The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  Modernity and democracy undermined caste, but they also exacerbated old tensions by upsetting traditional hierarchies and making people aware of one another as never before. The higher castes, whose numbers were small, became insecure about their place in the world. So, the spread of modernity in India threatened caste but also made the need to assert it more vehement; and the unfolding story was not of the disappearance of caste, but of its surprising resilience. Brahmins continued to exert an outsize influence over intellectual life; the armed forces were still dominated by the martial castes; a majority of rich businessmen and industrialists still belonged to the mercantile castes; and the lower castes still did the most wretched work.

  Caste had the power to hide in other forms of distinction, such as class, race, education, and privilege. But deeper than the manifestations of caste was that basic grounding in the intrinsic inequality of human beings that had been bred into the Indian psyche. It was the society’s deepest affinity, stunting the ability of people to transcend their group. Caste, secreted away in the Indian soul, prevented men from seeing in the experience of others a shade of their own. It abolished birth as a shared point of origin, leaving it instead as a spiritual stain.

  Caste would have informed the behavior of the woman at the Italian restaurant. It was what made a relation of mine in Delhi say to me, “This is the only country in the world where one person can look at another and say, ‘Oh, he looks like a servant.’” Tiwari, too, was acting out of caste hatred. He might have resented English-speaking India, he might actively have loathed Muslim India, but it was for those who had been excluded by the Hindu caste system, the Untouchables, and whom even a change of religion could not save, that he reserved a bottomless contempt. They were scarcely human to him. He could never join hands with them socially or politically; the sight of them in orange jumpsuits with modern cleaning implements, refusing to make a spectacle of their degradation, filled him with distaste. The active ingredient in caste violence is not so much a hatred of the inferior caste, but a horror of transgression. The man who steps out of the place society has designated for him and who has the audacity to believe that religious conversion will save him from degradation attracts the ire of an attacker. Too often I am asked abroad why India was spared an all-out class revolution, though outwardly the conditions are so opportune. My answer every time is caste.

  ANAND INTRODUCED SHIVAM TRIPATHI TO me one evening on the riverside with the words, “He is a revolutionary Brahmin.”

  Shivam was dressed in a saffron lungi with a saffron scarf—saffron was the color of Hindu nationalism. He was slightly built, with dark piercing eyes. His face was downed in a growth of light brown hair; his intensity was feral. I could feel the force of his gaze on me, before it shifted to Anand, whom he eyed with disapproval.

  The two men could not have been more different. Anand was in the grip of that fatal instability—the chanchal side of his nature—that had always been his downfall. One minute, he was singing Bollywood songs, the next he was frenziedly talking politics. His support for Modi, the source of such delirium eighteen months before, had lapsed. “The mood has gone cold,” he informed me. A few months ago, in Anand’s home state of Bihar, Modi had suffered his first serious electoral setback since he swept to power. Anand had no love for the winning side, but he was elated by the drama of the result. Politics for him was less an expression of ideology than a vessel into which he channeled his restlessness.

  “Have you ever seen such a thing?” he trilled. “A prime minister, making some twenty-odd speeches in a single state election, and losing! Now Modi has learned that we Biharis, we have our own way!”

  Shivam, though I did not know it at the time, was also a member of the Hindu nationalist ABVP. He watched Anand’s performance with displeasure, perhaps as much because of its wild, erratic quality as for what was being expressed. He was reserved and watchful, but I sensed that beneath the calm on the surface was a cauldron of passion. When Anand explained why I was in Benares—“He is writing about the conflict between tradition and modernity”—Shivam could not restrain himself:

  “The conflict is not between tradition and modernity. It is between modernity and spirituality.” The word Shivam used, adhyatmikta, was important; it was derived from atman, which meant “self,” both in the sense of the personal self and the Hindu idea of the Supreme Self, or soul. In old India, atmanam viddhi—“know thyself”—was the great message of the Upanishads. It was thought that the personal self could serve as a site for the discovery of the Supreme Self, making it possible to transcend the illusion of individuality. “The Atman is impartite,” writes Coomaraswamy, “but it is apparently divided and identified into variety by the differing forms of its vehicles, mouse or man, just as space within a jar is apparently signate and distinguishable from space without it.”

