supreme example in this city of that blend of magic and theater that was part of faith all over the classical world, and of which traces could still be found in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. The Brahmins were the magi, and it was no accident that that word is deeply linked, in etymology and meaning, to magic.
The crowd thickened in the precincts of the temple. Golu sat me down on a wooden bench at one of the entrances to the sanctum, where I was able to observe at my leisure what in the past I had been too overwhelmed to see: from a fat and gentle Shiva dancing on a marble keystone to a cheap modern clock mounted on the wall. A fluorescent coil illuminated the small sanctum. The linga, deep in its silver basin, was totally submerged. Bilva leaves and rose petals floated on the cloudy surface of the water. Then the basin was drained, and the linga greeted us in all its si
mplicity, a smooth, wet oblong stone standing in for the primordial. It reminded me of that other rock, half a world away in Mecca, which millions flocked to see, and which exuded a similar austere power.
The worshippers were ushered out, one by one; then, slowly, like chamber musicians taking their places, the priests entered the sanctum. One, looking exactly like an opera tenor, with a great dome of a head, a light beard, and sensual lips, bore five stripes of sandalwood paste across his forehead, a red circle smoldering at the center. There were streaks of white on his huge flabby arms. He was the chief officiant, and his smiling half-closed eyes radiated the contemptuous sagacity of the Buddha. Beside him sat a man with a thick black mustache and a huge necklace of rutted rudraksh seeds resting on a bed of dense black chest hair. His countenance was fierce, his wet long hair brushed back. Amid this assemblage of corpulent men with lowering expressions was a young boy, who played a central role in the chanting:
“Shambho, shambho,” he cried, addressing Shiva from the Samaveda.
The older priests answered back with something indecipherable, a harsh and inarticulate call that raised the temperature in the sanctum. A silver bucket arrived full of the utensils of worship: ladles, pouring vessels, Ganges water. The little sanctum was crammed full of offerings. The flowers were tossed in the back. Other offerings—sweets, clay pots of yogurt, butter, packets of bhang—came to the fore and were smeared on the linga. The opera tenor, whose great bulk should have rendered him immobile, moved swiftly about his tasks, seeming to take a sensual pleasure in rubbing the different substances over the smooth stone. The yogurt turned a cannabis green; then it was slopped up and smeared over the linga again. The cycles of smearing and cleaning continued.
“Shambho,” the boy cried, and the chanting quickened.
A five-headed silver cobra was brought into the sanctum. An altar of flowers rose over the linga. The dark dithyrambs of the Samaveda started to gather speed. A controlled movement of bells—a jerk, then a clapping shut—produced an abrupt percussive effect. A man behind me, a devotee, began to mutter deliriously in conjunction with the priests; his eyes were closed, but slits of white were visible. Small implosions of religious ecstasy occurred now all around me. A ranging animal energy took hold, and people were rapidly coming undone. Fire burned out of view, behind the cupped palms of priests, the glow reflected in their faces. Then they tore their hands away and honored the linga with a smoky five-tongued flame, which they swung through the air in a circular motion. The chief officiant had lit a thick bundle of incense sticks. He put out the fire with one swift movement of his wrist, as if flicking off something unclean or hot, and wreaths of smoke scattered everywhere. He distributed the burning sticks among the other Brahmins. The chanting was at a pitch now. Bells were smashing. The voices coalesced into a low choral bass, which rose around the chief officiant like a flood; it curled up around the tower of flowers, whose summit was lost in the smoke-filled darkness.
The officiant so far had been silent, like a key instrument awaiting its turn in a symphony. He now added his voice to the mix, and it sent the devotees into raptures. Everything was coming together: the smoke, the bells, the two strains of chanting, and the audience of devotees, agog with emotion. We had been worked into a frenzy, goaded up a precipice.
It had to break. A wave of anticlimax swept through the sanctum, and the devotees, elated and fatigued, began to file out of the enclosure of the temple.
ILLUSION, NOT SIN, WAS THE error old India sought to disabuse men of. The tower of flowers went up, only to come crashing down a moment later as a reminder of the impermanence of existence. Death was held close, so that no man ever forgot that it was not real. Benares looked into a void that was a metaphor for the Hindu concept of the abyss—for it was, as Coomaraswamy tells us, “by the fire of the idea of the abyss” that the factors that contributed to ego were destroyed beyond recovery.
But to rid men of illusion is not to comfort them. The energy of Benares is primal, cruel, full of laughter. It radiates right through the city and gives it its tamasic character. It may have offered a glimpse into the true nature of the universe, but the need for men to keep their gaze fixed on the abyss has passed out of modern religion. The world is so full. One can lose oneself in the stuff of existence and never have time to stop and wonder what comes next. The monotheistic faiths, especially, are more concerned with this world than the next. I suspected that in India, too, the day was not far off when the darkling energy raised here tonight, and the loss of control it implied, would be too frightening for modern man to enter into. Then the void would cease to speak, and Benares would be confronted with the altogether new silence of an empty sandbank, where, in a time long ago, arcane laws had forbidden construction in perpetuity.
