What was merely a comedy in the lives of other Brahmin boys had been the real lived experience of Shivam. He had done what most only made to do. He had spent time, money, and labor studying what was valueless in modern India. He was of a poor family and could not afford to be romantic about the beauty and antiquity of his education. Nor was he insulated by the unthinking continuities of tradition. He could see his situation clearly. The questions that he asked himself, and which had inspired his political awakening, were: What would become of young men such as him, traditional students of Sanskrit? What would become of the sacred language itself in this country where it had flowered? And since he was using the language as a metonym for the life of tradition itself, the real question was whether modern India would move into the future with no thought to her past. Would old India simply be forsaken? If so, what would the future look like?
We sat in his tiny room, which he shared with two other students. The floors were strewn with rugs and mattresses. On a low table to the side, bound cheaply in red, were the great books of classical India: grammars, treatises, epics, the Vedas. They were some of the oldest books in the world, and the room, with its air of medieval scholarship, was like a scene out of Chaucer. I could not help but think that this was what an Indian education in the humanities might look like if only some distance could be created, if only Shivam could come to this learning not from a spirit of piety, but of intellectual curiosity and inquiry.
In the corner was a picture of Kali, red-tongued and fierce, with a small linga in front of it. As few were fit to cook for them, the Brahmin students did all their own cooking, and there were little plastic jars of spices, a small gas stove, a rolling pin, some dry flour. In the courtyard outside, a great tree had died, the same tree that gave us the bilva leaves that were so dear to Shiva. Its branches cast long shadows over the powder-blue walls of the house. The courtyard was overrun with weeds, and half-hidden in the undergrowth was the carcass of a uniquely Indian contraption called a desert cooler. Its screens of matting were punched out and the broad blades of its fan rusted in the night air.
Shivam wanted me to come with him to his village: “If you want to see living Indian culture, you must come home with me.” It was not the vitality of the old country that he wanted me to see, but rather a place in its death throes. He wanted me to meet young people crushed by the conflict between modernity and adhyatmikta. “Let them meet someone like you, who is modern through and through. Then they will understand this terrible middle state they’re in.”
I WAS IN A MIDDLE state of my own. In the intervening months, between the summer election in Benares, and now this winter, eighteen months later, I had met someone, married, and moved from Delhi to New York.
Everything about my husband’s and my meeting—from the way we met to the life we cobbled together—was a repudiation of my life in India. We met through a dating app in New York. We had absolutely no one in common. He also came from a place—the American South—where religion and politics had formed a toxic amalgam. The shape of our lives—the single mother, the many half-siblings, the distant father—was uncannily similar. We were two individuals operating alone, with neither tribe nor tradition to serve as a guide. We had come together out of an immense pool of humanity. It felt modern in the very real sense of being new, of being like nothing that had gone before. There was no other time in which we could have met; no world previous to ours that could have supported our union. We made a life in a small apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and soon we had something else in common: the violent death of a father.
On a rainy November morning, a few weeks before I was to leave for this return journey to Benares, my husband received a Facebook message from his half-brother saying that their father was dead—shot in the back of the head at point-blank range by his nephew, their cousin.
My husband was estranged from his father, as I had been from mine. At the time of my husband’s father’s death they had not spoken in a decade. His father was living with his sister in Florida. He had an altercation one night with his nephew, a policeman.
“The uncle and the officer’s mother had been embroiled in a rather heated argument,” said the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office. “The argument became physical … The officer”—later exonerated—“attempted to break it up and separate them. He was unable to. That’s when he made the decision to retrieve his gun.”
The big Florida night; the heavy overhanging foliage, incongruous through the lens of a November night in New York; the little house on Tradewinds Drive, with its white louvered windows; the sheriff’s yellow tape; the police car; the pretty Fox 35 reporter in red—the details made the violence more lurid, even as they made death more remote. I did not envy my husband’s trying to make real the surreal, trying to find his father in the garish spectacle of the late-night news bulletin from Deltona, Florida.
