MARCH 2002: GOD IN GUJARAT
The defining image of the week is of a small child’s burned and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat. The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies, the massacre of innocents in Nellie, Assam, in the 1980s, and of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them, or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood. I say “our” because I write as an Indian man born and bred, who loves India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India’s strengths, then India’s sins must be mine as well.
Do I sound angry? Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in over a decade, many people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed, or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men’s unwillingness to defend the citizens of India without regard to religion, by saying that these men have feelings too, and are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general.
Meanwhile, India’s political masters have been tut-tutting and offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control. (It has escaped nobody’s notice that the ruling BJP—the Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian People’s Party—and the Hindu extremists of the VHP—the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council—are sister organizations, offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some international commentators, like Britain’s Independent newspaper, urge us to “beware excess pessimism.” The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we’re used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That’s how life is, folks. Most of the time, India is the world’s largest secular democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy-religious steam, we mustn’t let that distort the picture.
Of course there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992, when a VHP mob demolished a four-hundred-year-old Muslim mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some Muslims were ready to give it to them. The murderous attack on the trainload of VHP activists at Godhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the trainload during the Partition riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists’ hands.
The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and insufficient radicalism of the BJP government. Prime Minister Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a coalition government, and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP’s more extreme Hindu-nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together. But it isn’t working anymore. In state elections across the country, the BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP firebrands. Why put up with the government’s betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn’t even result in electoral success?
The electoral failure of the BJP (used by the let’s-not-get-carried-away gang to show that India is turning away from communalist politics) is thus, in all probability, the spark that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque—that’s where the Godhra dead were coming from—and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically, tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee has insisted that the notoriously slow Indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait.
The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to the Indian president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing “too little too late,” and pins the blame firmly on the “motivated, well-planned out and provocative actions” of the Hindu nationalists. However, another writer, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India’s Muslims en masse and praised the nationalist movement. The murderers of Godhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in her letter demands “stern legal action” against them. But the VHP and its other related organization, the equally sinister RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, or Association of National Volunteers, from which both the BJP and the VHP take inspiration), are determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting them, V. S. Naipaul makes himself a fellow-traveler of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award.
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there’s something beneath it, something we don’t want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect.” What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we’ve done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India, happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
PART IV
Step Across
This Line
The Tanner Lectures
on Human Values,
Yale, 2002
Part One
The first frontier was the water’s edge, and there was a first moment, because how could there not have been such a moment, when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary, and found that it could breathe. Before that first creature drew that first breath there would have been other moments when other creatures made the same attempt and fell fainting back into the waves, or else suffocated, flopping fishily from side to side, on the same seashore and another, and another. There were perhaps millions of these unrecorded retreats, these anonymous deaths, before the first successful step across the waterline. As we imagine the scene of that triumphant crossing—our volcanic young planet, the smoky, sulfurous air, the hot sea, the red glow in the sky, the exhausted entity gasping on the unfamiliar, inhospitable shore—we can’t help wondering about those proto-creatures. What motivated them? Why did the sea so thoroughly lose its appeal that they risked everything to migrate from the old into the new? What urge was born in them that overpowered even the survival instinct? How did they intuit that air could be breathed—and how, living underwater as they did, could they begin to grow the lungs that allowed them to breathe it?
But our extremely pre-human ancestors did not have “motives” in the sense that we understand the term, the scientist in the room protests. The sea neither appealed to them, nor did it disappoint. They had no intuitions, but were driven by the imperatives hidden in their uncracked genetic codes. There was no daring here, no heroism, no adventurous, transgressive spirit. These beach-crawlers did not travel from water to air because they were curious, or in search of jobs. They neither chose nor willed their deeds. Random mutation and natural selection were their mighty, impersonal driving forces. They were just fish who by chance learned how to crawl.
