Danton's Vigil

The romance of revolution is nothing but a camouflage for the fear of great turmoil and the beginning of tyranny in another name. The history of revolutions taught as at least as much. French, Russian and countless other revolutions - big and small trampled on humanity in general in their sway. Some say what’s happening in Iran is nothing short of a revolution. But you can feel the apprehensions of mutineers palpable in the million tweets and blogs as they go wave after wave against the children of Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah.

Watching Danton (Andrej Wajda, 1983) once again convinced me of the power of cinema - how it lends clarity to viewers' vague apprehensions and insights into the shifting sands of human frailty and lessons in history. I watched it late at night fighting sleepy eyes and thunderous rain drumming away on the roof. I remember power going off before and after Danton's ominous speech on how revolution devours its own children.

It wasn't that difficult to lay doubt about the evil lurking in best of the goodwill in even among the finest of political systems. When I watched the movie in late 1989, Indian political arena too was undergoing unprecedented upheavals with the right wing BJP making strides in the electorate, V.P Singh introducing caste inspired identity politics and a more than jaded congress delved in open communal politics throwing the country into greater turmoil.

The world too was in the throes of change. Berlin wall was torn down. Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan. Pakistan cashed in on its mercenary bounty as it kicked the aggro on India by several notches. East Europe unwound from the communist dictators. Prague spring culminated in the winter of Moscow.

Danton was still laughing - pulling down the delectable dinner from the table which he arranged so carefully for Robespierre. Yet you could see the earnestness in his eyes, almost pleading with his friend for justice with whom he wrote the cornerstone of French revolution - Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Danton arrived in Paris to convince Robespierre of the perilous path he had set the country into. Liberator turned into a dictator in the name of the humanity. Having recognized the monster, Danton allowed himself to be caught and tried in the tribunal in order to address the people of France on the nemesis of modern times - dictatorships and the tyranny of righteousness.

Gerard Depardieu, who played Danton leaves the long shadow over everyone in the movie including the viewers who are caught up in the drama. Just like the desperate Desmoulins raging at his own ideals, scared of the guillotine and longing for a life with his newborn baby and distraught wife. He forewarned us to be on constant vigil for our own sake so one may not become a tyrant or a victim.

Mathrubhumi

A few months back, a dear friend subscribed Mathrubhumi magazine in my name. After a gap of more than ten years the magazines sealed carelessly in plastic covers had begun to sail towards me crossing oceans.

It wasn't dejavu this time, even as I opened the first magazine in exhilaration trying to reach across the other side of a reader's memory. I can recall the places I'd been when I read some of the landmarks printed in Malayalam. More than the reference-worthiness, what fascinated me was its ability to provoke curiosity and earnestness to causes bigger than oneself without being elitist.

M.T. Vasudevan Nair used to write editor's note for a while. He wrote about child labor and how Chekhov's Vanka pained his conscience. Another note quoted the Indian chief's profound and poetic letter to the great white chiefs in Washington of his fears for the fragile ecosystem and the dying earth's providence. That was when O.V. Vijayan's eco-fiction Madhuram Gayati had begun serializing in Mathrubhumi.

Earlier, scholar and poet N.V. Krishna Warrier led the editorial team. I could sense their quite confidence and brilliance in the way they put out the magazine and paved way for intelligent and insightful discourses. I couldn't have known Nitya or Octavia Paz or Brodsky the way I did had it not been the space given to independent thinkers in the pages of the magazine.

Another major attraction was the illutrations of A.S and Nampoothiri who complemented writers' imagination and more often than not surpassed readers' mental image of the landscapes and characters.

Somehow the magazine managed to complement my eclectic and random reading delightfully. I still remember reading Kamala Das's childhood memoir and V.K.N's inimitable Payyan tales. Same pages had varied and unique voices of the world - Axel Munthe, V.S Khandekar, Sunil Gangopadhyaya, Bhishma Sahni and Marquez who romanticized his own private cinema paradiso in the rickety movie halls in Bogota.

The reappearance of this magazine in another shore isn't connecting with me. May be I am left behind. Or I am more into connecting the dots between NPR radio and nytimes.com now. Since the primary readers of Mathrubhumi live faraway, their perception of reality and worldview is now circumstantially remote.

Yet I am indebted to my friend who cared way more than I ever did to do this for me. Thank you P.K.

