India (13 page)

Meditation and stillness can be a form of therapy. But it may be that the true Hindu bliss – the losing of the self – is more easily accessible to Hindus. According to Dr Sudhir Kakar, a psychotherapist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who is himself Indian and has practised both in Europe and in India, the Indian ego is ‘underdeveloped’, ‘the world of magic and animistic ways of thinking lie close to the surface’, and the Indian grasp of reality is ‘relatively tenuous’. ‘Generally among Indians’ – Kakar is working on a book, but this is from a letter – ‘there seems to be a different relationship to outside reality, compared to one met with in the West. In India it is closer to a certain stage in childhood when outer objects did not have a separate, independent existence but were intimately related to the self and its affective states. They were not something in their own right, but were good or bad, threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, all depending on the person’s feelings of the moment.’

This underdeveloped ego, according to Kakar, is created by the detailed social organization of Indian life, and fits into that life. ‘The mother functions as the external ego of the child for a much longer period than is customary in the West, and many of the ego functions concerned with reality are later transferred from mother to the family and other social institutions.’ Caste and clan are more than brotherhoods; they define the individual completely. The individual is never on his own; he is always fundamentally a member of his group, with a complex apparatus of rules, rituals, taboos. Every detail of behaviour is regulated – the bowels to be cleared before breakfast and never after, for instance, the left hand and not the right to be used for intimate sexual contact, and so on. Relationships are codified. And religion and religious practices – ‘magic and animistic ways of thinking’ – lock everything into place. The need,
then, for individual observation and judgement is reduced; something close to a purely instinctive life becomes possible.

The childlike perception of reality that results does not imply childishness – Gandhi proves the opposite. But it does suggest that Indians are immersed in their experiences in a way that Western people can seldom be. It is less easy for Indians to withdraw and analyze. The difference between the Indian and the Western ways of perceiving comes out most clearly in the sex act. Western man can describe the sex act; even at the moment of orgasm he can observe himself. Kakar says that his Indian patients, men and women, do not have this gift, cannot describe the sex act, are capable only of saying, ‘It happened.’

While his world holds and he is secure, the Indian is a man simply having his being; and he is surrounded by other people having their being. But when the props of family, clan, and caste go, chaos and blankness come. Gandhi in 1888, not yet nineteen, taking ship at Bombay for Southampton, would have been at sea in every way. It was about Gandhi and Gandhi’s account of England that I talked to Kakar when we met in Delhi. Gandhi would have had no means of describing what he saw at Southampton on arrival, Kakar said: Gandhi would have been concentrating too fiercely on the turmoil within him; he would have been fighting too hard to hold on to his idea of who he was. (And Kakar is right: later in the autobiography Gandhi says of his first weekend in England, spent at the Victoria Hotel in London: ‘The stay at that hotel had scarcely been a helpful experience for I had not lived there with my wits about me.’)

‘We Indians,’ Kakar says, ‘use the outside reality to preserve the continuity of the self amidst an ever changing flux of outer events and things.’ Men do not, therefore, actively explore the world; rather, they are defined by it. It is this negative way of perceiving that goes with ‘meditation’, the striving after the infinite, the bliss of losing the self; it also goes with
karma
and the complex organization of Indian life. Everything locks together; one cannot be isolated
from the other. In the Indian set-up, as Kakar says, it is the Western-style ‘mature personality’, individualistic and assertive, that would be the misfit. Which no doubt explains why, in the ashrams, while Indians appear to flourish in the atmosphere of communal holiness, Western inmates, like the hippies elsewhere in India, tend to look sour and somewhat below par.

In an active, busy country, full of passion and controversy, it is not an easy thing to grasp, this negative way of perceiving. Yet it is fundamental to an understanding of India’s intellectual second-rateness, which is generally taken for granted but may be the most startling and depressing fact about the world’s second most populous country, which now has little to offer the world except its Gandhian concept of holy poverty and the recurring crooked comedy of its holy men, and which, while asserting the antiquity of its civilization (and usually simply asserting, without knowledge or scholarship), is now dependent in every practical way on other, imperfectly understood civilizations.

