Toward the end of the afternoon, the sand gradually merges into the mist, which is itself a kind of celestial sand that has joined forces with the earth against the limpid blue-green of the sky. The desert loses its undulations and eminences; it merges with the evening, in a vast, uniform rosy mass which, as yet, has hardly more substance than the sky. The desert has become a desert even in relationship to itself. Gradually the mist spreads everywhere until there is nothing left but night.
After the touchdown at Karachi, day dawns over the incomprehensible, lunar desert of Thar; then small groups of fields appear, still separated by long stretches of desert. As the light strengthens, the cultivated areas fuse together to form a continuous surface of pink and green tints, like the exquisite and faded colors of some very old tapestry, which has been worn threadbare by long use and tirelessly darned. This is India.
The fields are irregular, yet there is nothing untidy about the collocations of shapes and colors. However they are grouped, they present a balanced pattern, as if a great deal of thought had been given to the drawing of their individual outlines in relationship to the whole. They might be geographical musings by Paul Klee. The whole scene has a rarefied quality, an extreme and arbitrary preciosity, in spite of the recurrence of the triple theme: village, network of fields, pond surrounded by trees.
As the plane lands at, and takes off from, Delhi, one gets a brief glimpse of a romantic India, with ruined temples set in a vivid green undergrowth. Then the floods begin. The water seems so stagnant, so dense and so muddy that it is more like oil floating in streaks across the surface of another form of water constituted by the earth. The plane goes over Bihar with its rocky hills and forests, and then comes the beginning of the delta. The land is cultivated to the last inch, and each field looks like a jewel of green gold, pale and shimmering because of the water with which it is impregnated, and surrounded by the flawless dark rim of its hedges. There are no sharp angles; all the edges are rounded, yet fit against each other like the cells of a living tissue. At the approaches to Calcutta, the small villages increase in number, and their huts appear piled up like ants' eggs in nests of greenery, the vividness of which is still further intensified by the dark red tiles of certain roofs. The plane lands in torrential rain.
Beyond Calcutta lies the delta of the Brahmaputra, a monster of a river, and such a meandering mass that it seems more like a beast than a watercourse. All around, as far as the eye can see, the countryside is obliterated by water, except for the jute fields which, when looked at from above, form mossy squares of a greenness all the sharper through being so cool and fresh. Villages surrounded by trees emerge from the water like bunches of flowers with, all around, a swarm of boats.
Caught as it is, between sand without men and men without earth, India offers a very ambiguous appearance. The impression I was able to form during the eight hours it took me to cross from Karachi to Calcutta disassociated India definitely from the New World. It has neither the rigid chessboard pattern of the Middle West or Canada made up of identical units, each with a precise spatter of farm buildings in the same place on the same side; nor, still less so, the deep velvety green of the tropical forest, which is only just being encroached upon here and there by the bold inroads made by the pioneer zones. When the European looks down on this land, divided into minute lots and cultivated to the last acre, he experiences an initial feeling of familiarity. But the way the colors shade into each other, the irregular outlines of the fields and rice swamps which are constantly rearranged in different patterns, the blurred edges which look as if they had been roughly stitched together, all this is part of the same tapestry, but—compared to the more clearly defined forms and colors of a European landscape—it is like a tapestry with the wrong side showing.
ANDRÉ MALRAUX
(1901–76)
André Malraux, who was born into a wealthy Parisian family, assumed almost as many poses as it was possible to assume in the twentieth century: He was, often simultaneously, archaeologist, aesthete, anticolonial revolutionary, novelist, Communist activist, and diplomat. He was also one of the last old-fashioned Orientalists, prone to making large generalizations about the worldviews of the East and the West. But his curiosity was prodigious, and his knowledge seems, in this time of narrow specialization, impressively wide-ranging. As the Minister of Culture of France, he traveled widely, meeting such international celebrities as Mao Tse-Tung and Pandit Nehru, with whom he held improbably long conversations about the state of the world. He went to India in the late 1950s. His primary response to the religious and artistic marvels of Benares, and the Ajanta and Elephanta caves, was, as recorded in his autobiography, Anti-Memoirs (1967), rhapsodical. But, as this excerpt shows, behind the exuberant flourishes and often arcane prose there lies a genuine sense of wonder, and the intelligent admiration provoked by an older, more mysterious culture in a cultivated sensibility from Europe.
