The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  Madam Veena was a dwarfish woman with a searing intellect. She taught the boys at the school some twenty-five verses of Sanskrit a week. She took a close interest in Anand and gave him some useful advice: “If only you would put one iota of the energy that you put into life into your studies, you would go very far.”

  “She really believed in me,” Anand said. Almost as an elegy for Madam Veena’s trust in him, he now recited some verses of Sanskrit that she had taught him that he still remembered. They were from the invocation of Karnabharam (Karna’s Burden), a play by the Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa, who lived some fifteen centuries ago.

  The Sanskrit sounded out into the courtyard of Alice’s house, where the lights had come on. Anand recited the verses hurriedly, as if the practice of committing them to memory was still fresh. He enjoyed how easily they came back.

  I put my notebook down. I had in my travels through the Muslim world seen young boys who knew the Koran by heart. But Bhasa was not religion; Bhasa was literature; and though Anand was not an impressive figure, not a learned Brahmin, it was as if this twenty-something waif, with his threadbare appearance, were saying, I am still part of an aristocracy of the mind.

  Anand left the second Sanskrit school in ignominy. He clashed with a senior, a Ph.D. student, who told him to wash his dishes. Anand refused outright. There was a stand-off, and Anand was called into the office of the man who had foreseen a bright future for him in Sanskrit, the guru from the wedding. When this venerable figure questioned him, Anand replied with a defiance that would have been shocking. He said, “I’m not a eunuch. I’m no less a man than you, from no less a family. My blood runs hot too.”

  The guru balked. “Anand, if you can speak to me like this, I can only imagine how you must have spoken to that senior.”

  Anand was told to take some time off. He had blown too many chances with too many people. Then, in the midst of his despair, he was thrown the kind of lifeline that only those who have been in disasters of their own making can ever really appreciate: a few older friends told him about the Banaras Hindu University, a seat of learning that had been founded in Benares a century before with the express hope of resurrecting the glory of the Hindu past.

  “You’re wasted where you are,” they told him. “That place is too small for you.”

  Anand took their advice and applied to BHU. He had nothing to lose. His father didn’t even know that Anand had applied and was surprised when a “call letter” arrived—the arrival of a letter in a village is always an event!—requesting Anand’s presence in Benares for an entrance exam.

  It was a Friday. Anand was not in the village. He was 120 kilometers away, performing a religious ceremony. He was dressed in a dhoti and kurta, but didn’t even have time to come home and change. He got his father to give his “admit card” to the stationmaster at Muzaffarpur station. When Anand got there, the man handed it to Anand. He changed out of his traditional clothes, and into Western clothes. “I was dressed in jeans,” he said proudly, “when I first arrived at BHU.”

  He had no idea what to expect. He thought the great university was yet another Sanskrit school. He arrived at the cantonment at 1:00 a.m. and spent the night at the station itself.

  In the morning, Anand saw from the vast crowd that had gathered at the station that this BHU, which he had thought was another piddling Sanskrit school, could not be so small an affair after all. He took a Tempo, a kind of open truck, the ten kilometers into town.

  Anand arrived at the great arch, pale yellow and red and ornamented with the features of Hindu temple architecture, and stood there for many minutes. There was a statue of the founder of the university at the center of a roundabout, where a drab blue-tiled fountain occasionally played. Anand still didn’t understand. He hadn’t realized what this place was—that here every subject under the sun was taught.

  At the end of April, when Anand came for his entrance exam, he felt the temperature fall by a few noticeable degrees upon entering the sylvan sprawl of BHU. He had left traffic, noise, and smoke behind him. The big umbrageous trees of the north flanked the wide streets, scalloping them with pools of shade. The gulmohar, with its terraced canopy of ferns, would have been coming into bloom, and the laburnum, with its restless plumes of solid gold, stirring in the hot wind, would have given the heat and dazzle of the day a bewitching quality.

