The Twice-Born Read online

  I had been given Alice’s room. A narrow river-facing room, sparsely furnished, with rust-red walls and a wainscoting of Indian matting. The ceilings were high and coffered, with black metal hoops hanging from the stone beams. Small grille windows, shabbily curtained, gave onto the river. Beyond was the sandy waste delineated by a pale line of trees. The light inside the house, though harsh and white outside, was pale and diffuse. A daytime darkness welled up out of the central courtyard. A steep internal staircase led downstairs, where a plaque read ALICE BONER, SWISS ARTIST AND SCHOLAR, LIVED IN THIS HOUSE FROM 1935 TO 1978.

  I came to know Alice through reading her diary, a published copy of which was kept upstairs in her library, as the days grew hotter and the election raged below.

  She came from a wealthy Swiss family—her uncle was one of the founders of the engineering firm Brown, Boveri. She had expressed an interest in being an artist, but was immediately disenchanted with “the pert, lewd atmosphere” of Paris in the 1920s. In 1926, she saw Uday Shankar dance in Zurich: “Evening in the Kursaal: a lot of kitsch, and a revelation, the Indian dancer,” she wrote in her diary. In Shankar, Alice saw “a living source of Indian sculpture.” She was not alone. Shankar was causing a sensation in Europe at the time, a cultural event equal to the stir caused by his brother, the sitarist Ravi Shankar, in the 1960s. “In recent years,” wrote René Daumal in Rasa, his collection of essays on Indian art and music, “something extraordinary occurred in various European cities … Uday Shankar, perfect and all powerful master, governs some four hundred and fifty muscles of his body; each one does exactly what he wishes it to do, obeying the head and ignoring the neighboring tissues.” Daumal believed that he was witnessing “Hindu thought, alive, authentic, in flesh and bone, in sound, gesture,” presented in their midst.

  Uday and Alice became lovers, and she accompanied him to India for the first time in 1930. Five years later, after their affair was over, she returned to India alone to live in this house on the Ganges. Like her hero, the Sri Lankan art historian A. K. Coomaraswamy, Alice devoted herself to the study of Indian art and lived in Benares until a few years before her death in 1981.

  In those first days in Alice’s house, as I was waiting for Tripathi to call, but also waiting more generally for a sign of some kind—a bit of luck, a synchronicity—to tell me that what I was doing was worthwhile, Alice’s anxieties about belonging assuaged mine. Her decision to come to India was something of an intellectual experiment. And India was hard. Not in terms of discomfort—which Alice never mentions—but hard on her nerves. “Every day I have to invent a reason to justify my being here,” she writes. India is the country “where the soul feels best,” but Alice is also intensely lonely. She misses Europe. She comforts herself: “One thing I know now: my centre is here and not there”; but the more she stresses feeling centered, the more one suspects she isn’t. “My entangled nerves are now loosened and vibrate in accordance with the constant, eternal rhythm of this country.” But surrender is not easy. She digs “into the chambers of the soul,” in search of a way to support the varied selves she contains.

  “On an evening like this,” she writes, months after moving to Benares, “in the loneliness of this house, in front of the river glittering in the moonlight, in the ringing stillness where only sounds from unknown people, unknown dogs, unknown temples reach me, where nothing overshadows the inner existence, one comes to oneself, so it is said. The multidimensional identity of being rises up. The thousand different individuals and lives that are in me, all hopes, all opportunities, all experiences are aroused and press against each other, forming a clew, a firm block.”

  Alice finds she cannot take a step further without the consent of her whole being, but no wholeness is at hand; she has “outgrown the inherited world of Europe,” and though India is part of that outgrowing, traditional India is a closed world: all community, all instinct, the group above the individual. Alice can no more enter it than she can banish the “inborn individualism” of being raised in the West, the feeling of “being-thrownback-to-myself.” She finds herself plagued by the scrutiny of “the self-observing self.” And so, she writes, she oscillated between worlds.

