The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  We reached Benares a little before midnight. The odometer showed that we had traveled just under a thousand kilometers. I paid Mukesh by the kilometer and turned to Shivam. We said goodbye with little expectation that we would see each other again. Then his slight figure disappeared around a corner, retracing his steps in answer to a call my ears were slowly growing deaf to: the dharma of place.

  11

  THE PROTECTION

  OF THE SEED

  A TIME OF LEAVE-TAKING was upon me.

  It rained continuously through my last days in Benares. The river swelled. Sky and water turned the same color, blurring the boundary between day and night. I was forced to stay indoors during the day, and in the evenings, when the rain let up, I walked along the now empty riverside, with its parasols under which no astrologers sat, and its little tea and paan stalls wrapped up like Christmas presents in blue tarpaulin. The sky was a pinkish red; the floodlights on the shore left long islands of white reflected light on the river. That great open-air arena was now an empty stage from which all the players and all the spectators had departed. Even the ghat dogs and goats had retreated to places of shelter. All that was left of the pageant were the lone figure of a Japanese photographer in green cargo pants and the imposing sight of a solitary Indian bull, with its ashen hump, newly barred from the inner city by cattle grids, neither sacred enough to be given shelter nor reviled enough to be killed; so, there he stood, the mount of Shiva, black lips and tongue moving in a thoughtful chewing motion.

  ALICE HAD BEQUEATHED HER LIFE’S work, her legacy, and the care of her house to one of the great doyennes of Benares: the Austrian Indologist Bettina Bäumer. Alice and Bäumer met in the 1960s. Alice had already been living in Benares for some thirty years. “She was a monument in Benares,” Bäumer told me. “Very well known, but quite alone.”

  Bäumer and I sat in her office in the Abhinavagupta Library, where I had heard the Brahmins of Benares hold forth in Sanskrit a decade before. The library, named after the tenth-century aesthetician and logician of medieval Kashmir, was Bäumer’s creation; it was what she went on to do after relinquishing charge of Alice’s house and foundation. Bäumer sat at a desk strewn with external hard drives and devices, a black-and-white photograph of Swami Lakshman Joo, one of the last great pandits of Kashmir, at her back. She was dressed in a brown sari and sweater.

  Here was another face marked with beautiful lines. Her hair, despite her age, was solid gold, and there was a glint of steel in her faintly greenish smile of capped teeth. Bäumer reminded me, in every detail from her dentistry to her clothes to her spectacles, of a quieter, more genteel time in India, when, as Rakesh of Harmony Books had said, there was nothing in Benares save for buffaloes and anthropologists. Even the room, with its cupboard of polished wood and glass, full of books, and its seating on the floor, was reminiscent of this other time, as was the snack of lemon tea and rice flakes I was offered upon sitting down.

  I associated this time with a period of innocence in the modern republic of India. When Bäumer came to Benares in 1967 to do postdoctoral research at BHU, Nehru had died only three years before. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, had been prime minister for scarcely a year. She was then still believed to be the “dumb doll” that one of the Congress party elders had called her, easy to manipulate; she was not yet the victor of the 1971 war with Pakistan, nor the tyrant of 1975, who abolished press freedoms overnight and imposed a state of internal emergency in India, jailing the opposition and suspending Indian democracy for two bad years in an otherwise unbroken history of political freedom. The movies then were still full of sweet songs, chiffon saris, and bougainvillea.

  At the tail end of this time of innocence, Alice and Bäumer met in Benares. “She was full of ideas and concerns,” Bäumer said, “and she had no one to share them with.” Bettina lived nearby, and the two women would meet and talk in German about Indian art, about Coomaraswamy, about Alice’s fear that India was on the verge of losing her culture. The threat was much less then, but Bäumer was surprised at how prescient Alice had been: “She could see the dangers, and she was very severe and critical of the hypocrisy of Indians.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know, the saying you believe one thing, and the living and behaving as quite another. This was part of her disappointment with Uday Shankar too. She felt he was leaving truer forms of dance for kitsch.”

  As Bäumer spoke, the picture that began to emerge of Alice was of a lonely old woman, surrounded by thieving servants, who rented out the rooms of her house while she was in Europe for the summer. She was also, it seemed, insecure with contemporaries, such as the art historian Stella Kramrisch, and Bäumer wondered if this had to do with Alice’s lack of formal academic training and her intuitive, rather than exact, proficiency in Sanskrit. Often the meaning came to Alice, Bäumer said, before the actual words and language.

  Alice’s diary, which Bäumer read in secret while Alice lay on her deathbed, was a revelation: “She was so reserved that I had very little sense of how powerful her internal life was.”

  The intensity of that internal life had solaced me during this period of flux in Benares. Alice’s and my situations were both alike and diametrical. Her movement had been toward India. As a foreigner, it had been open to her to live in India in a way that would never have been possible for me. I left a modern Indian city, such as Delhi, because I felt it offered a desiccated imitation of life in the West, and because an invisible barrier prevented it from nourishing itself culturally by reaching into the Indian heartland. I had moved toward Sanskrit, Benares, and now the Brahmins because I needed that nourishment myself. But I also knew that I could never overcome the barriers of my upbringing in India. I would never be able to live in Benares as Alice had. I would never be able to pass. People would always be able to place me at a glance—as English speaking, as Muslim, as part of the class of interpreters. The degree of anonymity that Alice had enjoyed in India was only open to me in the West, and maybe all my questing after India had been the precursor to my moving more honestly away from it.

