The Twice-Born

Title: The Twice-Born – Life and Death on the Ganges

Author: Aatish Taseer

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789353023881

Pages: 248

Just a throat-clearing before I begin. This is my 500^th book review in this blog. I had completed 400 on April 12, 2017, exactly 638 days before. Looking back, I feel that the progress has been steady with each book taking slightly less than a week. It is especially gratifying when I consider that the previous hundred took me 751 days and the hundred before that required 828 days. Most probably, I would not be able to finish off another hundred without starting the use of spectacles which I had been staving off till now. I am still clueless on how many more books should be completed before I can call myself a bibliophile..!

With the cultural heritage of three millennia at its back and which forms an unbroken thread to the present and possibly to the future too, India was felt to be intriguing to most visitors. Here, I definitely do not mean a person’s origin to classify him or her as a visitor. Many Indians have lost the ability to enjoy the captivating notes made by the strings of culture upon encountering a cultural experience from the bottomless reservoir in which it is welled up. Contempt is also an emotion exhibited by a few foreigners and natives who see in it nothing but superstition, casteism, and calcification of morals. Jawaharlal Nehru likened it to an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie has been inscribed and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. Traditionally, the Brahmins have been the custodians of India’s ancient knowledge and this book is an effort to gauge the amount by which they have changed in answer to the relentless onslaught of modernity on the time-honoured customs and traditions of Hinduism. Brahmins are thought to have two lives – one begins on their natural birth and the other with the rites of initiation into the order of priesthood. Hence they are called dvi-ja, the twice-born. The title is thus exceedingly suited to a book that studies the spiritual horizons of Varanasi’s Brahmins. Aatish Taseer is a writer-journalist born out of the union of an Indian journalist with a businessman-politician from Pakistan. This mixed parentage enables him to claim the legacy of both the Indian and Islamic civilizations.

Taseer maintains that India’s intellectual past plays no role in engendering its present and future. Both the old and the new thrive side by side in the country. An educated, English-speaking, westernized community is living with an ignorant, superstitious and doctrinally observant community steeped in tradition. The former is visible in cities such as Delhi and the latter more so in lesser towns like Varanasi (Kashi) and rural India. The two cities are only 800 km apart, but the real distance, the sense of travelling across centuries, is not physical. In place of the jet-setting fashion-lovers of Delhi, you see Sanskrit scholars – young and old – discussing about arcane concepts of linguistics in many of the smaller towns of the Indian heartland. This forms the basic dichotomy between India and Bharat existing in the minds of its people. The divide runs from just one or two centuries ago. India faced many societies coming in through the ages. Huns, Sakas, Parsis, Jews and Muslims arrived in waves of invasion, migration and cycles of trade. They assimilated into the culture of the country and its continuity remained the same. But with the advent of the English, the ‘thought’ content became powerful and its soft power enthralled the people who followed it. The ugliness of modern India, standing alongside the beauty of its past is enough to make one believe in the intangible India of mind and spirit.

The book does not explain why it chose Brahmins as the point of study in so many words, but drops hints on the motive. Brahmins constitute the intellectual superstructure that existed everywhere in India. Among the numerous castes divided into many classes, they stood out as the beacons of religious learning. As a percentage of the total population they are very small, but represent the underlying unity of Indian thought and spiritual life. This is especially so as every element of how you live, down to what and with whom you eat, is informed by the imperative of caste (p.86). What Taseer argues is that Brahmins constitute an aristocracy of the mind. Written with western readers in mind, this book presents many half-truths under the guise of first-hand experience. The source of a Brahmin’s prestige in society is claimed to be his autonomy though he lacks financial and physical strength. In Bengal, a family that accepted a donation or a gift is considered to be lower in rank. This observation is not in sync with actual facts. As a priest, he is bound to accept some honorarium from the clients.

If the author is to be believed, caste oppression is still rampant in India, though his examples fail to prove his point. Indian reforms on religion were not organic. Taseer avers that it took root in Bengal only due to the assimilation of western ideas and those apologists of Hinduism such as Tagore and Swami Vivekanand internalized a foreign criticism of their culture and pretended that it was their own. However, he concedes that Hinduism, with its great pluralism and none of the doctrinal strictness of the monotheistic faiths could never serve the needs of politics as Islam did in Pakistan and other countries (p.133). This is one of the reasons why democracy is well entrenched in the country. The book makes some startling remarks on the similarities of religious symbolism arching over different faiths. Taseer mentions that the linga (idol) of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in all its simplicity, reminded him of a rock half a world away in Mecca which exuded similar austere power (p.194). I don’t know how many pious Muslims would give their assent to this wild comparison!

Taseer takes great pains to view India as a ‘pure’ westerner. Whenever he visits a shop or a home, the readers are presented with a sickening description of the filth in the clogged drains, peeling plaster on the wall and the squalor of the streets in the usual formulaic pattern. Typical Indian conditions rendered by such authors include potholed roads too, but somehow our author seems to have missed it! However varied are his sources, the author does not come up with even a single soul who is progressive among his Indian subjects of observation. This is in spite of the fact that the ultraconservative priests were fully prepared to permit the author who is not of their religion to enter sacred premises, indulge him with earnest deliberations of their philosophy and to share food with him in their own homes.

A notable feature of the narrative is the unwarranted elaboration of the author’s personal preferences and experiences that are not at all relevant to the topic. One of them is his uneasy relationship with his Pakistani father. Taseer tells us about the lukewarm welcome he received at his father’s residence in his earlier book ‘Stranger to History – A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands’ reviewed in this blog. This is quite understandable as his father who was already married only had a casual affair with his journalist mother who had gone to interview him at that time. Now, in this book he recounts the terrible loss he felt when his father was assassinated by his own bodyguard in Pakistan. Taseer also makes the readers aware about his unnatural gender preference for a spouse. This being a private and personal matter, there was no need to trumpet it from the rooftop. The author’s remarks also smacks of obvious political opinion cleverly disguised as a liberal’s outrage at the so-called atmosphere of intolerance in the country after Narendra Modi came to power. His vain criticism falls to the level of the absurd when he mocks even the Swachh Bharat initiative that promises to rid the villages of India of the evil of open defecation which the author was forced to perform at a friend’s home in rural Madhya Pradesh.

There is no original content in the book and it is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star