  Alice came to be a friend across time. She had an acute understanding of the trouble India would be in if it failed to close the cultural gap that was emerging between the modern state, the legacy of British rule, and the ancient culture upon which it had been grafted.

  On June 25, 1946, the year before Indian independence, Alice met the freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu, the quintessential anglicized Indian in the mold of men such as Nehru, and credited with a famous witticism about Gandhi: “Ah,” she said, on seeing Gandhi living in an Untouchable quarter equipped with modern amenities, “if the Mahatma only knew what it costs us for him to live the simple life.”

  Many in the India I grew up in shared the sentiment behind this clever remark, but they also failed to see what was plain to Gandhi: if one was to change India, one would have to change it from within. It would never work for a colonial class to speak down to India. I was deeply struck by this entry in Alice’s diary:

  I asked [Naidu] whether, when India would have her own government, they would not consider calling Coomaraswamy back from America to give directives for the new education in art and other fields. I thought that he was the man who could really put India on the right path and help her to keep her own tradition intact, while recognizing her whole social and economic life … “Oh no!” she said. “We have other things to do now! We have to rebuild India politically. Those things will come much later! And, besides, he is old now, and out of touch with India.” I felt disappointed and wondered who was more out of touch with India, whether a man living in America and devoting all his studies and deep penetration to the exact meaning of Indian tradition, or people living in India and looking all the while towards Europe for inspiration and direction of all their activities?

  ON MY FIRST DAY IN Alice’s house, I went for a walk along the Ganges. The auspicious hour of juncture—sandhya: when day meets night—was near. I hadn’t gone far before I noticed a young man who could only be a Brahmin. He sat on a wooden platform gazing out at the water. He was handsome, though the marks of poverty were manifest in him no less than those of high caste: his small teeth were crested yellow and lodged high in his gums; he wore a light beard, through which his skin, rough and beaded from exposure to the sun, was visible; and the whites of his eyes were faintly yellow. He was dressed in two measures of white cloth, one wrapped around the waist, the other draped lightly over the shoulders. A sacred thread hung loosely from his torso, and from the crown of his tonsured head, the trademark lock of rough unshorn hair was neatly knotted.

  The young Brahmin sat speaking to an older man with kohled eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. It was hot, and the young man used the edge of the lower garment to wipe the sweat from his chest and armpits. The conversation of the two men concerned arrivals and departures; since I had only just arrived in Benares myself, I tried to join in by asking the young Brahmin if he was from out of town.

  The question—or perhaps my language, or the way I was dressed, or how I stood at a distance, not introducing myself—made him start. He looked up at me as if I had committed an impropriety. Then he beckoned me over and asked me to repeat my question.

  When he heard it, he seemed dismayed by its banality. He had been in Benares since November and was staying at an ashram nearby. He had come to the city to read Tulsidas’s famous poem and to gaze upon the Ganges. He wanted to have its darshana. That was all.

  It seemed like an extraordinary indulgence. Did he do no work? What had brought him to Benares? How long would he stay?

  “Someone I love told me to go to Kashi, so I came to Kashi.” He didn’t know how long he would stay. “Here”—he gestured to the great temple upriver—“nothing happens of one’s own doing; it happens only by His will.”

  Pavan Kumar Mishra came from a family of peasant Brahmins from a small vi
llage near Hardoi, a town four hundred kilometers away. He had a wayfarer’s air of drift about him, and as he spoke, I began to see how much religion in India was still threaded into life. It did not exist in a separate sphere as a set of precepts, or a private matter; it was a ritualized part of action, and it expressed itself in the instinctive, unquestioning way in which this young Brahmin, like a pilgrim in medieval Europe, had come to Benares. If there was work to be done in the monastery, he explained, he would “lend a hand” in exchange for food and board. But work was not the point, nor could he say what was. My trouble communicating with Mishra gave me a foretaste of what was to be one of the ironies of this journey: those in whom tradition was most intact were often the least able to speak of it. They could not see themselves from the outside. When tradition was intact, life itself was an expression of belief. And this particular life had been so cloistered, so walled in by tradition, that it made conversation hard. We lacked a shared vocabulary.

