Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  This sense of febrile hyperactivity clings as tenaciously to Indians as the smell of curry. It assaulted me, indeed, before I had even set foot in the country. No sooner had I stepped into a Bombay-bound Cathay Pacific flight than whole mobs of Indian families began crashing into the cabin behind me, loaded down with VCRs, trailing in their wake five extra pieces of hand luggage, or maybe six, straggling a crush of miscellaneous loved ones and possessions. And no sooner had any of them sat down than they began shouting across the aisles at their children or calling out to relatives or standing up again to order the mostly Chinese cabin attendants to bring drinks and then more drinks. The kids started slithering over seats, their mothers raced to the bathroom, the men took up permanent residence in the aisles and began crying out gossip to friends and presumed enemies several cabins away. The attendants tried to restore order and send people back to their seats, and the scheming and the screaming only mounted. The passengers ordered more drinks and second meals and vegetarian meals and second vegetarian meals, and the attendants told them that none were available. The demands grew louder, the attendants told them to be quiet. The passengers bawled, the attendants snapped. Shouting matches broke out, and all the while, tens of families kept trundling inexorably through the aisles, transporting curries, heirlooms, squalling kids, more pieces of luggage, and then some more. Before long, the arguments turned into all-out, ten-decibel warfare. The attendants shouted their orders, the crowds milled all around. And through it all, a solemn Sikh looked around the cabin sadly, and began philosophizing, as only an Indian can, about mass hysteria. Where did it come from? How was it caused? What did it mean?

  Not surprisingly, this sense of fertility run amok had also seeped from the country’s textures into its texts. “Indians,” John Russell wrote shrewdly, “are prodigious, irrepressible, never-tiring talkers.” They are also, he might have added, fabulous raconteurs and rhapsodists, storytellers and sermonizers, purveyors of small talk and big; the garrulous gurus are only the most celebrated examples of the country’s indefatigable speech-makers, their books less often written than transcribed from the hundreds of thousands of words they spin out of their mental loom each year. The whole country, it often seems, suffers from a kind of elephantiasis of the imagination; it teems and seethes, Babel-like, with texts on the subject of mortality and divinity. There is no place for the lapidary in India, and irony is quickly lost; amid all the agitation and animation, the only appropriate forms are rhodomontade, litany, hyperbole and exclamation. India’s national epic, the Mahabharata, fifteen times longer than the Bible, is the longest poem ever written.

  Nor is it ever possible to detach oneself from the whole clangorous Indian gallimaufry. Its smell seeped into the third-floor apartment where I stayed, its street cries penetrated the walls. When my car stopped at an intersection, a man carrying a limp child appeared by my side, an amputee began pounding on the windows. When I walked out of a serene Victorian library in central Bombay, a swarm of beggars was instantly around me, unaccommodated and bare. All doors were flung open in India, all boundaries collapsed: everything was thrown together in the streets. And next to this 3,000-ring circus, with a cast of thousands of hundreds of thousands, appearing in your neighborhood twenty-four hours each day, the overcrowded and impossibly melodramatic movies begin to make a little sense. They even begin to look rather small.

  FOR FOREIGNERS, WHO do not have to live with the consequences, India’s whirligig of earthly horrors and delights may often be the greatest show on earth. “India has everything,” said a Yugoslavian girl I met in Tibet. “India is life on the stage,” said a Canadian sitting nearby. “India is so different,” said a Swiss designer. “I see many good things, also many bad things. The people are so generous, and so selfish.” Every trip through India was to some extent a magical mystery tour into chaos and color and commotion. India might not be the easiest or loveliest place in the world, most travelers agreed, but it was surely the most shocking, the most amusing, the most overwhelming; the happiest, and the saddest; the most human—certainly the only country, as Geoffrey Moorhouse writes, “where superlatives were as much in order as adjectives anywhere else.” India had everything, and its opposite; and if the West often struck me as a masculine culture, dedicated to assertion, virility and power, while Southeast Asia seemed feminine in its texture, all softness, delicacy and grace, India was both, and neither, as grotesque and fascinating as a hermaphrodite.

