(Book Review)
[He watches Modi manipulating precisely those high-minded Hindu values that he, Taseer, has so admired. He is particularly eloquent when he bemoans the weird claims that have been made for Indian (that is, Hindu) science, including the assertion that ancient Indians used nuclear weapons and mastered air travel.]
By Wendy Doniger
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Indian devotees on the bank of the Ganges in Varanasi, November
2018. Credit
Dominique Faget/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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The
“twice-born” in Aatish Taseer’s
title are the Brahmins who
are “reborn” when they undergo initiation as young men into India’s highest
caste. But the word could refer equally well to Taseer himself. His story is a
variant of the much-told tale of the American man (or Englishman or European
man, seldom a woman) who revolts against the shallowness of Western materialism
and goes to India to find his soul, to reinvent himself, to be spiritually
reborn. Cross this genre — epitomized by W. Somerset Maugham’s
1944 novel, “The Razor’s Edge” —
with the equally shopworn story of the American in search of his ethnic
identity and you get a man of Pakistani and Indian heritage who (re)turns to
India to find his roots (and/or soul). But Taseer’s is a far more convoluted
authorial voice: Born in 1980 in London to a Muslim father (the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province,
assassinated by an Islamist fanatic in 2011) and a Sikh mother (a famous Indian
journalist), Taseer was educated at a posh international school in
India and then in America, where he graduated from Amherst College. A
successful, often controversial, journalist, he was much praised for his first
book, a blend of memoir and travelogue called “Stranger to History:
A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands,” and for his three novels, which deal
with a young Indian who returns to his country after some years abroad. It’s
not very hard to see an obsessive pattern here, in which “The Twice-Born” forms
the final element, since it aims to do for Hinduism (and India) what Taseer’s
first book did for Islam (and Pakistan).
It was a
difficult re-entry. Taseer describes his own cultural schizophrenia in India:
“I saw everything as an Anglicized Indian watching an imaginary European or
American visitor watch India, and I had my heart in my mouth as I tried to
guess what he would make of it. It was an embarrassment twice removed.” Part of
the problem was that he had chosen to view his rediscovered country through the
lens of Sanskrit, the
ancient language of India, which he had studied for a decade.
Actually, Taseer calls it Benares, the British name Indians have
replaced with the original Sanskrit. Elsewhere he comments obliquely on this
choice: “One forms an idea of India by balancing what India knows about herself
with what outsiders, from Megasthenes and Fa Hsien to Al-Biruni and Niccolo de Conti,
have written about her. It makes the country ripe for being defined from the
outside.” Yet he largely ignores the many Indian writers who, pace Taseer, have managed to
define it quite well from the inside.
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THE TWICE-BORN
Life and Death on the Ganges
By Aatish Taseer
242 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26
|
By this time,
Taseer has realized that a much-admired Brahmin friend named Tripathi is
speaking “a cut-rate version of the banalities one hears every day on American
college campuses,” and Taseer fears that his former awe of this man may have
been “an extension of my romantic idea of Tripathi.” Finally, near the very end
of his narrative, Taseer comes up against the issue of caste. After a seemingly
jolly dinner at a Brahmin home, he is shocked, shocked, to see his friends
insist that a non-Brahmin dinner companion must wash his own plates and
utensils. At that moment, “a deep shame came up in me, as if from the recesses
of childhood, like the shame of wetting one’s pants.”
Despite his
sharp-eyed condemnation of the evils of Hindu nationalism and caste, Taseer
manages to salvage his admiration for the Brahmin world by making a rather
artificial, though quite common, distinction between two aspects of religion,
spirituality and magic. Spirituality — love of the gods, of ancient texts, of
uplifting and comforting ceremonies and magnificent architecture — is
high-minded, moral, inspiring, and Taseer praises the Brahmins for their
spirituality. However, magic — the superstitious belief in the efficacy of
rituals and astrology, along with the measures taken to avoid pollution from
contact with lower castes — is stupid, destructive, cruel. Taseer’s damning
critique of Modi’s “pseudoscientific impulse” culminates in his dismissal of
Hindu magical thinking, which he sees as opposed not only to science but to
religion.
Though he
admits that “I had tried to sidestep the subject of magic until now, even
though it had encroached many times,” it is magic that finally drives Taseer
out of India. After months spent hanging out in ashrams, he realizes, as he is
about to visit yet another, that “I did not want to enter its crowded spaces
where religious feeling was at a fevered pitch. I made some excuse about not
wanting to remove my shoes.” He had undergone a kind of reverse enlightenment,
from the purified life of the mind to a realization of the material tragedy of
present-day India. He puts it well: “Maybe all my questing after India had been
the precursor to my moving more honestly away from it.” As he encounters more
anti-Muslim violence, more anti-Dalit violence, as well as the “vigilantes”
falsely proclaiming the sanctity of cows, he recoils from the sort of
fanaticism that killed his father. But he salvages some of his original
idealism by remarking, “It was an age that spelled the destruction of the very
ideal of the Brahmin.”
And what of his own ideals? “After Amherst,” he writes, “I had
planned to come back to India forever, but I was unable to fit back in.” He
returns to New York, to the man to whom he is married (as he tells us, though
he lies about it to his friends in India). All that he has been able to salvage
from the saffron days is his love of Sanskrit, which he continues to study, now
at Columbia University. There he encounters a “left-wing Indian intellectual”
who insists, “I am not a Brahmin. … For me that word is the same as Nazi.” This encounter makes Taseer
recall the horrors of “castebound” India and Modi’s manipulation of “the old
Indian disease of symbolic action.” Two more deaths rekindle his grief over his
father. In mourning all three, he explains, “I was also mourning the end of my
life in India.” And that death was his rebirth.
Wendy Doniger is the author of “The
Hindus: An Alternative History.” Her latest book, “The Donigers of Great Neck:
A Mythologized Memoir,” has just been published.