The Path of the Prophet: Triumph of defeat

Charioteer from the epic - charioteer, the Prophet spoke to the brokenhearted traveler: “Kurukshethra was never finished.”

Traveler asked: “When does Kurukshethra become complete?”

Charioteer smiled. He said: “We have learnt that when you take absolute away from itself, absolute remains. However when you stack absolute over absolute, it transcends itself.” Charioteer continued: “absolute is nothing but a dimension involving space and time. Human spirit cannot traverse the transcendental . Even their quantum mathematics is scared of accepting the challenge. However the "transcendental absolute", in times of great uncertainty becomes one of us - it takes birth and dies. Look…

Auschwitz, the city of gas chambers where tens of thousands of Jews were charred to death. In the gloom of human sacrifices, Christ’s newly weds, nuns knelt down in the glimmer of a lone candle light and chanted:

“O Virgin Mary, O Mother of god
Pray for us sinners, now and all the time.”

Piercing through the blinding walls, the Prayer in the face of evil became the prayer of all human tribes. The candle light flickered on the walls. The seeker was aghast at the nail marks left behind by Jews as they wrote the last musical notes of mortal pain as they died exhaling the gas. The king with the crown of thorn wailed from his cross: “My brothers! Would I ask my maker to punish you for the guilt of not recognizing me? Why do my priests allege the guilt of vengeance on me? My lord! But the cup of accusation is more unbearable. “

The chants of nuns became mourning: “O Virgin Mary, the most merciful, let this prayer be with the testament written in the agony of your son.”

The flame of love - presence of a martyr. The atom of love cleanses the sins of a world bent on destroying, and lends freedom to the galaxy of stars. The chariot rolled on. Presently it finds itself in the valley of golden apples. Charioteer asked the traveler: “Do you remember these trees?”

“I do. The forbidden fruit of knowledge.”

“With all due respect, you didn’t get it right! Sin and punishment are nothing but a fiction of make-believe fear. By eating these fruits you cannot get knowledge but learn all the tricks to create toys and weapons. In His creation there is only love, no schemes to punish.”

The children of humans who ate the fruits of tricks built up empires. They erected fortresses of technology, architected toy houses to fornicate and giant armories to wage wars. The competed among themselves to grab the lion share. The footprints of the Prophet who walked away unnoticeably from their insatiable lust were upturned.

Traveler asked the man clad in nothing but a loin cloth who waited alongside the highway to freedom: “why are you eating nothing but leaves.?”

“This is my food - fallen leaves. I walk by the benevolent avatar Kali without troubling vegetation or animals.”

The seeker asked: “You walk in loin clothes, sustain life with leaves - aren’t you losing it all?”

“Yes”

“Why?”

“Look yonder…”

Tribes and castes clamored to fight each other! Kurukshethra is replete with apocalyptic arsenals. Gita author confesses at the end of each cycle of Kurukshethra. The final stanzas of the prophecy were silenced to obscurity by the roar that rose from the parade for weapons of mass destruction: Maa Nishada! Do not kill! Isn’t the defeat of a loin clothed fakir preferable?

* * *

"an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind" - Gandhi spoke as he squatted in Naokhali, he knew he was confronting the medieval monster. Anybody who took him for a fool underestimated his awareness of the epic sweep of subcontinental history . He demanded a secular fiber from the Jehadi, called his attention to non violence and co-existence. He knew he was waging a lone campaign against a million revolts in the name of Gods strewn across centuries.

Martin Luther King made a choice. Nelson Mandela couldn't have taken another path to freedom. Gandhi's one man act reminded Indians to choose life over death. Didn't we know that already?

The Path of the Prophet: the revelations

Reading O.V. Vijayan prompted me to pick up on the theme of India as an Idea. I keep going back to random pages of his “The Path of the Prophet (1992)” and marvel at the insights on offer. And I have not been reading much of late.

Vijayan was a unique voice you wouldn’t find clamoring for attention, especially among the mountain of schmaltzy Diasporas, or post colonial master servant dichotomies or countless other broadsides heaped on India. His career as a cartoonist and having lived in Delhi during the tumultuous decades of Indian experiment of democracy and nationhood elicited quite a number of stand out observations from him.