from ANTI-MEMOIRS
The town from which one reaches Ellora is Aurangabad, a Muslim city dominated by the tomb of Aurangzeb's wife, a rugged Taj Mahal amid rose bushes that have gone back to nature, which reminded me of the archaeological museum at Autun, a kitchen-garden with Celtic steles and Romanesque statues growing among the artichokes.
The town from which one reaches Elephanta is Bombay.
Like Calcutta, Bombay, which was born in the nineteenth century, is not at all a modernized Indian town: it is a town as Anglo-Indian as Agra, Lahore and Aurangabad are Indo-Muslim. The Red Fort, from whose gigantic gateway a woebegone camel emerged, the domes of marble and confectionery surrounded by woods full of squirrels, the Victorian Gothic buildings (inspired by what cathedrals?) bristling with outsize dentists' advertisements designed in the form of Sanskrit invocations, the dusty coconut palms overgrown with a jumble of old tires—all this blurred into a single derisory backdrop as soon as one entered the sacred caves. Their link with the bowels of the earth suggested an entire subterranean India, secretly watching over the India of the villages, the animals, the processions of urn-carrying women, the majestic trees, while the towns, chimerical and theatrical, made ready to return to dust. The caves of Ellora reign over the bare and unprepossessing plain which they overlook, while those of Elephanta seem hidden away in their island where the gulf shone with a Hellenic radiance beneath the gulls of the Arabian Sea. But they are all united in their sacred darkness. As soon as one entered Elephanta, the glittering ocean was borne away, like the towns, like the India of the British Raj, the India of the Moguls, the India of Nehru—all perishable offerings to the famous Majesty, the gigantic triple head of Shiva.
Photographs, and even the cinema, give no idea of the scale. These heads, fifteen to twenty feet high, are smaller than those of the Bayon at Angkor; but, colossal in comparison to the figures around them, they fill the cave as the Pantocrator fills the Byzantine cathedrals of Sicily. Like the Pantocrator, this Shiva stops below the shoulders without becoming a bust. Hence its disturbing aspect of severed head and divine apparition. It is not simply a question of its being “one of the most beautiful statues in India,” whatever meaning one may assign to the word “beautiful.”
Here, recognizable at first glance, is a masterpiece of sculpture. A full face and two monumental profiles, whose planes (notably those of the eyes) are worthy of the very highest works of art in spite of a seductiveness which is more to do with the jewelry than with the faces.
But then there is Shiva, the cavernous gloom, the sense of the Sacred. This figure belongs, like those of Moissac, to the domain of the great symbols, and what this symbol expresses, it alone can express. This face with its eyes closed on the flow of time as on a funeral chant is to the dancing Shiva of Ellora what the latter is to the Dances of Death of the South, and even to the fabulous figures of Madurai.
Finally, as with many of the works which make up the treasury of humanity's imaginary museum, there is the conjunction of the artistic effect of the work, its religious effect and another, unforeseea
ble, effect. The effect of the Pharaoh Zoser arises from the fact that the weathering of the stone has turned it into a death's-head, that of the Winged Victory from the fact that fate has devised the perfect mythical creature which men have looked for in vain in the angels: wings being the arms of birds, the Victory is perfect only without arms. The famous line that runs from the point of the breast to the tip of the wing was born of this amputation. The perfection (in this sense) of Shiva demanded the sacred gloom, the absence of a body, even a dancing one, the two profiles still embedded in the mountain, the mask with closed eyes—but above all the unique creation by which the Shiva of Elephanta is also the symbol of India.
