India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  What did I really know of this civilization? Its arts, its thought, its history. No more than I knew of the great dead civ-ilizations—except that I had heard its music and had met a few gurus, which was not without importance in a land whose religious thinking expresses a Truth which is not to be understood but lived: “Believe nothing that you have not first experienced.” I was not presumptuous enough to “know” (on the way through…) a way of thought that had survived seventeen conquests and two millennia; I merely sought to grasp something of its haunting message.

  Man can experience the presence of universal Being in all beings, and of all beings in universal Being; he discovers then the identity of all appearances, whether they be pleasure and pain, life and death, outside himself and within Being; he can reach that essence in himself which transcends his transmigrated souls, and experience its identity with the essence of a world of endless returning, which he escapes through his ineffable communion with it. But there is something at once bewitching and bewitched in Indian thought, which has to do with the feeling it gives us of climbing a sacred mountain whose summit constantly recedes; of going forward in darkness by the light of the torch which it carries. We know this feeling through some of our saints and philosophers; but it is in India alone that Being, conquered from universal appearance and metamorphosis, does not part company with them, but often becomes inseparable from them “like the two sides of a medal,” to point the way to an inexhaustible Absolute which transcends even Being itself.

  Of course, the word “being” is not a satisfactory rendering of the “uncreated” Brahman, the supreme Deity—to which the wise man gains access through what is deepest in his soul, and not through the mind. The gods are merely different means of reaching it, and “each man approaches God through his own gods.” It is It that the Buddha seeks to destroy in his earliest teachings, when he gives as the final end of ecstasy what he magnificently calls “the peace of the abyss.”

  Superstitions swarmed like mayflies around this peak of thought, which animated all the temples I had seen, as well as Benares. But how inadequately it illuminated the vast nation that surrounded me! I had met men of the Brahmin caste, but no priests; intellectuals, artists, diplomats—and their wives; a few great figures, and many politicians, a race unknown at the beginning of the century. Not a single tradesman, not a single peasant. Alone in this melancholy garden of an enormous city looking out over the most religious and surely the most affectionate country in the world, I could recall only an immense and silent multitude—as silent as its friendly animals. A Hindu rather than an Indian crowd: its fields resembled French fields, but its dreams did not resemble French dreams. But what I evoked by way of contrast (more precisely, what was evoked in me), was not a Christian crowd: it was the crowd of the Paris métro, and more especially the one I had known best, that of the war. The spirituality of India made me think fleetingly of the Glières chaplain, but the Hindu multitudes, for whom death gives a meaning to life, made me think with bitterness of the men of our own land for whom death has no meaning: the shadowy figures who for centuries had laid a scarlet hibiscus at the foot of a dark god or of a tree reminiscent of a divine benediction, brothers of the peasants in whom I perceived only the sad smile that had perhaps greeted Semiramis, the little tradesmen, brothers of so many other little tradesmen spoke to me of all our own men without caste whom I had seen in the face of death.

  Beyond the garden where the sound of the waves was inaudible, the gulf still glittered; the gulls of Oman would wheel back and forth until nightfall. I went inside the deserted bungalow of the last governor of Bombay, to re-read what I wrote in 1940 about my comrades who fought and died in vain…

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  (1927–)

  Born in New York City, Peter Matthiessen was educated at the Sorbonne and Yale University. In 1950, he moved to Paris where he helped found the literary magazine Paris Review. Later that same decade, he published Wildlife in America (1959). It was the first of many such books he would write on the disastrous effect of human beings upon the natural environment. For the next four decades he explored similar themes in places as diverse as New Guinea, Siberia, and Africa. In 1973, soon after the death of his wife, he traveled to India and Nepal, looking for the rare and elusive snow leopard. The beautifully strange book he published subsequently, The Snow Leopard (1978), became something of a cult item. Matthiessen seemed to belong in it to both the great tradition of American transcendentalists, reverential before Indian religion and philosophy, as well as to the more recent and troubled generation of American seekers of Eastern wisdom. He never saw a snow leopard; he wasn't admitted to the Buddhist monastery he badly wanted to see. But these disappointments were more than compensated for, it seems, by the exhilaration of a mind emptied Zenstyle, amid the Himalayan vastness, of its usual western concerns. Remarkably, for someone so seemingly self-absorbed, Matthiessen rarely missed anything in the world around him. These excerpts from the beginning of The Snow Leopard show him capable of both hard-edged cerebration and lyrical meditation.

