The Twice-Born Read online

  The tempo quickened. Sudden eruptions of red appeared throughout the temple. We were all covered in powder and silver mica. It was part carnival, part riot. Then I saw something that captured the breakdown of boundaries that I had sensed was imminent earlier: a policeman who, moments before, had been patrolling the precincts of the temple, yelling orders into a handheld microphone, was swept up in the ecstasy. His olive-green uniform was covered in red; his eyes were rheumy from bhang; and using that same government-issue microphone into which he had been barking orders a moment before, he now bellowed a primal invocation to Shiva: “Hara hara bom bom, hara hara Mahadev.”

  In the background, past a lattice of barbed wire, was the white mosque, the heavily defended symbol of a fragile historical peace.

  THE LEGACY OF BRITISH RULE in India was one fault line, the legacy of Islamic rule another. The night after the ceremony at the temple, Mapu told me a story that gave a partial view of how India had dealt—or perhaps not dealt—with the physical remains of a history of invasion.

  I had hardly seen Mapu until then. I had arrived and gone straight to the temple for the ceremony, and then Mapu was busy tending to his many friendships in the city. We talked at last at some length over dinner at the Ganges View Hotel. I told Mapu how strange it had been to see the mosque, adjacent to one temple and standing on the ruins of another, protected by Hindus. It was then that Mapu told me the story of Marshal Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator, in Benares:

  “He was greeted by the Kashi Naresh”—the king of Benares. “The two men took a river tour of the city. Drifting up the Ganges, the Kashi Naresh pointed to the site of a major Hindu temple. Tito was surprised to see that there was no temple there at all, but a large red mosque. And he questioned the Kashi Naresh about this.”

  Mapu paused, his eyes glittering. Here were two men who came from places with very similar histories—several centuries of Muslim rule over a non-Muslim population. The Balkan approach to the unwanted reminders of that past had been different from India’s. When I traveled through the region in 2005, I remember people telling me that Sofia once had sixty-nine mosques, of which only one still stood. This historical attitude was summed up in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in which a Macedonian wishes to remake Macedonia as it had been five hundred years before. Whenever he saw a ruined church or a castle that belonged to the Serbs and was destroyed by the Turks, “he would take Turks and Moslem Albanians away from where they lived until he had enough labour to rebuild them, and then he made them work under armed guards. And when people said, ‘But you must not do that,’ he answered, ‘But why not? They knocked them down, didn’t they?’”

  “So, what did the Kashi Naresh say to Tito?” I pressed Mapu.

  “He said”—Mapu suppressed a smile—“that every day the shadow of the mosque’s minaret comes and falls at the feet of Lord Ram!”

  Now it was Tito’s turn to smile. “You’re a very tolerant people.”

  “But was he so tolerant, this old king of Benares?” I asked Mapu.

  “No!” Mapu cried. “He was an old bigot!”

  Yet the story stood as an example of how singular India’s approach to its past of invasion and conquest had been. This was the sophistication of Nehru’s palimpsest country. Save for the demolition of a sixteenth-century Mughal mosque in 1992, which had marked the beginning of the rise of Hindu nationalism, India’s approach to its varied and difficult history had been synthesis and assimilation. It had rarely sought erasure.

  Mapu told the story on the eve of the rise of another kind of leader in India. While we were in Benares, news had broken, spreading through the clogged streets of the temple town, that Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had chosen Benares as one of his two constituencies for the general election two months away. Modi was not from Benares, or even Uttar Pradesh, and the significance of his choosing the eternal city of the Hindus as his parliamentary seat was not lost on anyone. He was repurposing its symbolic power to fit his politics of revival.

  I HAD FIRST HEARD MODI speak one September morning in Delhi, six months before. It was a dazzling day of crystal heat—the kind that follows the rains in India. An editor friend and I had come far too early to a dengue-infested wasteland in west Delhi called Japanese Park. The press enclosure held mainly cub reporters and Hindi-language journalists. There were no senior commentators, no one from the foreign press.

