India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  And I remember also at Calcutta: this time it was not a matter of a Rotary Club meeting but of a cocktail party in honor of some actress or another, the usual fat piece with the made-up eyes: there had been a gloomy party with music and traditional dances in the dining room at the center of the hotel; then the guests had wandered out into the corridors and the waiting halls, with the great hangings and the huge ventilators suspended above the pink velvets and light woods of vast colonial elegance: they were all half drunk (the Indians get drunk easily: and in many states there is prohibition), lugubriously happy: but silent. They didn't know how to exchange conversation. And one understood that around their cocktail party extended Calcutta, the unconfined city where every human pain and suffering touches the extreme limit, and life is carried out like a funereal ballet.

  The people in India that I have studied, whether they possess something or carry out that function one calls “governing,” know that they have no hope: scarcely freed from the inferno by means of a modern cultural conscience they know that they will have to stay in that inferno. The horizon of even the most vague renaissance is not visible in this generation, nor even in the next, and who knows in which of the future ones. The absence of every realizable hope makes the Indian middle class, as I said before, enclose themselves in that little certainty they possess: the family. They huddle there in order not to see and not to be seen. They have a very noble civic sense: and their ideal heroes, Gandhi and Nehru, are there to testify to it: they possess a quality which is absolutely rare in the modern world: tolerance. This, despite the impossibility of acting, forces them into a state of renunciation which reduces their mental horizon: but such modesty is infinitely more touching than irritating. And this is certain: it is never vulgar. Although India may be an inferno of misery it is wonderful to live there, because it almost totally lacks this vulgarity. Even the vulgarity of the “hero” with which the Indian identifies himself (the pink puppy with black whiskers) is in reality absolutely ingenious and comic, generally common to all peasant societies. The big puppies with their black whiskers, vulgar in the true sense of the word (be it in type contaminated by imitation of a foreign middle class, more precisely, by Americanism), are very rare. At Tekkadi, a place lost in the heart of the South, I saw two types of different middle-class people: exactly in proportion to their numbers.

  Tekkadi is a tourist place: hotels are grouped on the boundaries of Kerala and the state of Madras, in the middle of a forest, on the banks of a large artificial lake. One goes there because they say there are some wild animals: indeed it is true that a tour by boat on the lake at dawn, the hour in which the animals go to drink is included in the tourist program. In reality we didn't see a single thing, and I had to seek the innocent pleasure of seeing wild animals roaming freely in Africa.

  The day on which we arrived in Tekkadi was the day of the tenth anniversary of Indian independence. Throughout all the villages we crossed one felt this simple atmosphere of a noble national festival because, as I was saying, India is an extremely simple and provincial country. There were flags and bunting on the poor huts amidst the palm groves, columns of schoolchildren through the streets, and gatherings of people seated formally in the middle of dusty village squares.

  Many groups had made an excursion to Tekkadi for the festival: but let's be clear, there was much simplicity and poverty. However the atmosphere was that of certain European tourist spots on a Sunday.

  Evening was descending: the lake in front was fearsome in its primordial silence, inimical to man. But around us we heard voices, the laughter of groups.

  Before supper Moravia and I went on a little walk along the road by the hotel which, with its rather Swiss aspect, rose up on a long promontory of the sad lake.

  While we were walking a 1100, a black one (yes, a 1100, a Fiat, which is a very common car in India) came toward us, full of four or five rather fat young men, pink, with black whiskers: it pretended to come across our path, with an insolent hooting of the horn: nothing else. But this was the only pathetic, aggressive and vulgar act of our whole Indian stay: something worthy of Milan or Palermo. Heaven preserve that this is not the way of evolution of the scarcely formed Indian middle class. Certainly objectively there is a danger. The weak have a strong tendency to become violent, the fragile to become ferocious: it would be terrible if a population of four hundred million inhabitants, which at the moment carries such weight on the historical and political stage of the world, became westernized in this mechanical and degrading way. There is everything to wish for this people apart from the middle-class experience, which would end up being of the Balkan, Spanish or Bourbon type. However, those fat fellows with their whiskers were only four; nothing in comparison with the whole school with its teachers who we met a little while after as we were continuing our walk.

  They were all dressed in white: but this time the cloth was really white and new, because it was a holiday, because it was the day of independence. The big sheet around the hips or held down as far as the ankles, or taken by the corners and tied on the stomach in such a way as to leave the leg bare, the little tunic or white blouse, the white turban bound round the black wavy hair, with its weight and curls so romantic and barbaric: all was clean and pure.

  They were standing at the bottom of a grassy slope on the edge of the lake, which had already disappeared in the last bloodred colors of dusk.