We had only been married a few months, and many elements about my husband’s father’s death reminded me of my own father’s killing: the violence; the not knowing what to do, or whom to call; the period of mourning conducted through YouTube and Facebook. But in my father’s case there was an added element: his death was political. It was inseparable from the shadow that was falling over Pakistan’s old colonial elite.
When I was last in Benares, I had found the spectacle of death in the city distasteful. It was in part grotesque, in part too much a thing for tourists. There they were, on the Harishchandra Ghat, photographing the chaos: of corpses, doms, passers-by, and mourners in peaked white Nehru caps. Goats roamed about, looking like teenagers from the 1980s, in baggy T-shirts of sackcloth. A boy slapped the ribbed gray belly of a reposing cow. Through a wall of orange cremation fire, I could see women on the river shore, washing clothes on a smooth slab of red stone, twisting the cloth into what looked like thick colored strands of twine. The soap mixed with the ash; a mother or sister removed nits from the hair of a small child; birds wheeled over the river; and stony-faced ascetics sat on their haunches, watching the scene, like old park-benchers waiting for a game of chess. The blissful ease that surrounded the industry of death in Benares had seemed to me to dishonor the memory of the dead.
I felt differently now. The experience of the last few weeks in New York, of watching modern life consume the reality of death, had left me more open to the philosophical implications of a city that could look death in the face. The cremation ground in every other Indian city was profane, polluted, and placed outside the city limits. Not here; Benares was the supreme cremation ground. Here the cult of death, as Octavio Paz writes of Mexico, was a cult of life, “in the same way that love is a hunger for life and a longing for death.”
Death, for my husband and me, was dull and anesthetizing, quietly bludgeoning. We did not weep; we carried on. My husband took the week off work because one had to, for the sake of others. But then he went back to work, and I sensed he was relieved to have the distraction, to be back in the society where death did not exist. Eventually there was a funeral, a brief affair. The deaths of our fathers had embarrassed us. Their violence made them too particular, too detailed, too ostentatious. It was harder for the society around us to forget and move on.
IN BENARES, DEATH WAS NOT merely to be endured; it was on occasion to be celebrated as an affirmation of life.
One foggy morning, a crowd gathered at the Tulsi Ghat, upriver from the Alice Boner House. Two boatfuls of people were waiting at the shore. At the center of a green-bottomed boat was an object that looked like a red box in a chair. It was covered in garlands of marigolds; men were dancing around it, crying, “Hara hara Mahadev” (Shiva, take away [my sins]). They had incense and drums. I asked someone standing next to me on the shore, a young man in track pants and blue rubber slippers, what was going on.
“Baba hai,” he said tersely: there was an old man, or ascetic. I tried to inquire further, but the young man slipped off.
The tempo aboard the two boats was picking up. Another young man, this one in a bright green jacket and j
eans, appeared next to me.
“What is happening?”
“Baba hai,” he said.
“What are they going to do with the baba?” I said at last.
“We,” the man said pointedly, though he had no more part in what was about to happen than I did, “are going to immerse him.”
“He’s dead?”
The man refused to dignify this with a response.
The crowd of young men began to dance around the red box, which I realized now was not a box at all, but a chair in which the dead ascetic sat. He was old, and so the death was not to be mourned. The crowd of young men knew exactly what to do; nobody needed to tell them. Custom contained belief; the belief was not so much held, or articulated, as it ran through action. It was manifest.
P. K. Mukhopadhyay had felt that it was precisely this instinctive aspect of tradition that made it ripe for destruction, for how could one defend what one did unthinkingly? He believed that for tradition to live again, to be relevant, it had to be able to speak to modernity. His view, like Coomaraswamy’s, was that tradition suffered “from the inevitable consequences of all formulation. The formula, however admirable, is inherited rather than earned, it becomes an end instead of a means, and its meaning is forgotten, so that it is insecure.” Yet to watch these young men dance around the dead ascetic was to feel the power of the unselfconscious. It was basic; it was tribal; it needed no explanation.
