‘Criminals roamed the campus with guns and homemade bombs. Some of these were boys who came from my own district. I tried to do what I could. I read on my own. I took private classes from the same teachers who did not show up for classes at the university. I was very privileged. You have seen my house. How big it is. But these privileges didn’t help. What can you do if you haven’t got a decent basic education? I found myself working very hard, but I felt unmotivated. I asked myself: What was I working so hard for? The British had created universities like Allahabad so that they could get educated Indians to help them exploit this country. And now people went there so that they could get a job with the government, become part of the elite class, and plunder the country just as the British used to. I didn’t want to work for the government. I wasn’t interested in making money. I hoped I could do something else.
‘I had also started reading other books. These weren’t things I had ever found in Gorakhpur, where the bookshops had cloth editions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Nothing I had read had told me about my own world. In Allahabad, I discovered Osho Rajneesh, I read Swami Vivekananda. These philosophers taught me to think, to see things in a new way. I felt on my way to some kind of personal liberation.
‘I began to see how much of what I had grown up with and come to accept as common sense was ignorant prejudice. For instance, our society had arranged things so that you could not satisfy your sexual urge outside marriage. The sexual repression in our society kills so many sensitive and intelligent people; that is also why you have so much rape and violence against women. I think from Osho I gained at least the knowledge that sex is a natural thing and nothing to be ashamed of.
‘Swami Vivekananda taught me to see that our society has grown corrupt and feeble, how it has lost its manhood. Of course, this wasn’t just something I got out of books. You can see it in the world around you. The peasants breed mindlessly, live in poverty and disease, and then die as ignorant and trampled-upon as ever. The shopkeeper adulterates the food and oil he sells. The policeman wants a bribe before he can register your report, and will implicate you falsely for the sake of money. The student is not interested in education; he only wants a degree. The teacher will supply it to him at a price. And he will become a government official. What will he do then? Go to the civil hospital. Go to the district collector’s office. The men working there collect their salaries, like the family planning man, and they extort money from the poor people who come to them for help. They have lost all idea of what they are supposed to do.
‘It is people like Gautama Buddha and Gandhi who have misled us. They have taught us to be passive and resigned. They have told us of the virtuous life; they have told us to deny ourselves in order to be content. But they haven’t told us how to live in the real world – the world that grows bigger and bigger and more complex all the time. This is why Vivekananda is important. He could see why the old habits of fatalism and resignation – the habits of village people – wouldn’t work any more. He saw that they had made us the slaves of the Muslims and then the British, why these people coming from outside could rule over India for so long. He was totally unsentimental, and he was brutally frank. He told us that we were sunk in tamas, darkness. There was no point in trumpeting our spiritual success, our philosophical wisdom. All that was in the past. It was meant for primitive people. This was now the age of big nations. India was one such nation but it was way behind Europe and America. The West had technology, it had mastered nature, it had exploded nuclear bombs, it had sent people to the moon. When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of western civilization, he made a joke. He said that western civilization would be a good idea. But Vivekananda knew that the West had much to teach us. The first lesson was that we have to be materialists first. We have to learn to love wealth and comfort; we have to grow strong, know how to take pleasure in things, and recognize that there is no virtue in poverty and weakness. We have to know real manhood first. Spirituality comes later, or not at all. Perhaps we don’t need it.
‘I wish I had known this before. I could have avoided much confusion and pain. I could have seen the hollowness of the life and the values I had known. Perhaps, it is not too late to make something of myself. I fear sometimes that I will have to make my peace with what I had. But if I can’t go forward then I can’t go back either. I can’t unlearn anything I have learnt. And now with these different ideas I have, the new vision of things, I find it very hard to come back home and find the same old complacency. The fields are still ours, the peasants still work on them, the servants haven’t left, the house still stands. But people don’t even know where they are in the larger scheme of things. They have no future. They need to change but don’t know how. The world has moved on. People have gone to the moon, they are conquering space and time, they are living in the nuclear age. We are stuck in our old ways. You saw my father and mother. You must have wondered about my silence before my parents. But I find it too hard to say anything to them, and then I feel ashamed of the impatience and contempt they provoke inside me. They have spent the last five years mourning my sister, and will mourn her until the day they die. But she is not going to come back to life, and for me the worst thing is that they don’t, they can’t, even see what killed her. They have no idea of the world outside their little fiefdom here. In Allahabad, I took a course on western philosophy and the first thing I learned was about Plato’s cave. I thought then that my parents were like the people in Plato’s cave, who watch shadows and images on the walls and imagine that there is a clear sky and sun outside the cave and the shadows they see are reflections of the realm of eternally true laws and ideas. They think that there are rules out there, some kind of divine morality, governing life and society. But they are mistaken. And perhaps this is what I discovered for myself. There is no clear sky and sun out there, no great ideals or values to appeal to. You have to live in the dark cave and there are no rules there except those that strong men make for themselves and enforce upon others.’
