The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  Real? Balaram cried. Is it real to be cut to size with a tape? What you heard is rhetoric. How can rhetoric be real or unreal? Rhetoric is a language flexing its muscles. You wouldn’t understand: you’ve spent too many years reading novels about drawing-rooms in a language whose history has destroyed its knowledge of its own body. The truth is your mind is nothing but a dumping-ground for the West.

  Gopal gasped at the injustice of it. My mind? he said. And what about yours? What about you, spending your life reading about Pasteur curing beer in nineteenth-century France? What about all those books you read written by crazy Europeans about the shapes of skulls in prisons? How can you say my mind is a dumping-ground … ?

  Balaram’s face was suddenly flushed. He jumped to his feet: Be quiet, Gopal. Don’t say any more. You don’t know what you’re saying. Science doesn’t belong to countries. Reason doesn’t belong to any nation. They belong to history – to the world.

  Balaram turned, flung a stone into the lake and stalked off. Wait, Balaram, Gopal called after him, listen …

  Balaram’s voice came back to him from a distance – You’re wrong, I’ll show you – and Gopal was left alone with his sense of foreboding.

  For eight months after that Gopal neither saw nor heard from Balaram. He sent three letters to Lalpukur in that time. None was answered. He sent a telegram: Cable welfare speediliest. There was no answer, and Gopal was seriously worried. He began to think of dropping his cases for a few days to make a quick trip to Lalpukur.

  Then one day in mid-July, while Gopal was at home, drinking his evening tea, his wife heard the doorbell ring. She saw Balaram at the door and exclaimed with pleasure. Before he could step in she unleashed a volley of questions about Toru-debi and Alu. But he brushed past her, straight to the veranda.

  He stood in the doorway, looking at Gopal, his hands on his hips. I have an answer for you, he announced. I’ve made Alu a weaver.

  Gopal instantly forgot all his relief at seeing Balaram again. His mouth fell open with disbelief at the thought of an educated, literate man pushing his own nephew to manual labour.

  Balaram, delighted at Gopal’s surprise, said: Yes, it was the answer. The right thing to do. It took me a long time to reach it, but I did at last.

  Gopal, in stupefaction, took off his spectacles and began to wipe them on his vest. But why? he said. Why?

  It was the lump on his forehead beneath the hair-line. It had taken him all these years to discover its meaning. Spurzheim was wrong. The Mechanical sense was not on the pterion; it was not a mere propensity, to be lumped with Alimentiveness and Acquisitiveness. The Mechanical was the highest of all organs – the organ that made a mere two-legged creature Man, the seat of Reason. Where else could that organ be but on the crown of the forehead?

  Once the organ was identified everything else became blindingly clear – Alu’s huge hands, his squat stocky frame. Even the mysterious attraction that drew him to Shombhu Debnath’s home. How could he cheat his destiny?

  As soon as he knew the truth he had smuggled his instruments out of his house, under his clothes, and gone to Shombhu Debnath’s house. For months he had spent his evenings measuring Shombhu Debnath’s looms, the distance between the shuttle strings and the weaver’s hands, between the pedals and the seat. He had worked until there was no room left for error. The calculations had taken even longer. When at last it was all done, trembling with apprehension, he had matched Alu’s measurements with his calculations.

  His intuition was proved right in every detail: Alu’s body, his hands, his legs, his arms, not to speak of the Organ, corresponded exactly to his calculations of the proportions ideal for a weaver.

  Only then, when Balaram knew he was right, did he take the boy to Shombhu Debnath and say: Take him to be your apprentice.

  And the boy?

  The boy was overjoyed. He wanted nothing better.

  But why? Why weaving?

  What could it be but weaving? Man at the loom is the finest example of Mechanical man; a creature who makes his own world as no other can, with his mind. The machine is man’s curse and his salvation, and no machine has created man as much as the loom. It has created not separate worlds but one, for it has never permitted the division of the world. The loom recognizes no continents and no countries. It has tied the world together with its bloody ironies from the beginning of human time.

  It has never permitted the division of reason.

