India in Mind Read online

  PANKAJ MISHRA

  INDIA IN MIND

  Pankaj Mishra was born in north India in 1969 and now lives in London and India. He is the author of The Romantics, which won the Los Angeles Times's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement.

  ALSO BY PANKAJ MISHRA

  The Romantics

  An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  J. R. ACKERLEY

  from Hindoo Holiday

  PAUL BOWLES

  “Notes Mailed at Nagercoil”

  BRUCE CHATWIN

  “Shamdev: The Wolf-Boy”

  ROBYN DAVIDSON

  from Desert Places

  E. M. FORSTER

  from Abinger Harvest

  ALLEN GINSBERG

  from Indian Journals

  HERMANN HESSE

  from “Childhood of the Magician”

  PICO IYER

  from Abandon

  RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

  “Two More Under the Indian Sun”

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  from Kim

  CLAUDE LÉVI-STRA USS

  from Tristes Tropiques

  ANDRÉ MALRA UX

  from Anti-Memoirs

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  from The Snow Leopard

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  from A Writer's Notebook

  VED MEHTA

  from Portrait of India

  JAN MORRIS

  “Mrs. Gupta Never Rang”

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  from An Area of Darkness

  GEORGE ORWELL

  “Shooting an Elephant”

  PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

  from The Scent of India

  OCTAVIO PAZ

  from A Tale of Two Gardens

  ALAN ROSS

  from Blindfold Games

  PAUL SCOTT

  from The Jewel in the Crown

  PAUL THEROUX

  from The Great Railway Bazaar

  MARK TWAIN

  from Following the Equator

  GORE VIDAL

  from Creation

  INTRODUCTION

  In his great History, the Greek historian Herodotus mentions India, briefly and inaccurately. It is the first known reference to India in western literature; and what should surprise us now is not how little but how much Herodotus, who is supposed to have traveled only as far as Egypt, knew about lands farther east of Greece's great rival, Persia. Much of the world was then a mystery, as much for Herodotus, the father of western history, as for anyone living around the Mediterranean in the fourth century BC. India, where the Buddha was then teaching his subtle philosophy, existed for Herodotus at the extremity of the inhabited world—he could not believe that Asia could be bigger than Europe. He also thought that gold-digging ants existed in India and produced the tribute he imagined Indians paying to Persia. He did get some things right, however. “The tribes of India are numerous,” he wrote, “and do not at all speak the same language.”

  In around 400 BC a Greek critic of Herodotus, Ctesias of Cnidus, became the first writer to produce a separate work on India. But he had even fewer facts. To him Indians were satyrs and the Indian sun was hotter and ten times bigger than it was elsewhere. Xenophon spoke of the fabulous wealth of India in his historical novel, Cyropaedia. Plato and Aristotle made half-informed guesses about the country east of Persia. India was, from its first references in western literature, a blend of fact and fantasy in the European imagination.

  The precise shape of India was unclear even to the Macedonian conqueror Alexander, who reached as far as the Punjab in north India in 326 BC before turning back, exhausted, and returning to an early death in Babylon. But Alexander managed to bring the West closer to the East than it had been at any other time before. Megesthenes, the Greek envoy to the court of the great Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya (320–297 BC), soon provided the first firsthand account of India. He described a society in which honor, virtue, and wisdom were prized above all. He noticed the Brahmins and the ascetics. He painted an idyllic picture of peasant life. His accounts fed the fantasies of the geographer Strabo (64 BC–AD 24) and of the Roman writer Pliny (AD 24–79), who thought that India covered one-third of the earth's surface. These general ideas about India—its great population and wealth, the caste system—also showed up in the work of the influential Greek historian Arrian.

  More people traveled to India during the first centuries of the Roman Empire when trade between the Mediterranean and Asia flourished. But the Roman historians show little advance over their Greek predecessors in their knowledge of the region. During the Middle Ages, a time of intellectual torpor in the West, India became even more remote. Islam, rising fast in the eighth century across Arabia, Mesopotamia, and North Africa, came to form another barrier between the West and India. During this time, Arab travelers—al-Beruni in the tenth century and Ibn-Batutah in the fourteenth—wrote the greatest accounts of India.

  Medieval Europe invested its own fears and fantasies in the remote unknown land; myth and legend flourished in the absence of information. The cult of Alexander the Great came to be propped up by imaginary tales of his exploits in India. India was where St. Thomas had preached and found converts soon after the death of Christ. India was also the home of Prester John, the fabulously wealthy Christian king, who was going to help Europe decisively defeat the Muslims.

  This embroidered veil of ignorance lifted in the sixteenth century, when Jesuit missionaries penetrated India farther than anyone before them and sent back detailed reports to Europe. The opening of the sea route to India in the late fifteenth century brought European traders to India; they studied carefully the native cultures they encountered. The new impulse of curiosity and learning that inspired the Renaissance and led to the Enlightenment took many more Europeans to India. Among the more famous of these were the French travelers Francois Bernier and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, whose seventeenth-century accounts of India were analyzed closely by Voltaire, among other philosophers of the Enlightenment, and formed the persistent European view of India as an Oriental despotism.