But so, in a way, are we. Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontier between the elements. As we emerge from amniotic fluid, from the liquid universe of the womb, we, too, discover that we can breathe; we, too, leave behind a kind of waterworld to become denizens of earth and air. Unsurprisingly, then, imagination defies science and sees that first, ancient, successful half-and-halfer as our
spiritual ancestor, ascribing to that strange metamorph the will to change its world. In its victorious transition we recognize and celebrate the prototype of our own literal, moral, and metaphorical frontier crossings, applauding the same drive that made Columbus’s ships head for the edge of the world, or the pioneers take to their covered wagons. The image of Armstrong taking his first moonwalk echoes the first movements of life on earth. In our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are storytelling animals, too. There is a story about a mermaid, a half-and-half creature, who gave up her fishy half for the love of a man. Was that it, then, we allow ourselves to wonder. Was that the primal urge? Did we come questing out of the waters for love?
Once upon a time the birds held a conference. The great bird-god, the Simurgh, had sent a messenger, a hoopoe, to summon them to his legendary home far away atop the circular mountain of Qâf, which girdled the earth. The birds weren’t particularly keen on the idea of this dangerous-sounding quest. They tried to make excuses—a previous engagement, urgent business elsewhere. Just thirty birds embarked on the pilgrimage. Leaving home, crossing the frontier of their land, stepping across that line, was in this story a religious act, their adventure a divine requirement rather than a response to an ornithological need. Love drove these birds as it drove the mermaid, but it was the love of God. On the road there were obstacles to overcome, dreadful mountains, fearsome chasms, allegories and challenges. In all quests the voyager is confronted by terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a dragon there. So far and no farther, the guardian commands. But the voyager must refuse the other’s definition of the boundary, must transgress against the limits of what fear prescribes. He steps across that line. The defeat of the ogre is an opening in the self, an increase in what it is possible for the voyager to be.
So it was with the thirty birds. At the end of the story, after all their vicissitudes and overcomings, they reached the summit of the mountain of Qâf, and discovered that they were alone. The Simurgh wasn’t there. After all they had endured, this was a displeasing discovery. They made their feelings known to the hoopoe who had started the whole thing off, whereupon the hoopoe explained to them the punning etymology that revealed their journey’s secret meaning. The name of the god broke down into two parts: “si,” meaning “thirty,” and “murgh,” which is to say “birds.” By crossing those frontiers, conquering those terrors and reaching their goal, they themselves were now what they were looking for. They had become the god they sought.
Once upon a time—“a long time ago,” perhaps, “in a galaxy far, far away”—there was an advanced civilization, free, liberal, individualistic, on a planet whose ice caps began to grow. All the civilization in the world could not halt the march of the ice. The citizens of that ideal state built a mighty wall, which would resist the glaciers for a time but not forever. The time came when the ice, uncaring, implacable, stepped across their lines and crushed them. Their last act was to choose a group of men and women to travel across the ice sheet to the far side of the planet, to bring news of their civilization’s death, and to preserve, in some small way, the meaning of what that civilization had been: to be its representatives. On their difficult journey across the ice cap, the group learned that, in order to survive, they would need to change. Their several individualisms had to be merged into a collectivity, and it was this collective entity—the Representative—that made it to the far side of the planet. What it represented, however, was not what it had set out to represent. The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross.
The first of these stories is medieval: the “Conference of the Birds” by the Sufi Muslim poet Fariduddin Attar. The second is an account of Doris Lessing’s science-fiction novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, itself inspired by the doomed journey toward the South Pole of Scott of the Antarctic and his companions—but also by Lessing’s own long-standing interest in Sufi mysticism. The idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpassing the limits of our own natures, is central to all the stories of the quest. The Grail is a chimera. The quest for the Grail is the Grail. Or, as C. P. Cavafy suggests in his poem “Ithaka,” the point of an Odyssey is the Odyssey:
Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka
You must pray that the way be long,
Full of adventures and experiences.
. . .
Be quite old when you anchor at the island,
Rich with all you have gained on the way,
Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.
Ithaka has given you your lovely journey.
Without Ithaka you would not have set out.