  Human beings have woven and traded in cloth from the time they built their first houses and cities. Indian cloth was found in the graves of the Pharaohs. Indian soil is strewn with cloth from China. The whole of the ancient world hummed with the cloth trade. The Silk Route from China, running through central Asia and Persia to the ports of the Mediterranean and from there to the markets of Africa and Europe, bound continents together for more centuries than we can count. It spawned empires and epics, cities and romances. Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo were just journeymen following paths that had been made safe and tame over centuries by unknown, unsung traders, armed with nothing more than bundles of cloth. It was the hunger for Indian chintzes and calicos, brocades and muslins that led to the foundation of the first European settlements in India. All through those centuries cloth, in its richness and variety, bound the Mediterranean to Asia, India to Africa, the Arab world to Europe, in equal, bountiful trade.

  Think of cotton. It’s easy now, but it wasn’t once.

  India first gave cotton, Gossypium indicus, to the world. The cities of the Indus valley grew cotton as early as 1500 BC. But soon cotton was busy spinning its web around the world. It had King Sennacherib of Mesopotamia in its toils by 700 BC, and before long it had found its way to Herodotus in Greece. It travelled eastwards more slowly, but its conquests were no smaller in magnitude.

  Everywhere it went people had trouble thinking of it. Only the oldest of the Indo-European languages could think of it as a thing in itself and even then the thought was so difficult that across continents people hardly dared differ. In Sanskrit it was called karpasia, in Persian kirpas. In Greek it was carbasos, and in Latin carbasus. They gave Hebrew its kirpas.

  But it couldn’t last. Cotton changed the world too fast, made too many demands, called for too much subtlety. English is lucky. It has a word which can even begin to suggest cotton as a substance different from others. So many languages, like German with its baumwolle, are condemned for ever to the blinkers that bound Sennacherib and Herodotus to think of cotton as a misbegotten wool. But even the English were handed down their word, like so much else that raised them to civilization, by the Arabs, from their kutn (how fine an irony when several centuries later hundreds of thousands of Egyptian fellahin were tied in bondage to the demands of the cotton mills of Lancashire). But the Arabs took their own word from the Akkadian kitinu. And there they had lost the battle already, for that word came from kitu, in the same language, which meant nothing but dreary flax.

  What does it say for human beings that they let themselves be ruled so completely by so simple a thing as cloth?

  When the history of the world broke, cotton and cloth were behind it; mechanical man in pursuit of his own destruction.

  Perhaps it began in the sixteenth century with William Lee in England, and his invention of a stretching frame for yarn. Then it was Arkwright with his spinning-jenny, and Kay and his flying shuttle.

  The machine had driven men mad.

  Lancashire poured out its waterfalls of cloth, and the once cloth-hungry and peaceful Englishmen and Dutchmen and Danes of Calcutta and Chandannagar, Madras and Bombay turned their trade into a garotte to make every continent safe for the cloth of Lancashire, strangling the very weavers and techniques they had crossed oceans to discover. Millions of Africans and half of America were enslaved by cotton.

  And then weaving changed mechanical man again with the computer. In the mid-nineteenth century when Charles Babbage built his first calculating machine, using the principle of storing information on punched card
s, he took his idea not from systems of writing nor from mathematics, but from the draw-loom. The Chinese have used punched cards to discriminate between warp threads in the weaving of silk since 1000 BC. They gave it (unwillingly) to the Italians, and the Italians gave it to the rest of Europe, in the form of the draw-loom. Basile Bouchon of Lyons, in 1725, added a roll of perforated paper to store the pattern in its punched memory. And in 1801 Joseph Jacquard invented his automatic selective device based on the same principle. Babbage took his ideas for his calculating engines from Jacquard’s loom, and Holleville who patented the first punched-card machines took his ideas from Babbage. Once again the loom reaches through the centuries and across continents to decide the fate of mechanical man.

  Who knows what new horrors lie in store?

  It is a gory history in parts; a story of greed and destruction. Every scrap of cloth is stained by a bloody past. But it is the only history we have and history is hope as well as despair.

  And so weaving, too, is hope; a living belief that having once made the world one and blessed it with its diversity it must do so again. Weaving is hope because it has no country, no continent.