  Small wonder, then, that India freaked out its visitors, and psyched them out, more than any other place I knew. One night, as I slept in a tiny inn in Kyoto, the screen door was violently pulled back and in stumbled a young Chinese photographer from Hong Kong. Taking one look at me, he registered my origins and began raving. He had just arrived, he said, from the land of my forefathers. “Varanasi,” he said, spitting out the name. “They call it a holy city. But it is a filthy city, a stinking city, a city full of shit!” He had had enough, he said, more than enough of “silk men” and a holy river that was only a large-scale bathroom. He had had enough of cosmic dirt. He had had it up to here with the world’s most persistent touts. He had had enough of being hounded and harassed. He had been taken, he said, for $350. He had been in India for six weeks, he went on, and six weeks was enough—no, more than enough. He could stand it no longer. And he wanted to go back, and he could talk of little else.

  I could to some extent sympathize with his muddle. For few countries engage the sympathies more powerfully than India. Yet so many opposites are so haphazardly blended together in India that it is hard to be unequivocal about anything. Contradiction provides the only consistency—in the people’s preservation of a British legacy they are glad to have sloughed off, in their fierce devotion to the clans whose pressures they resist, in the tangled intensities that bedevil every foreigner and find most eloquent expression in the agonized surveys of V. S. Naipaul. To many foreigners, every Indian seems a god or a demon; that, in a sense, is how India possesses them. “And are you liking India?” asks an Indian in Don DeLillo’s The Names. “Yes,” replies the narrator, “although I would have to say it goes beyond liking, in almost every direction.”

  ALL NIGHT LONG, I heard, our relative howled and howled with pain. What he was going through, said my uncle, one would not wish on one’s bitterest enemies. The cries never ceased.

  AS I ATTENDED more Indian movies, I came in time to discover another of their special pleasures (to be found in the West only at Coppola or Stallone or Boorman movies, or in such freak stunts as The Long Riders): the thrill of totting up the recurrences of a single surname in the credits. One poster advertised: “F. U. Ramsay presents Tulsi Ramsay and Shyam Ramsay’s Saamri, with photography by Gangu Ramsay.” Another show was made by Ramesh Sippy, assisted by Vijay Sippy and Al Sippy and produced by G. R. Sippy (none of them, of course, related to Romu Sippy, the producer I met who financed movies directed by his brother). In Rajasthan a pair of voluble rickshaw drivers started reciting the names of the First Family of Indian cinema (their Redgraves or Carradines) as if they were the thousand names of God: “Shashi Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Raj Kapoor” (mercifully, they left out Tiger Kapoor, as well as Prithviraj Kapoor, the patriarch of the clan, whose image was shown, reverentially, before every one of Shashi and Raj Kapoor’s movies). And so the list went on indefinitely—Satyajit Ray begat the director Sandip Ray, Dharmendra begat Sunny Deol, and Lata Mangeshkar’s only rival, and possible successor, as the voice of India, was her sister, Asha Bhosle. After Dimple Kapadia struck it rich as a seventeen-year-old actress, up popped a look-alike sister called Simple Kapadia. Before long, one of my young cousins dryly remarked, there would doubtless be a Pimple Kapadia.

  On screen too, the movies invariably paid their respects to the all-powerful and omnipresent Family, which had a way of turning every business into a family business. Mard, for example, had been supplied with a real father and mother, an adopted father and mother, a disguised father and an intricate set of duti
es to his motherland. “To me,” intoned the hero in his famously resonant voice, “Mother is everything.” His girlfriend knew she could expect to play only second fiddle in the orchestra of his emotions. And the same would be true of the Indian Rambos, I recalled, thinking back to Sippy’s description. Even newspaper horoscopes—the movies’ first cousin when it came to mass-producing dreams—tended to focus their advice, not on love affairs, but on family affairs.

