India (29 page)

‘Because of his background my father was philosophically oriented. Even within that his reading was different from my grandfather’s. My grandfather would practise the hard-core Sanskrit, the original mantras as written in the Vedas or Puranas. It is the hallmark of ritualism that you don’t necessarily understand the deeper meanings of everything you do, and my grandfather didn’t
necessarily understand what he chanted. Ritualism is perhaps, though not very crudely, a show-act.

‘My father wasn’t a performer; he didn’t have that pressure. So he tried to understand what he read. He read a lot of interpretations by newer philosophers. This led him to read in many languages. He read modern philosophical works in Bengali, and he read in English. I grew up with volumes and volumes of his books in Devanagari and English. He made relatively small forays into other topics. The core was philosophical.

‘And there was something else. In addition to the old Puranic values, my father had the diffusion from nationalistic values, essentially Gandhian. Gandhianism was almost a mass hysteria in India, but of a healthy kind. It was the good old values, but packaged in a modern-looking way, very mass-based. The old values looked intellectual and were intellectual, and therefore maintained a distance from the masses. Gandhi found a way of making old truths appear simple. And I grew up with quite a few of those Gandhian slogans. “Work more, talk less.”

‘In my house the continuity of the brahminic value system remained, and then I also made my own change from an old world to a new world, from a hot room to a cold room. But this time the change was different. Nobody asked me, “Why are you wearing long pants?” Or, “Did you eat food cooked by a brahmin?” But, like my father in his government job, I didn’t have a scaffolding. I had, so to speak, to break down the door myself.’

‘Why did you go in for science?’

‘There’s the milieu and the current value system. The third factor is a sense of mystery.’

‘Mystery?’

‘It’s one of the strongest motivating forces. All religions are replete with miracles. Mystery attracts, and science has that mystery. I felt that mystery, subconsciously. Put two chemicals and the colour changes – that’s the simplest mystery. Or make a machine like an electric fan which runs apparently without any motive force.

‘I have made one more level of transformation than my father did from his father’s time. I am more liberal in outlook than my father. I’ve probably become more questioning, because of what we may call “science”. I’m less knowledgeable about rituals. My
father got a part of what his father had, and I have only a part of the rituals my father had.

‘I grew up in my intimate family surroundings up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. That’s the time you pick up the rituals, because you are not allowed to perform certain rituals before a certain time. For example, there are some rituals that only married men can do. But at that age I went away from home, going back only for a few days a year. So I missed a lot of the ritual side. And now I have only half the faith in it.

‘I don’t do it, but I have a nostalgia for it. My roots are in it. It is not alien to me. If someone says to me that I shouldn’t eat rajasik food – eggs or something – I don’t find it strange. I understand, unlike a modern nutritionist. And, in the philosophy line, I have done more of what my father did. I diversified, even more than him, into other schools of Indian philosophy and schools of other philosophies. My father had gone from the basic Vedic to the broader Indian philosophy. I have gone from that to a more global approach.’

I said, ‘With your scholarly approach, you probably actually know more about Hinduism than your grandfather.’

Pravas said, ‘Probably I can articulate it better in a Western sense, but I cannot say I know more than my grandfather.

‘Change is a continuous process. You can discern a change only once in a generation. Because once you discern it, you are already there. So in these last 50 years I can discern only two changes, but they are large because a continuing process is being focussed at two or three points. The next big change will come with my son. There are spans of transition. There are much bigger spans with the succeeding generations.

‘My son will go through a very large change in circumstances in many ways. In the family, in the school surroundings, in the job market, everywhere. I grew up in a half ritualistic background. My son will have no ritualistic background. But if my son loses the rituals even further, he could still be rooted locally, within his peer group. There will be many like him. Society is moving that way.

‘The food restrictions and so on that I talked about are known to some, but not known to most in my generation. They don’t know that such things existed and exist. And yet they are perfectly at balance in the local surroundings. If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted,
fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father’s case – become natural for the next generation.’

I thought that the changes he was talking about might have been in some way like the changes that had come a generation or two earlier to the Indian community in Trinidad, the peasant India that my grandfathers had taken with them, an apparently complete world, with language and rituals and social organization: an India that had, in its New-World setting, even during my childhood, begun to disintegrate: first the language going, then the reverence for the rituals and the need for them (the rituals going on long after they had ceased to be understood), leaving only a group sense, a knowledge of family and clan, and an idea of India in the background, an idea of India quite different (more historical, more political) from the India that had appeared to come with one’s ancestors.

Pravas said, ‘For you the change was not subversive.’

The word was arresting.

He said, ‘The change wasn’t from within. It was external. Here change is gradual. It’s happening all around me – in my father, my brother, everybody. I cannot distinguish any longer what is alien.’

And (extending what Pravas said) there was a further, and fundamental, difference between the new generations in India and our immigrant community far away. For people of that community, separated from the Indian earth, Hindu theology had become difficult (as it had become difficult for people of formerly Hinduized areas of south-east Asia); the faith had then been half possessed by many, abandoned by many. It had been part of a more general cultural loss, which had left many with no strong idea of who they were. That wouldn’t happen in India, however much ritualism was left behind, and however much the externals changed.

Pravas said, There will remain a few primordial principles. People will lose all the details about individual behaviour – eating and sleeping and so on. All these things will go away. But in the group memory some streams will remain perennial. Faith and its expression is one of those primordial streams, though the details may get blurred.

‘Recently there has been on TV the serials of the epics, the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
. Most of the people on the streets of Bangalore haven’t actually read those epics. They haven’t read them in the original or in an English version or in any version. They take them for granted; they’re there. They would have known the main characters and the broad theme. They wouldn’t have known the details; they wouldn’t know the inside characters. But the TV serials were an instant success.’