  Weaving is Reason, which makes the world mad and makes it human.

  Chapter Three

  War

  Wars keep people busy. As a rule the spectators are the busiest of all. Some keep busy helping armies with their business of murder and massacre, loot and rapine. Others are left with blood trickling their way and no choice but to join the flow or mop it up.

  The people of Lalpukur could not help knowing that a war was brewing across the border; their relatives on the other side never let them forget it. Often they were drummed to bed by the rattle of distant gunfire. But on the whole the fighting was to pass Lalpukur by. And, unlike some of their neighbours, no one in Lalpukur had the energy to join in of their own will. The reason was that the people of Lalpukur were too melancholy. Vomited out of their native soil years ago in another carnage, and dumped hundreds of miles away, they had no anger left. Their only passion was memory; a longing for a land where the green was greener, the rice whiter, the fish bigger than boats; where the rivers’ names sang like Megh Malhar on a rainy day – the Meghna, the Dholeshshori, the Kirtinosha, the Shitolokhkha, the majestic Arialkha, wider than the horizon. Rivers which bore the wealth of a continent to their land, from Tibet, from the Himalayas. Rivers overflowing with bounty, as wide as seas, their banks invisible from one another.

  Lalpukur could fight no war because it was damned to a hell of longing.

  The vocation of the melancholy is not anger but mourning. When in need they charge by the hour and sell a bitter sort of consolation. And all that Lalpukur had to offer was consolation of a sort – refuge. It could never be a battlefield; nothing but a dumping-ground for the refuse from tyrants’ frenzies.

  Long before the world had sniffed genocide in Bangladesh, Lalpukur began to swell. It grew and grew. First, it was brothers with burnt backs and balls cut off at the roots. Then it was cousins and cousins of cousins. Then it did not matter; borders dissolved under the weight of millions of people in panic-stricken flight from an army of animals.

  Bamboo shanties soon luxuriated around the village. The great banyan tree at its centre became a leaky shelter for dozens of families and their bundled belongings. Lalpukur burst its boundaries and poured out, jostling with the district road a furlong away. Bhudeb Roy’s rice fields sprouted shacks of packing wood and corrugated iron. He didn’t mind. On the contrary, he was very helpful and even hired a few tough young men to organize the shacks properly. He had discovered that rents from refugee shacks yielded a better harvest than rice. The tea-shop under the banyan tree diversified into selling rice and vegetables, and Bolai-da began to stock corrugated iron and sheets of tin beaten out of discarded kerosene-containers. Soon cycle-repairing was the smallest of his concerns.

  Everyone was busy, and Balaram, though he did not know it and would not have cared if he had, had good reason to be grateful for it. Had people had time on their hands he may have had to face a good deal of criticism and even straightforward opposition over his decision to apprentice Alu to a weaver. And despite everything people did find time to talk: what business had a schoolmaster to take his nephew out of school and apprentice him to a weaver (and that, too, when schoolmasters didn’t have to pay school fees)? What could it mean?

  A few rumours took root under the banyan tree: Alu had been thrown out of school for failing once too often; Balaram was going to start a cloth factory in Calcutta with Alu as foreman. It was something deep; that was for certain.

  But then Lalpukur would be convulsed with growing pains once more and people would be busy again.

  As for Balaram, the only person he was really worried about was Toru-debi. But Toru-debi was busy, too: she had perfected her seamless petticoat and was hard at work on a scheme for a buttonless blouse. Weeks passed before she heard of Alu’s apprenticeship. When she did she talked of it only once to Balaram. The books weren’t enough, she said resignedly. There’s nothing I can do about your head. But it doesn’t matter – you’ll put an end to it yourself.

  Balaram could hardly believe that he had got off so lightly. He sighed with relief; at last he was free to give his whole energies to the new problem that had so suddenly confronted him.

  The fact is that, because of the extraordinary developments in the village, Balaram had almost forgotten about Alu. Soon after the refugees began flooding into Lalpukur, Balaram had gone to take a look at their shacks and shanties. He was appalled: he saw people eating surrounded by their children’s shit; the tin roofs were black with flies; in the lanes rats wouldn’t yield to human feet; there were no drains and no clean water, and the air was stagnant with germs, pregnant with every known disease.