  Mishra now turned my questions on me.

  Where was I from?

  From India, I said.

  He stared at me in disbelief. No, but—really—where was I from?

  From Delhi, I clarified.

  He seemed unhappy. He was sure I was a foreigner of some sort, but he couldn’t tell what sort. He tried to invoke a deeper level of identity: What was my dharma?

  It is one of the great untranslatable Indian words. Dharma could mean “duty,” “religion,” “vocation”; but it is also the dharma of fire to be hot, and of water to cool. It is so basic a word, so central to the Indian scheme, that it would not do to say I had no dharma. Everything, even an inanimate object, has a dharma. As the Hindi writer Kubernath Sukul tells us, “The immensity of dharma is such that we sometimes say that all that is not adharma [i.e., not unjust, undutiful, or wrong] is dharma.”

  I said I was a Sikh. It was half a lie. My mother was a nonpracticing Sikh, but religion and caste in India were patrilineal. I was, however, afraid that if I said I was Muslim, practicing or not, our conversation might end on the spot.

  The mention of Sikhism brought a look of puzzlement to Mishra’s face. He didn’t know anything about Sikhs, except that their places of worship were called gurdwaras. He wanted to know whose picture or idol they contained.

  The older man sitting next to him—Shukla, a Brahmin too—explained that the Sikhs followed a book.

  The young Brahmin’s puzzlement grew. He was trying to decide, with his limited exposure to the world, whether Sikhism was part of the Hindu fold or not. He now asked with some impatience—perhaps because dharma was inextricably linked to caste, and caste to work—what I did for a living.

  I said I was a writer. His exasperation grew. “But what do you want to do?” he stressed. “What do you want from life?”

  It was an odd question coming from him. Mishra, who had drifted to Benares on a whim and had no plan other than to gaze upon the Ganges and read a sixteenth-century poem, was asking me what I wanted from life?

  I said, “I want to write books.”

  His interest waned; he must have thought I was being deliberately obtuse. “Good. Write them, then.”

  Our conversation ought to have ended there, but the hour of ritual bathing was at hand and the two Brahmins asked me if I would partake. I said I would not, adding that I was not religious—but I accidentally said I had no dharma.

  The Brahmins’ faces blazed with incredulity. It was like saying one had no soul, no nature, no parent, no personality, no country. It was absurd.

  “What are you saying?” Mishra asked. “These books you’ve mentioned, they would not have entered your life if you had no dharma.”

  “But that is a literary interest,” I said.

  “It’s the same thing!” the two Brahmins said in one voice.

  “I have no religious faith,” I said, now using a different word.

  Mishra’s face softened. That was not the same as not having a dharma. The religion was lived; that was the part that was important: belief was a separate matter.

  “But you must try and have faith,” Mishra said.

  I said something about being modern in my thinking. The word in Hindi meant “new” or “recent,” as it did in English, but it did not carry the same historical weight. The Hindi word contained no suggestion of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment; it simply meant “new.” In the West, one could be modern and religious; in India, to say one was modern was to say one was English speaking and westernized, part of the class of interpreters. It implied familiarity with the mores and customs of a particular culture rather than the acceptance of a universal set of beliefs and ideas.

  Mishra stared at me, uncertain of my mental processes. He did not see his world through the lens of the West; he was not even familiar with westernized India; and he did not recognize his India when it was recast in the image of European history. After a moment of silence, he gave me the only response he saw fit. Without a trace of malice, he said, “I have never met anyone like you.”

  We were stalled. Mishra tried again to find some common ground between us. He asked me about marriage.

  I said I was open to the idea of marriage, though not perhaps ready yet.

  “But you do want to marry?” he said with the relief of a man who, having feared his interlocutor to be an alien, discovers he is not merely earthly, but a mammal too.