Vijayan saw India essentially as a conflation of many ideas left behind by millennial prophets from the Vedic period, the Buddha, Nabi, Christ, Nanak, Marx and Gandhi. Their ancient and modern manifestations are alive in unexpected corners in violent and sometimes harmonious fashion. As you travel in time through centuries long strife you sense the kind of dejavu that accompanies a fatalistic realization of this land’s survival from invasions. Vijayan set the backdrop of the book a few years and days into the murder of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent butchering of Sikhs in Delhi.

Narayanan - Vijayan’s alter ego in the book narrates the story of his father who imparted the wisdom of Gita, which he acquired from the world war I as a soldier when he lay down under the benevolence of small pox bacteria.

“First world war - In the sand dunes of Mesopotamia and in the legendary banks of Tigris and Euphrates, my father fought. Narayanan listened to the story snuggling in the lap of his father. The soldiers squatted in the trenches they dug in the dirt and sand and meditated on the love they left behind. Meanwhile a procession of another tribe was crossing their path - an exodus in search of Promised Land.

“Do you know who were they, Nanoo?” Asked his father and he answered himself: “they were bacteria on their journey from another battlefield, to get some rest.” Father contracted the pox bacteria. Fellow soldiers insisted that their ill compatriot couldn’t be allowed to stay inside the trench in order not to spread the disease. They wanted him shot and thrown into the cauldron of summer fire. Their commander, Capt. Gurmit Singh stopped them. He took father over to a tin shed and kept a leather pouch-full of water in it. On his way back to the trench, he was shot and killed by enemy fire.

In a soldier’s language, father explained the stories of the battles and retreats of bacteria as if they were yet another enunciation of Gita: Mankind is the disease of this earth - just like them, bacteria the micro mankind - they travel, discover, migrate - make tribal empires, civilizations, literature, art and entertainment. That indeed becomes our disease.”

* * *

Josef, Narayanan’s friend bemoans the fate of his former communist radical friends in prison who are awaiting death sentence: “They will come out. Staring death in its face and building the mystery of an exotic death have nothing in common. I can‘t really imagine what will they become at the very last moment!”

Martyrdom is only for those who accept God as their father. Like the crucifixion of Christ, only a soul can claim real martyrdom. How can enzymes and proteins claim martyrdom? When communists die, it will be reported in pamphlets and notices as mere deaths - meaningless deaths! A few things disintegrate and vanish around you - dreams, truth, periods of history, masteries sewn up in fat leather jackets. In the end, what left would be a glimmer of one’s own solitude and a short distance across. The human, bereft of civility and compassion stands alone, crumbles apart into minerals and chemicals, becomes one’s own prophet and speaks gibberish… Bhagat Singh was reading Lenin’s autobiography into the last few days of his life. What would an individual sentenced to death, pick up from such a book? Bhagat Singh and his comrades were moving towards a grand boundary. What was that lay beyond the fence? Each one of the prophets passed by, asking the same question.


* * *

While Sikh uprising troubled northern India, Narayanan met with Sujan Singh, a world war veteran and a taxi driver in Delhi - with whom he shared some of his thoughts and fears. During one of the rides, Sujan Singh as he takes the Journalist Narayanan to Rasuyi where a roadside death needed to be reported decides to call on Indian democracy:

Sujan Singh said: “this is just a beginning, Saab. Mark my word. Soon the country will fall into the hands of lawless goons. One of them has been shot dead in the middle of the road, in Rasuyi.”

Thugs have grabbed a nation of majestic lineage. People cheer on as triumphant plunderers flaunt their crowns, while the thief finds himself in the palace, feasts on left over from the empire, stands tall on the empire’s stilts and advice its simple subjects.

“The ruling class in India” Sujan Singh continued: “what they need is short respites, for that they will sacrifice Punjab.”

“Remember, we do not have an enemy to fight anymore. There won’t be another Bangladesh, most likely another nuclear test.”

“Or else a genocide!”

Note: The text in Italics is original translation by me. To keep the discussion on track, I 've selected the pieces randomly from the book. Another part to follow...

India's unfinished business with Pakistan

India was supposed to be an idea - a final destination for many a weary traveler seeking an enlightening unknown and for many others a final frontier queer enough to conquer, loot and crush. To think about the world's most populous democracy and emerging economy in medieval light seemed totally out of place in times of globalization, until a week ago.