  The judgments on India were much less harsh before the days of European empires, when the inferiority of native peoples became an article of faith. Travelers from Europe did not deny that they had in India come up against a culture much older, and in many ways more sophisticated, than the one they belonged to. Voltaire, for instance, often invoked the virtues of India and China in order to show up the inadequacies of eighteenthcentury France.

  But the nineteenth century brought new attitudes. A series of scientific, economic, and political revolutions gave Western Europe a new idea of itself. India, and more generally, Asia, became a place against which the traveler from the West measured his own society, and usually found it superior; it became the gigantic but often invisible backdrop to understanding his emotional state, and the refining of his moral and philosophical vision.

  The nineteenth century also saw the British complete their conquest of India and become the paramount power in the world. Unlike the Persian and Central Asian conquerors of India before them, the British never looked as if they meant to stay on in India and make it their home. They either went home or died young. India remained, despite a veneer of modernity, a profoundly foreign country; and travelers from the West continued to record its alienness and their own sense of difference and bewilderment.

  In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), the elderly Mrs. Moore, looking for the “real India,” visits the dark Marabar caves—the caves where the mysterious “rape” of Mrs. Quested later takes place, and which in
the novel represent the deeply unsettling ambiguities of India. There is a crush of people inside. Mrs. Moore can't breathe. She tries to leave, but fails, and panics. She cries out for help, but the answer she receives is only a meaningless echo, “Boum.”

  The cave is famous for the echo, which is produced by just about any sound. As Forster writes, “The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life.” It reveals to her the void that lies beneath her experience of India. It is as if India is telling her that “pathos, piety, courage—they exist but are identical, and so is filth” and that although “everything exists, nothing has value.” “If one had spoken vileness in that place,” Forster adds, “or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same— ‘oum-boum.’”

  Mrs. Moore's reaction may seem exaggerated to us. But it is the reaction of many an exhausted visitor from the West who despairs of ever making rational sense of the vastness and diversity of India. The same response can be found in the visitor who discovers in India an exact complement to his inner emptiness and seeks oblivion in drugs or a spurious form of spirituality.

  But occasionally India receives confident, well-prepared travelers. In his memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955), the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss describes his visit to a Buddhist village in the hills of northeastern India. Lévi-Strauss was an admirer of the Buddha. And so he walked barefoot through mud; he followed the “prescribed ablutions” before entering the temple. But he did not join his companion in prostrating himself four times on the ground before the altar. As he explains, he didn't hesitate out of embarrassment.

  It was not a question of bowing down in front of the idols or of adoring a supposed supernatural order, but only of paying homage to the decisive wisdom that a thinker, or the society which created his legend, had evolved twenty-five centuries before, and to which my civilization could contribute only by confirming it.

  Lévi-Strauss will pay homage in the way he knows best: through the mind and sensibility that have been shaped by Europe. He will analyze the rites; he will describe the temple as accurately as possible. He will attempt to draw analogies between Buddhism and western philosophy. Most of the contributors to this volume—mostly writers from Europe or America—resemble Lévi-Strauss more than Forster's Mrs. Moore. They traveled to, and wrote about, India in the last century; they took their ideas and habits of rational analysis from a successful western civilization. By attempting to understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance, they reveal honestly a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus, to the earliest images of India in the West.

  Such continuities, extending over two millennia, may seem odd. After all, you are told by conventional history that during the last century—the time span covered by this volume—India moved from being a backward British colony to a modern democratic nation-state. But these changes often seem superficial to the outsider, and so they are to a large extent. After more than fifty years of modernization, India is far from being made over in the image of a western country. It remains too poor and populous and bewilderingly diverse. Its history lies in obscure ruins, not in museums, its religions proliferate in everyday life, not in grand organized churches, and its food is best had at homes, not in restaurants. Its heat is severe, its rain unending. It rarely inspires pure affection or admiration in the way Italy or Greece, other sites of great civilizations, do. It often poses hard challenges. The reactions it evokes are complex, ranging from awe and wonder to repulsion and rejection. They tell us as much about the traveler as the world he describes.

