The Missionary and the Libertine

by Ian Buruma

  Eliade is a mythomaniac who presents himself as a European rationalist. In some wonderful vignettes, Maitreyi takes her former lover to task for his pedantry. In a childish caprice, she writes a poem on a favorite tree, addressing it as a friend. Eliade called this “pantheism.” Maitreyi’s retort: “He could not believe that this was no ‘ism’ but just a soaring poetic fancy.”

  A simple walk with Maitreyi in the country elicits this reverie from Eliade:

  Relentlessly, I forced myself to keep awake, to resist the enchantment of the fable that surrounded us. The rational being inside me was floundering in the unreality and the sanctity of our presence at the edge of that silent lake.

  A prolonged fit of passion, in which he kisses her hands and they both shiver with desire, prompts the following flight of exultation:

  We had lived, confirmed, that miracle of human ascent into the supernatural through touch and sight. The experience lasted two hours and exhausted us.

  And when the deed is finally done:

  While I retained my lucidity, handling my experience of love with rationality, she gave herself up to it as though it had a divine origin, as though the first contact of her virgin body with that of a man were some supernatural event.

  This is not the language of a rationalist at all, but of a romantic to the core. Yet Eliade professes to be annoyed by his lover’s irrationality and mythomania. After he had left the Dasgupta house, he receives a letter from Maitreyi in which she tells him that she felt his presence when she kissed a bunch of flowers. She writes that she worships him. He is to her “like a god made of gold and precious stones”; he is her sun, her life! Eliade:

  That escape into mythology pained me; it was extremely strange to see myself increasingly idealized, transformed from man into god, from lover into sun.… I did not want her to disappear into unreality, to become an idea, a myth; I did not want to console myself with an eternal, celestial paradise.

  So both pride themselves on being rationalists. Eliade’s claim rests on his status as a European intellectual, and Maitreyi’s on her status as a bhadralok. Both accuse the other of mythomania, and both are deeply attracted to the irrational. On the one hand, Maitreyi, the Bengali intellectual, says it “was my habit to analyse everything.” On the other, she turns to spiritual melodrama when the memories of her early passion haunt her. She cannot understand why this “completely alien person” still exerts such a pull on her. Why does she have this irrepressible urge to see him again?

  Can he be the reason for it all, or is it some other power, from some other place who is moving me towards an unknown destiny? Can there be someone who is the source of all knowledge and all love, and the message is coming from that direction? My agnostic mind does not like to admit it, but the doubt is never eased.

  In a mood of acute anxiety about her future, Maitreyi even resorts to an astrologer. But, ever the rationalist, she is horrified at her own “degradation” in doing so.

  This tension between rationalism and a fascination for the irrational, evident in both Maitreyi and Eliade, is related to another preoccupation shared by the two former lovers: purity. When Eliade leaves the Anglo-Indian boardinghouse in Calcutta to start his Bengali life with the Dasguptas, he distances himself from Harold, his Eurasian roommate: “My new life seemed so pure, so sacred, that I dared not describe it to him.” When he first falls in love with Maitreyi, he asks her to recite a mantra given to her by Tagore “as a talisman against impurity.” Despite being upper-caste Hindus, the life of the bhadraloks was neither particularly “pure,” nor especially “sacred,” but Eliade typically contrasts Indian purity with Eurasian impurity.

  Maitreyi applies a similar conceit to the simple peasants she meets when she and her husband move to the countryside. She admires the rustic “music in their throats and poetry in their mind.” She contrasts their purity with the crude British planters. “Being a globetrotter,” she writes, “I have seen many nations and races, but in innocence and faithfulness that hill-tribe surpasses many.”