Terrorists emerged from the gateway of India to inflict untold pain on the psyche of an ancient India decked in new age garb. It could've been Ghazni's mercenaries cutting through Khyber pass on their way to a million savageries no matter how many times they had been rebuffed and magnanimously offered their lives back. They return with greater brutality, wilier deception and a malicious smile at the weakness of their opponent.

Centuries have hard wired the orgasmic passion for violence on the wild things and their offspring who lived westwards of Khyber. Ever since Genghis Khan legitimized the philosophy of kill to live, central Asia was nothing but killing fields for the organized mercenaries. Islam has tagged itself on to it later as merely a context to vanquish the other a.k.a infidels. India was always the final frontier for the motivated. Unfortunately it still is the same.

Even after repeated defeats in wars and proxy wars at the hands of a democratic India, even after the country had been split into two, even after world's rapt attention on the failure of their own state, Pakistanis are in a perpetual denial of reality. The abyss shown by Pakistan's forerunner, Afghanistan was never enough for the plotters in that country to doubt what destiny has in store. For them this is supposed to be a small phase, in fact an insignificant price to pay for the greater and purer Pakistan notwithstanding what they are up against. During nineties they were executing their plans meticulously with an insipid secular Congress government in power, belligerent but wayward right wingers in opposition, China in tow, splintered Soviet union and an indifferent U.S.A run by big mouth liberals from the left.

Kargil war was supposed to be the beginning of the end. It was, but in a direction that wasn’t anticipated. World events, pivoting around America's war on terror, realignment of "rogue" elements with Al-Qaeda and Palestine's political obliteration led the international attention eventually towards Pakistan. Iraq war has been nothing but Bush's miscalculation and a distraction.

The raison de'etre for Pakistani Army is its unfinished business with India. They antagonized and bled India in every available opportunity. They experimented with democracy and international institutions (major supplier of soldiers to U.N peace keeping missions) to thwart Indian diplomatic efforts, aligned military institutions including ISI with Jehadists who had no regional ambitions to challenge India with frugal resources. However the global war on terror, while Jehadis looking to usurp power and Taliban on the run complicated the equations.

Thus it's become an unfinished business of India to dismantle Pakistani terror camps, cut down the Pakistani monolith - Armed forces and destroy their borrowed/stolen nukes.

Free falling free market and McCain's message

When I looked around to buy a house in the land of opportunities during the last quarter of year 2005, I couldn’t help wondering about the apparent but glossed over disconnect between real estate prices and real buying power of average Americans. House prices spiked dramatically at the rate of 200 percent in less than a year. Mortgage lenders and developers sprang up everywhere. Having exhausted those with a credit history, they turned their attention towards the softer underbelly of the population - barely legal immigrants and job hopping victims of credit card vultures. To grant them entry into the brave new American dream, their benefactors provided an opening in the name of deferred principle and interest rates a.k.a sub-prime mortgage. In time reality set in - bills began to show up with their true numbers. Occupiers of the houses fled abandoning their unsolicited dreams.

The word spread rapidly. Foreclosure signs began to appear in neighborhoods. Soon everyone understood what Katrina had forewarned. Once the canopy of denial is flung open, you know the dweller of the pretty home across the street was a poor man made homeless by greed.

But what I didn’t realize like everyone else then was the depth to which housing speculators had dug their hands to fund the project to build a home for every decent and hard working American. Insurance companies, mutual funds, investment bankers had all diverted funds into the project to make some fast buck. Its unreal to think that companies like Lehman Brothers and Investment banks like Washington Mutual which survived the great depression of 1930s would go belly up with a day’s notice. Insurance giant AIG is propped up by the Federal government for now. So are Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. Retirement funds and other savings are at risk to send shivers through many an aging bones.

Most significant fallout of all this is its worldwide impact. China made major investment in U.S market. So are the Japanese, Germans and Oil barons in the middle east. Even ICICI bank in India had a major investment in Lehman Brothers. Stock markets around the world have been shaken by this quake which may not have reached its highest point yet.

At the core of this problem is the sustained implementation of Republicans’ conservative ideologies on government’s role in capital market and legitimization of corporate greed. Reagonomics of deregulation and huge tax cuts and credits to big corporations were continued for the past two decades with republican dominated senate and congress even though Clinton, a conservative liberal was president during its time of bliss. Another aspect of republican politics is its clever and tactical use of wedge issues such as abortion and gay rights with biblical references to undercut criticisms from the left on its economic policies, especially during elections. Clearly, the Republicans favor rich folks who need geopolitical and logistical opportunities to make their billions since we now know a lot more about Enron adventures in third world countries, tax credits for self-serving Oil corporations and how Iraq became a goldmine for Halliburton. Deregulation is the toast of the time and yet the number of career politicians accused of corruption and behind bars are increasing.

