India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  The Vedas already included the idea that mortal desire—since it implies lack—had no place in the highest state of being; that what was needed was that death-in-life and spiritual rebirth sought by all teachers, from the early shamans to the existentialists. Sakyamuni's creed was less a rejection of Vedic philosophy than an effort to apply it, and his intense practice of meditation does not content itself with the serenity of yoga states (which in his view falls short of ultimate truth) but goes beyond, until the transparent radiance of stilled mind opens out in prajna, or transcendent knowing, that higher consciousness or “Mind” which is inherent in all sentient beings, and which depends on the unsentimental embrace of all existence. A true experience of prajna corresponds to “enlightenment” or liberation—not change, but transformation—a profound vision of his identity with universal life, past, present, and future, that keeps man from doing harm to others and sets him free from fear of birth-and-death.

  In the fifth century BC, near the town of Gaya, south and east of Varanasi, Sakyamuni attained enlightenment in the deep experience that his own “true nature,” his Buddha-nature, was no different from the nature of the universe. For half a century thereafter, at such places as the Deer Park in Sarnath, and Nalanda, and the Vulture's Peak near present-day Rajgir, he taught a doctrine based upon the impermanence of individual existence, the eternal continuity of becoming, as in the morning river that appears the same as the river of the night before, now passed away. (Though he preached to women and weakened the caste system by admitting low-born brethren to his order, Sakyamuni never involved himself in social justice, far less government; his way holds that self-realization is the greatest contribution one can make to one's fellow man.) At the age of eighty, he ended his days at Kusinagara (the modern Kusinara), forty miles east of Gorakhpur and just west of the Kali Gandaki River.

  This much is true, all else is part of the Buddha legend, which is truth of a different order. In regard to his enlightenment, it is related that this wanderer was in his thirties when he gave up the rigors of the yogi and embraced the “Middle Path” between sensuality and mortification, accepting food in a golden bowl from the daughter of the village headman. Thereupon, he was renounced by his disciples. At dusk he sat himself beneath a pipal tree with his face toward the East, vowing that though his skin and nerves and bones should waste away and his life-blood dry, he would not leave this seat until he had attained Supreme Enlightenment. All that night, beset by demons, Sakyamuni sat in meditation. And in that golden daybreak, it is told, the Self-Awakened One truly perceived the Morning Star, as if seeing it for the first time in his life.

  In what is now known as Bodh Gaya—still a pastoral land of cattle savanna, shimmering water, rice paddies, palms, and redclay hamlets without paved roads or wires—a Buddhist temple stands beside an ancient pipal, descended from that bodhi tree, or “Enlightenment Tree,” beneath which this man sat. Here in a warm dawn, ten days ago, with three Tibetan monks in maroon robes, I watched the rising of the Morning Star and came away no wiser than before. But later I wondered if the Tibetans were aware that the bodhi tree was murmuring with gusts of birds, while another large pipal, so close by that it touched the holy tree with many branches, was without life. I make no claim for this event: I simply declare what I saw there at Bodh Gaya.

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  (1874–1966)

  The British writer W. Somerset Maugham is best known for his skillful short stories and the novel Of Human Bondage (1915), which describes the doomed passion of a medical student not much unlike the one Maugham himself was. Many of his stories are set in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaya, and prefigure the gloomier cosmopolitan fiction of Graham Greene. Strangely, he did not visit India until late in his life—1938—and he took what in many ways was the British Grand Tour of India: Bombay, Benares, Agra, Kerala, Goa. Although a partisan admirer of Kipling, Maugham cast a skeptical eye at the pretensions of empire building. He was interested in exploring the Indian claim to spirituality. He was particularly intrigued by the practice of chastity, perhaps because he found it so difficult to adopt it in his own life. He met a number of Indian holy men. Some of these interests found their way into one of his more famous novels, The Razor's Edge (1944), which prefigured the western quest in the 1960s for unwestern forms of personal salvation.

  from A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK

  Goa. You drive through coconut groves among which you see here and there ruins of houses. On the lagoon sail fishing boats, their lateen sails shining white in the brilliant sun. The churches are large and white, their façades decorated with honey-colored stone pilasters. Inside they are large, bare, spacious, with pulpits in Portuguese baroque carved with the utmost elaboration and altarpieces in the same style. In one, at a side altar, a priest, a native, was saying mass with a dark-faced acolyte to serve him. There was no one to worship. In the Franciscan Church you are shown a wooden Christ on a crucifix and the guide tells you that six months before the destruction of the city it wept tears. In the cathedral they were holding a service, the organ was playing and in the organ loft there was a small choir of natives singing with a harshness in which somehow the Catholic chants acquired a mysteriously heathen, Indian character. It was strangely impressive to see these great empty churches in that deserted place and to know that day by day with not a soul to listen the priests said mass in them.