  No sooner had Shivam set me straight than he wanted urgently to show me something. I recoiled from the force of his personality, but he had an integrity that I was powerless to resist. I had not told him much about my journey, but he seemed quickly to have grasped what was at stake. In appropriating my reasons for traveling, he gave me the surest indication I had thus far received that my line of inquiry was important not merely to me, but to those I found myself among.

  Before Shivam and I could do another thing, Anand begged five minutes of us. He, too, wanted to show me something.

  “Five minutes!” Shivam said sternly.

  “Five minutes,” Anand said.

  Then we were off, racing up the steps of the ghat; we passed an assemblage of small squat temples, covered in thick orange paint, each with a border of silver. We turned around and went up another flight of stairs. Some Bengali writing was on the wall. All the while Anand was saying, “You know how I don’t like the girls of today. I hate all that lip gloss and high heels and jeans. I’ve fallen in love with a very different kind of girl. She lives in this ashram that I’m taking you to. She’s very pure, like the women of classical India. Pure inside, pure outside. She spends her days lost in prayer, in her studies, in classical song and dance. She thinks only of God and passes her hours in contemplation of the Ganges. She’s like someone out of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, and she has tremendous internal power. I did not think it possible that such girls could still exist.”

  We came onto a beautiful balcony, set deep within a bend of the Ganges. The river sprawled below, fading into violet darkness. At our back was a building with loggias. An ashram of sorts, it was set around a courtyard, and the rooms were reminiscent of the small monkish cells found in Buddhist ruins.

  Anand took me to the end of the balcony, where a shrine lay beyond a shuttered gate. It contained a large picture of a beautiful woman with prominent rounded cheekbones. Her eyes were vast pools of melancholy and inner calm, and she wore her long black hair loose. This arresting face, though I did not know it at the time, was of Anandamayi Ma, a famous twentieth-century saint whose advice was sought by Indira Gandhi and of whom we have not one, but two, literary portraits, from Arthur Koestler and Octavio Paz.

  “Her husband never enjoyed her,” Anand said of Anandamayi. “He loved her like a mother. He let her fulfill her dreams and do something for the girls of Kashi.”

  We stood at a balustrade overlooking a grove of frangipani trees. Across from us, and deliberately kept out of view, was a cream-colored building with pale blue jalousies. “The girls are never exposed to men,” Anand said. “They never leave this place, except under the surveillance of a guard.”

  Then, suddenly, Anand gestured across the courtyard to a roof terrace, where through the gaps in the thick balustrade a few figures were dimly visible. “There she is. Now she’s gone. There she is again.” For a second I saw her: a fearful-looking slight girl, with dark skin and attractive features. A green shawl was draped over her head. She looked piercingly at us, then was ushered away. Anand, overflowing with romance, said, “What a life I could have with someone like that! None of this awful modern stuff. Wh
at our society would be if we could depend on the strength of women like that—women possessed of knowledge and ascetic power, the secret of the sages.”

  The glimpse of the young girls, with cropped hair, looking like child widows, was depressing. And when I tried to square it with the society that I knew to be a furnace of sexual desire—in which men, who were unable to converse with women, were nonetheless avid consumers of pornography, and where rapes happened only in India, not in Bharat—it was more than depressing; it was alarming. Anand, more than he realized, was part of the collapse of old ways. It fed his fantasies of a return to a golden age when women were pure. I did not believe he could sentimentalize tradition in this way if tradition were still intact in him. And the sentiment was not benign, for underlying the wish to bring back an irrecoverable past was a more violent impulse to undo the present.

  We were still in the ashram when Shivam burst in on us in a rage.

  “This is your five minutes?”

  Anand recoiled.