  Anand would have passed by the university’s many faculties, which are European in their use of mass, space, and proportion; but where there might have been a cupola or a Corinthian column, there appeared soaring shikhars with notched capping stones, sloping chhajjas, and ornamental chhatris with sweeping arcades of bracketed Hindu arches. Sanskrit and Ayurveda sat alongside Chemistry and Computer Science. The buildings were the expression of the idea upon which the university had been founded a hundred years before: the idea of synthesis.

  The Brahmin glory may have run thin in Anand’s village in rural Bihar; but here, in BHU, on exam day, it was on full display. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Anand said, “vast foreheads ornamented with sprawling caste marks; great big shikhas, oiled and combed; everyone dressed in dhotis with huge brocade borders. And there I was, a ragamuffin, in jeans and shirt. I tell you, my mind short-circuited. I thought, ‘What is going to become of me in this crowd? I, who know nothing except how to perform the odd little religious ceremony?’ I had to tell myself, ‘Listen, Anand, it’s Shiva who’s brought you this far—he must have done it for a reason. Now go in, do your exam, write whatever you know, and leave the rest to Him.’ And that is just what I did.”

  That evening, after his exam, Anand hit the town. He saw the Dashashwamedh Ghat, where the worship of the Ganges was performed every night; he tried (and failed) to give offerings of flowers and holy water at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. “The crowd was huge, and I don’t believe in this form of prayer. I pray through my heart, and I said to Baba Vishwanath, Lord of All, ‘Please. I want to come and live in this town of Yours, which I love very much. But I’m from a poor family, and only You can make this possible.’ A voice came up from within me that said, ‘If Baba wills it, you will be permanent here.’” Permanent! It was Anand’s word for an infinite security, and it had run right through his story.

  Anand’s father did not know that Anand had applied to BHU, let alone visited Benares and sat an entrance exam. When he was admitted, his father was not sure what BHU was, or how hard it was to get into, especially for someone such as Anand, who was the first in his family to be admitted to a university of this caliber. Mr. Jha wanted to be happy for his son, but needed to call a more cosmopolitan relation in Patna to confirm the meaning of the news.

  “This man went berserk,” Anand said. “He told my father that BHU was a huge deal; they would teach me—really educate me—my entire future would change. When my father heard all this, he short-circuited too. He couldn’t believe that his son, the son of a bus driver for the Bihar government, had been selected for this great honor. He said fearfully, ‘How much is it going to be, son? You know what I earn. How will we send you there?’ I said, ‘Baba has made all this possible. He has put down my name for this. He will find a solution.’”

  Anand had tended throughout his story to let the certitudes of a pastoral past intrude upon the hard reality of his life. And he was doing it again. This business about God and fate may have consoled his father, but I knew it did not console Anand. Certain beliefs that had solaced an earlier generation—his father, his grandfather—had died in Anand, and I was pretty sure that he believed this life to be the only life. In fact he was in the grip of an extremely modern anxiety about what to do next, and how to pay his way. He had come this far, but he had no idea how he would go any further. His Sanskrit education was of no use to him. He had no real academic interest, and he had stumbled into a thesis on Buddhist India. “I don’t have the intellect to be a professor,” he said with desperation. “I don’t have the money to sit around. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He was due to le
ave BHU the following year; he had no career prospects, and in his confusion, he had strayed into the world of Hindu nationalism, which promised to restore the glories of his past.

  Anand took his phone out of his pocket and said, “Look at this.” It seemed just like any other phone. But then he removed the red rubber band that held it together, and the whole instrument—dial pad, battery, screen, and cover—came apart in his hands.

  Anand put the pieces back together carefully. “This is my story,” he said. “I’ve told it to you. And perhaps, after you, no one will ever hear it again.”

  That was May 2014. Ten days later, in the last phase of voting, the sacred city went to the polls. I was back in Delhi when I saw that Modi had been elected by the largest mandate the country had seen in thirty years. Anand was ecstatic. He sent me a text message, saying he had danced in the streets of Benares until dawn. “If only you’d seen the deluge of humanity!”

  6

  THE MODERN TRADITIONALIST

  IT WAS TRIPATHI WHO SUGGESTED I meet P. K. Mukhopadhyay. “He is a profound scholar,” he said, “representing the Brahminic tradition of Bengal on the one hand, and totally versed in modern European philosophy on the other. You will enjoy speaking to him in English. His English is excellent.”