There is a significant section of Americans who are blissfully unaware of world’s perception of themselves. They fear change and embrace status-quo. For them there is no creature more disgusting and revolting than a liberal democrat who is out to increase tax and unleash gays into their private Christian lives. They do not care a fig about the world and they truly believe that the war in Iraq is convenient and after all things considered Pakistan is still an ally. Drop names like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - they’ll run to polling booth to vote for a serial killer under republican column.

It is important to note that the sternest opposition to W. Bush‘s $700 billion bail-out plan has come from the Republicans and not Democrats. They are worried about facing impending senatorial and congressional elections and the real possibility of owning up a greater depression if things took a turn for the worse. No wonder Republican presidential hopeful McCain is doing everything he can to usurp the message of change from Obama. He lived most of his life during the cold war era and appears to be cruising in a time machine inexorably into the past. He admitted several times that he has no clue on economy and he would rather spend his time on foreign policy. Engaging in geopolitical conflict a.k.a war economics is after all a Republican contribution to humanity. Given that depression is unofficially declared, McCain’s military Keynesianism is just what the doctor order to secure this damn world.

Celebrating Folk Art

It seemed like a long time ago when time was still timeless, I had an affliction of color and sound. My mind for the first time, was registering the overwhelming play of bright colors and engrossing sounds of yearly festival at the temple in our neighborhood. Even the color of candies which the seasonal peddlers stacked upon their makeshift stalls added an ethereal sheen on the phantasmal vision unfolded in front of my eyes.

The soothsayer song in praise of snake deities, loud and stout looking actors on stage enacting extra-terrestrial battles from Ramayana and Mahabharata , the balloon man with his mobile paraphernalia - those were the early connectors to the heritage of the land and expressions of a world order that defied the onslaught of time as long as they did.

It was much later when I began to notice earthier and rather primordial forms of folk art such as Ayyappan Paattu, songs in praise of Dravidian gods (Muthappan, Vishnumaya) along the sidelines of flashier performing arts. In them, deep down I could sense a sort of cathartic realization of individual and collective dreams and fears which otherwise would have never ever made it out of the subconscious domain or exploded into something sinister and dark.

The national festival of Kerala - Onam was borne out of a folk legend and an occasion to celebrate all sorts of folk arts - ritualistic and secular (such as Tiger dance, Kummatti Kali etc). More than its significance as an age-old tradition, Onam brought up a grand setting for people to celebrate life and revel in others' joy.

Some of the shapes and forms I have seen in the traditional settings of Kerala were intense enough to let go on my growing apprehensions of the general lack of development and modernity in the state's social life. The richness of the folk art easily filled the wide gaps of general deprivation and the prevalence of snobbery among the audience and practitioners of classical arts. Often I have marveled at the striking similarity of Theyyam and Kathakali in their costumes and how Theyyam invariably breaks into bouts of cries as opposed to the finesse of aural and literary tradition of Kathakali. The social dynamic at work here was too stark to pass up.

The dialectics in folk art has been cleverly adopted and manipulated by political strategists, especially the communists who engrained their ideology in seemingly innocuous and subtle variations of folk music practiced and enjoyed by workers in the fields. Later on popular poets used the structure and sounds of folk music to lend an exciting latitude of folk imagery and unexpected dimension to their art. Listening to such poems in their native languages like Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali etc have become a unique experience. Translating them would not have made any sense at all.

However the most impressive of all folk arts has always been music. The rhythm and sounds of folk music have a rare ability to cut through the carefully manicured fences of culture and language. The aspirations of common folks rising in unison resonate naturally with their ilk around the world and touch hearts in a unique way - whether it is a group of Moravian gypsies assembled in a tavern, a Texan singing Americana, a Baul singer walking down the beaten fields or a bunch of farmers somehwere in a nondescript islet in Kuttanad, rhapsodizing the season of harvest and pleasures of simple unhurried life of yore.