A few minutes later, the two boats set off through the fog. I followed them down the river past the bathers and the boatmen and knots of idle youth. I walked all the way to the Prabhu Ghat. Midriver, the cries of “Hara hara Mahadev” grew louder through a white fog. The damru, a small two-headed drum, struck by two beads fastened to two strings—this was the drum of Shiva, sharp, percussive, and stilling—reached a crescendo. The body had been thrown overboard, I thought to myself.
On my way home, the boats were returning, now without the red casket. The baba had been immersed; the revelers were quiet. All that could be heard was the steady chug of the motor, emitting little puffs of black smoke.
Rama Nama Satya Hai! Ram’s name is truth. This was the sound from the street! A corpse in white cloth, sprinkled with a few flowers, and rocking on the bier, carried on the shoulders of poor fellows dressed in soiled clothes and continuously shouting: Rama Nama Satya Hai! Innumerable corpses were carried over and cremated down below by the Ganges. How easy life and death are here. Everyone already knows how it will happen. There is no drama and no tragedy, because everything that happens is part of eternal becoming and passing away, endlessly repeated. Personal destiny is insignificant. That is why individual aspiration is so rare. That is why almost everyone thinks, talks the same way, and that is why there is so little differentiated individuality. And yet there is no superficiality. It is a deep relation to the whole creation: Rama Nama Satya Hai!
—alice boner diaries, january 27, 1936
“THE CITY IS DYING,” PINKU said to me one morning. “If you come here in ten or twenty years, you won’t see what we have now.”
Pinku is Ajay Pandey. I had met him eighteen months before at the height of the Modi election. I had gone on one of his guided tours of the city, of which he possessed an encyclopedic knowledge. I was struck by his intelligence, his quiet self-effacing manner, and his beautiful literary Hindi, which had been his subject at university.
Pinku was a Brahmin, too, albeit a reluctant one. The family story followed a now-familiar pattern: a grandfather, lost to the mists of time, who was a priest in a royal household; a father who was a government servant; and Pinku, who, in this age of private enterprise, was his own man, half tourist guide, half something grander. He was tall, dark-skinned, and fine-featured; his large eyes conveyed fatigue and melancholy; he kept a Brahmin’s shikha, but it was ragged and unkempt, more an afterthought than a gesture of self-regard. A single recessed tooth, stained brown, gave his otherwise pensive aspect a touch of humor. Pinku’s vocation—his dharma—was his love of Benares, where he had lived all his life, and of which he had compiled a painstaking oral history of ruin and decay.
“If you spend too much time with me,” he said as we set out one morning, “you will become despondent.”
“Why?”
“Because I see this city, and I see the buildings that give it its distinctiveness and character, falling away before my eyes. When I look down this street”—he pointed to a faceless modern building that interrupted a line of fine blue-washed buildings with delicate tracery and wrought-iron balconies—“I cannot see Benares; I could be anywhere.”
We came to a row of redbrick buildings with pale blue accents. Pinku pointed to the deep interior courtyard of one house where, through shadow, I caught a glimpse of mildewed walls bathed in sunlight.
“The hallmark of the Bengali style was the marrying of architectures,” Pinku said, “the European with the traditional Indian.”
Buildings cannot lie, and these buildings showed the creative potential of the contact between Bengal and Britain. It had produced an attractive synthesis—one of spirit, rather than of ornament—and it stood in marked contrast to the relationship with Western influence today, which was sterile at best, and corrosive at worst. The names on these buildings were the anglicized names of Bengali Brahmins: Mukherjee and Chatterjee standing in for the hard-to-pronounce Mukhopadhyay and Chattopadhyay. The houses built by the Bengali Brahmins reflected the depth of their engagement with the new culture of Europe. For a brief moment in the late-eighteenth century, Britain seemed to brighten India, and there was a hope that the meeting of the two cultures would be fertile.
