The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  Tamas is inseparable from the chthonic energy of Shiva, the city’s presiding deity, and the god of creative dissolution. Lannoy describes tamas as a downward pull as strong as gravity, “the dark ground” of Shiva’s being. The city deals in equal measures of light and shade. There is dirt and squalor, death and disease; but there is also the transcendent spectacle of the river, and the utter beauty of people lost in meditation, waist-deep in water, as the sun comes up over the uninhabited opposite bank. So long as the balance holds, tamas is kept at bay. But when that darker element overwhelms the light, tamas can turn predatory. Then it is time, as Mapu said, to flee. It is to keep from becoming the victim of tamas that one is advised to seek the blessings of a fierce form of Shiva called Kala Bhairava before entering the city. Needless to say, we had not.

  I wanted my American friend to see those eternal river scenes and the riveting life of the street, with its medieval artisans and workshops, the close air that had the cloying sweet smell of incense and linen in need of airing. But, despite my every effort, the city did not disclose its secrets. There was more shade than light. Benares was all surfaces. The river was flat and oily; beggars circled, more wretched than I remembered, their diseases more florid. Tumors ravaged one man’s face, and flies covered the festering wound on a boy’s lip. A darkling energy was abroad in the city. It was in search of a victim, and one morning it found him.

  My friend and I stood on the riverfront, watching a group of Norwegians on a tour. A blond man in his forties, handsome, with a lined but youthful face, was dressed all in white. No sooner did our eyes settle on him than it was plain to see that something was terribly wrong. He looked stricken. He was trying to communicate something urgent to his guide. But his manners, his Scandinavian politeness, were too gentle for India. The guide smiled past the man’s distress. Come on, I remember thinking, grab him, tell him that you need to go back to the hotel immediately. Instead, the guide prevailed and got the Norwegian to sit down on the steps of the river.

  The sun was strong. The fear in the Norwegian’s face was one I had known all my life in India: it was the fear of losing an individuated sense of self, which the West fosters, and India systematically undoes.

  The group of tourists stood in front of a high rampart of rich honeyed stone. Its recessed arch was blind and frilled, the base festooned with red paan spittle. The Norwegian rose suddenly and lurched. He made one last flailing attempt to tell his guide that he was in bad shape. Then, before another word could be said, he crumpled into the arch. His face was deathly pale, his eyes rheumy. They fastened with blank intensity on the diamond-strewn surface of the river.

  There was no way to shield him from the gaze of those on the riverfront. A crowd of twenty or so gathered around. For many moments, the man just sat there, in the arch, his internal discomfort gone, even as his external shame was amplified. Some moments later he was led away to the bus, the seat of his white trousers hideously stained.

  I HAD COME BACK TO Benares in a cautious, noncommittal way. My wish to learn Sanskrit was an attempt to deal intellectually with a country whose reality perturbed me. I had not come to Benares prepared to do whatever it took to embrace that reality. I came hedging my bets. This second trip to Benares seemed destined to end like my first: in flight and oblivion. But then, on my last day, as if to deny me so easy an out, the city gave me a glimpse of its inner life. That was the day I met the twice-born.

  My American friend was resting in the hotel. I had tried to meet Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi, but he was a hard man to track down. One of Mapu’s contacts suggested I try the Abhinavagupta Research Library, where he was meant to be addressing a gathering of scholars. It was late afternoon when I arrived at the library, a pretty building with a façade of jalousie windows and sleeping columns, all in different shades of yellow, cream, and brown.

  Inside, the Brahmins filed into the room, some bare-chested, some with foreheads emblazoned with caste marks. I had known Brahmins all my life, but I had not known Brahmins like these. The Brahmin, who sits at the top of the Hindu caste system, is “twice-born,” or dvija in Sanskrit, for he is born once at the time of his actual birth, and then again when he is initiated by rite into his ancient vocation of the mind. The Brahmins I knew had not undergone this second birth; they were Brahmins in name only, and the life of tradition in a place such as Benares was as closed to them as it was to me.

  Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi was among the twice-born. One of the younger Brahmins, seated on the floor next to me, pointed him out: a tall, thin-lipped man in his seventies, with a margin of fine white hair running along the shiny dome of his head. He was dressed that afternoon in a wrinkly off-white kurta, with a discreet dot of dark vermilion on his forehead. He addressed the others in Hindi, then switched to Sanskrit. For the next ninety minutes, I sat there in stupefaction listening to the Brahmins of Benares have a heated argument in Sanskrit. Someone explained that they were discussing sphota, an esoteric branch of Indian linguistics that dealt with the relationship between sound and meaning. Sphota, or “word-seeds,” as the French mystic and poet René Daumal translates it, “evokes the blossoming of a flower, the development of a bud—thus a constant germinative power hidden beneath the appearances which manifest it.”