  We went to sit on the slope opposite them, and we began to look at each other a little timidly. What a difference to our students! These were behaving perfectly, almost silently, chattering amongst themselves or with their teachers almost in a whisper. However the happiness of the moment and of the occasion shone in their eyes, black and brilliant in their dark faces, those tender and modest features. They looked at Moravia and me, sometimes scarcely noticing us, other times giving us a full smile. But they didn't dare address us, and we were also silent, as if through fear of interrupting that current of sympathy, which although silent was so full. Also they seemed to have understood, teachers and students, that the best thing was to look and smile at us like that, in silence.

  Five, ten minutes passed, a quarter of an hour. The light of dusk became ever more gloomy, and there we all were, opposite each other, looking: their clothes belonging to the ancient pagan world became ever whiter, their silent sympathy sweeter.

  Then, after having exchanged some words almost in a whisper, one of them, who was nearer on the gentle slope, came forward to where we were sitting: his companions were seated around him, cross-legged on the dry grass; in his hand he held a recorder or a flute, I don't know, but a little wind instrument: almost hidden amidst the folds of his tunic. He was uncertain whether to play or not: and his companions smiled, encouraging him. Then he decided. He sat on the grass and, with his face turned toward us, began to play. It was an old Indian melody, because India is resistant to any kind of foreign musical influence: indeed I believe that the Indians may not even be physically capable of hearing music other than their own. It was a syncopated, muffled and doleful phrase, which always finished, as with every Indian air, in an almost guttural lament, a sweet, pathetic death rattle: but a kind of noble, innocent happiness was enclosed within this sadness.

  The boy played his flute and looked at us. It seemed as if, by playing to us in that way, he spoke to us, he made us a long speech, for himself and his companions.

  “Look at us here,” he seemed to say, “poor little Indians, with these clothes of ours which scarcely cover our small bodies, naked and dark like those of animals, lambs or little goats. We go to school, it is true, we study. You can see our teachers around us. We have our ancient religion, complicated and a little terrifying, and in addition today we celebrate with flags and little processions the festival of our independence.

  “But how far there is still to go! Our villages are constructed with mud and with the dung of cows, our cities are only markets without form, dust-ridden and impoverished. Illnesses of every kind threaten us, smallpo
x and plague are at home here, like snakes. And so many younger brothers are born for whom we cannot find a handful of rice to divide amongst them. What will happen to us? What can we do? However in this tragedy there remains in our souls something which, if it is not happiness, is almost happiness: it is tenderness, humility toward the world, it is love… with this smile of sweetness, you, lucky foreigner, when you have returned to your homeland you will remember us, poor little Indians…”

  He continued to play and to talk like this, for a long time, in the anguished silence of the lake.

  OCTAVIO PAZ

  (1914–98)

  Octavio Paz was born to an impoverished lawyer in Mexico City. He published his first collection of poems when he was nineteen. He visited Spain during the civil war in the 1930s, as a sympathizer for the Republican cause. He was influenced at the same time by French surrealists. In Mexico, he wrote more poetry and founded and edited literary magazines. In 1950, he published his influential study of Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude. He first visited India as a diplomat in 1951: a brief, tantalizing trip that ended before it began when Paz was transferred to Japan. In 1962, he returned as the Mexican ambassador in New Delhi. For the next six years he traveled extensively across the subcontinent. His “education in India,” he wrote in In Light of India (1997), marked him deeply; and his record of it, contained in several poems and essays, present the rare spectacle of a Mexican sensibility examining with confidence what he called the “immense reality of India.”

  from A TALE OF TWO GARDENS

  THE MAUSOLEUM OF HUMAYUN

  To the debate of wasps

  the dialectic of monkeys

  twitterings of statistics

  it opposes

  (high flame of rose)

  formed out of stone and air and birds

  time in repose above the water)

  silence's architecture

  IN THE LODI GARDENS

  for Claude Esteban

  The black, pensive, dense

  domes of the mausoleums

  suddenly shot birds

  into the unanimous blue

  THE DAY IN UDAIPUR

  White palace,

  white on the black lake.

  Lingam and yoni.

  As the goddess to the god,

  you surround me, night.

  Cool terrace.

  You are immense, immense—

  made to measure.

  Inhuman stars.

  But this hour is ours.

  I fall and rise,

  I burn, drenched.

  Are you only one body?

  Birds on the water,

  dawn on eyelids.

  Self-absorbed,

  high as death,

  the marble bursts.

  Hushed palaces,

  whiteness adrift.

  Women and children

  on the roads:

  scattered fruit.

  Rags or rays of lightning?

  A procession on the plain.

  Silver running cool

  and clanking:

  ankle and wrist.

  In a rented costume

  the boy goes to his wedding.