“Look,” Pinku said, with dismay. “It has come up in literally one year.” He pointed to a five-story block of flats with undulating white balconies. It stood next to a slim tall building, in the Bengali style, from whose façade the playful parrot green of a Corinthian column had fallen away. The balcony was a shattered stump. A stunted forest of weeds grew up in an internal courtyard. The buildings formed a diptych: decay, with all its surprising beauty, acting as a preservative next to the clean effacement brought by change. Pinku, as he went about his tours and historical walks, lived in constant awareness of change as an agent of erasure. I had heard an American guide a few days before use the phrase “intangible culture.” He was referring to a time in the not-too-distant future when India may live on in hearts and minds, but there would be nothing left of its spirit enshrined in stone. I could not help but think it was a fitting outcome for a culture that had historically held the material world in such low esteem.
As we approached the river, near the Dashashwamedh Ghat, Pinku showed me a family of bright orange stones.
They were planted along the edge of a road leading up from the river. One or two were housed in their own tiny temples, no bigger than coffee tables. On the surface of each stone were the carved figures of a man and a woman with rounded breasts.
“Sati stones,” Pinku muttered.
He explained that the stones commemorated women who had committed sati, the Hindu rite by which widows immolated themselves on the pyres of their husbands. The practice had been outlawed by the British in the nineteenth century. But the stones remained, a reminder of the violence of the medieval world, no less real than its romance. Pinku pointed to a man asleep in one of the miniature temples. He clutched the sati stone as if it were a pillow.
Behind us, the Ganges glittered in the morning sun.
PINKU WANTED TO GIVE ME an oral history of Benares. He expertly threaded it into certain places where he brought me as if by chance. One morning we found ourselves at the Chet Singh Ghat, overlooking a dusty maidan, an open quadrangle streaked with long slim islands of grass. Some Brahmin boys with thick knotted shikhas were playing cricket to one side; card players gambled in a tight circle on the other. Around us, on all sides, were the age-blackened spires and domes of temples and palaces, whose rough, scarified surfaces were framed against the pale blue sky.
Pinku began to tell m
e of a pivotal moment in the eighteenth century. Muslim power was vanishing into a perfumed haze of over-refinement; the British were circling; Hindu India, after years of subjugation, was ascendant. The Muslim governor of Benares, Mir Rustam Ali, fell in love with the city and devoted himself to its sensual pleasures. While he was distracted, a Hindu dynasty rose in cahoots with the British. “For the first time in over five hundred years,” writes Diana Eck, “the city was under the jurisdiction of Hindu kings.”
The first of those kings, Balwant Singh, belonged to a special class of land-owning Brahmins known as Bhumihars. He had no legitimate sons, so when he died, in 1770, his family tried to install a favorite nephew as king. But his illegitimate son Chet Singh staged a coup. “Even as his father’s last rites were being performed on the Manikarnika Ghat, Chet Singh seized this palace and fort,” said Pinku.
Soon, however, Chet Singh ran into trouble. He tried to get out of paying taxes to the British, whose protection he had invoked against the Nawab of Awadh, in the west. Warren Hastings, the British governor-general, was fighting a bellicose Muslim prince in the south, and he was under constant pressure to send money to the East India Company in Britain. “The English government now chose to wring money out of Cheyte Sing,” Lord Macaulay writes in his great essay on Hastings. “It had formerly been convenient to treat him as a sovereign prince; it was now convenient to treat him as a subject.”
The two men—Hastings and Chet Singh—confronted each other on this very maidan in 1781. “The national and religious prejudices with which the English were regarded throughout India were peculiarly intense in the metropolis of the Brahminical superstition,” writes Macaulay. Chet Singh was popular, Hastings outnumbered. A crowd assembled in the streets surrounding the palace. “The tumult became a fight, and the fight a massacre.” Three British officers and over a hundred sepoys were butchered.
Pinku now pointed out the little memorial to the soldiers on the far end of the maidan. In the confusion that ensued, Chet Singh, who had been held prisoner by the British, used a rope made of turbans to climb down the high embankment on which we sat, then took a boat to the opposite shore.
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