  India being India, the idea of purity is never far removed from the colour of people’s skins. This is sometimes transcended by attitudes molded by class and education. Maitreyi admires the dark-skinned hill-tribes and despises the white, or more accurately red, British planters. But at the same time she worships the beauty of Eliade’s skin, “white as alabaster.” She also wants to be white, she says: “Is it possible, do you think?” Eliade answers, “I don’t know, but I suspect not. Perhaps with powder …”

  One of the fine ironies in the two accounts of the Eliade/Maitreyi affair is that “blackness,” in a negative sense, is represented by the man who acts all the time as a faithful messenger between the lovers. Khokha is a poor relative living in the Dasgupta house. Eliade discovers him playing footsie under the table with Maitreyi: “I could not bear it. I saw that black, dirty hoof, darkened by the sun and from walking on tar, coming into contact with Maitreyi’s soft flesh …” And when Maitreyi, years later, finds out that Khokha had been a less than honest go-between, she writes, “I watched him intently. Perspiration was glistening on his crude face. In the dim light of the candle he appeared to me like some primitive animal in a cave.” So much for the noble savage.

  I suspect that Eliade’s interest in purity had something to do with his defence of “Romanianism,” which, in the Romania of the 1930s (and, indeed, still today), had sinister political overtones. Jews, for example, were not true “Romanians.” Eliade’s journalistic support of Romanian fascism in the 1930s has been exposed brilliantly by the Romanian writer Norman Manea. To be sure, India served as a great and enduring inspiration for Eliade’s intellectual life, but its rigid notions of social and ethnic hierarchy might also have appealed to his antiliberal tendencies.

  Eliade’s account of his love for Maitreyi was first published in 1933, so we have to turn to Maitreyi’s book for the extraordinary coda of the affair. Eliade’s novel ends with the sentence “I would like to look Maitreyi in the eyes …” But when they meet again, after forty-two years, in the library of the Divinity School in Chicago, he cannot bear to see her: he turns his back to Maitreyi. She asks him why he never answered her letters. He replies that their experience was “so—so sacred that I never thought I could touch it again. So I put you out of time and space.” True to form, he escapes into fantasy and myth. And she, as usual, is a mixture of cool reason and romance. Her trip is meant to put a full stop behind an unresolved episode in her life. At the same time, she still has hope of rekindling the old passion. She tries to be concrete, to face the truth, to look Eliade in the face, but she also wants to restore “the light of love” in his eyes.

  MAITREYI: Turn around, Mircea, I want to see you.

  ELIADE: How can I see you? Did Dante ever think he would see his Beatrice with eyes of flesh?

  She is angry. She resents being treated as a ghost. She stretches her arms towards him one more time: “My mind is lucid and steady. I will free him from his world of fantasy. We will see each other in this real world. ‘Awake, dearest, awake.’ ”

  At last he turns around, but still without raising his eyes to her. He quotes a phrase in Sanskrit about the immortality of the soul. She asks him to look at her, telling him she will take him back forty years. He lifts his face and stares at her blankly. It is too late. The light has gone from his eyes, and she lacks the power to restore it.

  1994

  V. S. NAIPAUL’S INDIA

  Near the end of V. S. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, there is an unforgettable piece of writing. It is a description of his visit to the village of the Dubes. It was from there that Naipaul’s grandfather left for Trinidad around the turn of the century, as an indentured laborer. Naipaul, “content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors,” visits his ancestral village with a feeling of dread.

  In fact the village is not as bad as he had expected. An old woman who had known Naipaul’s grandfather is produced. She tells him a famil
y story. Naipaul gives her some money. Then the wife of a man named Ramachandra wishes to see him. She bows before him, seizes his feet, “in all their Veldtschoen” (a wonderful Naipaulian detail, this), and weeps. She refuses to relax her grip on his Veldtschoen. Naipaul, horrified, asks his guide what he should do.