  The mood at first was lackluster, the crowd small. The prodigious heat, the greasy packaged breakfasts, the tiresome looping slogans made my friend and me restless. We were half considering leaving when the strangest thing occurred: the sky darkened; a cool wind began to blow; the temperature dropped by many perceptible degrees. A poster of Modi, tied to the steel frame of the tent, came free and began to flap in the wind. The effect was magical. It was as if Modi, arm raised, were waving at us. The crowd began to cheer. Photographers in the press enclosure captured this small miracle, not merely because it was wondrous to see the apparition of the leader waving at us, but because the change in weather corresponded exactly to Modi’s arrival on the dais.

  I stood up on my chair and looked behind me. The crowd had grown into a throng. They had been arriving all the time, quietly filing into the open tent from all sides. Now, as far as the eye could see, down the length of the vast tent and pouring out of it in every direction, I saw great multitudes of restless young men. These people were a world away from the old base of the Congress Party. Those had been the faces of a rural class, infinitely patient, weather-beaten and lined, eyes yellow from undernourishment. These were men of jeans and sneakers and fashionable haircuts—“spice cuts,” as I was later to learn they were called. They were slightly built, the bones small and prominent, their thin wrists bandaged in red religious threads. The wiriness of their bodies seemed to intensify the seething male energy they projected.

  They were spread across a wide income bracket. Some wore blue rubber slippers; others, fashionable sneakers. Some came on bicycles and scooters, others in small cars. Some wore polyester shirts, with baggy trousers in dull colors; others, cotton and denim. These were the temple-goers: Hindi speaking, deliriously nationalistic, young and full of idealism. That they were middle-class had less to do with their income, and more to do with their aspirations and self-image. When Modi began to speak—after the interminable bugling of a conch and cries of “Victory to Mother India!”—he was able to convert their belief in themselves into the political pain of dreams deferred and the wasted promise of youth.

  He began with humor, which was rare. Indian politicians are not by and large funny. “The prime minister,” he said, referring to the frail Sikh gentleman, regarded by many as a puppet who reported directly to Rahul Gandhi and his mother, Sonia Gandhi, “is in America at the moment. He is groveling before Obama, telling him we are a poor country. America must help us.”

  Silence fell over the crowd. In imitation of the prime minister’s thin, plaintive voice, Modi said, “We are a nation of some one and a quarter billion, but we are poor. Help us!” There was some laughter. “I have only one question,” Modi now said, in a low growl. “Is this real poverty? Is this the poverty of our towns and villages? Or is this also that ‘state of mind’ poverty of which the Prince speaks?”

  The Prince was Rahul Gandhi. Modi used him as a metonym for the Indian elite. Gandhi was reluctant, effete, and—oddly enough for a Gandhi—charmless. No communicator, he had just referred to Indian poverty as “a state of mind.” It came off sounding like a modern version of “let them eat cake,” and translated into Hindi, it sounded even worse, like a medical condition.

  The crowd roared with laughter; but Modi himself was no longer laughing.

  He implored his followers to tell him how the prime minister of Pakistan, who had at the United Nations recently described the Indian premier as a “village crone,” could dare insult India’s prime minister abroad. Modi’s anger grew, and it was a fr
ightening thing to behold, a crescendo of outrage and humiliation. “In honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and Pakistan,” writes Salman Rushdie, “male honor resides in the sexual probity of women, and the ‘shaming’ of women dishonors all men.” Here, India was the shamed woman, and Modi the man who would restore her honor, and thereby the honor of his vast male audience. He would give her back her dignity and return her to the glories of eons past. She would once again stand, head high, among the comity of nations.

  If India’s shame dishonored the tens of thousands who had come out to hear Modi speak, they, in turn, knew a shame of their own through joblessness and lack of opportunity. Their male pride had been hurt. Modi would empower them. His belief in these people was absolute. He saw in them a potential even their own mothers had failed to see. He felt their ambition as they felt it; he was kept awake at night by their restlessness; and he promised to ennoble that youthful energy with an outlet. He would give them jobs. The rest would follow. The dream was vague and short on details, but that was so much part of its charm.