  from THE SNOW LEOPARD

  September 28

  At sunrise the small expedition meets beneath a giant fig beyond Pokhara—two white sahibs, four Sherpas, fourteen porters. The Sherpas are of the famous mountain tribe of northeast Nepal, near Namche Bazaar, whose men accompany the ascents of the great peaks; they are Buddhist herders who have come down in recent centuries out of eastern Tibet—sherpa is a Tibetan word for “easterner”—and their language, culture, and appearance all reflect Tibetan origin. One of the porters is also a Sherpa, and two are refugee Tibetans; the rest are of mixed Aryan and Mongol stock. Mostly barefoot, in ragged shorts or the big-seated, jodhpur-legged pants of India, wearing all manner of old vests and shawls and headgear, the porters pick over the tall wicker baskets. In addition to their own food and blankets, they must carry a load of up to eighty pounds that is braced on their bent backs by a tump-line around the forehead, and there is much testing and denunciation of the loads, together with shrill bargaining, before any journey in these mountains can begin. Porters are mostly local men of uncertain occupation and unsteadfast habit, notorious for giving trouble. But it is also true that their toil is hard and wretchedly rewarded—about one dollar a day. As a rule, they accompany an expedition for no more than a week away from home, after which they are replaced by others, and the testing and denunciation start anew. Today nearly two hours pass, and clouds have gathered, before all fourteen are mollified, and the tattered line sets off toward the west.

  We are glad to go. These edges of Pokhara might be tropical outskirts anywhere—vacant children, listless adults, bent dogs and thin chickens in a litter of sagging shacks and rubble, mud, weeds, stagnant ditches, bad sweet smells, vivid bright broken plastic bits, and dirty fruit peelings awaiting the carrion pig; for want of better fare, both pigs and dogs consume the human excrement that lies everywhere along the paths. In fair weather, all this flux is tolerable, but now at the dreg end of the rainy season, the mire of life seems leached into the sallow skins of these thin beings, who squat and soap themselves and wring their clothes each morning in the rain puddles.

  Brown eyes observe us as we pass. Confronted with the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details: a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog eating withered grass, an ancient woman lifting her sari to move her shrunken bowels by the road. Yet in Varanasi there is hope of life that has been abandoned in such cities as Calcutta, which seems resigned to the dead and dying in its gutters. Shiva dances in the spicy foods, in the exhilarated bells of the swarming bicycles, the angry bus horns, the chatter of the temple monkeys, the vermilion tikka dot on the women's foreheads, even in the scent of charred human flesh that pervades the ghats. The people smile—that is the greatest miracle of all. In the heat and stench and shriek of Varanasi, where in fiery sunrise swallows fly like departing spirits over the vast silent r
iver, one delights in the smile of a blind girl being led, of a Hindu gentleman in white turban gazing benignly at the bus driver who reviles him, of a flute-playing beggar boy, of a slow old woman pouring holy water from the Ganga, the River, onto a stone elephant daubed red.

  Near the burning ghats, and the industry of death, a river palace has been painted with huge candy-striped tigers.

  No doubt Varanasi is the destination of this ancient Hindu at the outskirts of Pokhara, propped up on a basket borne on poles across the shoulders of four servants—off, it appears, on his last pilgrimage to the Mother Ganges, to the dark temples that surround the ghats, to those hostels where the pilgrim waits his turn to join the company of white-shrouded cadavers by the river edge, waits again to be laid upon the stacks of fired wood: the attendants will push this yellow foot, that shriveled elbow, back into the fire, and rake his remains off the burning platform into the swift river. And still enough scraps will remain to sustain life in the long-headed cadaverous dogs that haunt the ashes, while sacred kine—huge white silent things—devour the straw thongs that had bound this worn-out body to its stretcher.