  The next day, in a nearby town where Naipaul is staying, Ramachandra himself turns up. Ramachandra is the present head of Naipaul’s grandfather’s branch of the Dubes. He is a physical and mental wreck: “His effort at a smile did not make his expression warmer. Spittle, white and viscous, gathered at the corners of his mouth.” He, too, clings to Naipaul, wanting to talk, to invite him to his hut, offer him food. Again, Naipaul is horrified, asks for help, tells him to go away, draws the curtains in his hotel room. He can hear Ramachandra scratching at the window.

  When they meet again, in the village, Ramachandra still refuses to let go. He speaks of his plan to start some litigation over a piece of land. Naipaul was sent by God. Naipaul must help him. Another man slips Naipaul a letter. Naipaul is followed around by a crowd of men and boys. It is all too much. Naipaul wants to escape. He gets in his jeep. A young boy, freshly bathed, asks for a lift to town. “No,” says Naipaul, “let the idler walk.” And “So it ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

  I wish to recall this passage at some length because it says a great deal about the writer: above all about his pride, and his horror at the lack of it in others. The clutch of the Veldtschoen, the inertia of poverty, the abjectness of Ramachandra: these are what make Naipaul take flight. He is an expert on humiliation, sensitive to every nuance of indignity—see his novel Guerrillas; see his analysis of Argentine machismo in The Return of Eva Perón; see everything he has written on India.

  But when Naipaul behaves badly, as he undoubtedly does in the village of the Dubes, it is without the blinkered contempt that Blimpish colonials display. Nor is he like Kipling, whose fear of the tar brush was perhaps one reason for his desire to keep the people at the club amused with cutting descriptions of the natives. This is, however, precisely the way many so-called Third World intellectuals see Naipaul: as a dark man mimicking the prejudices of the white imperialists. This view is not only superficial, it is wrong. Naipaul’s rage is not the result of being unable to feel the native’s plight; on the contrary, he is angry because he feels it so keenly.

  Pride and rage: they go together, and they are at the heart of Naipaul’s work, of India: A Million Mutinies Now no less than of his earlier, younger, more ill-tempered books. Pride is what enables him to empathize with people whose policies or religious views, or social customs, may be alien to him—even abhorrent. Naipaul, the fastidous aesthete and connoisseur of good wines and Elizabethan sonnets, is far removed from the rednecks he described in A Turn in the South, yet he senses in them a pride, an aesthetic, a feeling of independence. Rednecks may also be racists, but that, in this instance, is beside the point.

  Nor is there reason to believe that Naipaul has any sympathy with militant Sikhs, Hindu nationalists, or Bengali Maoists; yet he describes them with a kind of tenderness, and a rare understanding, which is neither patronizing nor sentimental. This is because, as he wrote in the introduction to his masterly little book Finding the Centre, “The people I found, the people I was attracted to, were not unlike myself. They too were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre; and my discovery of these people is as much part of the story as the unfolding of the West African background.” In this case he was writing about people on the Ivory Coast.

  This empathy with people struggling with their fate, trying to find their center—people who, as Naipaul has put it, reject rejection, who try to escape, however naively, clumsily or even violently, from the darkness and poverty of their past—the empathy with such people is what explains Naipaul’s relative optimism about India.

  Optimism might strike people who read about India in the newspapers as perverse. Around the time of publication of India: A Million Mutinies Now, in 1990, I read a description in a London paper of Hindu holy men storming a mosque at a time of day deemed auspicious by astrologers for destroying the Muslim shrine. They believed that the Hindu god Rama was born on the site, and were prepared to die for the sake of reinstating their idol there. The ensuing riots caused hundreds of deaths. The holy men were supported by the party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, that might one day form the government of India. One of its leaders had been touring through northern India in a Rama chariot, fanning Hindu hatred. One of his colleagues threatened to destroy 3,000 other mosques occupying Hindu sites.