  That morning after Japanese Park, I came home and wrote in my diary:

  His victory will decimate the opposition. Not just in terms of numbers, but philosophically too. It will be a long time before they find their way again. The pundits in Delhi will say, How will he find the numbers? The numbers will come. This is going to be one of those elections when all the old calculations cease to apply.

  THE RISE OF MODI WAS part of a historical awakening. In 1992, Hindu mobs destroyed a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya, which they said stood on the birthplace of the epic hero Ram. Riots ensued, and the BJP profited politically from the atmosphere that was created. A few years later, they formed their first government in Delhi. Modi had been one of the organizers of the movement that led to the demolition of the mosque. Modi knew that the historical wound left by the Islamic invasions of India had a violent potential; the demolition of the mosque showed him how history could be made to serve politics. He positioned himself squarely at the center of a triangular historical antagonism. He made out that India had endured a thousand years of slavery, first under Muslims, then under the British. The inheritors of that history were the anglicized classes, a small elite as represented by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and India’s 170 million Muslims, a largely converted population that comprised some of its poorest citizens. Modi’s genius was to open a culture war on two fronts, in which he used the passion generated by anti-Muslim feeling, especially virulent in his home state of Gujarat, to attack the ruling Congress Party, accusing it of coddling minorities to the detriment of the Hindu majority.

  In 2001, Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, where he presided over some of the worst religious violence in recent years. In 2002, some two thousand people, the majority of them Muslim, were killed in riots, and the state looked the other way. It didn’t hurt Modi politically. He won, and won again. The senior leadership of his party were unable to prevent his rise. He now stood at the precipice of becoming prime minister, and as with other leaders adept in the politics of revenge and revival, he played down the element of revenge as he grew more powerful, speaking only of development and progress. He became many things to many people, while never entirely disabusing the party faithful of their implicit belief that when he came to power, he would find a way to settle the scores of the past. Modi would usher in an age when Nehru’s palimpsest would be scraped down to its bottommost layer, where Hindu purity, free of British and Islamic accretion, could be found.

  In 1998, my mother interviewed the writer V. S. Naipaul for television. “Well, I am probably not as horrified by Ayodhya as most people are,” Naipaul said. “I see that Babur was no friend of India, had little regard for India. And, in Babur’s building of a mosque there, there would have been an expression of contempt. So, if you behave in this way, you challenge hubris. If you are a builder and a conqueror, and nemesis catches up with you a few centuries later, really, one shouldn’t complain.”

  Naipaul’s view was received with dismay on the left and exaltation on the right. It was an election year, the BJP was poised to form the government in Delhi, and Naipaul was seen to be giving intellectual support to the worst elements in Indian politics. Naipaul had also made an important clarification that was missed in the hysteria of that time:

  Let me talk about the other matter, the matter of the invasions and why a political idea of taking revenge doesn’t make sense. I think that after a cultural death, a true revival comes about when we accept that the past is truly dead. As I said earlier, the Dark Ages in Europe came about when there was a strong belief among the people that the old world was continuing, that the classical world was just going on, and on, and on. People feel continuity is what they are expressing, but the renaissance doesn’t come about by people trying to pretend that the past is still going on. The renaissance comes when people accept that the past is over. I think this is where I would probably part company with the political postures of the BJP!

  THE MEMORY OF THE BRAHMINS, holding forth in Sanskrit, from that afternoon six years ago made me want to come back to Benares for an extended time. A conjunction of events—a meandering line that ran between my private awareness of my isolation in India, the circumstances surrounding my father’s death in Pakistan, and now the rise of Hindu nationalism in India—made Benares, on the eve of a revolution at the ballot box, feel like the right place to be. I wondered if this city’s Brahmins, living as men had in classical times on the banks of a river in a temple town, might serve me as a prism of sorts—that it would be possible to observe in them what old societies, such as India’s, went through in their quest to be reborn as modern nations.