  Balaram could think of only one answer: carbolic acid. Nothing else would be remotely as appropriate. There was a kind of historical legitimacy about carbolic acid. The only alternative Balaram could think of were mercury-based disinfectants, and somehow he could not bring himself to use those. Weren’t they created by the Great Adversary, Robert Koch, who had so tenaciously and falsely opposed Pasteur until he could no longer deny the truth? And weren’t they invalid in a way, since Koch had come upon them almost by accident, believing their effects to be other than they actually were? Besides, they’d probably be too expensive anyway. No, it had to be carbolic acid, that masterly brainchild of Lister’s, Pasteur’s friend and Great Disciple.

  So Balaram started a campaign. He went around the shanties, warning people of the swift death they were calling on themselves. He called meetings and urged them to contribute what they could to buy carbolic acid. People listened to him, for they knew he was a schoolmaster, but they hesitated. It was not till he started a fund with a bit of his own money that they threw in a few annas and paisas. Soon they had enough to buy a fair quantity of disinfectant. Then, very systematically, with the help of a few volunteers, Balaram began to disinfect every exposed inch of the new settlements.

  Bolai-da said one day, watching him: This is a new Balaram-babu. It was true: Balaram, antiseptic and pungent with disinfectant, had never been so happy.

  Bhudeb Roy, as he told ASP Jyoti Das later, did nothing to stop Balaram, because at the time he was one of the busiest people in the village. But he watched suspiciously because it was clear to him at once that Balaram was up to something. It had to be more than mere coincidence that he had started the business with disinfectants and apprenticed his nephew to Shombhu Debnath at the same time.

  It was the link with Shombhu Debnath which really upset Bhudeb Roy. It worried him so much that he managed to find time to speak to Balaram about the matter.

  One day Balaram was summoned to Bhudeb Roy’s office in the school. He went reluctantly, for he hated the office. Five portraits of Bhudeb Roy stared out of its narrow walls. Two of them – one a photograph of Bhudeb Roy in a black gown, holding his BA degree, and another, a picture of him in Darjeeling, his m
assive bulk posed playfully against a railing with the Himalayas in the background – had incense sticks burning reverentially under them.

  Balaram could not bring himself to sit in that room. He stood stiffly, holding the back of a chair, and said: Yes?

  Sit down, Balaram-babu, said Bhudeb Roy. Balaram shook his head. As you please, said Bhudeb Roy, sticking a plug of tobacco into his jaw with his little finger. His jaw worked laterally as he chewed on it.

  Balaram-babu, he said, your decisions are your own and I don’t want to interfere, but I have to think about the good of the school. Do you think anybody will want to send their children to a school where they will be taught by a man who has apprenticed his own nephew to a weaver? Think about it, Balaram-babu. I leave it to you, but perhaps you should think about your future in the school, too.

  Balaram turned and would have walked out, but Bhudeb Roy called out after him: Wait, Balaram-babu. Have you thought about what you’re doing? You’re putting his health at serious risk. People like us can’t do that kind of work. He’ll fall ill, and you’ll be responsible. He’ll have to drink water there, maybe even eat there. I don’t believe in caste, as you know, but their food is dirty. Very dirty. Have you thought about that?

  Balaram had not. He stopped worriedly. Do you mean, he said, their food may have germs?

  Yes, yes, said Bhudeb Roy, germs.

  But, Balaram said, thinking hard, their food must be cooked by Maya, and Maya cooks in our house, too, sometimes. There can’t be much difference.

  Bhudeb Roy’s tiny eyes hardened. His voice rose: Balaram-babu, you’re calling disaster on yourself. I warn you: stay away from that man Shombhu Debnath. Have you any idea what that man is like? Why, he’s not even a good weaver.

  Balaram had to turn sharply on his heel and walk out of the room. It would not have been correct to let Bhudeb Roy see him laughing.

  You couldn’t expect Bhudeb Roy to be dispassionate about Shombhu Debnath.