  The priest. He came to see me at the hotel. He was a tall Indian, neither thin nor fat, with good, somewhat blunt features and large dark liquid eyes, with shining whites to them. He wore a cassock. At first he was very nervous and his hands moved restlessly, but I did what I could to put him at his ease, and presently his hands were still. He spoke very good English. He told me that he was of Brahmin family, his ancestor, a Brahmin, having been converted by one of the companions of St. Francis Xavier. He was a man in the early thirties, of powerful physique and of a fine presence. His voice was rich and musical. He had been six years in Rome and during his stay in Europe had traveled much. He wanted to go back, but his mother was old and wished him to remain in Goa till she died. He taught in a school and preached. He spent much of his time converting the Sudras. He said it was hopeless now to try to do anything with the high-caste Hindus. I tried to get him to speak of religion. He told me that he thought Christianity was large enough to embrace all the other faiths, but regretted that Rome had not allowed the Indian Church to develop according to the native inclinations. I got the impression that he accepted the Christian dogmas as a discipline, but without fervor, and I am not sure that if one had been able to get to the bottom of his beliefs one would not have found that they were held with at least a certain skepticism. I had a feeling that even though there were four hundred years of Catholicism behind him he was still at heart a Vedantist. I wondered if to him the God of the Christians was not merged, if not in his mind, at least in some obscure depth of the unconscious, with the Brahman of the Upanishads. He told me that even among the Christians the caste system still obtained to this extent that none of them married out of his own caste. It would be unheard of that a Christian of Brahmin extraction should marry a Christian of Sudra extraction. He was not displeased to tell me that there was not in his veins a drop of white blood; his family had always kept resolutely pure. “We're Christians,” he said to me, “but first of all we're Hindus.” His attitude to Hinduism was tolerant and sympathetic.

  The backwaters of Travancore. They are narrow canals, more or less artificial, that is to say natural stretches of water have been joined up by embanked channels to make a waterway from Trivandrum to Cochin. On each side grow coconuts, and thatched houses with mud roofs stand at the water's edge, each surrounded by its little compound in which grow bananas, papaya and sometimes a jack tree. Children play; women sit about, or pound rice; in frail boats, sometimes carrying loads of coconuts or leaves or provender for cattle, men and boys slowly paddle up and down; on the banks people fish. I saw one man with a bow and arrow and a little bundle of fish that
he had shot. Everyone bathes. It is green, cool and quiet. You get a very curious impression of pastoral life, peaceful and primitive, and not too hard. Now and then a big barge passes, poled by two men from one town to another. Here and there is a modest little temple or a tiny chapel, for a large proportion of the population is Christian.

  The river is grown over with the water hyacinth. The plants, with their delicate mauve flowers, rooted not in soil but in water, float along, and as your boat passes through, making a channel of clear water, they are pushed aside; but no sooner has it passed than they drift back with the stream and the breeze, and no trace that you have gone that way remains. So with us who have made some small stir in the world.

  The Dewan. I had been told that he was not only an astute but an unscrupulous politician. Everyone agreed that he was as clever as he was crooked. He was a thickset, sturdy man, no taller than I, with alert but not very large eyes, a broad brow, a hooked nose, full lips and a small rounded chin. He had a thick crop of fuzzy hair. He was dressed in a white dhoti, a white tunic fitting close round the neck, and a white scarf; his feet were bare and he wore sandals which he slipped on and off. He had the geniality of the politician who for years has gone out of his way to be cordial with everyone he meets. He talked very good English, fluently, with a copious choice of words, and he put what he had to say plainly and with logical sequence. He had a resonant voice and an easy manner. He did not agree with a good deal that I said and corrected me with decision, but with the courtesy that took it for granted I was too intelligent to be affronted by contradiction. He was of course very busy, having all the affairs of the state in his charge, but seemed to have enough leisure to talk for the best part of an hour on Indian metaphysics and religion as though there were nothing that interested him more. He seemed well read not only in Indian literature, but in English, but there was no indication that he had any acquaintance with the literature or thought of other European countries.

  When I began to speak of religion in India as being the basis of all their philosophy, he corrected me. “No,” he said, “that is not so; there is no religion in India in your sense of the word; there are systems of philosophy, and theism, Hindu theism, is one of its varieties.”

  I asked him if educated, cultured Hindus had still an active belief in Karma and transmigration. He answered with emphasis. “I absolutely believe in it myself with all the strength of my being. I am convinced that I have passed through innumerable lives before this one and that I shall have to pass through I do not know how many more before I secure release. Karma and transmigration are the only possible explanations I can see for the inequalities of men and for the evil of the world. Unless I believed in them I should think the world meaningless.”

  I asked him if, believing this, the Hindu feared death less than the European. He took a little time to think of his answer, and, as I had already discovered was his way, while he was considering it, talked of something else so that I thought he was not going to answer. Then he said: “The Indian is not like the Japanese who has been taught from his earliest years that life is of no value and that there are a number of reasons for which he must not hesitate for an instant to sacrifice it. The Indian does not fear death because it will take him away from life, he fears it because there is uncertainty in what condition he may be born next. He can have no assurance that he will be born a Brahmin, an angel or even a God, he may be born a Sudra, a dog or a worm. When he thinks of death it is the future he fears.”

