Such were the conditions of modern life, defined by the conflict of individuals seeking their self-interest, which to Nietzsche revealed the fragile human, not divine, sources of Christian morality. These conditions turned human beings into nihilists despite themselves. It wasn’t that God did not exist – Nietzsche wasn’t interested in making theological arguments against God. It was that men by their own actions had rendered God superfluous.
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche described the madman who runs into a marketplace, looking for God, and is met with laughter. ‘Where is God?’ he cries. ‘Well, I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I.’
But for Nietzsche, ‘many new gods are still possible’. As he saw it, new secular illusions were at hand in the nineteenth century to replace the superseded religious goals and values and to exploit the spiritual vulnerability of Europeans. These included religions of science, socialism and egalitarianism. They asked for another kind of blind faith, this time in the ideals of free trade, progress, democracy, socialism, justice and equality – all of which Nietzsche denounced as disguised and degraded ideals of Christianity.
For him, they were wholly inadequate responses to what he saw as the seemingly insurmountable problem of nihilism. Men pursuing truth had found themselves robbed of their most ancient illusions – those values, aims, convictions stemming from faith in a so-called ‘true world’, which gave them a purpose and meaning on earth, and which they had used to create political and moral order. They were now faced with a terrifying meaninglessness. Nietzsche feared that the spirit of nihilistic despair and destruction was likely to blight Europe after the death of its old moral certainties.
‘The story I have to tell,’ he wrote, ‘is the history of the next two centuries…For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection.’5 He claimed that the world was entering an ‘era of monstrous wars, upheavals, explosions’ and that ‘there will be wars such as have never been waged on earth’ – one of his extravagant and vivid visions of disaster that were realized in the twentieth century.
Much of the prophetic aspect of Nietzsche was hidden from me when I first read him as an undergraduate in Allahabad. I wasn’t aware then of his reputation as an adolescent favourite in Europe and America – indeed, few students around me at the university in Allahabad would have known who Nietzsche was. I found his short aphorisms about art, death and boredom easier to grasp than the elaborately conceived attacks on Socrates, Christianity and Kant, or his frequent if cautious praise of the Buddha.
I was held by the inner drama he frequently confessed to – the loneliness, the urge for self-knowledge and self-overcoming – the drama that culminated in his mental collapse twelve years before his death. One statement particularly stood out. He had written it one bright winter in Genoa, after a period of pain and sickness: ‘No, life has not disappointed me. Rather, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day the great liberator overcame me: the thought that life could be an experiment for the knowledge-seeker.6
Vinod asked me often about him. He had become curious after reading about him in a book by the self-styled God, ‘Osho’ Rajneesh. He was much taken by an aphorism I once read out to him. ‘Life’, Nietzsche had written, ‘is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation, at least, at its mildest, exploitation’.
Vinod immediately copied the lines down in a small notebook he carried in the pocket of his kurta. But when he asked me to explain more about Nietzsche’s philosophy, I floundered. I was too ashamed to tell him that I didn’t understand most of what I read in Nietzsche, or that I had the greatest trouble with the word he appeared to use most often: nihilism.
Nietzsche often implied that a belief in historical progress and modern science – articles of faith for me, and for educated Indians like myself – was a form of nihilism. This was as puzzling as the character Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, who was defined as a nihilist not despite but because of his belief in progress and science.
More than what he wrote about, it was the image Nietzsche presented – the solitary thinker, struggling with what Thomas Mann in Death in Venice had described as the ‘tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul’ – that was initially attractive. He was part of my high idea of Europe and the West in general – the idea which Vinod also had, and from which he drew his conclusions about the role of people like the Buddha and Gandhi in India.
Years later, while I was living in London, this romantic image of Nietzsche began to dissolve. I knew more about Europe’s nineteenth century: how it had shaped much of the world, and thus my own circumstances. The physical and emotional landscape Nietzsche had moved through became more vivid. I began to see what he had meant when he compared his position in modern times to the Buddha’s in classical India: how both of them had lived at a time of tumultuous change, and confronted, in different ways, the phenomenon of nihilism.
The significance of what Vinod said to me late one evening up on the roof of his parents’ house also came back to me. It was his own experience of nihilism, which I was too young to understand then, but which stayed in my memory for a long time afterwards.
That evening, after our bus had broken down, we had waited for a couple of hours before being rescued by a passing truck. It was not until late the next morning that we reached the town where the smuggled goods from China were sold. There, I bought a red baseball cap while Vinod looked on slightly mockingly. We then travelled to the border, from where another bus took us deeper into India, on increasingly narrow and broken country roads. It stopped just where late monsoon rains had washed away a bridge over what was usually a narrow river. An improvised ferry took us across the brown silt-laden waters of the river. A tonga stood on the other side.