  As a young man in Bengal, Mukhopadhyay resolved that when his time at Jadavpur University in Calcutta was over, he would spend his final years in Benares. In 2003, after some forty years of teaching, he left his post as head of the philosophy department and made good on his vow.

  One hot afternoon in May, as my time in Benares was nearing an end, I went to see Mukhopadhyay in his small flat on a desolate intersection, a short distance inland from the Alice Boner House. I had called ahead, and Mukhopadhyay gave the auto-rickshaw driver clear directions. The congestion around the river soon gave way to a treeless stretch of road. We took a right after the Durgakund Temple, with its tank of still green water, the surface litter strewn. We came to a roundabout—the Gurudham Intersection—on whose raised platform a solitary black bull lay in the dust. Political posters quivered in the hot wind; a large metal billboard advertised a preschool. Mukhopadhyay lived above a shop that sold Exide car batteries. An underpass led into a petrol-stained courtyard, where a few scooters and motorbikes were parked.

  I climbed an open-air staircase that led up to Mukhopadhyay’s flat and stopped at the landing to look out at Gurudham Park, with its balding patches of grass, lined with hulking ashoka trees, a ragged palm or two, and bushes of flowering oleander. The blazing summer day fell at a slant over the park.

  A young Brahmin boy answered the door and led me into an anteroom of sorts. There was a small porcelain sink, a desk, and a low, heavily varnished bench with thin cushions in an ugly checked pattern, all reddish brown. Other doors gave onto other rooms: a bathroom, a prayer room, a kitchen in the distance, where I could make out a stove and red gas cylinder. A smoked-glass window, partly open, overlooked an interior courtyard. A calendar of the Bengali freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das gazed down at me from the yellow walls.

  Soon P. K. Mukhopadhyay appeared, a small man dressed in a short-sleeved kurta that left his pale hairless arms exposed. He wore a white dhoti with an attractive indigo border. His skin was sallow and veined blue; there was the faintest trace of sandalwood on his forehead. His garland of rudraksh and sacred thread was visible. His face was stern and tremulous, with piercing eyes, but it was also somehow boyish and elfin, with short blunt teeth that turned inward at the middle. The soft folds around his eyes gave an impression both of ill health and sagacity.

  We sat down by the window. I was at a hard angle to Mukhopadhyay, and this fitted the mood of our early conversation, which was stilted and difficult. I found the Bengali Brahmin tetchy, defensive, and keen to shock. He wanted me to know that he was extremely conservative, and he illustrated his point with an anecdote.

  “Some time back, I was asked by a colleague of mine…” He paused. “He is a man of a different caste, and there is a deep-rooted intellectual and scholarly difference between us. I was very friendly, but he always took the opportunity to poke me on this point: ‘Ah, you are a Brahmin, and all that.’ One day it so happened that he said, ‘Professor Mukhopadhyay, many people tell me that you are very strict in your food habits; but, at the same time, you love to feed people. So, what would you do if I was to come into the room while you were eating and sit down across the table from you?’”

  Mukhopadhyay, reliving his shock, flared his eyes. “‘How dare you say that? You will not be permitted.’”

  “Not permitted?” I asked.

  “The question does not arise. How do you permit it?”

  I was not yet sure if he was teasing me.

  “I had a student of a low-caste background. He stayed in my home. I maintained him. I fed him. I taught him. He was a boy of a very poor family. And because he could not cook for me, I had to cook and feed him. I was happy to do it, but if he takes food in my house, he will clean the place. He will clean the utensils.”

  This was no ordinary cleaning. Nor were the dishes dirty in a mere physical way. They were contaminated. The deeds of a past life had left the young man Mukhopadhyay spoke of, his student, spiritually unclean. A vessel that has come into contact with saliva can only be handled by someone inferior in rank, or equal, to the eater. Mukhopadhyay could not touch the vessel his student had eaten from, so the “cleaning” he described was a kind of purification. Mukhopadhyay tried to make it seem like a simple matter of doing the dishes. He wanted to show me how easy it was to accommodate his belief that human beings were inherently inferior or superior. But as with other carefully crafted race laws, this attempt to domesticate the alarming belief only enlarged my horror at what was implied.