  What Alice and I had in common was the late-in-life realization that we could not remain where we had grown up: to be more fully ourselves, to adhere to our dharma, we had to break the bond of place. It was not done in a moment of youthful exuberance, but only after many years of private reckoning, in which the awareness that to grow, one had to leave flickered on the margins of life. The decision to go was quiet, creeping, and final. Europe was to Alice what India was to me: a place she never ceased to love, but one where she could not continue to live.

  ON A DISMAL EVENING IN January, I found myself climbing the drab staircase that led up to P. K. Mukhopadhyay’s flat. Halfway up, I stopped on the landing. Dusk was settling over Gurudham Park.

  Inside, Mukhopadhyay was in a lively mood. He wore a gray polo sweater under a white woolen kurta and salmon-pink socks with rubber slippers. He seemed starved of conversation and was keen to talk. Of the new government, he said, “They are Hindus without apology, but they have not yet mastered the challenge of being Hindus without revenge.”

  Mukhopadhyay was referring to the mass hysteria that had seized India. Every day brought a new incident of chauvinism and misplaced pride, and all the time, as Hindu India reasserted itself, the attacks on Muslims continued. The killings grew more graphic by the day: the lone hunted figure of a dairy farmer lurching and stumbling along the edge of a dusty highway before he is set upon by “cow vigilantes”; a laborer hacked to death and immolated. It was all on social media, so the whole country bore witness. A great clamor surrounded the assertions of pride, even as a great silence settled over the killings.

  Mukhopadhyay was intelligent enough to see that this unapologetic revivalism, motivated by historical revenge, would have no more room for him than for me. It was an age that spelled the destruction of the very ideal of the Brahmin. “They have no clear notion of what they are,” he said of the people of this new time, “just as
they have no clear notion of what they have almost ceased to be. Nor any clear notion of what they’ve come to be.” He added, “I feel sometimes that I have lived too long.”

  Mukhopadhyay’s entire life project had been motivated by the desire to revive tradition with the sap of thought. His aim was to become actively aware of all the beliefs and practices that had come down to him through the unthinking continuities of tradition, and to give them new life through fresh consideration. For a man such as this, the present Hindu revival represented a world turned upside down. Mukhopadhyay dreamed of tradition, imbued with thought, speaking boldly to modernity; what happened instead was tradition itself became the plaything of a violent modern impulse and acted in clean contradiction of itself. The Hindu horror at the taking of life, any life, was what underlay India’s widespread vegetarianism. It was the same doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence, that governed the beliefs of men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Now that same exalted idea had engendered a killing enterprise. It was a perfect inversion of Mukhopadhyay’s dream. He wanted autonomy, intellectual life, and renaissance; what he got was revivalism and reaction, his great Hindu past held hostage by the present. Just as the Islam that had appeared in our time—and that killed my father—was not traditional, not even medieval, but utterly new, so, too, was this brand of Hinduism. It was, whether we liked it or not, modern.

  But hadn’t Mukhopadhyay himself been a little naïve, a little unrelenting, in his rigidity, in his grand vows and stances?

  On returning from Benares after the summer election, I relayed the story he had told me of the intercaste marriage to an academic friend in Delhi, who said he knew a man who fit the description of the “boy” in the story. He was now a professor of philosophy at an American university. My friend offered to put us in touch, but I didn’t take him up on it.

  Some weeks went by. I returned to New York, where I was a private student of Sanskrit at Columbia University. One day my professor told me of an upcoming lecture on Indian logic and hermeneutics. It was to be given by none other than the “boy” in Mukhopadhyay’s story.

  I thought I had better attend. I took my friend up on his offer of an introduction, and one February morning, weeks after I had returned from India, I found myself in room 754 of the Schermerhorn Extension at Columbia University, listening to a lecture entitled “Moral Epistemic Authority With or Without God: The Meaning of an Imperative Sentence.”

  Chairing the lecture was the éminence grise of subaltern studies, Gayatri Spivak. She introduced a man in his late fifties with floppy gray hair and a straggly salt-and-pepper beard. Dressed in a kurta and black waistcoat, he was the very picture of a left-wing Indian intellectual, disheveled but vain.

  The lecture, not intended for lay audiences, was incomprehensible to me. But I sat through it nonetheless in the hope that, when it was over, I would be able to speak to Mukhopadhyay’s former student. We had been in touch by email. He had suggested we have lunch after the lecture, so that I could explain at some length what I was writing about. But no sooner had I approached and mentioned Mukhopadhyay’s name than his face became a contorted mask of rage.

  “I have no desire to speak about this,” he said, and hurried past me.

  I thought he must have misunderstood and I tried to explain further. When I mentioned India, he snarled, “I have no interest in India, or the Indian experience, or Sanskrit studies. I am a philosopher. Talk to me about philosophy.”