10
THE DHARMA
OF PLACE
SPIRITUALITY IS IN THE VERY soil of India,” Urmila had said; then she told me a story that was meant to demonstrate the spiritual richness of India; and, I suppose, as a corollary, the bankruptcy of the West. The story was of an American sociologist who apparently doubted the extent to which spirituality had seeped into the soil of rural India. He had come all the way to Mount Abu in Rajasthan, where Urmila’s guru, Vimala Thakar, had her ashram. Thakar said, “I’m driving to Ahmedabad in Gujarat. There are many fields and villages along the way. Why don’t you come with me and speak to anyone you like?” The American sociologist agreed. They left at 5:00 a.m. and drove by jeep along dirt roads. Dawn broke, and they saw a poor farmer making his way through the fields. The sociologist wanted to stop and talk to him.
The sociologist asked the farmer if he believed in God. The farmer replied with great confidence—the sun was rising—“Do you need to believe in that? That is just there. As there is the sun, so there is God.” The sociologist thought the farmer had misunderstood his question. He picked up some soil in his hand and questioned him as to its nature. The farmer caught the soil as it fell and said, “You have sprung from this, and it is to this that you will return. This is the mother of us all. This is the mother, and that”—the farmer pointed to the sun—“is the father. Together they make us what we are.”
Shivam must also have had in mind this idea of a spiritualized landscape when he said, “If you want to see living Indian culture, you must come to my village.” I knew I would go. The loss of an idea of home had become a political force in our time; I myself had keenly felt the loss. Now Shivam was inviting me into his home. It was not merely a home to him, but a sacralized way of life, which he felt was in danger.
WE LEFT BENARES AT DAWN on Makar Sankranti, a festival day in the Hindu calendar, when the sun begins its northern course. The December murk was gone. The mornings were sunny, the sky cloudless; the city reappeared out of the haze. Shivam’s roommate, Rohit, came with us, on his way to Maihar, a place of pilgrimage not far from Satna, the town nearest Shivam’s village. The two Brahmins were dressed in jeans and sneakers. Shivam wore a maroon-and-beige-checked jacket with some meaningless words on the back STYLE RIGHT, THESTEROS COPIC FEETING. It was a kind of disguise. Save for their shikhas, and the occasional glimpse of a sacred thread, nothing in their appearance spoke of their identity. In this sense, they really were part of a secret India, an older life that had been forced inward.
We were a group of four—Shivam, Rohit, myself, and our driver, Mukesh, an erratic young man from Bihar. After a brief salutation to Ganesh, we sped out of the old town, through the spillover city of redbrick and ruin, and into fields of young green wheat and yellow mustard. I had not expected to feel so elated to be in the country; to leave small-town India after a long period was to know what it must have been like in medieval Europe to leave an urban environment of poor sanitation and disease for the freshness of the open country. It was such a relief to be rid of the beeping of scooter horns and the cloying sweet smell of unaired winter clothes. I felt as if I had woken from a long illness and found I had untapped reserves of strength, energy, and optimism.
I said I didn’t know what he meant.
“But I have seen it a hundred times,” Rohit said. He described men who, in the grip of religious ecstasy—“coming into feeling,” as he put it in Hindi—sliced off their tongues and threw them at the feet of the goddess. And lo! Two weeks later, sometimes that very afternoon, the tongues grew back.
Upon hearing this, Mukesh became so impassioned he could barely drive, and he launched into story after magical story. There was the village official who had embezzled the donation money for a Hanuman temple and been punished by being thrown into jail on a false charge of murder; then there was that time, on festival day in Benares, when Mukesh had received an order from the goddess Durga to come visit her. A throng stood outside the temple, and he thought he would have to wait for fourteen hours, but no sooner had he arrived than the crowd parted, and he found himself in the presence of the goddess. Speaking of her, he said, “We fight a lot. I sometimes ignore her for days and say in anger, ‘Mother, I never do any harm to anyone, why do you let harm come to me?’ But, in the end, it is a mother-son relationship, and when she calls me, I always go.”
As Mukesh spoke, the two Brahmins caught my eye in the rearview mirror to make clear their scorn. One of the reasons for the Brahmin’s high regard in Hindu society is his self-control. The Brahmin is jitendriya—he who has conquered the senses and is able to exert total control over every aspect of his life from his speech to his diet, his actions, his lust, his emotions. Mukesh was nothing if not uncontrolled.
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