And now, for Pravas, there were all the frustrations of modern Indian life. As he described them, they were like the frustrations of the visitor: the difficulty of travel by air or train or road; the crowded, dangerous city streets; the poisonous fumes; the difficulty of doing simple things, the difficulty of arranging the physical details of day-to-day living, which the industrial revolution was meant, after all, to simplify.

Pravas said, ‘Sometimes even I despair. And it is perhaps only something in my make-up that stops me going to the mafia.’ To straighten people out, to get things done. ‘There are no rules in the Indian streets.’ That wasn’t a simple or frivolous matter. Pravas rode a motor-scooter; he arrived always, when he came to see me, like a kind of spaceman, with his big helmet. ‘You feel a little bit like being in a jungle, and this can transfer to a larger view of things. It can, and does. It actually translates into a loss of productivity. I am a far less productive person than I ought to be. A lot of energy goes into these things, those traffic jams, that chaos. Friction in society is like friction in the machine.’

I thought of his grandfather, one of the five or 10 priests of the king of a small state in the east. He lived on very little; he had only his subsistence piece of land to keep him from absolute want, if the king withdrew his favour. He had no other skill – the little state at that time didn’t require many skills. That was an arbitrary world, where change could come suddenly and overwhelmingly to a man. It was like the India which had been overrun again and again by this army and that; it was the India of unfinished monuments, of energy going to waste, creating an impression of randomness. That was a jungle, too. Did Pravas’s grandfather live with something like that idea?

‘I never knew my grandfather. He died when my father was twelve or thirteen. I have no memory of his world, but I can reconstruct it. He was part of a static society. He was not different
from his father or grandfather. So, even if there was friction, he wouldn’t discover it, because he didn’t have the bike.’

The bike – Pravas had been talking of the Bangalore traffic and his own motor-scooter. I liked the metaphor: it made the static past understandable.

I began to wonder whether many of the frustrations Pravas spoke about were not rooted in the past, whether they hadn’t been created by the smallness of Indian expectations, the almost pious idea – like the idea behind Gandhian homespun – that a country so poor needed very little. I wondered whether there wasn’t deep in India even now a psychology of shoddiness, an extension of the idea of holy poverty, the old religious-political feeling that it was wrong, wasteful, and provoking to the gods (and the ruler) to get above oneself. And I asked Pravas, as I had asked Subramaniam, about the psychological effects on him, as he was growing up, of the shoddiness of Indian manufactured goods.

He said, ‘I didn’t have much to compare with when I was growing up. I might have seen my grandfather’s watch, but I never saw an Indian watch and had nothing to compare. So I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t grow up with too many imported goods. The things we used were made locally, or we simply didn’t have them. We used a lot of the products of Indian artisanship – metal plates, not china, and metal plates have been made for thousands of years. Textiles had been made long before I was born. So the basic needs were met by local goods. When you are small, besides, your needs are very small.’

About the shoddiness of Indian goods he saw now he was philosophical. ‘Compared with contemporary goods elsewhere, they are bad. Compared with the nothing we had 50 years ago, it is something. It only means we have started late. Japanese goods 50 years ago were shoddy.’

The new world was so new: it had begun for some people with their grandfathers, and for most with their fathers. And people had travelled so far so fast that many active people had a success story to tell, their own sometimes, or that of someone in their family.

I had got to know Kala. She was of Tamil brahmin origins. She did the publicity for a big organization. She was in her twenties, and unmarried. She was diligent and methodical; she had a
reputation as a worker. She was grave, self-possessed, educated. But I didn’t know enough of India, and especially of that brahmin South from which she came, to guess at her background.

And then, at lunch one day, speaking of it as of a fairy story, she said that her grandfather had started from nothing, had been so poor as a child that he had studied by the light of street lamps.

(Hadn’t that been said of many other people? Hadn’t there been another very poor boy somewhere – without paper or pencil or slate – who had had to work out sums on the back of a shovel with a piece of charcoal? I thought of Kala’s story as a piece of romance. And then, some weeks later, in a small brahmin ‘colony’ in Madras, I saw a small boy one evening actually sitting with a book below a street lamp. The lamp was too dim to read by, but the brahmin boy was there cross-legged with his book, acting out ambition and struggle and self-denial, doing the virtuous thing he and his parents had heard about.)

I asked Kala the name of this ancestor. It was the name of a princely-state administrator; it was a name famous in pre-independence India. The boy who had studied by the street lamps had risen to power and wealth.

From Kala’s manner, I might have expected someone like that grandfather in her background. What was unexpected – and yet a little thought would have shown that it was in keeping with that brahminical background – was that, on Kala’s mother’s side, there was a
sanyasi
ancestor, an ascetic, someone who had renounced the world to go and meditate on the river-steps or ghats of Banaras, among the pyres and temples beside the Ganges.

Such strands of old India did Kala carry in her make-up. She knew she was part of the movement out of old India that Pravas had spoken about; but she didn’t know it in the same analytical way. When Kala meditated on her family past, as she did with something like obsession, her thoughts were of her mother, who had been caught by that movement forward, had been trapped between the generations, and had had her life distorted.

Kala took the story about her grandfather reading under the street lights seriously. She had heard the story when she was nine or ten from her mother, and then later on in more detail from her grandfather himself. She said, in her grave way, ‘When there is a power failure, and the lights go off, and one becomes irritated, then I think of this man, this boy, who didn’t have lights at all in
his house.’ It was probably so. This was in Madras in the early 1900s. His parents had sent him to his grandmother’s house in Madras to live.’ And though Kala didn’t say, I thought that this would have been part of the brahmin migration to the cities that occurred in so many people’s stories. In Madras, Kala’s grandfather lived in a brahmin area near an important temple.