Living in a time when Hypermodernity and globalization are often confused and utterly inadequate terms to describe human and to a great extend mother earth’s conditions, folk art may be able to offer much needed healing for our electrocuted humanity. Although we will never return to the refuge of rural and agrarian setting, there can be only simple solutions for our complicated problems.

I remember reading Milan Kundera as he spent an entire chapter to discuss folk music and modern society. He spoke about men being weary under the weight of their own ego and mistrust of their identity:

...and I felt happy within these songs, in which sorrow is not reckless, laughter is not crooked, love is not ridiculous and hate is not apprehensive, where people love with their bodies and souls, where they draw knives or sabres in hatred, dance in joy, throw themselves into the Danube in despair, where, for that matter, love is still love and pain is still pain, where the original emotion is not yet devoid of itself and where values are still unravaged; and it seemed to me that within these songs I was at home, that I had my roots in there. That their world was my primal point of reference... (from Joke)

* * *

Notes:

Some of the most evocative use of audio and visual expositions of folk arts have been employed in popular and offbeat Indian movies - Aravindan's Kummatty comes to my mind. The entire film was based on a folk tale with a rousing treat of folk music. Nokkukuthi (scarecrow) was another experimental effort based on M. Govindan's poem depicting a ballad. Other folk arts like the popular Theyyam, Kalam paattu have always had their place in popular movies. Mani Kaul did a documentary on Rajasthani puppetry and a film Duvidha, based on a folk tale.

Info on Kummatti here

In Light Of India

A review on In Light of India: Octavio Paz.

It rained.
The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.
The river of music
Enters my blood.
If I say body, it answers wind.
If I say earth, it answers where?

The world, a double blossom, opens:
Sadness of having come,
Joy of being here.

I walk lost in my own center.

As a reader I couldn’t help but notice Paz’s polemics on existential and reflective differences between civilizations and how oriental was time as a concept in his poems and other writings. His inimical vision of history as an imagination of time had had its parallel in ancient Indian philosophies. Isn’t he now being rediscovered for his scathing criticism of modern democracies for their development model and establishments of greed?

Having seen him establish how *Mexican civilization has come to a stasis, forgo a glorious culture to withdraw into oneself and self-deprecatingly look up to its neighbor in the north, it was fairly easy to recognize Octavio Paz’ affinities and opinions on India in his book – In Light of India. (* from Labyrinth of Solitude)

As anyone who visited India would vouch, India gets through your senses much before brain begins to register all your pre-conceived notions of her. You will realize that the teeming reality around you will soon blur its contour to leave you in daze. Paz spoke about the India he encountered in the bustling streets of Bombay of yore:

“I put my things in the closet (at Hotel Taj Mahal), bathed quickly, and put on a white shirt. I ran down the stairs and plunged into the streets. There, awaiting me, was an unimagined reality:

Waves of heat; huge grey and red buildings, a Victorean London growing among palm trees and banyans like a recurrent nightmare, leprous walls, wide and beautiful avenues, huge unfamiliar trees, stinking alleyways,

Torrents of cars, people coming and going, rivers of bicycles,

in the doorway of a shack, watching everyone with indifference an old man with a noble face,

Another beggar, four half-naked would-be saints daubed with paint, red beetel saints on the side walk,

Turning the corner, the apparition of a girl like a half opened flower,

Stalls selling coconuts and slices of pineapple, ragged vagrants with no job and no luck, a gang of adolescents like an escaping herd of deer,

A magnificent eucalyptus in the desolation of a garbage dump, an enormous billboard in an empty lot with a picture of a movie star,

More decrepit walls, whitewashed walls covered with political slogans written in red and black letters I couldn’t read,

As night fell I returned to my hotel, exhausted…but my curiosity was greater than my fatigue. I went out again into the city. I found many white bundles lying on the side walks: men and women who had no home…I saw monsters and was blinded by the flashes of beauty. I strolled through infamous alleyways and stared at the bordellos and little shops: painted prostitutes and transvestites with glass beads and loud skirts. I wandered toward Malabar Hill and its serene gardens.

Paz goes back to his hotel, but decides to take another walk towards the coast and there he tries to take inventory of all that he had seen, heard, smelled and felt. He thought of dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea and an inescapable attraction to explain his state of mind as a young barbarian poet.

If we chop and change some images here and there, I guess the contemporary India despite the double digit economic growth would not be too far away. Paz gets down parsing his newly found exhilaration in the rest of the book which took decades to complete. You don’t read Octavio Paz for your academic exercise, do you? You read for his insights and sometimes opinions which you may or may not agree.

