Mukhopadhyay showed me to the green metal door for the last time and said, with a hush in his voice, “There may be weaknesses in my argument; but I can tell you one thing: on such occasions, I don’t speak a word I do not believe.”
I FOUND ANAND MOHAN JHA lying back in a boat, just as he had been when I first met him during that election summer. He got up when he saw me, and I almost didn’t recognize him in his black-and-white beanie. I asked him if the boat in which he had made himself so comfortable was his.
He grinned, a broad mischievous smile. “What? Even this body is not ours.”
Anand was dressed in a white tracksuit top and bright red-and-black socks, and he was loafing about with a young friend from his village called Prakash Thakur. When I asked him his age, Thakur said, “On the certificate, I am fifteen. But in actual fact I am nineteen.”
“You won’t find him on any voter list,” Anand said. “Ask him how many times he voted for Modi.”
“Three,” Thakur said proudly.
Modi was in town, but Anand hadn’t gone to see him. “You know how much I did for him during the election? But this time I haven’t so much as gone there. I’m not interested in the posters, the banners, the deluge of people. The mood has gone cold.”
The jobs that Modi had promised had not come. There were endless new schemes: smart cities, International Yoga Days, Swachh Bharat Missions, and Make in India programs—in Delhi they were calling it “The Announcement Raj”—but the economy was slowly tanking, and in the months to come, Modi would make gesture after grand populist gesture. He would put 86 percent of the country’s currency out of commission overnight in a quest to end black money; he would implement a tortuous new regime of taxes, for which he called a special midnight session of Parliament, such as had never been called since Nehru delivered the “Freedom at Midnight” address that marked the birth of the modern nation.
Modi had promised Kyoto to the people of Benares. He had brought Shinzo Abe to the city, and their pictures had been up at the airport when I first arrived. It was just a little bit of theater. Under Modi, the old Indian disease of symbolic action, such as the washing of feet in Urmila’s house, had returned, and an example of what Benares would see of his second Kyoto was the electronic water dispenser, with a cool blue screen and soft silver buttons, which appeared magically one morning amid the dirt and chaos of the riverside. As with all such machines in India—whether they be ATMs or the check-in kiosks at airports—the dispenser did not make men obsolete: it provided employment. It came with a human caretaker, who protected it from the untrained touch. The dispenser’s human arm, valet to the great machine, was thereafter to be seen handing out little paper cups of water to pilgrims and tourists as they made their way down to the river. This was the kind of misadventure for which Benares reserved a special laughter, and the jokes had already begun. Abe meant “hey” in the local dialect, but more in the sense of “hey, asshole.” And, unthinkable as it would have been a few months before, people now said of the prime minister, “Abe, Modi!”
Modi’s failure, predictable as it might have seemed to the outsider, was no small matter in India. The election had been an election of hope. The country had felt it was trusting to itself after a long period of “foreign rule,” sloughing off the class of interpreters. Modi’s coming had implied a reassertion of autonomy, and the end of an age of custodianship. The disappointment he represented now was personal and keenly felt. It was the disappointment of a place that was out of ideas, out of options. The “nerve gas” of contact with the West had paralyzed the life of tradition—that door had closed—but it had not brought the material rewards of life in the West either. “Nationalism,” wrote Nehru in his autobiography, “is essentially an anti-feeling, and it feeds and fattens on hatred and anger against other national groups, and especially against the foreign rulers of a subject country.” As such, the nationalism that had taken hold in India was not quenched by failure, but fed by it. There would always be other people to blame for why Modi had failed. The culture war on two fronts would rage on.
Anand had just been home to his village, in Bihar, and he described a place where the expectations that Modi had aroused were beginning to curdle. Crime was returning. “And it is very young men who are doing the robberies. They’re in debt because they’ve all bought phones they cannot afford, and now they have to pay back the money from somewhere.
“This new generation is a lost generation.”
Thakur agreed, “It’s all self-destructiveness, and fashion, and waywardness. The town has come very near, and they’re all living with the illusion that they are part of the town. But in fact, they’re living off their parents’ hard-earned money, and when they try to stand up on their own, they sink back into poverty.”
“Their sense has become disturbed,” Anand said, using the English word with the flourish for which Biharis were famous.
“Disturbance” was exactly the right word, and Anand instinctively knew what lay behind it: “There is still oneness in our village, still community, but in other villages, it is finished. People have grown distant from each other.”
Anand himself was in trouble once again. He had been caught communicating with his girlfriend in the ashram, and the men of the neighborhood had got together and driven him out. He had had to find another place to live. It had been especially galling as he was a BHU student, and a Brahmin to boot.
“This is all mohamaya,” Anand said with a smile as we parted. “Mohamaya—a darkness, or delusion of mind,” the Sanskrit dictionary informs us, “that prevents the discernment of truth and leads men to believe in the reality of worldly objects.”
IN MY LAST DAYS IN Benares, I was haunted by the memory of a man I had met during that election summer, eighteen months before.
