Temptations of the West

I recently finished reading Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West – How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond. It was a very enjoyable read, and one that was in line with what we try to write on this blog.

The book includes nine essays about places in the Indian subcontinent. Five of them are about India and one each about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet. Mishra writes about diverse trends in life in these places and finds a common thread in them, which he refers to by the book’s title. I enjoyed reading all these essays. But the ones on Allahabad and Benares were especially enlightening, after having a taste of life here.

One’s first questions, when one comes to Allahabad and Benares, are about how nothing works here. The banks won’t do what they should, post offices won’t do what they should, municipalities won’t do what they should, students won’t do what they should, teachers won’t do what they should, ad nauseam. Mishra had similar questions when, for example, he went to the University at Benares in 1988 and saw students and teachers doing everything but their job. The scene stood in contrast with the post-independence idealism at the universities and his own brahmin’s thirst for study.

Allahabad was even more intriguing for him. He was here at the university from 1985 to 1988 and now came again in 2000, during elections.

The long bone-rattling drive … to Allahabad on potholed roads, through calf-deep floods, past the tin-roofed shacks and rain-battered villages of mud and thatch—the cowering huts, so picturesque from the plane, now appearing frail, in danger of collapsing onto the sodden earth from which they had been so arduously raised , the low-caste women paving tiny courtyards with cow-dung, the men spinning ropes for the string cots, the sky low and grey over the flat fields and tiny huts and buffaloes placid in muddy pools—the long drive through a world that belonged to itself as fixedly as it would have done two centuries ago was a reminder of how far even the superficially good things of a globalized economy were from this heavily populated and impoverished part of India.

He stayed in the “only four star hotel in town,” where they have Mexican and Italian food on their coffee shop menu, and slums and dingy lanes all around outside. From his perch high up in this eight-storey building he could survey Allahabad’s colonial design. He could even understand the chronology in it: the little pilgrim district of Prayag centred at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna and the railway strip dividing this from the Civil Lines, the university and the public library, both of which the British built after they came here in the nineteenth century. (One Colonel James Neill killed 6,000 “dirty Indian niggers” at that time.) This Allahabad, “Rudyard Kipling’s Allahabad,” had its differences cut and dried. With independence, this “romance had gone, but this distance hadn’t really diminished,” with the administrators immediately squatting on the British bungalow and perpetuate their difference from the “masses”. “Dignity, and how to hold on to it: that was what preoccupied these men, most of whom the civil service had rescued from a lower-middle-class shabbiness.” He goes on to describe sadly comical tales from his visit to such a city and the countryside around it.

Mishra also lays out many pages on the Nehru dynasty that came from Allahabad and half-returns to the original theme by telling of the bourgeois anxieties of the new upward mobile occupants of the Civil Lines. But now

the middle class that had depended for a long time on its close affiliations with the executive and legislative branches of the administration—and on its class loyalties, now weakened at a time when every man was for himself—the middle class in small towns and cities sees itself besieged. In this you could detect the beginning of the end of an India that thought itself safe in the cocoon of colonial privilege; an India that with all its inherited advantages had failed to create a democratic and egalitarian society.

The other three essays on India are about Bollywood, Hindutva and Kashmir—all three have the same skilful exposition in them. On the book’s blurb is the following testimony from the New York Review of Books for Mishra’s other book An End to Suffering:

With perfectly modulated lyricism, Mishra evokes a world few of us have seen from within. He is the rare writer who is at ease as a historian, philosopher, traveller, and memoirist, and the combination of roles allows him to produce a book that few others could even have attempted.

This surely applies to this book too.

Durwasa ashram

We did a good 10 km hike at last! This was to a village called Kakara downstream the Ganga, up to the ashram of Durwasa, about which I had written in an earlier post. It was a great morning and we enjoyed walking a lot. With the autumn coolness and the Sunday there was also the feeling that we were going “off the beaten track.” In fact almost nothing can be obtained about this place from Google, and when this post goes on line, this will be one of the very few places that will do that job!

We set off pretty early in the morning—at five—and as the four of us walked under the almost full moon, I began wondering about who Durwasa was. It so happens that I hardly know of any of the mythology behind that name. I did not remember if he appears in the Ramayana or the Mahabharata or in any of the other stories. The only thing someone remembered was that the person was short tempered. Later in the day each of us was handed a booklet that contained a Sanskrit composition of eight stanzas by one Mahadev Prasad Goswami, which claimed to tell the story that “lies scattered in several books like the Bhagavata, etc.” I couldn’t gather much though, other than that he was intelligent and strong and was associated with one Raja Nahush and another, Sudyumna, and also with Krishna and other Yadavas, and used to live “four kosa” to the East of the Triveni in Prayag. (I really don’t know how much a “kosa” is, but the ashram is about 18 km away from Allahabad now.)