  I must have said something about Brahmins because he turned on me and said, “I am not a Brahmin. Perhaps P. K. Mukhopadhyay might see himself as a Brahmin. I certainly do not. For me that word is the same as Nazi. It is like your saying to me, ‘I hear you’re from a Nazi family. Tell me about being a Nazi.’”

  With this, the professor vanished into the mouth of the subway at 116th Street, leaving me alone to process the violence of his reaction to India, where a castebound society had sought to extinguish his personal happiness. I thought of Mukhopadhyay and his proposed solution to the moral dilemma in which the couple had found themselves—that simple solution that would “add glory to the life of the boy, glory to the girl, and glory to the system.” In that moment, as the great diversity of the American university rushed past me on all sides, the weakness of traditional society had never seemed more apparent. What a grave mistake Mukhopadhyay had made in never leaving that enclosed sphere where his arcane code still held sway! Merely recalling that other place from this intersection in Manhattan, where the fluidity of the world system was at its greatest, and where so many narrower ideas of self had already dissolved, was to feel the full fragility of a closed society whose destruction was all but assured.

  Caste now came up again in my conversation with Mukhopadhyay. I was still thinking of the treatment Mukesh had received in Shivam’s house, and Mukhopadhyay, speaking of the need for men to give “a theoretical justification” for their beliefs and practices, made me realize that I had never heard one from him: not for the edifice of caste itself, but for the prohibitions surrounding food.

  The limited scope of my question startled Mukhopadhyay. I think he would have preferred that I speak more abstractly. He said, “It is the British style that at food time there is all sorts of discussion and socializing. But, in India, eating is a strictly religious activity. You begin by sharing your food with God. Then sharing with your environment. Then with the elements of your body. These are the three stages. All that is there within this practice. The meaning is lost, but the practice remains.”

  I told him the story of what happened with Mukesh and pressed Mukhopadhyay on this specific point of food.

  He said that nothing was wrong with the practice. “I cannot share my food even with my own sister or brother. That’s a different thing. A person of a different caste, I will not allow him to touch my utensils or to go into my kitchen.” He reminded me of the low-caste student who had once resided with him, and how he fed and taught him. “He had no difficulty living with me.”

  I was sure he didn’t, just as Mukesh had no difficulty with the rules of Shivam’s house. “It must be remembered,” writes James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son, “that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality.” I wanted to know from Mukhopadhyay, who claimed to have rethought that reality, with all its criteria and beliefs, who claimed to have taken nothing for granted, what he considered to be the basis for the commensal prohibition: Why could a Brahmin not eat from the same utensils, or even in the company, of a low-caste person?

  Mukhopadhyay’s mouth tightened. “A person has been born in a particular caste because of some reason, some objective conditions. He is obliged morally to practice what is legitimate within that caste. I can violate the caste only if I convince myself that it is man-made.”

  He was still not answering the question, but when at last he did, I found myself almost wishing he hadn’t.

  “If a person is suffering from a communicable disease, you would not let him touch your utensils. You have this one idea of contamination, but you refuse to accept that there might be certain spiritual conditions…” His voice trailed off. He seemed to know he had lost me.

  We were speaking during a week when every newspaper in the country was reporting the suicide of a young Dalit student named Rohith Vemula. He was a twenty-six-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Hyderabad in the south. Vemula was active in student politics and part of a Dalit organization that frequently clashed with the ABVP—the same Hindu nationalist group of which Shivam and Anand were members. In August 2015, Vemula was accused of assaulting an ABVP member. The group wrote a letter, which eventually made its way to the education minister, accusing Vemula of “casteist” and “anti-national” activity. The next month, Vemula, along with four other students, was suspended. In December, the university upheld the suspension, barring Vemula from all public places on the campu
s, and effectively ending his education.

  A few weeks later, Vemula, who had once hoped to become a science writer in the tradition of Carl Sagan, committed suicide, hanging himself from a ceiling fan. The suicide had inspired protests across the country and forced Indians to once more confront the fundamental inequality on which their society had been predicated.

  Vemula should have been part of a national healing. Here was a student from among the lowest castes, attending one of India’s most prestigious universities. His story could have been about the country’s success in overcoming the terrible history of caste. Instead it became a testament to India’s inability to do so. In his suicide note, Vemula wrote that he could not move past the “fatal accident” of his birth.

  Mukhopadhyay now said, “You have to understand that modern European culture is based on the idea that all men are born equal and later become differentiated. The Indian idea is different. We believe that men are born unequal, but we are all, Brahmin, sage, cobbler, outcaste, heading toward the same destiny.”

  It was a valiant attempt at a “theoretical justification,” but it was absurd. It would mean that millions of lower-caste Indians such as Rohith Vemula would have to forfeit the aspirations of this life in exchange for the promise of some ultimate destiny, many lifetimes away, in which all differences would be obliterated. If men could not be equal at birth, then the only community left for them to be part of was the community of death. No patriotism, no fellow feeling, no notion of the pursuit of happiness—no ambition, no audacity—could survive so systematic a deferral of hope.