  The Family, indeed, seemed the strongest of all the forces organizing India’s swarming congregation of subsets. It was the power that arranged marriages. It was the binding force that protected people from the centripetal pull of the masses. It was the last word in Indira Gandhi’s India. And not only were the clans all-powerful; they were also huge. The typical Indian family tree resembles a banyan whose tendrils stretch in every direction and whose roots are cast halfway across the country. The family is the source of identity, and the extended family is the source of an extended identity stretched far and wide (in India, identity seems not to be diminished by being subjugated to a unit, as in Japan, but only strengthened). A typical sentence in India would begin: “Jaygopal’s brother’s sister-in-law’s cousin,” and the figure in question would be treated as a brother, worthy of the same affection, open to the same demands. Before long, therefore, the family itself began to seem as many-headed and undifferentiated as the flood it had sought to dam. Family planning had never enjoyed much success here.

  With Indian roots myself, I was, perhaps, more aware of the power of family here than in other Asian countries where it was no less suffocating or strong. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that in India the force took on a decidedly Indian flavor. I was amused to find that the Indians had smuggled into English such terms as “co-brother” (to designate one’s sister-in-law’s brother) and “cousin brother” (to denote the sex of a first cousin, and, better yet, to draw the cousin as close as a brother). In some of the local languages, the terms were even more precisely defined, with separate words for a father’s elder and younger brothers and special terms for uncles on one’s mother’s and one’s father’s side, as well as words to distinguish between mother’s sisters and uncle’s wives, blood uncles and uncles by marriage. Though India had a hunger for absolutes, it swarmed with relatives; before long, everyone came to seem related to everyone else.

  The enveloping tightness that resulted might be responsible for much of the country’s warmth, the hospitality of its embrace; but it also seemed to lie behind many of the country’s antagonisms. If the large family made for an extended sense of alliance, it also made for an extended sense of enmity; thus a grievance against one Muslim would vent itself in an attack on all Muslims, a suspicion of all Sikhs assert itself in a mistreatment of one. If there was safety in numbers, there was also terror in numbers. So too, a typical office worker was often trussed up so tightly within an entangling net of obligations to this relative and that one, this one’s friend and that one’s in-laws, that he had no option but to ignore the general public, leaving the general public with no option but to make demands upon relatives of its own. In the end, the extrapolated sense of identity could smother an individual as much as it protected him.

  Much of this, no doubt, was explained—and largely excused perhaps—by Hinduism, with its notion of collective identity. If all are simply parts of a single great Oneness, every individual is related to every other in the Family of Man. One touch of Siva makes the whole world kin.

  This all-pervading sense of affiliation was brought home to me in a wonderfully Indian way. Early one morning, I boarded an intercity bus, and found myself next to a gentle civil servant. He could not speak much English, but he summoned every syllable he could recall in order to welcome me to his region and to wish me well. He was not a rich man, he said, or an educated man. But he was a pious man, a Brahmin, rich in his belief. I need never fear, he assured me, for my Atman would survive the death of my body. It was all in the Bhagavad-Gita. He had followed the Gita’s injunction, he went on, by giving his son the name of God (so that in calling out to his son he felt that he was calling on God). And as he continued, struggling to share increasingly complex metaphysical truths in a language that he clearly found difficult, I commended him on his gallant conquest of English. “Oh yes,” he said happily, “your child learns English in school.” This was not what I had expected. “What I am saying,” he explained, “is that your son learns English in school.” I looked daggers at him. Was he making some licentious insinuation about my private life? Or, worse still, trying to marry me off to his daughter? “You see,” he went on, taking pity on my cluelessness, “I say ‘your child’ and not ‘my child’ because we are all one. If he is my child, he is also your child. And if I say ‘your child,’ I am not suffering from pride.”