Even in the opening chapter we can see Paz’s sense of history and his uncanny ability to glean valid archetypes. According to him, wandering in New Delhi is like passing through the pages of Victor Hugo, Walter Scott or Alexander Dumas and that it was the most ancient of cities - Indraprastha of the epic Mahabharatha where legendary battles of power and ethics played out; and also of the serene Muslim mausoleums. He writes about the unforgettable moment when he wandered into a tiny empty mosque whose walls were made of marble and inscribed with passages from the Qur’an. Above, the blue of an impassive and benevolent sky, only interrupted, from time to time, by a flock of green parakeets. He stayed there for hours. According to him it was a vision of the infinite in the blue rectangle of an unbroken sky.

Paz returns as an ambassador to India when he would travel around the country and write East Slope, a collection of poems on Indian themes. He would also talk about his experiments in collaborative poetry with Agyey and Shrikant Verma on Friendship. He gave Lecture on India upon Rajiv Gandhi’s behest and eight years later he would revisit the paper to write In Light of India although he makes no claim of anything in particular. And yet the book is a treasure for its insights and tenacity to seek answers in an unfinished quest.

Rama and Allah

Paz is incisive when he speaks about the coexistence of the two religions that are strikingly at extremes as one being the richest and most varied form of polytheism and other, the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism. He observes how the two communities retained their identities without any fusion and that the Muslim invasion happened in India long after the decline of Islamic civilization. He further observes that Sufi mysticism triggered a literary tradition in northern India. Similarly there was a Bhakti movement which sought to imbibe some of the radical patterns from Sufism and anti-orthodox Hindus.

Kabir is the son of Allah and Rama. He is my Guru, he is my pir…Tagore translated Kabir’s poems because in Kabir’s Unitarian vision he had seen a failed promise of what India could have become.

Paz doesn’t miss out on the contributions of Akbar and Dara Shikoh, especially to think that Darah Shikoh’s translation of Upanishads into Persian eventually ended up in Schopenhauer’s desk which in turn sparked the evolved minds of Nietzsche and Emerson! However the period of enlightenment was followed by dark years of Aurangzeb who single-handedly was responsible for the fault lines between Hindus and Muslims which had repercussions for ages and still echoing. Paz had noticed that the East India Company had never interfered with the social fabric or religious identities of Indians, they in fact exploited the conditions to their advantage. However the notion of nationhood was an idea given to the Indians by their former rulers.

Another aspect of the book is Paz’s interesting take on Caste system in India. This much derided Indian artefact and often times confused with racism is seen in a different light. Paz uses it to understand the social fabric of Hindu community in tune with their philosophy based on Karma. He acknowledges the critics of caste system in India and the dogma of untouchablity, but he warns the gentle souls out there who are horror-stricken by the word caste to not to miss the ancient hypotheses of cosmic order and how time is an illusion (maya) that eventually delivers those suffering in the cycles of birth and death.

Modern Indian History

Paz pays attention to all the regular names from the recent history of India: Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Subhash Bose, Gandhi, Nehru, V.K.Krishna Menon, M.N. Roy. Of these V.K.Krishna Menon and M.N.Roy need special mention. V.K. Krishna Menon, according to Paz was a malignant influence on Nehru who ultimately proved to be a fatal union for Nehru.

Menon was an arrogant and intelligent man, but, as so often happens with the proud, he was not the master of his own ideas: he was possessed by them. Nehru was never able to recuperate from the disaster of his foreign policy.

Reading Paz’s chronological account of M.N. Roy’s many political volte-face especially with the benefit of hindsight that we have when seen from this far in time, I couldn’t but be spellbound by Paz’s understanding of political history and ability to recognize probably the only genuine political mind to have emerged from India ever to make any impact on International political history.

M.N. Roy, an extreme nationalist inspired by Marx, was pursued closely by the British Intelligence, traveled to Chicago and later during First World War sought asylum in Mexica where he was instrumental in founding the communist party. Impressed by Roy’s activities and skill, Lenin invited him to participate in the third International and made him its agent in Central Asia and China. He broke up with Comintern and Marxism itself. He returned to India and fought for Indeopendence, spent years in Jail, however during Second World War supported allied force having realized the threat Nazism posed rather than being a cohort of Gandhi or Subhash Bose. After the war, convinced that the totalitarian system founded by Lenin and Bolsheviks was a disaster, he invented Radical humanism as a revolutionary response to the crisis of socialism.