  Soon after Mapu told me the story of the Kashi Naresh and Tito, I found the place where I would live in Benares in the weeks and months to come. A friend of Mapu’s, also a textile man, suggested I try the Alice Boner House, which was next door to the Ganges View Hotel, where we were having dinner. He said it was basic but well situated. We could go there afterward.

  The nights were still cool. The moon, coming into fullness for the festival of Holi three days later, was high on the river. It was not late, but the city was fast asleep. We passed an ascetic with matted hair spooning with his pet monkey. Mapu’s friend led me into a side street, no wider than a corridor. A beam of white tube light was overhead. The flagstones ran with water. We knocked on a low wooden door with an iron hoop. A fearful tiny man, with beetle brows and a mouthful of crowded teeth, opened it. He was reluctant at first to show us in. The house was full, he said; and besides, permission to stay could only be obtained through the director in Zurich.

  We persuaded him that we were, to use his phrase, “big people” too, and he let us into the house. We came into a lotus-crested courtyard. The city beyond retreated. The house, with its dim electrical light and long slanted shadows, was a sanctuary, and, unlike so many modern buildings in India, not at war with the climate. It had thick walls and cool stone floors, excellent proportions, complete with an aperture at the top. The house spoke, with quiet self-assurance, of tried solutions to old problems. It was perfect.

  I wrote to Johannes Beltz, curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. He responded almost immediately: “May I know what you think to write about Brahmins? As an old student of Sanskrit, I would like to know. I’m just curious.”

  I knew too little then to answer him. I knew of course that Brahmins sat at the apex of the Hindu caste system—above the Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (merchant), Shudra (worker or laborer), and the Dalit (the Untouchable, who is outside the system, outcaste). But, in the India I grew up in, we possessed little knowledge of caste. I could not tell a Brahmin name, such as Mishra or Mukherjee, apart from any other; and even if I could, I would not have held it in any special esteem. India has infinite systems of inequality: exquisite composites of class, caste, language, education, and wealth. Our markers were all to do with class, which originated in our familiarity
with the West, in general, and our comfort with English, in particular. The inner workings of caste, no less than to any foreigner, were a mystery to me.

  “It is much easier to say what caste is not,” writes the journalist Taya Zinkin in Caste Today, “than what caste is.” Caste is not class, not religion or race, or even occupation. It is above all a religious or metaphysical idea, concerned specifically with the purity of the soul through the ages. Our deeds on earth—our karma—determine the progress of the soul, which in turn determines what caste we are born into. Our caste tells us who we may or may not marry, what work we may or may not do, and with whom we may or may not break bread. Nobody knows if the original categories of priest, warrior, merchant, and laborer—the varnas, as they are known in Sanskrit—were once fluid and hardened into the reality of caste today. But what we do know is that there is no escape from caste, save death or renunciation. Caste in India, as the Mexican writer Octavio Paz had observed in the 1990s, is still “the first and last reality.”

  “No sense yet,” I wrote, replying to Beltz’s question. He was understanding. He said stay at the house was free, as were meals; but that guests were expected to “manifest their gratitude through a little donation.”

  Ten days later he CC-ed me on the brief email he wrote to the manager of the Alice Boner House:

  Please receive Mr. Aatish Taseer at the airport in Varanasi.

  Arrival: 1 April, 2014, 14:10

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  THE HOUR OF JUNCTURE

  THE STARS ARRAY AND HARMONY constitutes itself gradually,” wrote Alice Boner in her diary in February 1936, “This house is a strangely soothing and exciting matter. In it I feel withdrawn into myself, my house, my home … It encloses me with love and opens the world for me. It spreads the blossoming earth out in front of me, the colourful life, and surrounds me with the simple peace of a monastery. I feel fulfilled, happy, settled, and supported, like on a gentle stream.”