It had rained early that afternoon. The thatch-roofed huts of the villages looked battered, the ponds under the clump of mango trees were full and muddy, and deceptively shallow pools had gathered on the ruts and potholes of the road, in which the tonga’s large wheels plunged with a terrible crunching sound. The driver cracked his whip then, and the horse swayed angrily to one side and swished his tail, spraying us with water.
The few pedestrians walked very slowly, prodding the ground with large tattered black umbrellas, carefully raising their dhotis with one hand. Naked children floated paper boats in the larger potholes on the road; mud draped their brown legs as cleanly as breeches. They looked appraisingly at us as we approached – in what was in those parts a rich man’s vehicle – and their furtive eyes seemed fearful as we drew close.
The power had failed and lamps were being lit at Vinod’s house when the tonga finally drew up outside it. I dimly saw the outline of a rectangular double-storeyed white-painted building with a flat roof, standing in the middle of a large treeless compound.
Vinod shouted a few names into the darkness, and servants – silent white-clothed apparitions – abruptly emerged to take our bags. In the first room we entered, a man sat on a low wicker chair, his long thin shadow splayed across the wall by the lantern kept next to him. He got up as soon as he saw Vinod.
Vinod’s father was tall, with an unexpected shock of white hair and a lined face that suggested a great and tormented old age, although he couldn’t have been more than fifty. The gesture he made towards his son was one of respect and deference. Vinod made as if to touch his feet, but then walked past without saying anything. I had taken off my new cap as soon as I saw Vinod’s father. I now followed Vinod somewhat embarrassedly, past his father and into the inner courtyard.
On the parapet of a well tiny candles fluttered bravely, outlining a large tulsi plant and making the abraded plaster on the whitewas
hed walls of the house look like a gigantic scab. Each room opening out into the courtyard seemed to contain its own small glow and flickering shadows. In the room I was shown to, bare except for a string cot with a rolled-up mattress, a candle rested along with incense sticks on a rack under the framed and garlanded picture of a young woman. The garland was of plastic; the light under the photo exposed the dusty cracks in the flowers. The beauty of the dead woman, her large liquid eyes and full lips, seemed to dominate the room.
The woman was Vinod’s sister. He had a smaller framed photo of her hanging in his room in Allahabad. I had noticed that Vinod kept it face down on a table while he was with a prostitute. I had once asked him about her, and Vinod had seemed not to have heard my question. It was obviously something he did not want to talk about.
Vinod and I bathed in the open courtyard, next to the well from which a servant drew pails of cold refreshing water. Vinod’s father came out and watched us as we dried ourselves, with an expression of tender solicitude on his face. Here, too, Vinod barely acknowledged his presence.
We later ate in the long narrow kitchen, sitting on low stools on the stone floor. In the far corner, an old man turned rotis over a wood fire, his brown skin glistening with perspiration. Vinod’s mother sat before us, in a posture suggesting both resignation and ease, one hand supporting her head and the other slowly twirling a coir fan. She asked us questions about our journey, about life in Allahabad. Vinod barely said a word. I found myself replying to her, slightly disconcerted by her resemblance to her dead daughter.
Later, we went up to the roof. The clouds had vanished, and the night sky glittered indifferently over us. Strange noises kept erupting in the undergrowth, dogs howled in the far distance, and then it was quiet and the only sound was of the water dripping off the roof to the wet ground.
I felt a shiver of loneliness, and in that feeling was blended the strangeness of the evening in the large gloomy house in the middle of nowhere, the doting parents and their silent son. And, perhaps, it was the setting and mood it engendered that made me ask Vinod what I wouldn’t have dared to ask at any other time about the woman whose photo hung in my room.
He was silent. And then when he began to speak, he didn’t stop and spoke much more frankly than he ever had. He didn’t wait for my response, but I don’t think I could have said much anyway.
He said, ‘I know you have asked me this before. What can I tell you about that photo? It is of Sujata, my sister who was married to a businessman in Bombay. She was harassed by her in-laws and husband for not bringing sufficient dowry, although my parents had given them a car, several hundred thousands rupees in cash, and then one day, a year after her marriage, they poured kerosene over her and burnt her alive. There was a police case, but the in-laws claimed that she had committed suicide. They bribed the coroner. Her husband remarried.
‘But I don’t want to shock or upset you. That’s why I didn’t tell you before. And also because I came to feel that there is nothing shocking about her murder. It happens every day. It is part of our world. And there is nothing we can do about it.
‘I have many friends in Allahabad who ask me the same question about the photo. I have never brought them here. I know they will ask me the same question and I know that they won’t understand why we couldn’t do anything either to save her life or to punish the husband. Some of them think it is a question of family honour, which you can settle with a gun. But this is primitive feudal thinking, which brought us to this pass in the first place.
‘Perhaps you will understand what I mean. You will understand what I mean when I say that all of us are born with certain advantages and disadvantages, and then it’s up to you to make something of them. I didn’t lack much where I was born. You see this land, this house that my forefathers built. For you who have seen other places, big cities like Delhi, it may seem nothing, but for people here, these things mean wealth and achievement. You saw how people looked at us when we were travelling on the tonga. They knew who I was, who my father was. This is the kind of reputation my family has had.