A recent remarkable novel, however, takes us closer to the Indian idea of the self, and without too much mystification. The novel is
Samskara
, by U. R. Anantamurti, a forty-four-year-old university teacher. Its theme is a brahmin’s loss of identity; and it corroborates much of what Sudhir Kakar says. The novel was originally written in Kannada, a language of South India; its India is not over explained or dressed up or simplified. The novel has now had an India-wide success; it has been made into a prize-winning film; and an English translation (by a poet, A. K. Ramanujan) was serialized over the first three months of 1976 in India’s best paper, the
Illustrated Weekly of India
.

The central figure is the Acharya, the spiritual leader of a brotherhood of brahmins. At an early age the Acharya decided that he was a ‘man of goodness’ – that that was his nature, his
karma
, the thing he was programmed to be by his previous lives. In the Acharya’s reasoning, no one can
become
a man of goodness; he is that, or he isn’t; and the ‘clods’, the ‘men of darkness’, cannot
complain, because by their nature they have no desire for salvation anyway. It was in obedience to the ‘good’ in his nature that, at the age of sixteen, the Acharya married a crippled girl of twelve. It was his act of sacrifice; the crippled girl was his ‘sacrificial altar’; and after twenty years the sacrificial act still fills him with pleasure, pride, and compassion. Every day, serving the crippled, ugly woman, even during the pollution of her periods, he gets nearer salvation; and he thinks, ‘I get ripe and ready.’ He is famous now, this Acharya, for his sacrifice, his goodness, and the religious wisdom brought him by his years of study of the palm-leaf scriptures; he is the ‘crest-jewel of the Vedanta’, and the Vedanta is the ultimate wisdom.

But among the brahmin brotherhood there is one who has fallen. He drinks; he catches the sacred fish from the tank of a temple; he mixes with Moslems and keeps an untouchable mistress. He cannot be expelled from the brotherhood. Compassion is one reason, compassion being an aspect of the goodness of the Acharya. But there is another reason: the fallen brahmin threatens to become a Moslem if he is expelled, and such a conversion would retrospectively pollute, and thereby break up, the entire brotherhood. This very wicked brahmin now dies of plague, and a crisis ensues. Should the brotherhood perform the final rites? Only brahmins can perform the rites for another brahmin. But can the dead man be considered a brahmin? In his life he abjured brahminhood, but did brahminhood leave him? Can the brotherhood perform the rites without polluting itself? Can another, lower sect of brahmins be made to perform the rites? (They are willing: the request flatters them: their brahmin line got crossed at some time, and they feel it.) But wouldn’t that bring the brotherhood into disrepute – having the rites for one of their own performed by a lower group?

These are the problems that are taken to the Acharya, the crest-jewel, the man of goodness. The matter is urgent. The heat is intense, the body is rotting, the vultures are flapping about, there is a danger of the plague spreading. And the brahmins, who are
fussy about their food in every way, are getting hungry: they can’t eat while the corpse is uncremated.

But the Acharya cannot give a quick answer. He cannot simply consult his heart, his goodness. The question of the status of the dead man – brahmin or not brahmin, member of the brotherhood or outcaste – is not a moral question. It is a matter of pollution; and it is therefore a matter for the laws, the sacred books. The Acharya has to consult the books; no one knows his way about the palm-leaf manuscripts as well as the Acharya. But this consulting of the books takes time. The plague spreads; some untouchables die and are unceremoniously burned in their huts; the brahmins are beside themselves with hunger and anxiety. And the books give the Acharya no answer.

The Acharya understands that his reputation for wisdom is now at stake; in the midst of the crisis he acknowledges this remnant of personal vanity. But a decision has to be made, and it has to be the correct one. The Acharya can only turn to magic. In the morning he goes to the temple of the monkey god and ritually washes down the man-sized idol. He puts one flower on the god’s left shoulder and another on the right. And he decides how the god will answer: if the flower on the right shoulder falls first, the brotherhood can perform the rites for the dead man. But the god gives no reply. For the whole of the hot day, while the Acharya prays and anguishes (and his crippled wife becomes infected by the plague), neither flower falls. And, for the first time in his life, the Acharya, the man of goodness, has doubts about himself: perhaps he is not worthy enough to get an answer from the god.