  This is all a far cry from the civilized secularism and Old Harrovian rectitude of Jawaharlal Nehru. And yet Naipaul’s optimism is not ill-considered. For it is based on a deep truth about India: even thuggish opportunists, however much they might end up undermining it, are still part of a remarkably resilient political process, which is Indian democracy. In describing a Sikh militant whose head is in some ways still buried in the darkness of myths and holy wars, Naipaul is struck by how much he takes for granted—the constitution, the civil service, elections. Naipaul is right to say that in India “power came from the people. The people were poor; but the power they gave was intoxicating. As high as a man could be taken up, so low, when he lost power, he could be cast down.” The rascals, in India, can still be voted out, which is more than you can say of many other countries in Asia.

  Naipaul likes to say that he has no views. As he put it to Andrew Robinson in the Literary Review, “My ideas are just responses to human situations.” Here, I think, he is being a little coy. Of course he has views. They are liberal views in the classical sense of the word. Naipaul’s view of what he calls universal civilization is one where people have escaped from the world of myths and ritual and instinct and worship of ancestors and gods. Universal civilization “implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.”

  Many of the people Naipaul describes in his books are awakening to this idea—which does not prevent their responses from often being muddled. Again and again Naipaul applies his view to India:

  To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.

  The million mutinies of Naipaul’s title are to be seen as signs of life, of India kicking itself out of its old inertia, the inertia of poverty, which was perpetuated in a vicious circle of karma, gods and holiness. Here, then, is the pride of the low-caste Dravidian politician dedicating his life to the struggle against Brahmin supremacy:

  In this small dark man were locked up generations of grief and rage. He was the first in his line to have felt the affront; and, from what he had said, he was still the only one in his family to have taken up the cause. His passion was very great; it had to be respected.

  And here, in one of the best passages in the book, is Gurtej Singh, the young Sikh militant, mentioned above, who resigned from the Indian civil service to fight for the cause of “my people.” Gurtej was highly educated, had awakened, as Naipaul would say, and yet he had turned back to the gods, the myths and the holy men. Just as pride comes with rage, confusion comes with awakening:

  Like Papu the Jain stockbroker in Bombay, who lived on the edge of the great slum of Dharavi and was tormented by the idea of social upheaval, Gurtej had a vision of chaos about to come. Papu had turned to good works, in the penitential Jain fashion. Gurtej had turned to millenarian politics. It had happen
ed with other religions when they turned fundamentalist; it threatened to bring the chaos Gurtej feared.

  Democracy is always a messy process. In India it is bound to be messier than anywhere else. And as politicians, pushed up by the poor and the no longer quite so poor, do their best to remove the Old Harrovian legacy of Nehru, many people in India fear this mess. Naipaul fears it too. He is an orderly man. But he does not make a fetish of order. Disorder is an inescapable consequence of India’s awakening. It is why he can respect the passion of men whom most Western liberals would regard with, shall I say, Blimpish disdain: the religious radicals, the Indian rednecks, so to speak. This may be another reason why so many “progressive” Third World intellectuals see Naipaul as a reactionary figure; for it is they, the admirers of Mao and Kim Il Sung, who make a fetish of order, and it is Naipaul who has the deeper understanding of the social forces that progressives claim to despise—perhaps because they are themselves still in the grip of those forces.

  The fetish of order is something many progressives, in East and West (or, if you prefer, North and South), have in common with many conservatives. Mao was much admired by European leaders such as Edward Heath and Georges Pompidou. Like so many intellectual Sinophiles—Henry Kissinger is another—they were impressed by the discipline Mao imposed, and were ready to defend the order reimposed on Tiananmen Square (even if they didn’t like the methods). Many saw a unified society of busy bees, all expressing great confidence in their leaders, all working in serried ranks toward a glorious collective future. Some even saw the regimentation of China as a mark of superior civilization, so unlike our own disorderly world. Left-wing Indian intellectuals admired China so much that they developed an inferiority complex about messy, chaotic India. Nehru himself was deeply exercised about the question of why the Chinese achieved such remarkable unity, whereas India was forever on the brink of collapse and disunity. It was always India that had to take a leaf from China’s book.