  The old man has been ravened from within. That blind and greedy stare of his, that caved-in look, and the mouth working, reveal who now inhabits him, who now stares out.

  I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives no sign.

  Grey river road, grey sky. From rock to torrent rock flits a pied wagtail.

  Wayfarers: a delicate woman bears a hamper of small silver fishes, and another bends low beneath a basket of rocks that puts my own light pack to shame; her rocks will be hammered to gravel by other women of Pokhara, in the labor of the myriad brown hands that will surface a new road south to India.

  Through a shaft of sun moves a band of Magar women, scarletshawled; they wear heavy brass ornaments in the left nostril. In the new sun, a red-combed rooster clambers quickly to the roof matting of a roadside hut, and fitfully a little girl starts singing. The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen hundred miles, the Himalaya—the alaya (abode, or home) of hima (snow).

  Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillaea: seen under snow peaks, these tropical blossoms become the flowers of heroic landscapes. Macaques scamper in green meadow, and a turquoise roller spins in a golden light. Drongos, rollers, barbets, and the white Egyptian vulture are the common birds, and all have close relatives in East Africa, where GS and I first met; he wonders how this vulture would react if confronted with the egg of an ostrich, which was also a common Asian bird during the Pleistocene. In Africa, the Egyptian vulture is recognized as a toolusing species, due to its knack of cracking the huge ostrich eggs by slinging rocks at them with its beak.

  Until quite recently, these Nepal lowlands were broadleaf evergreen sal forest (Shorea robusta), the haunt of elephant and tiger and the great Indian rhinoceros. Forest-cutting and poaching cleared them out; except in last retreats such as the Rapti Valley, to the southeast, the saintly tread of elephants is gone. The last wild Indian cheetah was sighted in central India in 1952, the Asian lion is reduced to a single small population in the Gir Forest, northwest of Bombay, and the tiger becomes legendary almost everywhere. Especially in India and Pakistan, the hoofed animals are rapidly disappearing, due to destruction of habitat by subsistence agriculture, overcutting of the forests, overgrazing by the scraggy hordes of domestic animals, erosion, flood—the whole dismal cycle of events that accompanies overcrowding by human beings. In Asia more than all places on earth, it is crucial to establish wildlife sanctuaries at once, before the last animals are overwhelmed. As GS has written, “Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save these remnants of his past.”

  The track along the Yamdi River is a main trading route, passing through rice paddies and villages on its way west to the Kali Gandaki River, where it turns north to Mustang and Tibet. Green village compounds, set about with giant banyans and old stone pools and walls, are cropped to lawn by water buffalo and cattle; the fresh water and soft shade give them the harmony of parks. These village folk own even less than those of Pokhara, yet they are spared by their old economies from modern poverty: one understands why “village life” has been celebrated as the natural, happy domain of man by many thinkers from Lao-tzu to Gandhi. In a warm sun children play, and women roll clothes on rocks at the village fountain and pound grain in stone mortars, and from all sides come reassuring dung smells and chicken clatter and wafts of fire smoke from the low hearths. In tidy yards, behind strong stiles and walls, the clay huts are of warm earthen red, with thatched roofs, hand-carved sills and shutters, and yellow-flowered pumpkin vines. Maize is stacked in narrow cribs, and rice is spread to dry on broad straw mats, and between the banana and papaya trees big calm spiders hang against the sky.

  A canal bridged here and there by ten-foot granite slabs runs through a hamlet, pouring slowly over shining pebbles. It is midday, the sun melts the air, and we sit on a stone wall in the cool shade. By the canal is the village tea house, a simple open-fronted hut with makeshift benches and a clay oven in the form of a rounded mound on the clay floor. The mound has a side opening for inserting twigs and two holes on the top for boiling water, which is poured through a strainer of cheap tea dust into a glass containing coarse sugar and buffalo milk. With this chiya we take plain bread and a fresh cucumber, while children playing on the shining stones pretend to splash us, and a collared dove sways on a tall stalk of bamboo.