  Nor was Mukhopadhyay acting out the unconsidered continuities of an ancient tradition. “All the beliefs that I have now,” he told me, “all the pride I take in being a Hindu, an Indian, a Brahmin—all this I developed myself after studying and thinking. I never inherited any of these things nor accepted them blindly.”

  Mukhopadhyay had also made a journey back, “a return to self,” of which he was profoundly aware. “How would you describe what we are discussing?” he asked after we had spent many hours together, stretched out over multiple days.

  I said, “An experience of cultural loss, and the journey you made back to a place of wholeness…?”

  “In my opinion,” he cut me short, “it is just the birth of a modern traditionalist.”

  Some thirty years before Mukhopadhyay was born, in 1910, the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore published a novel called Gora. The eponymous hero of Gora—the word means “fair-skinned” or “white”—is an Irish orphan adopted by a Brahmin family in Bengal. He grows up believing himself to be Brahmin, but his orthodox father knows better and, ritually cleansed from a morning bath in the Ganges, he avoids Gora’s touch before his prayers. The novel is set in the world of the educated classes in Bengal as they negotiate the transition between tradition and modernity. It is a world suffused with the atmosphere of Hindu reform movements. The Tagore family had played a key role in the development of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, a monotheistic reformation of Hinduism that thrived during the Bengal Renaissance. Tagore throughout his life faced tremendous pushback for what was seen as an attack on Hinduism. Gora is an embodiment of that reaction. He rejects the reformist movements altogether and ardently believes that modern India can only be rescued if she returns to her roots in strict orthodox Hinduism. “Take it from me in writing,” he says early on in the novel, “India has her own very special makeup, her own special strength, her own special truth, and it is only by developing these that we can succeed, and save ourselves.”

  Gora argues tirelessly with his reformist best friend; he denies his feelings for a girl of a reformist family, upholds the traditional role of women in Hindu society, and punishes his mother for her lax attitude to the food prohibitions that underpin caste. At the end of the novel h
e discovers the truth of his birth, and it shatters his belief in his religion and caste.

  The problem Gora dramatizes is an old one. The spirit of reform has not arisen organically, but is the product of contact with another civilization, namely Europe’s. How do you give autonomy to what began with assimilating the criticism of others? This anxiety is a theme that recurs again and again in Dostoyevsky. Yevgeny Pavlovitch Radomsky’s “extraordinary fact” in The Idiot is that Russian liberalism is not a critique of Russia’s social and economic structures, but an attack on Russia itself. “There cannot be such a liberal anywhere else who would hate his very fatherland,” says Radomsky. His explanation for why such a man should exist in Russia is that he isn’t in fact a Russian yet, but the embodiment of an alien criticism.

  Gora, too, addresses this question of authenticity, presenting it as a matter of survival. “If you think that by uprooting our ancient practices, and destroying our traditions, the nation will become one,” Gora tells the chief proponent of liberal Hinduism early on in the novel, “well then you may as well drain the ocean in order to cross it … The cause of rot might be air; but so long as we are alive we survive; if we die, we rot…”

  The world Mukhopadhyay was born into—Bengal at the end of two centuries of British rule—was similar to the world of Gora. The Mukhopadhyays were Brahmins, but in name only. They did not read their scriptures; the majority of their rites and rituals had lapsed. The thread ceremony, which marked initiation, was still performed, but more as a matter of course than a sacred duty. The family, Mukhopadhyay explained, were typical of a period of liberal Hinduism in Bengal.

  The forces of Hindu nationalism were on the rise now, but in Mukhopadhyay’s day the greater danger seemed to come from liberal Hindus, who dominated the discourse. Mukhopadhyay, by nature a contrarian, might always have rejected any form of received wisdom. “But,” he said, “since, at that time, the practices and beliefs in the society were being governed by the ideas of liberal Hinduism, it was the only thing I had to object to.”