In the neighboring cave, they were chanting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. It is familiar to all Hindus. It was recited during Gandhi's funeral wake, and during the fourteen hours of his cremation. Mysteriously in harmony with the subterranean temple, with the colossal Shiva, it seemed the very voice of this sanctuary to which it owed nothing.
Then, standing in their great chariot drawn by white horses,
Krishna and Arjuna sounded their sacred conches…
And Arjuna, filled with deep compassion, spoke despairingly…
The two legendary armies of India are face to face. The old king whom Arjuna is fighting against is blind. His charioteer has the magical power of knowing what is happening on the battlefield. He hears the dialogue begin, in the midst of the enemy army, in the chariot with the white horses, between Prince Arjuna and his charioteer, who is Krishna and will become the supreme Deity. The Gita is divine speech reported by magic to a blind Priam enclosed in his darkness.
Arjuna looks at those who are to die, and Krishna reminds him that if the greatness of man is to free himself from fate, it is not for the warrior to free himself from courage. It is the fratricidal combat of the epics, and for us the Trojan sadness of Arjuna seems like the desolate echo of the voice of Antigone:
Krishna, I see such omens of evil!
What can we hope from this killing of kinsmen?
What do I want with victory, empire,
Or their enjoyment?
How can I care for power or pleasure,
My own life, even?
The chanting voice was answered by another, as Krishna answers Arjuna in the poem.
Your words are wise, Arjuna, but your sorrow is for nothing.
The truly wise mourn neither for the living or the dead.
There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings.
Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be…
This chant began the Revelation which my companions knew by heart, accompanied in the darkness by the distant surge of the ocean and streaked with the cries of gulls: the song of the Deity who transcends, animates and destroys worlds, and of the spirit which transmigrates through bodies and souls, the Atman:
Know this Atman, unborn, undying,
Never ceasing, never beginning,
Deathless, birthless, unchanging for ever.
How can it die the death of the body?
Worn-out garments are shed by the body:
Worn-out bodies are shed by the dweller
Within the body…
I had heard this last stanza in Benares. Here it had shed its funereal overtones; and what followed took on among these unseeing gods an even greater solemnity than among the funeral pyres:
There is day, also, and night in the universe;
The wise know this, declaring the day of Brahma
A thousand ages in span
And the night a thousand ages.
Day dawns, and all those lives that lay hidden asleep
Come forth and show themselves, mortally manifest:
Night falls, and all are dissolved
Into the sleeping germ of life…
And all the creatures exist within me:
As the vast air, wandering world-wide,
Remains within the ether always,
So these, my wandering creatures,
Are always within me…
…I am Being and non-Being, immortality and death…
One of my companions answered the distant chant with one of the most celebrated verses of the poem, and his voice reached across the enormous pillars, muffled and yet carried by the low roof of the caves:
Who can kill immortality?…
For the chanting priests, was this response rising out of the silence as mysteriously natural as my wish for the poor couple at Madurai had been? They had fallen silent. At Benares, I had reread the Gita. From its subterranean depths, from all that it owes to an earlier Brahmanism, there emerged dimly, like the figures in these caves, the divine sermon of love which Brahmanism scorned, and above all the cosmic stoicism to which the poem owes its fame. In the inexorable march of constellations which is the return to the source, man is united with God when he discovers his identity with Him and when he observes the Law, which is caste duty. Action is necessary, because the divine scheme must be fulfilled: it is not you who are about to kill your kinsmen, says Krishna to Arjuna, it is I. And action is purified of life if man is sufficiently in communion with God to offer it up to him as a sacrifice.
… Because they understood this, the ancient seekers for liberation
Could safely engage in action…
There is nothing, in all the three worlds,
Which I do not already possess;
Nothing I have yet to acquire.