Exhausted, tormented, he leaves the temple in the evening, to go to look after his wife. In the forest he meets the untouchable mistress of the dead man. She expresses her concern for him; she has worshipped the Acharya for his piety, and it has occurred to her that she should have a child by the Acharya. Her breasts touch him, and he is enveloped by the moment; he wakes at midnight imagining himself a child again, in his mother’s lap. It cannot be said that he
falls or sins. The words are too positive. As with Sudhir Kakar’s patients in real life, the sexual moment simply happens. ‘It was a sacred moment – nothing before it, nothing after it. A moment that brought into being what never was and then itself went out of being. Formless before, formless after. In between, the embodiment, the moment. Which means I’m absolutely not responsible for making love to her. Not responsible for that moment. But the moment altered me – why?’

The reasoning is strange, but that is now the Acharya’s crisis: not guilt, but a sudden neurotic uncertainty about his nature. The earlier crisis has receded: the dead man has been cremated during the night by his mistress, with the help of a Moslem. The Acharya is left with his new anguish. Is he a man of goodness, or has he really all his life belonged to the other, ‘tigerish’ world? Men are what they are, what they have been made by their previous lives. But how does a man know his true nature, his ‘form’?

‘We shape ourselves through our choices, bring form and line to this thing we call our person.’ But what has been his defining choice – the long life of sacrifice and goodness, or that barely apprehended sexual moment? He doesn’t know; he feels only that he has ‘lost form’ and that his person is now like ‘a demonic premature foetus’. He is bound again to the wheel of
karma;
he has to start again from the beginning and make a new decision about his nature. In the meantime he is like a ghost, cut off from the community of men. He has lost God and lost the ways of goodness. ‘Like a baby monkey losing hold of his grip on the mother’s body as she leaps from branch to branch, he felt he had lost hold and fallen from the rites and actions he had clutched till now.’ Because men are not what they make themselves, there is no question here of faith or conviction or ideals or the perfectability of the self. There is only a wish for knowledge of the self, which alone would make possible a return to the Hindu bliss of the instinctive life: ‘to be, just to be’.

Formless now, his wife dead from the plague, and with her death his especial act of sacrifice abruptly terminated, the Acharya decides
to wander, to let his legs take him where they will. This is really an attempt to test his responses to the world; it might be said that he is trying to define his new form by negatives. What do other people see in him? Does the peasant see the brahmin still? Do other brahmins see the brahmin, or do they see a fraud? At a village fair, is he the man to be tempted by the women acrobats, the pollutions of the soda-pop stall and coffee stall, the lower-caste excitement of the cock-fight? Between the pollution-free brahmin world and this world, the ‘world of ordinary pleasures’, of darkness, a ‘demon world of pressing need, revenge and greed’, there is no middle way. All around him are ‘purposive eyes. Eyes engaged in things … Immersed. The oneness, the monism, of desire and fulfilment.’ Men are defined by the world; they are defined by the pollution they can expose themselves to.

The Acharya is terrified; he feels himself being ‘transformed from ghost to demon’. But, neurotically, he continues to test himself. His caste sins mount; and he understands that by exposing himself to pollution he has become a polluting thing himself. He comes to a decision. He will return to the brotherhood and confess. He will tell them about his sexual adventure with the dead man’s untouchable mistress, his visit to the common fair; he will tell them that, though in a state of pollution (partly because of his wife’s death), he ate with brahmins in a temple and invited a man of lower caste to eat with him. He will speak without repentance or sorrow. He will simply be telling them about the truth of his inner self, which by a series of accidents – perhaps not really accidents – he has just discovered.

Samskara
is a difficult novel, and it may be that not everyone will agree with my reading of it. The translation is not always clear; but many of the Hindu concepts are not easy to render in English. Even so, the narrative is hypnotic; and the brilliance of the writing in the original Kannada can be guessed. Anti-brahmin feeling (and by extension anti-Aryan, anti-northern feeling) is strong in the south; and some readers of the serialization in the
Illustrated Weekly
of India
have seen the novel as an attack on brahmins. This is a political simplification; but it shows to what extent Indians are able to accept the premises of the novel that are so difficult for an outsider: caste, pollution, the idea of the
karma
-given self, the anguish at the loss of caste identity.