M.N. Roy’s philosophy may have been inadequate, yet Paz’s brilliant sketch of his political genius in a few strokes might not be found in Kosambi’s tomes.

The project of nationhood

You can also find that Paz is aware of the emergence of right wing Hindu nationalist party B.J.P and the re-ignition of Hindu-Muslim divide. Although Paz acknowledges the inherent secular and moderate nature of Hindus, he observes how the radicalization of Hidnus started with Tilak and later consolidated by Savarkar which resulted in the bye-product of neo-Hinduism (Hinduthva) that envisions a monolithic concept of Hinduism united territorially and devoid of caste barriers hitherto unknown to the history-less Hindu culture. Drawing from his own history of Mexican nationalism, Paz has words of caution for the nationalists for their penchant for straight jacketing the identity of the acceptable and the abominable:

All this would be funny were it not frightening. Nationalism is not a jovial god: it is Moloch drunk with blood…In India many nationalisms live together and they are all fighting with one another. One of them, Hindu nationalism, wants to dominate the others and subject them to its law – like an aurengazeb in reverse. Another, in Kashmir wants the state to unite with a hostile nation, Pakistan – thus ignoring the lesson of Bangladesh.

Citing Shabano case to describe the weakness of secular politics when when Rajiv Gandhi overturned court order to defy constitution and earlier when Indira Gandhi showed how excessive polarization of power at the center could corrupt, Paz believes that the quest for Indian political and national identity should still be that of secularism and democracy with a constant vigil against disruptive tendencies and political expediency. Having seen the disasters of socialists’ totalitarian regimes in South America and the fate of nations built on military triumphs, Paz could not have suggested otherwise.

Contraptions of Time

Paz delves into the medieval and Vedic literature at length to point out the extent of erotic art, its strict adherence to structure (meter) and the absence of the notions of sin unlike their western equivalents. He ponders on the four branches of Vedic thoughts and attempts to find parallels in western thoughts and traditions. For e.g Genesis and the Rig Vedic postulation on the origin of the world and of humanity, or like the stanza from Atharva Veda which said: “Time Created the Lord of Creatures, Parajapati.” Further from Atharva Veda: “Desire (Kama) was the first to be born. Desire arose in the beginning which was the first seed of thought.” Sex is regarded as a vital force in Indian thought which looks at Life as energy which possessed the power to regenerate (a major school of ritual oriented vision of life – Tantric philosophy). However the enlightened man understands that while pleasure is a goal, is finite and it does not save us from death or free us from future incarnations. He seeks the path of abstinence and solitary meditation. Chastity gives strength for the great battle: breaking the chain of rebirths.

Paz expounds the teachings of Bhagavat Gita and Buddha in order to explain the two differing yet eventually unifying concepts on purpose of Life and living. However I was looking forward to the last segment of the chapter patently titled: Contraptions of time where he famously stated (from Nobel lecture): Every Civilization is a vision of time. Consequently the seeming staticity of Indian life is explained by the concept of time where it rejects the linear reality as Maya and the real reality is Brahman (Absolute Being) and at its depth, Atman (Self). Thus man is simultaneously impermanent as cosmos and unreal as an apparition. Paz looks at this as a metaphysical and social negation of time. According to him the first prevented the birth of literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history, while the second gave birth to the institution of castes, immobilized society. He extends this theory to reason why the Hindu societies have viewed the European invasions as mere dissonances in the larger scheme of cyclical passage of time. However this century old equilibrium has been disturbed with the advent of modernity among the elites and now the ever pervasive middleclass in India.

Paz ends his book with his quest of answers for the questions India posed to him, midway with a scathing attack on the capitalist’s model of development and the now forgotten solution put forward by Gandhi. Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj envisioned a billion small villages of farmers and artisans armed with non-violence and Dharma as the contract between civilizations. But population explosion had long thwarted the dream. Every village became a pit of misery and despair. Paz is now seeking a new politics and suggests that the reformation of our civilization must begin with a reflection on time.

I would have never known how personal India been for Paz and how she inspired the finest thinker and writer of our time to tell us what we, the people of India clearly and seemed to me, irrevocably lost!