  The viña-player. He was a stoutish man of forty, clean-shaven, with all the front part of his head shaven too; his hair, long at the back, was tied in a knot. He was dressed in a dhoti and a collarless shirt. He sat on the floor to play. His instrument was highly decorated, carved in low relief and ending in a dragon's head. He played for a couple of hours, now and then breaking into a few bars of song, music hundreds of years old, but some much less, music of the last century when under a Maharajah of Travancore, himself an accomplished musician, there was great enthusiasm for the art. It is elaborate music, which requires all your attention, and I do not think I could have followed it at all if I hadn't had some acquaintance with modern music. It is slowly rhythmical and when your ear gets accustomed to it various and tuneful. Of late years the composers have been not a little influenced by modern music, European music, and it is queer in these Eastern melodies to discern a faint recollection of the bagpipes or the martial din of a military band.

  A Hindu house. The owner was a judge who had inherited it from his fathers. He was dead, and I was received by his widow, a stout woman in white with white curly hair hanging down her back, and bare feet. You entered by a door in a blank wall and found yourself in a sort of loggia with a carved wooden ceiling of jackwood. It was decorated with lotus leaves and in the center a bas-relief of Siva dancing. Then came a small dusty courtyard in which were growing crotons and cassias. Then the house. In front was a veranda with hanging eaves, showing the open woodwork of the roof, beautifully joined, and with a carved ceiling of a rich brown like that of the loggia. At each end was a raised part under which were receptacles in which the owner normally kept his clothes and which served as seats. Here he received his guests. At the back were two doors with rich locks and hinges of decorated brass; they led to two small dark rooms, with one bed in each, and in one of which the master of the house had slept. At one side was a closed aperture which led to a space in which the grain was kept. Going through a small door at the side you came into another courtyard; at the back of this were the women's apartments and on the sides the kitchen and other small rooms. I was shown into one room in which was some poor, shabby and old-fashioned European furniture.

  The first courtyard at night would surely lose its dusty neglected aspect, and under the moon and the stars, cool and silent, form a romantic setting. I should have liked to listen there to the viña-player, his absorbed and serious face lit by the smoky flame of a brass lamp, its wick floating in coconut oil.

  VED MEHTA

  (1934–)

  Ved Mehta was born in what is now Pakistan. An attack of meningitis left him completely blind at four. He left India when he was sixteen years old to go to a school for the blind in the United States. He was educated at Oxford and Harvard and went on to live in New York. His many memoirs describe in detail these physical and emotional displacements. During the last four decades, he has returned often to India, researching reports for The New Yorker that have now gone into several books and form one of the most substantial journalistic engagements with contemporary India. The earliest of these pieces excerpted here describe his visit in 1966 to the Kumbha Mela, a once-in-twelve-years gathering of devout Hindus at the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna. Celebrities and glossy magazines in the West have recently discovered the Kumbha Mela. At the time of Mehta's visit, it was a less glamorous affair, notable mostly for its bewildering variety of Hindu sects and sadhus (mendicants). Mehta met, among other Hindu religious entrepreneurs, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, though then still some years away from worldwide fame as the guru of the Beatles, had, as the excerpt demonstrates, carefully distilled his wisdom into a vagueness that could both confuse and console.

  from PORTRAIT OF INDIA

  THE LOINS OF THE EARTH ARE BETWIXT THE GANGA AND THE YAMUNA

  Today, I am in Allahabad, which, like the other Indian cities, is a jumble of British, Muslim, and Hindu influences. The British Allahabad, which now exists only for the benefit of a few educated Indians, takes in the military and civil cantonments, the racecourse, the clubs, and the university. The Muslim Ilahabas is well represented by Akbar's great fort, which lies three miles to the east of the city, but the wedge of land has by now been so eroded that the water flows very close to the embankment, leaving a correspondingly larger sand bank at Jhusi, across the Ganga. The ancient Hindu Prayaga can be observed in the parched, dusty, but joyful faces of tens of thousands of pilgrims coming to the city on the Grand Trunk Road—some in buses, tongas, ekkas, and bulloc
k carts, some on bicycles, horses, and even elephants, but most on foot, patiently trudging, with loads on their heads, as if they had been walking for years.

  The country is in mourning for the death of Prime Minister Shastri, at Tashkent, but the mela goes on, and at one point on the day before Amavasya I find myself resting in a tent— pitched near the sangam—which I have reserved in advance, and composing a letter to Roy and Miss Devi, who print in Kumbha a letter to a friend relating some of their experiences at the Purna Kumbha mela of 1954:

  I have heard from you such a lot about the sadhus you have met [their letter says] that I may as well return the compliment by telling you about a few we have had the good fortune to contact here—at the Kumbha mela.