  Seeing him shrink from his temper, Shivam softened. ”Do you want to come with us?”

  “No,” Anand said, perhaps fearing that his frivolity would land him in more trouble. He looked long at me and said, “You’ll be all right with him.”

  Then Shivam and I were off again, at a fast pace, through the network of winding streets. They were flanked by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings whose narrow balconies were open to thin strips of sky. Paper kites flew overhead and flocks of pigeons burst out of the shady depths of the streets. The setting sun showed like a wan sickle at the edge of the rooftops. We passed bulls and ascetics, bent-over old crones with staffs and spruce young grooms with brides bedecked in silk and brocade following blindly behind them. I was dimly aware of passing mosques with enclosed gardens, where the azan now sounded. Through the iron bars of little alcove temples a smoky yellow light wafted out. I had not yet acquired the local talent of walking without stepping into something dreadful. My eyes were fixed on the paving stones, which were now wet with paan spittle bleeding into puddles—bits of Styrofoam floating in the reddish water—now smeared with cow shit; they were also covered in urine stains, large and brown and frilled, like great wilted carnations. The air stank, and then with that Indian genius for contraries it was overwhelmed by cloying waves of jasmine.

  The scene around us was changing fast. The temples were suddenly garish; I caught a glimpse of the curls and sharp angles of Tamil script, impenetrable as a line of riot policemen. Shivam explained that we were entering the South Indian quarter of the city. The increase in human traffic, and the appearance of souvenir shops and flower sellers, made it clear that we were approaching a major temple. The evening tide of worshippers swept us along. Shivam’s roommate, Rohit, a student of classical grammar, had joined us. The temple appeared at the end of a long bulb-lit street.

  In the interior courtyard, the cold marble floor was marked with the black impressions of wet bare feet. Rohit and Shivam pressed their heads against the keystone of the temple and entered with the ease and familiarity of people entering their own home. We passed many smoke-blackened subsidiary shrines before coming to a statue of Kali. The two Brahmins, wrapping one leg around the other, while holding the lobes of their ears in a gesture of reverence, squatted low before the dread goddess. Shivam took me into the central sanctum to see the great scarified head of the Kedareshwar linga. It sat in a brass casement and was among this city’s most powerful representations of its ruling deity, Shiva. It was not smooth and polished like the others, but dark and rutted, a domed outthrust of rock with a single white line running through it. The linga was ringed with cloudy water and strewn with leaves, marigolds, and tiny white flowers. Shivam sank to his haunches and drank the water with his cupped hands. I gingerly touched my head to the linga. Before I could look up, Shivam had smeared my forehead with cool streaks of sandalwood paste. It was a gesture of warmth and spontaneity, designed to bring me out of myself.

  Unspoken between us was the understanding that I was to try to apprehend what was happening here, in the sanctum, by using my intuition, rather than my intellect. It was as if Shivam could tell that I had been too long in my head and had failed to see—or, rather, feel—something important. So when, midway, I stopped to ask him the name of the leaves on the linga, he looked at me with annoyance. He told me they were bilva leaves and supplied the verses from scripture, which said that they were dear to Shiva, but I was missing the point. Faith functioned by an internal logic; it was its own means of knowing, and one knew by feeling, not by asking questions.

  As if wanting me to recognize this, Shivam now threw his head back, closed his eyes, and began to sing. He sang beautifully, in praise of the goddess Durga, bringing the song to an end with, “Shiva, Lord of All, who abides in Kashi, on the banks of the Ganges.” Then he recited a verse in Sanskrit, the meter sounding out like shot in the sanctum.

  Afterward, Shivam led me out from the back of the temple into the open night air. The steps going down to the river were bathed in white from floodlights. A pilgrim boat was arriving, full of middle-aged women who came onshore, hitched up their saris, and began to trudge up the steep stairs. Behind us some teenage girls, in jeans and pink socks, with busy designs on their sweaters, were taking selfies, screaming and giggling. Shivam turned to me and said with disdain, “Look, that is our modernity.” Then, pointing down the steps toward the river, he said, “And that is our spirituality.” On the edge of the Ganges where a few lamps floated, I could make out the figure of a man meditating. He sat with his back to us, draped in wet saffron, still as a rock.