But I go on working, nevertheless…
Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory
And defeat, are all one and the same: then go into battle…
For my companions, this famous moment was an eternal moment. Yet the sculptures all around me in the shadow, and the Gita itself, expressed not so much the sacred stoicism of the last verses as the communion with God into which the metaphysical austerity had transformed itself: the mystique which Brahmanism, like Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, had discovered. Even if the verses of communion had not been recited in another cave, the metamorphosis of faith would have been present here as palpably as it is in St. Peter's in Rome when one remembers our cathedrals there. India is obsessed by the image of the ever-changing waters of the changeless rivers, and the successive souls of its religion passed before Shiva as did its ancient armies before the sacrificial pyres. The Old Testament of the Upanishads had become the New Testament of the Gita. In the depths of time, there was the hymn to Kali:
Thou, Mother of Blessings,
Thou, terrible Night, Night of delusion, Night of death,
We greet thee.
And, well after Elephanta, the parable of prayer:
“I pray in vain,” said the daughter of the disciple to the Master. “What do you love best in the world?” “My brother's little child.” “Retire and meditate on him alone, and you will see that he is Krishna. Only love can cure the blind.”
The meditation of the colossal heads of the Majesty on eternity and time, twin prisoners of the Sacred, also seemed like a meditation on the destiny which guides religions from veneration to love as it guides mortals from birth to death—but beneath which there remained an inviolable permanence. If the Bhagavad Gita is present in so many holy places, it is because it expresses this; like the Majesty, it is India. Gandhi had tried to translate it. The greatest of the Renouncers of modern times regarded action carried out in the spirit of surrender to his God as the supreme form of renunciation. “My devotion to my people is one of the aspects of the discipline I impose upon myself in order to liberate my soul. I have no need to seek refuge in a cave: I carry my cave inside myself.”
Certain is death for all who shall be born,
And certain is birth for all who have died…
Night falls on the dead of the final combat, after the seventeenday battle. The few survivors have withdrawn into the forest to die there as ascetics. The patient birds of prey are waiting, and among the fallen swords glittering in the moonlight, monkeys like those which
accompanied me at Madurai touch the eyes of the dead with puzzled fingers.
Girls were passing by outside, each with a red flower in her hand. The gulls of Oman still wheeled across the sparkling gulf. A motorboat took us back. Bombay, a crazy bazaar that thinks itself a town, rose little by little above the water, and we made our way toward the enormous archway of the Gateway to the East. Once it watched over the English steamships like a marine temple over a war fleet. Today, ours was the only boat to berth there—back from the India of eternity. On the waterfront, atomic reactors glittered…
We were to return to Delhi overnight. For the evening, the former bungalow of the governor at the tip of the peninsula had been put at my disposal. It was a sad place, like all the uninhabited houses on the shores of the gulf. The garden, still more uninhabited in spite of a few silent gardeners, seemed like a cemetery of Indian Army officers. And the Indian Army was as remote as Akbar's horsemen.
The passion which Asia, vanished civilizations, ethnography have long inspired in me arose from an essential wonderment at the forms which man has been able to assume, but also from the light which every strange civilization threw on my own, that quality of the unusual or the arbitrary which it revealed in one or other of its aspects. I had just relived one of the most profound and complex experiences of my youth. More so than my first encounter with pre-Hispanic America, because England did not destroy the priests and warriors of India, and because temples are still built there to the ancient gods. More so than Islam and Japan, because India is less westernized, because it spreads more widely the nocturnal wings of man; more so than Africa, because of its elaboration, its continuity. Remote from ourselves in dream and in time, India belongs to the Ancient Orient of our soul. The last rajahs are not pharaohs, but the Brahmans of Benares evoke the priests of Isis, the fakirs were there in Alexander's time, and the peacocks in the derelict palaces of Amber had called to my mind the Chaldean multitude, astounded by the ambassadors from the kingdoms of India “whose birds could spread their tails.” And this other Egypt, whose people and beliefs had changed little since the time of Ramses, was perhaps the last religious civilization, certainly the last great polytheism. What is Zeus, compared with Shiva? The only god of antiquity whose language is worthy of India is the god without temples—Fate.
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