‘When I was growing up, I took our power for granted. I went to school in a nearby village. The master used to take his class under a big pipal tree; we used to sit before him on the ground with our chalks and slates. He used to beat the other students with a beshram stick at the slightest provocation, but he was always sycophantic towards me, always trying to please me. The tehsildar brought boxes of sweets to the house on Diwali and Holi. The local MP and MLA came asking for money during elections and touched my father’s feet. The peasants in the field trembled at my father’s approach. My uncle kidnapped the daughters and sisters of his farm workers and raped them. He murdered two low-caste peasants who had dared to attack his friend, an upper-caste landlord. The police registered a case, the people in the murdered men’s village went to Lucknow to complain to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, but no one could do anything.
‘Times may change fast in the cities, but life in these parts stays more or less the same. Even today the position of my father is unchanged. The local MP and MLA still pay him tribute; ask him for donations and votes. I could have stayed here and inherited all this power. I know people in this region who have built upon their fathers’ position, who are now in politics, in crime, who are running big smuggler mafias. But for little accidents of fate, I too could have stayed here, lived that kind of life, picked up the pretty girls in the fields and raped them.
‘I think it was my cousins from the big town who first gave me a sense of where I was. They used to come during school summer holidays from Gorakhpur. They used to love doing all the things that bored me: swimming in the nearby canal on warm evenings, throwing stones at the mango and tamarind trees in the morning when it wasn’t very hot.
‘But they also had things I envied. They wore ready-made clothes and bought shoes from the Bata shop instead of having them stitched by the local mochi. All we had by way of entertainment was a radio, but they went to the cinema once a month and spoke intimately of heroes and heroines I knew only by name. I wanted to be like them. I think it was during those holidays when I began to think of the world outside and grow dissatisfied with the place I had grown up in.
‘What did I see when I looked around? I saw all this land and the workers on it, the servants, and my family’s authority that had been maintained for decades for no other reason than that no one had challenged it. I left this compound and what did I see? I saw those half-naked boys and those wretched huts we saw on our way in. I went inside those huts and they are crammed with children that no one knows what to do with. There is not much to eat, so they die fast, but more are born each week.
‘There is no one to tell their parents what to do. There is a family planning centre not far from here but it is closed for much of the month. The man in charge of the centre collects his salary and pays a commission to his boss, and no one says anything. So the poor go on reproducing and suffer malnutrition and disease, and then if they manage to grow up, they suffer cruelty and injustice.
‘This is not what they taught me at school. This is what I learnt to see later. I saw that I went to school but my sister stayed at home and learnt to cook in that little kitchen we ate in. A pandit had taught her to read the Hindi alphabet and that was all she could do. She had girlfriends in a nearby village who knew no more than she did. She grew up a simple girl, with no knowledge of anything outside her home, and then one day her marriage was arranged into a family in Bombay who said that they were looking for exactly that: a simple girl from a village. My parents were flattered by their attention. They were high-caste people like us, rich, living in a big city, and respected within the community. My parents had no idea of the people they were marrying their daughter to. They had no idea because they had let themselves remain simple, they had trusted in obsolete things like God and society and morality. They barely knew what was going on in their own world.
‘I would have been like them if I hadn’t realized th
at this life of farming wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to grow up like my uncle. I saw how people my age could go and rape some low-caste woman in the fields and think nothing of it. I don’t know where the feeling came over me but suddenly I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to go to a city and study there.
‘As I say I don’t know where I got these ambitions. My father certainly didn’t understand them. He wanted me to do what he and his brother did. He wanted me to take over the running of the estate. He was getting too old. He wanted to retire and devote his life to religion. He couldn’t understand why I even wanted to finish my schooling. One day he saw the schoolmaster and asked him why he had put strange ideas in my head. The schoolmaster got so scared that he told my father that he would have been ready to confine me to the same class for a few years on his instructions and that would have killed my desires for further education. But when I insisted my father finally sent me to the nearest high school, which is in a kasba called Mehmoodganj. It wasn’t much of a school. The teachers rarely turned up, and then often dismissed the class because so few students had come. On examination days they helped the students cheat.
‘How can you learn anything in these conditions? I didn’t and I began to try to persuade my father to send me to Allahabad. I had heard so much about it from one of my cousins, about the grand buildings the British had created. I remember how impressed I was by the university when I went to get admission there. I saw that they were indeed palaces, with domes and towers.
‘But perhaps they were fit for only kings to live in; they weren’t for students. And not such students as you found in Allahabad: boys from poor families whose fathers were breaking the bank to give them higher education so that they can get a degree and be eligible for a job somewhere with the government. I went with such high expectations but it was the same story at the university: teachers not showing up for classes, the exams being delayed for months, sometimes years.
An End to Suffering Page 11