  “Yes,” I said, steering my mind away from all the more modern iterations of marriage. But it was not the gender of my future spouse that interested Mishra.

  “There must be a conversation going on, at least?”

  “A conversation?” I asked in confusion.

  “Between the families.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, now surprised myself. “It’s a decision I will definitely make by myself.”

  “Without the consent of your parents?”

  “Possibly.”

  An expression of total amazement, bordering on consternation, appeared on the young Brahmin’s face. Marriage to him was between families, not individuals; it was a social contract.

  The sun, though still strong, had begun to decline. Mosquitoes swarmed. Mishra wanted to have his bath. His older friend began to sing a verse from Tulsidas’s poem. He sang of a boatman who ferries Ram across the Ganges. Ram tries to give him a ring as payment, but the boatman refuses, saying that men of the same profession cannot accept payment from each other.

  “How can you and I be of the same profession?” Ram asks.

  “I ferry people across the Ganges. You ferry them across the ocean of life.”

  Shukla’s singing was beautiful, especially so because we were on the Ganges surrounded by boatmen who, with their ravaged sinewy bodies and long wooden boats, could not have been so different from the boatman in the epic. They sang songs too, and one sensed from the metaphorical descriptions of their vocation that they traced a line to the eternal boatmen of myth—Charon and Urshanabi—who ferry souls across a river.

  Shukla would sing one verse, then prompt Mishra to finish it. But this seemed to annoy Mishra, and I suspected it was because he had not memorized the poem—the poem he had come to Benares to learn to the exclusion of everything else. When Shukla began a new canto, Mishra left us abruptly and went down to the Ganges to bathe.

  On the river, though it was not yet dark, tourists were setting lamps afloat on the water. Mishra stood among them, his back wet and catching the late-afternoon light. He went through a series of swift, fluid movements, taking dips, cupping the water, standing with hands folded, eyes closed, oblivious to the traffic of lamps and offerings eddying around him. Then he returned full of the effect of his bath. His actions were brisk and dexterous as muscle memory. He stood next to the wooden platform where we sat and changed quickly, removing his wet clothes and slipping into dry ones. They were not now the clothes of the Brahmin—those had been collected and wrung out—but a simple red-checked shirt of cheap cotton and a pair of beige trousers. The transition robbed him of his earlier gr
andeur. He was now like any number of vagrant young men on the riverside.

  He let go of our previous misunderstandings as if they were part of a discarded self, too trifling to survive the renewal of a ritual bath in the river. He said that I should come and see him at the ashram.

  Then, as if reflecting briefly on all that had been discussed earlier, and thinking perhaps now of his time in Benares, and to what it had amounted, he said:

  “I don’t know what reward it will bring. But it doesn’t matter. It is all decided.”

  I WANTEd TO SPEAK TO Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi in part because the memory of that afternoon at the Abhinavagupta Library had become a lodestar—the beginning of a decade of Sanskrit education for me—and in part because Tripathi seemed to me the very image of what a Brahmin was. I thought, here is someone who must know what it is to balance his commitment to his tradition with an onslaught of foreign influence. What had surprised me that afternoon six years ago was how, despite having lived in India all my life, I had so naturally gravitated toward the glamour of the West, rejecting all that belonged to old India. The force that influenced me thus did not feel coercive in any demonstrable way, but how could something so powerful not be?

  “European rule in Asian countries,” wrote Arthur Koestler in The Lotus and the Robot, “was based on force, but its cultural influence was not.” He continued, “The Indian élite became Anglicized because Hindu philosophy, science and literature had come to a standstill a long time ago, and had nothing to offer them. We ruled by rape, but influenced by seduction.”

  I wanted to know what role the interplay of rape and seduction had played in Tripathi’s life. I wanted a sense from him of that moment when Western power was withdrawing, even as its influence was increasing. But Tripathi was a hard man to track down. I waited ten days in the febrile brightness of that election summer for him to call. I left messages at his place of work, I called his mobile; a young woman answered and promised to have him call me back, but he never did.