  I had never heard of the concept. I knew no Sanskrit. I did not know that ancient India had made a study of these things. I was ignorant of the Indian passion for grammar, linguistics, and hermeneutics, the obsession with literary theory and figures of speech. But I had studied Wittgenstein at Amherst; I knew of Hellenistic philosophy and the different Platonic schools. I had lived in two or three societies other than my own; I had traveled extensively in half a dozen more and written books about them; I had learned foreign languages; yet here I was, a few hundred miles from where I grew up, overtaken by an experience of the uncanny as powerful as any I had ever known.

  Brahmins are sometimes described as members of a priesthood, but this is not quite right. Historically Brahmins were grammarians, logicians, writers, poets, astrologers, and scientists. They were men of the mind, as these men still were. I had seen Brahmins performing religious ceremonies and reading their scriptures. That interested me less. But I found the sight of these men engaged in an ancient form of scholarship utterly compelling. How strange that it had been right here all this while. Strange, too, that no connection should exist between their world and mine—that India’s intellectual past should play no role in engendering its present and future. A link had been severed, but I knew too little about what had been lost to feel the pain of it. What struck me hard that afternoon was how automatic my incuriosity about old India had been.

  I had felt a discomfort since my return, a melancholy, an odd feeling of being abstracted. Nehru had written of the “spiritual loneliness” he put down to having become “a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” He wrote, “I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.” Nehru no doubt felt a version of what the French intellectual Didier Eribon experienced in relation to class—“the discomfort that results from belonging to two different worlds, worlds so far separated from each other that they seem irreconcilable, and yet which coexist in everything that you are.” That afternoon among the Brahmins of Benares, I knew an odd feeling of being impoverished by my exposure to other places. The legacy of British rule in India meant that I belonged to a zone of overlap that lay between East and West. It was what made it easy for me to go to college in America. The linguistic and cultural familiarity with multiple societies should have brought forth a rich cosmopolitanism; but instead it had been sterile, and it had left me feeling somehow poorer for my experiences.

  Like so much of the old non-West, India was an ancient civilization reborn as a modern nation, twice-born in another sense. But it was amazing to consider how long it had been trying to cure itself of the trauma of its second birth. A hundred years ago, in this very town,
the Banaras Hindu University had been founded with the stated intention of closing the gap between East and West. At its inauguration, in 1916, a little-known leader, freshly arrived from his activities in South Africa, had caused “a beautiful scandal.”

  “It is a matter of deep humiliation and shame for us,” began Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—addressing an audience comprising the viceroy, a pride of Indian princes, and Annie Besant, the leading theosophist and champion of self-rule for India—“that I am compelled this evening, under the shadow of this great college in this sacred city, to address my countrymen in a language that is foreign to me … But suppose that we had been receiving, during the past fifty years, education through our vernaculars, what should we have today? We should have today a free India, we should have our educated men, not as if they were foreigners in their own land but speaking to the heart of the nation…”

  Gandhi was responding to a process that had been set in motion a century before. The British administrator Lord Macaulay was roughly my age—in his midthirties—when, in 1834, he was appointed to the Committee of Public Instruction. Macaulay had felt duty bound to create a “class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” He envisaged an Indian elite that would gradually extend modern knowledge to the great mass of the population. But this is not what happened. Instead the class of interpreters grew more isolated with every generation, and by the time Gandhi gave his speech, the distance between the two Indias had become the cause of pain and anxiety, both for those who felt talked down to and for those who had been colonized and now lived at a great remove from their country.

  In Mapu’s generation, the sense of loss must have been painful enough to warrant a desire for return. In my generation, the memory of loss had been erased. It had been sublimated into a quiet, passionless aversion to one’s own culture. A dullness of mind, an almost willful ignorance. Until that day in Benares “colonization” had felt like an abstraction, one of those overused words, such as “poverty” or “global warming,” that seem to obscure meaning. But that afternoon in the Abhinavagupta Library, my colonization felt as real to me as a law of nature. It was as if my upbringing in India, innocent and unthinking on the surface, had been acted upon by a quietly coercive force that had the power to bend space and time. It could make New York feel culturally nearer to my Delhi than to Benares, and it could put centuries between those living next to one another, making foreigners of people in places they had never left.

  The image of the Brahmins of Benares seared itself into my mind. But I now also found it impossible to approach Tripathi with my original intention of learning Sanskrit. Mapu had spoken romantically of the relationship between guru and shishya. Perhaps he was nearer the life of tradition and could imagine himself immersed in it again. I, for my part, could not. Incredible as it was to glimpse the antiquity of a sacralized form of learning, to witness was not to participate. The induction into the ancient language was a ritual part of a traditional Brahmin boy’s passage into manhood.

  The world of ritual was closed to me. To insinuate myself into it now would have felt like an unspeakable act of fraudulence. A break had occurred, and I was on the other side of it.