It was in this mood Vinod spoke again about Gandhi and the Buddha: as luxuries India could not afford. It was why, he said, he had not been interested in visiting Lumbini. He said that he had been once to Kushinagara, the town where the Buddha is said to have died. He had seen a huge brick mound over the supposed site of his death. There were people worshipping there – people from South-east Asia and western countries, but not, as far as he could see, from India. He thought it fitting that the affluent countries should rediscover the men whose ideas of self-denial and passivity were no longer relevant in India and make them their own.
I listened, but didn’t feel I had much to add. What I knew of Gandhi and the Buddha resonated as little with me as with Vinod. It was hard to see, while living in Allahabad, much virtue in poverty and weakness. Perhaps, Vivekananda’s ideas could better illuminate our peculiar circumstances and show a way out of them. But I didn’t know enough about him to speak confidently.
We left the next morning for Allahabad. I had expected Vinod to stay a little longer. But he was in a hurry to leave. He was already dressed and packed and had ordered the tonga when he woke me up. I came out of my room to see him watching his mother praying before the tulsi plant in the sun-drenched courtyard. He said nothing to her, only touched her feet as she pulled the edge of her sari back from her head, and then before she could even ask where he was going, he turned his back upon her and walked out of the courtyard.
I followed him after a swift embarrassed namaste in his mother’s direction. I passed his father sitting where I had first seen him the previous evening, in the room that was still dark and gloomy, although the light outside was dazzling. He came out, walking slowly with his stick, and then as the tonga lurched off he stood there for what seemed like a long time, a small diminishing figure against the white house.
The autumn sun was warm. The bare-bodied men in the stripped-down rice fields looked exposed; the pipal trees with their ample spread and shade stood even more self-assuredly in th
e vast flatness. It was the same landscape we had passed through before. But the twilight and the rain of the previous evening had given it a gentle aspect. In the bold exposing sunshine it was touched by what Vinod had told me. Poverty and disease and neglect seemed to mark the low huts with the bare front yards where low-caste peasant women in colourful saris sat slapping together cowdung patties, and children who had been playing with paper boats the previous day looked underfed and malnourished with their rust-coloured hair and protruding, hard bellies.
Vinod sat next to me on the tonga and then the bus. But he didn’t speak much during the rest of the journey back to Allahabad. We met again several times. I went to his flat and found myself staring at the photo of his sister. We talked about Vivekananda; he gave me pamphlets and booklets to read on the subject of India’s regeneration. But we never talked about that evening.
At the end of three years, I left Allahabad and moved to Delhi. I heard intermittently about Vinod. He had become a lawyer; he had married; he had become a social worker; he had become very devout. It didn’t surprise me much when I heard that he had become a politician and joined the Hindu nationalists who were then rising to power on a wave of anti-Muslim violence all across North India and would soon form the federal government in New Delhi.
It was many more years later that I began to see differently the thoughts he had expressed that evening, and I realized that the certainties he longed for could have been supplied to him only by a radical political ideology.
I realized, too, that no one had ever spoken more directly to me of my own situation than he had that evening on the roof of his house. There were the obvious similarities in our circumstances: I had no difficulty in recognizing the picture of the colonial-age university, the sense of futility and doom the students lived with. But I had also heard for the first time a description of my own young life – of growing up bewildered and ignorant and frightened.
My own ancestral past was much like Vinod’s, if less constricted and exposed earlier to change. My father, who was born in the mid-1930s in a small village close to India’s north-western border with Nepal, belonged to a family of Brahmins. They had worked as priests at some point in the past, but for at least a century they had been farmers, small landowners, relatively rich but unambitious. They had invested their money in property and jewellery, patronized a temple or two. They were otherwise fully absorbed by the peculiarly demanding routine of agricultural labour. At best, they probably had what Nietzsche once called the ‘cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to be responsible for, who does not value anything in the past and future higher than the present’.
India was then under colonial rule but it wasn’t easy to see that in my father’s village. The institutions of British colonialism – the courthouse, the tax collector’s office and the police station – were in the nearest town, which was several hours away by bullock cart on an unpaved road. My father, who never saw a British person and rarely travelled outside his village in his early childhood, later had to work hard to imagine a big country called India, which had been enslaved by white people from the West, and which some great Indian nationalists had then liberated.
By the time he knew about India, it was free of colonial rule, but his family had grown poor. And the unsentimental western ways of organizing human society that Vinod admired had begun to shape his future.