Ithaka has no more to give you now.
Poor though you find it, Ithaka has not cheated you.
Wise as you have become, with all your experience,
You will have understood the meaning of an Ithaka. *30
The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. The wizard Merlin is responsible for the education of a boy called Arthur, who will one day draw a sword from a stone and become king of England. (The wizard, who is living backward through time, knows this, although the boy does not.) One day Merlin changes the boy into a bird, and as they fly over the countryside he asks Arthur what he sees. Arthur notices the usual things, but Merlin is talking about a thing that can’t be seen, asking Arthur to see an absence: From the air, there are no frontiers. *31 Later, when Arthur has possessed Excalibur and his kingdom, he will learn that wizards are not always wise, and the view from the air isn’t much use on earth. He will fight his share of frontier wars, and he will also find that there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.
When the king’s best friend, the king’s champion, falls in love with the king’s wife, when Lancelot of the Lake trespasses on the territory of the king’s happiness, a line has been crossed that will destroy the world. In fact the collection of tales known as the Matter of Britain have, at their heart, not one but two illicit, transgressive loves: that of Lancelot for Guinevere, and its occult mirror-image, the incestuous love of Arthur and Morgan le Fay. Against the power of these line-crossing lovers, the Round Table cannot stand. The quest for the Grail cannot cleanse the world. Not even Excalibur can prevent the return of darkness. And in the end the sword must be returned to water, and vanish beneath the waves. But wounded Arthur on his way to Avalon is crossing yet another line. He’s being transformed, becoming one of the great sleepers who will return when the right moment comes. Barbarossa in his cave, Finn MacCool in the Irish hills, the Australian wandjina or ancestors in their subterranean resting places, and Arthur in Avalon: these are our once and future kings, and the final frontier they are fated to cross is not space but time.
To cross a frontier is to be transformed. Alice at the gates of Wonderland, the key to that miniature world in her grasp, cannot pass through the tiny door beyond which she can glimpse marvelous things until she has altered herself to fit into her new world. But the successful frontierswoman is also, inevitably, in the business of surpassing. She changes the rules of her newfound land: Alice in Wonderland, shape-shifting Alice, terrifies the locals by growing too big to be housed. She argues with Mad Hatters and talks back to Caterpillars and, in the end, loses her fear of an execution-hungry Queen when she, so to speak, grows up. You’re nothing but a house of cards—Alice the migrant at last sees through the charade of power, is no longer impressed, calls Wonderland’s bluff, and by unmaking it finds herself again. She wakes up.
The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are. The frontier is the physical proof of the human race’s divided self, the proof that Merlin’s utopian sky
-vision is a lie. Here is the truth: this line, at which we must stand until we are allowed to walk across and give our papers to be examined by an officer who is entitled to ask us more or less anything. At the frontier our liberty is stripped away—we hope temporarily—and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in, where only the right things and people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes. We stand at what Graham Greene thought of as the dangerous edge of things. This is where we must present ourselves as simple, as obvious: I am coming home. I am on a business trip. I am visiting my girlfriend. In each case, what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I’m not anything you need to bother about, really I’m not: not the fellow who voted against the government, not the woman who is looking forward to smoking a little dope with her friends tonight, not the person you fear, whose shoe may be about to explode. I am one-dimensional. Truly. I am simple. Let me pass.
Across the frontier the world’s secret truths move unhindered every day. Inspectors doze or pocket dirty money, and the world’s narcotics and armaments, its dangerous ideas, all the contrabandits of the age, the wanted ones, those who do have something to declare but do not declare it, slip by; while we, who have nothing much to declare, dress ourselves in nervous declarations of simplicity, openness, loyalty. The declarations of the innocent fill the air, while the others, who are not innocent, pass through the crowded, imperfect borders, or make their crossings where frontiers are hard to police, along deep ravines, down smugglers’ trails, across undefended wastelands, waging their undeclared war. The wake-up call of the frontier is also a call to arms.
Step Across This Line Page 41