  One by one the porters come, turning around to lower their loads onto the wall. A porter of shy face and childlike smile, who looks too slight for his load, is playing comb music on a fig leaf. “Too many hot,” says another, smiling. This is the Sherpa porter, Tukten, a wiry small man with Mongol eyes and outsized ears and a disconcerting smile—I wonder why this Tukten is a porter.

  I set off ahead, walking alone in the cool breeze of the valley. In the bright September light and mountain shadow—steep foothills are closing in as the valley narrows, and the snow peaks to the north are no longer seen—the path follows a dike between the reedy canal and the green terraces of rice that descend in steps to the margins of the river. Across the canal, more terraces ascend to the crests of the high hills, and a blue sky.

  At a rest wall, two figs of different species were planted long ago; one is a banyan, or nigrodha (Fiscus indica), the other a pipal

  (F. religiosa), sacred to both the Hindus and the Buddhists. Wild flowers and painted stones are set among the buttressed roots, to bring the traveler good fortune, and stone terraces are built up around the trunks in such a way that the shade-seeking traveler may back up and set down his load while standing almost straight. These resting places are everywhere along the trading routes, some of them so ancient that the great trees have long since died, leaving two round holes in a stonework oval platform. Like the tea houses and the broad stepping-stones that are built into the hills, the rest walls impart a blessedness to this landscape, as if we had wandered into a lost country of the golden age.

  Awaiting the line of porters that winds through the paddies, I sit on the top level of the wall, my feet on the step on which the loads are set and my back against a tree. In dry sunshine and the limpid breeze down from the mountains, two black cows are threshing rice, flanks gleaming in the light of afternoon. First the paddy is drained and the rice sickled, then the yoked animals tied by a long line to a stake in the middle of the rice, are driven round and round in a slowly decreasing circle while children fling the stalks beneath their hooves. Then the stalks are tossed into the air, and the grains beneath swept into baskets to be taken home and winnowed. The fire-colored dragonflies in the early autumn air, the bent backs in bright reds and yello
ws, the gleam on the black cattle and wheat stubble, the fresh green of the paddies and the sparkling river—over everything lies an immortal light, like transparent silver.

  In the clean air and absence of all sound, of even the simplest machinery—for the track is often tortuous and steep, and fords too many streams, to permit bicycles—in the warmth and harmony and seeming plenty, come whispers of a paradisal age. Apparently the grove of sal trees called Lumbini, only thirty miles south of this same tree, in fertile lands north of the Rapti River, has changed little since the sixth century BC, when Siddhartha Gautama was born there to a rich clan of the Sakya tribe in a kingdom of elephants and tigers. Gautama forsook a life of ease to become a holy mendicant, or “wanderer”—a common practice in northern India even today. Later he was known as Sakyamuni (Sage of the Sakyas), and afterwards, the Buddha—the Awakened One. Fig trees and the smoke of peasant fires, the greensward and gaunt cattle, white egrets and jungle crows are still seen on the Ganges Plain where Sakyamuni passed his life, from Lumbini south and east to Varanasi (an ancient city even when Gautama came there) and Rajgir and Gaya. Tradition says that he traveled as far north as Kathmandu (even then a prosperous city of the Newars) and preached on the hill of Swayambhunath, among the monkeys and the pines.

  In Sakyamuni's time, the disciples called yogas were already well evolved. Perhaps a thousand years before, the dark-skinned Dravidians of lowland India had been overcome by nomad Aryans from the Asian steppes who were bearing their creed of sky gods, wind, and light across Eurasia. Aryan concepts were contained in their Sanskrit Vedas, or knowledge—ancient texts of unknown origin which include the Rig Veda and the Upanishads and were to become the base of the Hindu religion. To the wandering ascetic named Sakyamuni, such epic preachments on the nature of the Universe and Man were useless as a cure for human suffering. In what became known as the Four Noble Truths, Sakyamuni perceived that man's existence is inseparable from sorrow; that the cause of suffering is craving; that peace is attained by extinguishing craving; that this liberation may be brought about by following the Eight-fold Path: right attention to one's understanding, intentions, speech, and actions; right livelihood, effort, mindfulness; right concentration, by which is meant the unification of the self through sitting yoga.