After replacing their British masters, and declaring themselves democratic, socialist and secular, some Indians in remote New Delhi had gone after large landowners. Like the French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, whose example most postcolonials consciously followed, they proposed to sweep away all signs of what they called feudalism. As in much of Europe, changes in ownership of land were to begin the process of modernizing India. Land, individually and efficiently farmed, was to produce the capital for industrialization; some part of the rural population had to be weaned away to the cities to work in the factories and offices of the urban world.
And so one day an official from the nearby town came to my father’s village with a ball of string and the fresh stationery of independent India, with which he measured and recorded my father’s family fields, and then parcelled it out among several peasants.
My father was forced to leave his impoverished home and to begin his life on an altogether new basis in the city of Lucknow, where none of the advantages his family had enjoyed were of much value. He found that the bonds of caste and community could no longer be the source of identity and security; rather, they were the badges of backwardness.
Millions of human beings had known this experience: the displacement from their native habitats, the arrival in large anonymous places and the exposure to new kinds of uncertainty, freedom and suffering. It was what the Buddha had addressed, and what Vinod had also spoken of. But each person still had to bear in solitude the knowledge that the old props of caste and community were gone and that the awareness of being an individual brought both freedom and pain.
The simple fact of poverty probably blunted some of my father’s more existential anxieties, and both limited and clarified his choices. He had to educate himself in western-style institutions – liberal arts universities, or medical and engineering colleges – where thousands of young men like himself acquired degrees and prepared themselves for the few jobs available in newly independent India. Failure meant a return to the fresh deprivations of village life. If he succeeded, then there would be things he could acquire and enjoy – electric fans, running water, even the bungalows, servants and motorcars the British had previously enjoyed.
The new world came as a shock to him. Everything was regulated: from the arrival of the street cleaners in the morning to the big noisy railway station from which steam-engined trains travelled over rivers, lakes and canyons, across vast empty lands, and many small cities and settlements, to the unimaginably large bureaucratic and financial capitals of Bombay and Delhi.
All this had happened over the previous century, while my father’s ancestors were tilling their land and hoping for plentiful monsoon rains. And the change wasn’t random. There seemed to have been a will and a purpose behind it.
Men from distant Europe, such as those I first read about in Mashobra, had long moved away from the passivity and fatalism our ancestors still lived with. They had, in Marx’s words, ‘been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about’. They did not take the world as they found it. Rather, they studied it rationally, and proposed to change it, in accordance with the laws of science that they had developed through close observation and analysis of the empirical world.
Marx had seen these men – the European bourgeoisie – as temporary, soon to be overthrown by the working classes. But he couldn’t stop himself from celebrating their achievement in almost lyrical prose:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all previous generations put together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?7
Marx thought that this class of Europeans had ‘accomplished wonders that far surpass Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals’ it had ‘conducted expeditions that put all former migrations of nations and crusades in the shade’.
Young British men, who laid gigantic railway networks and dug canals across the world, had brought the same energy to India. They had brought, along with their high sense of self and economic calculation, the precise ways of science: the fixing of that elusive thing called ‘reality’ by the weighing and measuring of experience and the drawing of universally verifiable results. They had not only rediscovered India’s past and catalogued it exhaustively, th
ey had classified India’s population by religion and ethnicity, created new political identities of Hindus and Muslims, delineated India’s most inaccessible borders and linked India’s economy into the system of international trade and industrial production.
Confident that their conquests would make the world a better place, the busy men of Europe had also given their actions a high moral meaning. In the British books my father read, he was told that the British had brought the best of modernity – technology, secularism, the rule of law, civil society – to India, which had been a barbarous place ruled by tyrannical Muslims until the arrival of the Europeans. The Indian books he read denounced the British for exploiting India. But they conceded that, despite the oppression and violence, the British had inadvertently exposed many Indians to the benefits of the modern world, which the independent nation state of India was bound to enter much faster.
What was this modern world? How did one get into it? What were its benefits?
My father was too much under its spell to know how it worked. But both the British, and the Indians who replaced them, seemed to know what was needed. The guidelines had already been set by the political, economic and scientific revolutions of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a country dependent upon agriculture was backward and feudal; it had to industrialize its economy, embrace science and technology, organize itself along rational lines, and reduce the power of religion and other superstitions.
But as the English and then the Americans and the French seemed to have proved, a country couldn’t do any of this if it didn’t reconstitute itself as a nation state with a cohesive national identity. It seemed clear from their example that only a relatively homogeneous nation state was capable of defending itself and reconstituting disparate human beings into citizens of a productive and efficient society.
An End to Suffering Page 12