  In India, then, even complete strangers were related. But the connections did not end there. One sunny morning, a gardener in Bangalore invited me into his tiny hut. He had only one small room, and its simple decorations caught at my heart: American calendars that showed chocolate-box flowers, swans in flight, blond kids holding hands on a bench. The only other adornment in his modest hut was a large photograph of a beetle-browed lady, and of a couple at a wedding maybe forty years before. His wife had died five years ago, said the man in halting English, and ever since, he felt that he had lost his senses. He never wished to leave his home again; her memory was all he had to live for. And in the corner I noticed a humble shrine, richly decorated with pictures of the elephant-god Ganesh and other religious keepsakes. There too was a picture of the departed woman, to which each day her husband faithfully applied fresh makeup.

  Where the soul was immortal, no relative ever died; the family just kept growing and growing.

  But even there the clan did not draw the line. For not only did the dead dwell among the living, but so too, as the gardener’s hut reminded me, did the gods. And the issue was further complicated by all the fakers and fakirs and holy men and charlatans who walked the streets, saying that they were nothing less than gods in men’s clothing, and adding, sometimes, that the same was true of all of us if only we would awaken to the fact. As the temples merged with the streets, the gods began mingling with mortals. In India, life danced with legend as gracefully as Krishna with the Gopis.

  In the face of this ever-swelling swarm of gods and people and relations, a typical Indian could easily feel dwarfed—either buried within the exfoliating structure of the family or simply lost inside the shuffle. But unlike the Japanese, who seemed to have acquiesced in the sacrifice of personal identity, quite a few Indians appeared to hunger for it. Educated Indians are famous for their worship of degrees and diplomas, and for their preoccupation with keeping up with the times, and with the Patels. Many middle-class people I met seemed frankly unembarrassed about presenting themselves as walking entries for Who’s Who, and some, I heard, even went so far as to print up calling cards that read “BAABF” (Bachelor of Arts—Appeared but Failed). In India, line jumping had been turned into a fine art, and one-upmanship a popular pastime. This was again, no doubt, symptomatic of a culture that is not by its nature reticent or retiring. But I suspected too that intrusiveness breeds pushiness and that where the pressure of huge numbers and frightful odds is intensified, so too is the longing for distinction.

  STILL, I HEARD, day after day, my relative could not pass a night without screaming out his pain.

  WITH PERSONAL DISTINCTION so elusive amidst the press of the all-consuming crowd, many a common Indian of the masses could only look upward—to the heavens, or to the giant screen. It therefore seemed no coincidence that many movies took their inspiration from traditional myths, throwing fantasy and reality together as liberally as any Shakespearean romance. And it seemed only fitting that every film began with a consultation of an astrologer and a holy muhurat ceremony that included the singing of religious songs and the ritual breaking of a coconut. For in many ways, the movies fulfilled a role scarcely different from that of religion: to
an audience not grown too cynical for belief, they brought heroes who were avenging angels, heroines who were full-breasted goddesses.

  Thus the divisions between make-believe and reality, between reality and myth, became increasingly foggy. Appearing before the people again and again as a redeemer, with a face five feet high and a ten-gallon gift for heroics, an actor might well disappear within his divine role, hastened on his way by the latter-day mythmakers of the gossip rags. Off screen, moreover, superstars really did live in the manner of all-powerful gods; for his role in Mard, Amitabh had earned $500,000, as much as an average Indian would make if he worked for 2,500 years.

  When an actor died, therefore, it seemed as if a god had died. While I was in Bombay, the actor Sanjeev Kumar, then in his late forties, suddenly passed away. Within twenty-four hours, the national television network had cobbled together a twenty-five-minute tribute to the Everyman who had come to seem like something more. Rajiv Gandhi issued a public message of sympathy. Thousands gathered outside Kumar’s home to pay their final respects, some of them sobbing uncontrollably; and, within three days of the death, a government motion was raised to name a street after him. As had happened on a far grander scale when Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash (his demise changing his status from widely suspected rogue to full-fledged martyr), it had taken death to confirm Kumar’s status among the immortals.