  SUMMER

  2

  THE COLOR-FILLED ELEVENTH

  IT WAS MARCH WHEN I went to see Mapu about going back to Benares again. Six years had passed since that February day in 2008 when I had seen the Brahmins at the Abhinavagupta Library and left soon after for Delhi, half in terror, half in wonder. I wrote to Mapu when I got home, thanking him for the introduction to Tripathi:

  Just back from Benares. I’m sad to say that it defeated me this time round. I got in touch with KD Tripathi, but when we went to see him he wasn’t there. Later I caught up with him at a Sanskrit seminar he was organising. I’ve never seen anything more dazzling in my life: five or six grand Brahmins in a room full of people, sounds of cycle bells and horse carriages, coming up from the street, arguing passionately with each other in fluent Sanskrit. It was also at this moment that I was overwhelmed … I felt I wasn’t ready for him at all, felt that this was not the time to approach him with my beginner’s interest in learning Sanskrit. Also, Benares, in the way only certain cities can, cities like Venice, started to go wrong. And in this new ugliness, I felt that there was a message for me … I think I need some grounding in Sanskrit before going back there.

  Mapu replied with understanding: “Thank you for your mature statement. There are many ways to begin learning Sanskrit…” But I sensed he was disappointed. He knew what it was for the distance at which westernized Indians held India to collapse, knew how unnerving that collapse could be, and was perhaps sad that I had not had the courage to see it through—that I had resorted to the simple option of flight. But from that day on, I had spent several hours of every day learning Sanskrit.

  I came to Sanskrit out of a need to hear a voice from the past. That day in Benares it had struck me hard that there had been twenty centuries of continuous literary production in India, yet when I started out as a writer in Delhi, I had felt myself to be working out of a vacuum. “The historical sense,” T. S. Eliot says, “compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence.” It “involves” a perception “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

  I had no past as complete as that. Two thousand years of literary production in India and my perception of the past comprised little more than a handful of Victorian novels, a few snatches of Urdu poetry, and some Indian writing in English—R. K. Narayan, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie. Sanskrit gave me more literature than I could have read in twenty lifetimes. There were treatises and court poems, epics and plays. I read for the first time the marvelous opening to the Ramayana in which the sage Valmiki summons verse (shloka) “from an access of grief” (shoka); I lost myself in the mournful quatrains of Bhartrihari, with their relentless pessimism: “Gone indeed is youth, fruitless, like a lamp burning itself out in an empty house!” I especially loved the Sanskrit commentators, who, each with a distinctive style of literary analysis, made up a parallel history of reading to go along with the trove of texts. One commentator in particular, Mallinatha, active in fifteenth-century South India, virtually taught me the poetry of Kalidasa, who had lived ten centuries before. It was amazing to read a paragraph of Mallinatha’s thoughts beneath the impenetrable fifth-century couplet, now breaking up difficult compounds, now making wry observations. The link with the commentators—even more than with the poets and the dramatists—was electrifying. It was continuity; it opened the way to feeling whole again.

  Sanskrit is the oldest, fullest expression we have of a shared Indo-European linguistic past. An underground stream of language had run parallel to the rise and fall of empires, connecting places as far apart as the western reaches of China and Ireland. To possess Sanskrit was to look afresh at the history of language. My relationship to English—the language I thought, wrote, and dreamed in—changed. I stopped seeing it as merely the legacy of colonization, but part of a history older and grander than that of nations. Sanskrit made it possible for me to take ownership of the Indian past, but I was only too aware that these thrills occurred in a kind of intellectual vacuum. And it was from my wish to close the gap between text and context that I sought Mapu out again. I was ready to return to Benares on firmer footing.

  Mapu asked me to lunch at his house in Noida, a suburb of Delhi. It was an afternoon swept with windy shadows. The doors and windows of the Spartan bungalow where Mapu lived had been thrown open—the heat was almost there—and the white muslin curtains blew inward very gently. Mapu served a vegetarian meal and then we sat outside. When he heard what I had come to see him about, he said:

  “But I’m going to Be
nares next week! Why don’t you come with me?”

  Mapu’s access in Benares was legendary. “He keeps the keys to secret India in his pocket,” my mother had said. Mapu explained that at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, where the former priest was his guru, there was to be a great spring festival. The Rangbhari Ekadashi, literally the Color-Filled Eleventh, which occurred on the eleventh day of the lunar month of Phalguna, marked the beginning of the festival of Holi in the city.

  “It is the night Shiva and Parvati consummate their marriage,” Mapu said. “And it’s wonderful. I’m too old to hack it. But you should definitely go.”

  I asked after Kamlesh Dutt Tripathi.

  “K. D. Tripathi lost his son some years ago. And he’s not been the same since.”

  I asked Mapu why—since he was not attending the festival—he was going to Benares at all.

  “I want to see my guru before I pass on.”

  Mapu was in his sixties; his guru was in his nineties. Surely, Mapu meant, before he, the guru, passed on.

  “My chart says I have two more years at best,” Mapu said casually.

  “How do you know?” I gasped.

  “Birth and death, we know,” he said, and his eyes gleamed.

  BIRTH AND DEATH HAD ALSO played their part in bringing me back to Benares. In January 2011, three years before my return to that city, I was woken by a phone call from my mother in Delhi: “Your father is dead. He was killed a few hours ago in Islamabad.”