The Samaveda school was in the north of the city. The streets there were of a different quality—quieter, cleaner, the buildings in better shape. It was possible to follow the unbroken line of a cornice along a pale blue façade, or to admire the ironwork of a slim balcony jutting into the street. Pinku and I had come in from the glare of a hot April morning to a shaded courtyard with green-painted columns. The young Brahmin boy who showed us in was dressed in two measures of white unstitched cloth. He led us past great rusting metal cupboards, and through corridors hung with the pictures of former gurus. He explained that his guru, Gyaneshwar Shastri, had a high fever. But he would speak to us nonetheless because he was a teacher, and it was his dharma to teach. Shastri, whom Tripathi had described as living still as Brahmins did hundreds of years ago, taught the Samaveda. And it was all he knew.
I found Shastri reclining near a shrine in the far corner of the courtyard, where the air was smoky. He wore nothing but a loincloth and his sacred thread. His body was wrinkled and sinewy, and his white beard had yellowed in places.
We ran into the old difficulty almost immediately: those in whom tradition was most intact were least able to speak of it.
The world around Shastri was in flux, but without a shared vocabulary, I had no way to ask him about the space- and time-bending force that was encircling him.
What did he have to say to the world beyond the walls of the Vedic school? What did tradition have to say to modernity?
Shastri was not even aware of what was outside the walls of the school. Tradition, like faith, functioned by an internal logic. It was self-contained, and it nourished him completely. The only indication he gave me of even being aware of the passage of time was when he said we were living through Kali Yuga, an age of decline and unrest, followed by dissolution.
Since our conversation was running into dead ends, I thought I would ask him what the value was of teaching the Veda in this age of darkness.
The question roused his interest. This was at last language that meant something to him, and he now knew exactly what I was talking about. He looked at me through the glaze of his feverish eyes, then asked, “Do you know what beej raksha is?”
The phrase lit
erally meant “the protection of the seed,” but Shastri spoke of it conceptually; and as a concept, I did not know what it meant.
“During the rains, when the land is flooded, the farmer will take the seed”—Shastri made a pouch with his hands—“and he will put it in some high place, where it is safe from the waters. Then, when the flood retreats, there will be farming again.”
Shastri held my gaze a moment longer and, looking out at the Ganges, emaciated against a burning plain of beige, said, “This is what we do, and this is all that can be done.”
DEATH, METAPHORICAL AND REAL, HAD been with me all the while in Benares. I came there from a house of death in New York. My husband’s father’s death—oblique, numbing, hard to grieve for—contained an echo of my own father’s. I was also mourning the end of my life in India, and soon there was Mapu’s death from a rare intestinal disease, which happened almost exactly a year after he said it would and seemed in every way to bring my time in Benares to a close.
It was impossible to take death personally in Benares. Here, day and night, the corpses sizzled away on funeral pyres. Upon arrival, one immediately entered into a war of attrition: the universal fact of death wearing away at the particularity of one’s own experience of it. But though the community of death had triumphed over what was the supreme source of terror in the modern West—namely, as James Baldwin writes, that “the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time”—it had found no way to confront the small matter of its own death.
“This thing that goes by the name of life,” Tripathi had said, during the summer of the Modi election, “tests our thought.” He was referring to the death of his son. He remembered every detail of that morning. Tripathi had been invited to a conference in Trivandrum while his son was ill. He was being treated at a hospital in Delhi, a young man, in the prime of youth. The doctor said he was sure to get well. That put Tripathi’s mind at rest, and he decided to go to the conference, which was quite important. On his way to Trivandrum from Benares, he stopped in Delhi to see his son in the hospital.
It was only 4:00 a.m., but his son was awake. “You seem to have been waiting for me,” Tripathi said.
“No, I haven’t been waiting. I’m just not feeling very well today.” It was October. The seasons were changing. Tripathi thought that might be the reason his son’s condition had worsened. Tripathi said he would speak to the doctors when he returned from Trivandrum. With that, he bathed, said his prayers, and set off. He was on a 9:00 a.m. flight, which touched down in Trivandrum a few hours later. Tripathi disembarked to find that everyone from the conference had come to meet him at the airport. They all had sorrowful faces. Tripathi was not sure what the problem was. Then the main theater personality among them came up to him and said, “You must return immediately. We have made a reservation for you on this very same flight. You must go back at once.” That was when Tripathi guessed what had happened.
“It is in moments like these…” He left off. He mentioned how he got back on the plane and that his daughter was waiting for him at the airport in Delhi. She took him home, where his son lay dead. He had died within half an hour of Tripathi’s leaving. “It is in moments like these…” Tripathi began again. “A line seemed to come up in me from within. ‘Dhiras tatra na muhyati…,’” Tripathi said in Sanskrit, beginning to quote a famous verse from the Gita: “Even as the body passes from boyhood to youth to old age, so, too, does the soul at death pass from one body to another. He of steady mind is not perturbed by such changes.”
“This line,” Tripathi said, “came up in me again, and again. It reminded me that things went on. Death happens. He who is born has to go. It is decided; but to think it is all over at death … Well, it is not.”
This second untimely death, which bookended Tripathi’s life, seemed the spiritual analogue to the more politically significant death of his brother. And death, as I learned when I came to say goodbye to Tripathi, had been an all-too-frequent visitor in his life. It had struck twice in the eighteen months that I had been away, leaving him utterly alone.