  “Either we throw ourselves into this modernity,” Shivam said almost hatefully, “or we go back to what we were. What is intolerable is this limbo, this middle condition, for in the end”—he pointed down the dark arc of the river—“the truth is only that.” Through the thick murk of a December evening, the roaring orange fires of the cremation ghats were visible.

  THAT NIGHT, LYING AWAKE IN Alice’s room, I began to feel that even those who seemed most at home in India, most at home in a place such as Benares, were increasingly living in a world grown strange—a place they called home but no longer recognized. It was as if homelessness itself had become a political force in our time, and the promise of greatness restored, which every politician from Delhi to Washington was now peddling, was the fantasy of a homecoming—a promise to those who felt powerless in the world beyond the security of home.

  Eighteen months after Modi’s election, India was on the edge of mass hysteria. In October, two months before my arrival in Benares, a Muslim man had been lynched on the outskirts of Delhi for allegedly possessing beef. The cow was sacred to Hindus, the consumption of beef forbidden. During the election, Modi whipped crowds at his rallies into a frenzy over a “pink revolution,” an alleged conspiracy by his political opponents to promote the slaughter of cows. “We’ve heard of the Green Revolution,” he thundered. “We’ve heard of the White Revolution, but today’s Delhi government wants neither. They’ve taken up arms for a Pink Revolution,” he said, referring to the color of beef. “Do you want to support people who want to bring about a Pink Revolution?”

  The cow had been carefully chosen as a symbol in the culture war. Modi knew that the English-speaking elite did not have the same regard for the animal as his religious base did. He knew, too, that the meat industry was predominantly run by Muslims and that the consumption of beef was not forbidden in Islam. The cow was a way both to inflame the passions of the base and settle the scores of the past. After the first lynching, Modi, normally a voluble man, was silent. It was seen as a signal, and the killings continued.

  Caste, class, religion: all the ancient fractures were bristling. That old lie of India, the nonviolent country, was steadily being undone. A deep historical violence had been awakened. Shivam himself had been swept up. When Anand had said that Shivam was a “revolutionary Brahmin,” Anand was referring to a student protest in which Shivam had taken a bulle
t. The protest was ostensibly for a student council, but it had turned into a show of strength for the ABVP, part of the group’s growing clout on campus. Before falling asleep, I googled Shivam.

  BHU STUDENTS’ STIR TURNS VIOLENT: One student was injured in the melee, although reports that he had been shot at were categorically denied by the police and the university administration. The student, Shivam Tripathi, was reported to be out of danger.

  —THE INDIAN EXPRESS, NOVEMBER 21, 2014

  8

  THE COMMUNITY OF DEATH

  TO DIE IN BENARES IS to break free of the cycle of rebirth. That is Shiva’s promise, and that is why death here is not a fearful thing. But there was another kind of death taking place in the city that was less easy to confront. Old India itself was dying.

  It was Shivam who first made me see cultural death against the backdrop of this city of death. Shivam had come to Benares as an eight-year-old from a small Brahmin village in central India to learn the Veda. That rite of young Brahmin boys coming to Benares to learn their scriptures was so old that it had become a little bit of theater in the lives of those who would never actually undertake the journey. “The boy makes as though he were about to start on a long journey,” Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson tells us in The Rites of the Twice-Born, “and, as provision for the way, he takes in his hand a ball of sweet-stuff tied in a piece of cloth. Sometimes a copy of the Vedas is also wrapped in cloth and tied to his bamboo, and, with this bundle on his right shoulder, he leaves the house as though ‘off to Philadelphia in the morning…’” But his maternal uncle has gone on ahead and, apprehending him before he goes too far, brings him straight home.