  Clean clothes

  spread out on the rocks

  Look at them and say nothing.

  On the little island

  monkeys with red asses screech.

  Hanging from the wall,

  a dark and angry sun:

  wasps' nest.

  And my head is another sun,

  full of black thoughts.

  Flies and blood.

  A small goat skips

  in Kali's court.

  Gods, men and beasts

  eat from the same plate.

  Over the pale god

  the black goddess dances,

  decapitated.

  Heat, the hour split open,

  and those mangoes, rotten…

  Your face, the lake:

  smooth, without thoughts.

  A trout leaps.

  Lights on the water:

  souls sailing.

  Ripples:

  the golden plain—and the crack…

  Your clothes nearby.

  I, like a lamp

  on your shadow body.

  A living scales:

  bodies entwined

  over the void.

  The sky crushes us,

  the water sustains us.

  I open my eyes:

  so many trees

  were born tonight.

  What I've seen here, what I say,

  the white sun erases.

  ALAN ROSS

  (1922–2001)

  Alan Ross was born in Calcutta and enjoyed an enchanted childhood in Bengal before being sent back, like many hapless colonial children, to bleak, unfamiliar England. He went to Oxford before serving in the Royal Navy. He emerged after World War II as one of the more flamboyant men of letters in Britain. He wrote poetry, travel essays, biographies, and memoirs; he reported on cricket matches for The Observer; but he was, above all, a keen connoisseur of good writing, painting, cricket, and Indian food. His friends included Ian Fleming, in whose spy novel The Man with the Golden Gun he featured as Commander Ross. Ross visited India regularly. He went horse racing in Calcutta and Bombay and sniffed around for local talent. Many of the Indian writers well known in the West today—Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Seth, Amit Chaudhuri—found their first tentative efforts showcased in the London Magazine, a prestigious literary quarterly Ross edited for over four decades. In this excerpt from his memoir, Ross remembers, with a fierce nostalgia, the idyll he was born into and from which he was then wrenched away.

  from BLINDFOLD GAMES

  Above my desk, two views of Calcutta, dated 1798; four years after the Daniells, uncle and nephew, had left India. Entitled “Garden Reach” and “Hooghly” they show a similar sweep of river, that elbow of the Hooghly before it glides between the Botanical Gardens, with its Great Banyan Tree, and Kidderpore Docks. Soon it will straighten out past Fort William and the Racecourse, Eden Gardens and Strand Road. On the north bank the Grand Trunk Road, parallel to the river, leads out, behind Howrah station, to Belur Math, many-domed headquarters of the Ramakrishna Mission founded in 1897 by Vivekananda and so designed to resemble from different angles a church, a mosque and a temple. Not far off, at Chitpur, is the house where Tagore was born and where, in 1941, five years after the last of my childhood ties with India had been dissolved, he died.

  What the engravings show are expanses of water under scattered cloud. Boats drift under lateen sails or are laboriously poled to new fishing areas. Lawns slope to the river edge. At intervals steep, narrow steps run down to bathing ghats. Landing stages glint behind clusters of bamboo and mango. Spindly moplike palms shade the infrequent domed buildings, outposts of an invisible city. Between the huge sky and the wide waterway the land seems barely to have broken surface.

  This same scene appears more elaborately in View of Calcutta from the Garden Reach, in the Daniells' A Picturesque Voyage to India. The river jostles with sailing vessels and small craft, and in the distance the skyline of Calcutta suggests Venice. The Garden Reach of East India Company princelings set its mansions to catch the breeze coming off the Hooghly, some far scent of the sea lost in its muddiness.

  Thomas Daniell's drawings, particularly those of excavations, give India an Italian look. Doomar Leyna, or the ruins at Rameswaram, might be Pompeii, the Esplanade in Calcutta, Naples. The illusion derives from architecture divorced from climate.

  The Calcutta that emerges from the engravings of late eighteenth-century travelers is white and stately, a far cry from Kipling's “City of Dreadful Night.” That is how I remembered it, too, sheltered from its bustees and bustle. It does not matter how often I have experienced it to the contrary, I have only to look at a map of the skull-shaped city—the Hooghly running from temple to upper lip—for it to detach itself into a series of frozen images bereft of people: the Victoria Memorial; the Kaligha
t temple; South Park Street cemetery; the Ochterlony Monument; Dalhousie Square; the High Court; the Jain Temple; the Nakhoda Mosque; the Marble Palace. These are the conventional “sights” of Calcutta but they were nevertheless also the spoils of childish photographic expeditions that, so soon separated from the originals, were my only sources of comfort. They were “picturesque” views, just as the Daniells called their journeys “picturesque”—chosen for their suitability as subjects for pictures. From the ages of seven to twenty they had to stand in for me as icons.