  J. R. ACKERLEY

  (1896–1967)

  J. R. Ackerley was born in England. His father was a business tycoon and secretly maintained two separate households. Ackerley himself was no less unconventional and was certainly franker about his homosexuality and the greatest love of his life: his dog Tulip, who was brilliantly commemorated by Ackerley in My Dog Tulip (1956). He fought at Somme in World War I and saw his brother killed there. After serving eight months as prisoner of war in a German camp, he studied at Cambridge University where he met, among other furtive gay men, E. M. Forster, who had visited India in 1922 and had spent some time at the court of a campy Maharajah. As it turned out, the Maharajah was then looking for a secretary and had even written to H Rider Haggard for help in locating someone who resembled Olaf, a character in Haggard's The Wanderer's Necklace. The Maharajah wasn't impressed by Ackerley's good looks but fell for his poems. Ackerley later described his five months at Chhokrapur (“City of Boys”), his jokey name for the Maharajah's capital, in Hindoo Holiday (1932), which is one of the more witty products of the Anglo-Indian encounter. Ackerley shared none of the racial and political prejudices of the Englishmen of his class; the five months were, on the whole, great fun. As this excerpt shows, he and the Maharajah were perfectly matched as eccentrics.

  from HINDOO HOLIDAY

  January 7th

  I spoke to His Highness yesterday about a tutor for myself (he is very anxious for me to learn to speak Hindi), and taking advantage of some remark of his on Zeus and Ganymede, asked whether I might not have his valet to teach me.

  “I suppose he is indispensable to you?” I asked.

  “No, he is not indispensable to me. I will send him to you if you wish. I will send him to you tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you think he will be pleased to come?”

  “Oh, he will be very pleased—especially if you pay him two or three rupees a month.”

  After this neither of us said anything for some time, and then His Highness remarked with finality:

  “No, he is not at all indispensable to me.”

  But this morning a tonga arrived at the Guest House bearing two men I had never seen before, with a letter from His Highness. It ran as follows:

  “Dear Mr. Ackerley,—Here are two men who know English and Hindi very well. The bearer of this is called Gupta, he is my assistant librarian of Hindi books; and the other called Champa Lal, he is my icemaker. You can choose any one of them, and they will do for preliminary work well. Perhaps they might ask for some wages, and I think two rupees per month will do. Excuse pencil and paper.”

  To which I replied:

  “Dear Maharajah Sahib,—Your messengers have arrived, but I do not know quite what to do. Indeed they have both uttered remarks in English, but neither of them appears to understand my replies. I thought to myself, there is nothing to choose between them in looks; I will take the one who is the sharper in wits. So I returned to them and said:

  ‘I only want one of you. Which of you speaks the better English, for I will engage him?’

  The silence was at last broken by the icemaker, who said:—

  ‘I do not understand.’

  —and then by the assistant librarian, who said:

  ’Your English is very high.’

  I return them both, and hope I may still be allowed to have the dispensable valet, this morning or at 2:30 ?.?., for even if he cannot teach me Hindi, I should like to make a drawing of him.”

  The valet came this afternoon. I was lying on my sofa reading, when the light flicked across the page, and looking up I saw him standing in the curtained doorway. He bobbed a nervous salaam; I beckoned him inside, and throwing a rapid glance over his shoulder, he shuffled his laceless European shoes from his bare feet, pulled the curtain right back so that the open doorway was unveiled, and came a few paces further into the room. I indicated a chair, but it was too near me; he took the first at hand, and moved it back so that it stood in the doorway.

  I had already learnt a few Hindi phrases by heart: “Good day,” “How are you?” “It is a nice day,” “Don't talk so fast”; but I found I did not now believe in their pronunciation as much as when I had addressed them to myself; and since he only nodded to the first three, or uttered a throaty monosyllabic sound, I had no opportunity to air my “Don't talk so fast” composition, whi
ch therefore remains in my memory as the only phrase I got right. He was clearly very ill at ease, and anxious to please; but I soon realized that he did not really understand anything I said and was trying to guess from my expression what his response should be, so that most of the time a timid smile trembled on his lips and eyes, ready to vanish at the slightest sign of severity. And whenever I looked for a moment to consult my dictionary, his head went round at once, I noticed, to the open door, through which he could see across the gravel space the usual crowd of servants drowsing in the shade of the neem tree in front of the kitchen. So I gave it up at last and said I was going to draw him, but the moment I rose to get my sketchbook he was out of his chair and watching me in apparent alarm. I tried to convey with smiles and gestures that my intention was quite harmless, but although I got him to sit down again, I could not get him to sit still, and at length, in despair, told him to close the doors, for I could not go on if he kept turning round to look out of them. He began immediately to talk to me very rapidly, and since I did not know what he was saying, I got up to close them myself; but again he sprang up and barred my way, still chattering and gazing at me in what seemed to be a pleading manner. I stood still, wondering what was the trouble, and he at once began beckoning, in great agitation, to one of his friends outside, throwing me, at the same time, nervous, placating smiles. Soon the friend arrived, the young clerk who called on me the other day.

  “What is the matter with your friend?” I asked.

  “He say I must stay with him,” said the clerk.

  “Why?”

  “He is much frightened.”

  This was all I could get. He did not know why his friend was frightened, or if he did know he would not say. But at any rate it was clear enough that I must have both or neither, so I told the clerk he had better stay, though I did not want him—being a shy and, as will perhaps already have been noticed, a rather inexpert artist.