We walked till Nibi along our usual route through the Mahua groves (venue for this glorious sunrise!) and continued walking along the main street in the village to Chhibaiyya. This is a much densely populated town that lines this road. Kakara lies just beyond Chhibaiyya and the Durwasa ashram is at its edge, close to the Ganga. (See the route on Google maps; make sure you see the hybrid version.)

The place includes one Shiva temple, a defunct dharamshala (pilgrims’ lodge) and a Sanskrit school run by monks of the Giri order. People have further set up a primary school and an intermediate college near the temple. We couldn’t really gauge how old the structures could be but nothing apart from the idols looked more than fifty years old. The temple has a small corridor around a sanctum sanctorum of the size of a small room. Beside the corridor, in the alcoves in the wall, were kept around fifty idols. The biggest was that of the sage, with eyes convincingly indicating a short temper. A steady stream of old men and women of all ages kept passing in and out of the temple as we sat admiring the place. Outside the temple, which is connected by the dharamshala to the school, is a yajnashala with some fascinating stuff. The walls of the chamber had about eleven chaupais written on them. All of them were composed by one Ramsundar Das of the ashram about thirty years ago and—we didn’t notice this before a student of the school pointed it out—all of them were complete palindromes! Here is an example:

न तन तरन रस, सरन रतन तन ।
न छन तजत रत, तरत जतन छन ।

I found this unbelievable! The children also took us into their school, where I noticed rooms with labels “Modern section,” “Ayurveda section” and “Books section.” Their teacher looked at us hesitatingly from inside. He had arranged the booklets on Durwasa for us after we told him we were students too. We were then made to climb a floor higher, where their head swami—who presently was at Satna at a similar school—sat. And then on the roof of the building, from where we could see the whole village on one side and a huge desert near the Ganga on the other.

I wanted to go to the desert but we didn’t have much time; the walking alone had taken more than three hours. Instead we took a six seater to Hanumanganj, on NH2 and then took another to Chak, near our own Jhunsi.

Public Spiritedness – II

Is it really counter-intuitive?

“Common sense” models of human behaviour seem to predict a bleak face of humanity: that of independent agents working for their own profit, disregarding the “greater good” (if such a thing exists!). But there seems to be a yawning gap between these descriptions and reality. True, on the small scale we see corruption, trickery and single minded profiteering. In this chaos, we somehow lose the sight of the big picture: that humans have created civilizations. That humans have clustered together for centuries and despite their petty squabbles, have built huge, magnificent cultures.

Perhaps the most co-operative part of human civilisation is the passing of information. The discoveries made in our time are passed on to our children. We build up on what is already known. Seeking knowledge is inherently a very selfish act in that, it fulfills the individual’s own need and may not depend on outside rewards. But its result usually has wide-spread dissemination. Despite the clamour for patents, intellectual property rights and other such things, it would probably be difficult to find a discoverer who jealously guards the idea unto death. The thought that ones contribution has reached another soul is still a deeper satisfaction to most. The wide support for free educational resources (even on the cutting edge of research) is proof of this. Also significant is the open source movement in software technology. Thousands of high quality programs are now available to anyone who wishes to use them, all with the explicit condition that one is free to do whatever one wishes with the code. It is considered etiquette of this culture to acknowledge the previous authors and is mostly done willingly. What is most counter-intuitive in this mode of development is that a person you don’t know might voluntarily spend hours to solve your problems without expecting anything.

Many other examples of such “help your neighbour” behaviour exist. And I am certain almost every individual is helpful to a certain small group of individuals who are near. The trouble occurs when drawing the line between “ours” and “theirs.” Certainly, it is stupid to spend your energy for “them” when they do nothing for you in turn.

Perhaps, the answer lies in the awareness that the small effort each one puts in keeps the machine of civilisation going. The question is what brings this awareness? Wealth? Education? I think we have all seen enough recent counter examples to both these. What stops you from not playing your “responsible” part? Essentially, nothing!

If human beings only stopped reffering to cruelty in nature as a way of making excuses for their own! The human forgets with what infinite innocence even the most terrifying event in nature takes place. … [Nature's] consciousness consists in its completeness; because it contains everything, nature contains cruelty as well. Man, however, will never be able to encompass everything. … He is thus instantly condemned by his choice because it turns him into an exception, into an isolated, one-dimensional being no longer connected to the whole.

— Rainer Maria Rilke