We met for the last time in the compound of rain-drenched mango trees and yellow government buildings, which the damp had streaked black. Upstairs, in the brand-new office overlooking a garden where evening fell, the heater was on. Tripathi, wearing a brown woolen cap, a long blue scarf, and a white shawl, was sitting with Bettina Bäumer. The old Brahmin and the Indologist were gossiping when I came in. Their conversation touched on weight loss and advancing age as well as tantric Shaivism in medieval Kashmir. Bäumer, whom Tripathi described as a great rishika, or female sage, was saying that tantric Shaivism had, like Buddhism, become fashionable in the West. The remark, I sensed, contained something of the irritation people feel when a subject that has been their life work is taken over by people who know far less about it than they do, but who, in their ignorance, are better able to popularize it than they, in all their knowledge, ever could.
Soon Bäumer left, and Tripathi and I were alone.
We spoke for well over an hour, covering what was now familiar ground: the survival of old India into the present, and the challenge presented by the British—both the rape and the seduction. Tripathi said, “I don’t think there was anyone who understood the West like Gandhi. And he understood his own culture too.” Tripathi lamented that no one had even tried to follow Gandhi’s legacy. “We tried instead to discover India,” Tripathi said, taking a swipe at Nehru’s book The Discovery of India, “as if India was lost. We suffered under the exploitation of the westernized classes. They had their right to pursue their interests, but why were we so stupid to be taken in by them? Why were we not able to save ourselves? This is why I say that I have no faith in the Indian intellectuals, but I have a tremendous faith in the masses.”
Those “masses” had now brought about the Modi revolution, and Tripathi could already see a contradiction: these men wanted to save Indian consciousness, but also wanted Western technology. Tripathi believed, as Gandhi had, that the tools of the West were not neutral—that the screen of the smartphone was a portal to alien values, attitudes, ways of life. “Thanks to the superiority of their technology, they have made incursions deep into the Indian village, which is the unit of our culture, and which they will destroy.”
When Tripathi and I last spoke, I’d had no experience of the Indian village; I had only just met Shivam. But now I felt a chill hearing Tripathi speak of the village and Gandhi in these idealized ways. I feared that India was in danger of making a catastrophic decision about her future. The country was at a special boiling point: the right quantity of uprooted, semi-urbanized young men; the right kind of populist strongman; the right level of ignorance and heightened expectations, resentment and anger; the right fantasies about the past—who knew what little achievement of nation building and democracy might not yet be sacrificed at the altar of a future too bright to behold?
“Something is bubbling up from within,” Tripathi said. “The point we’re at right now is critical. The next three years will decide what India will be in the future.”
I could not have agreed more: the Indian soul was declaring itself, as the Russian and German souls once had. The trouble then was the same as the trouble now: it was precisely those who were no longer in possession of tradition—those in whom a break had occurred, those whom Rebecca West described in the 1930s as “the mindless, traditionless, possessionless section of the urban proletariat”—who most wanted to bring back what they imagined had been lost. But they themselves had been remade. They were only able to bring back an adulterated version of the past that contained, in far greater quantities than they knew, the alien present from which they were running. Their response to modernity had cut them from their own past. Outside, in one ever louder voice, they were yelling, “Victory to Mother India!”—but the more they stressed their victory, the more one suspected its absence.
Tripathi said, “You see, there is a
ll the difference in the world between being cultured and civilized. Civilization is fundamentally an urban concept, a city concept. This has nothing to do with our use of sabhya, or ‘cultured.’ For us, the people of the forests, or villages—what Europe calls folk culture—are very cultured. Culture is by no means restricted to the city. You see the difference?”
“You mean that, in your view of culture, no man who is in his natural environment can be considered uncultured—only those who have strayed out?”
“Exactly!” He who is among his own, Tripathi explained, is never uncultured. The word mleccha, often translated as “barbarian,” is not for a Muslim or a Christian, but for someone who has gone out of his cultural norms.
Thomas Mann, in a public feud with his brother Heinrich during World War I, had once said something similar in relation to Germany. “Culture is compatible with all kinds of horrors,” Mann wrote. “Oracles, magic, pederasty, human sacrifice, orgiastic cults, inquisition, witch-trials, etc.—by which civilization would be repelled; for civilization is Reason, Enlightenment, moderation, manners, scepticism, disintegration—Mind.” In Mann’s view at the time, Germany stood for culture, France for civilization. Or, to put it differently, civilization was India, culture Bharat.
Mann, after the horrors of the Nazi years, was forced to recant much of what he believed about the German soul, which, when it found utterance, brought into being a world in which there was no room for Mann—a world in which his books were committed to the fires at the Opernplatz. Hearing Tripathi speak, dabbling level-headedly in political emotions whose intensity he could not grasp, I felt I was listening to a man who would be forced—in the near future—to take back these fond ideas about culture and civilization, a man who was applying the tamer dissatisfactions of an earlier time to one whose crude fury he could never hope to understand. He was by his own definition still “cultured,” but he was dealing with a society that was every day more uprooted and adrift.
The Twice-Born Page 24
