Chasing the Monk’s Shadow

Title: Chasing the Monk’s Shadow – A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang

Author: Mishi Saran

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2005 (First)

ISBN: 9780670058235

Pages: 446

 

Ancient Indians were not too keen in writing history. As a result, historians are forced to resort to annals of invaders, memoirs of visiting dignitaries and oblique references in literary sources. Xuanzang was a Chinese monk who travelled to India in the seventh century CE for collecting rare religious manuscripts on Buddhism and to train himself in debating the finer points of philosophy. Born in 600 CE as Chen Yi, Xuanzang was the name given by the Buddhist order at the time of his enrolment as an ascetic. He travelled for eighteen years (627 – 645 CE) through western China, central Asia and the length and breadth of India. He meticulously wrote down what he saw and what he thought about the land and people he encountered. ‘Xuanzang’ is the reformed rendition of ‘Hiuen-tsang’ familiar to most Indians and adopted as the Pinyin system by China in 1958. Mishi Saran travels through the routes used by the monk 1400 years ago and similarly notes down her own reflections of the land and people she came up with. This journey was made in 2000-01. The author is a journalist based in Hong Kong and interested in travel writing. She was born in Prayagraj but has not lived in India since the age of ten. She is a graduate in Chinese Studies and handles the language well.

 

The importance of Xuanzang in patching up the missing pieces of not only Indian but the entire central Asian histories also is not fully appreciated by the public. So exact the monk had been in his directions that archeologists in each of the countries he traversed had used his pointers to fix and then dig up the old cities of the seventh century. The author meets with archeologists in the countries she travels in who share their findings and acknowledge the Chinese monk’s role in defining it. Xuanzang was accustomed to his country’s meticulous records, volumes of dynastic histories and genealogies copied and recopied for posterity. He could not know that his own record, inked for the Chinese emperor, would provide modern Indian historians with one of the few sources of information about the subcontinent in that era. His Chinese spelling and pronunciation is different from the common practice in India, but since it follows well-defined rules, scholars have no difficulty in identifying the places.

 

It is clear from the monk’s description that Buddhism was declining in India as well as in other places where it once held sway. Xuanzang notes with mild consternation the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Buddhist texts available in the Chinese language. This was the reason he undertook the arduous journey through inaccessible mountains and deserts infested with hostile brigands. Xuanzang learned Sanskrit in India which was the ecclesiastical language of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism to which China belonged. At the same time, he studied Hinayana treatises also, so as to argue and defeat them in discourse. Futile disputes on the finer points of religion had become fairly common even in Central Asia as attested by Xuanzang’s arguments with Mokshagupta at Kucha in Kyrgyzstan. Patronage extended by royal houses was running thin. Buddhist monasteries in the western and central regions of India were already abandoned by the time Xuanzang arrived. There were few monks and certainly no eminent Buddhist teachers.

 

Saran’s condescension on everything Indian is jarring. Having lived most of her life abroad, she looks at the country with anglicized eyes and insistently repeats the things a typical foreigner would record, such as peeling paint on building walls, vehicles that break down twice a day, potholed roads and garbage accumulated everywhere. Even then, she remarks that ‘somehow India held together. Somehow the garbage got collected; somehow there was ginger and milk for tea; somehow the rickety government buses got me to places. I had not worked out how’ (p.217). Such grudging admiration does not extend to expressing gratitude where it is legitimately due. The author’s family had connections at high places that an armed guard and a security vehicle were exclusively provided for her transport in strife-torn Kashmir. Under that security canopy, she went places and faithfully records the one-sided observations made by extremist elements or their sympathizers. This attitude is common in liberal authors who gleefully accept the comforts provided by the administration and then make a partisan narrative of the conflict. She mistakes Kapilvastu to be in Uttar Pradesh and excoriates the state government for the poor upkeep. It’s amazing that her research could not identify the place to be a part of Nepal! On the destruction of Nalanda, she places the blame on ‘central Asian invaders’ in 1197 as if history does not record their names. Every Indian knows that it was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khalji in the pre-Sultanate period characterized by frequent Muslim invasions.

 

The author’s faculty of criticism and mocking disparagement is entirely suspended when she crosses the border from India to Pakistan. On every step, she is shadowed by the security establishment, harassing even the people who help her by providing accommodation, for instance. She raises no complaints about this in the book though it was published a few years after the event. The author unconditionally yields to hardline dress codes and gets self-conditioned to accept them as good for her and the whole womanhood. Later, on seeing college girls in Swat Valley with uncovered heads, she notes that ‘they looked vulgar and their heads seemed naked’ (p.365). Saran herself takes extra care to keep those body parts – commanded by Sharia to be covered – fully in conformity to it without any grumble. Donning a burkha, she ‘sensed the power of concealment, the power of only revealing what is absolutely necessary’ (p.371). In the usual liberal fashion, the author meekly surrenders to religious injunctions when they are accompanied by an implicit threat of violence otherwise.

 

The author’s journey on the footsteps of Xuanzang was interrupted at the Uzbekistan border because the road to Afghanistan was blocked due to internal violence between the Taliban and local militias in the year 2000. So she directly flew to India. After completing the travels in India and Nepal she obtained a visa to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. The author could not visit any monument of her choice in the Taliban territory and was forced to travel the routes prepared by her male guide assigned by the Islamist regime. Public transport was non-existent and unsafe where they plied. She tried for UN aid agencies’ resources for travel and accommodation, but they refused to entertain her. Irritated by the lack of special consideration of the type she was familiar in India, the author makes a tirade against the agencies prompted by frustration. She accuses corruption in the international aid agencies. Even the funds contributed by well-meaning people gets sucked up in the great funnel of overheads and hefty staff salaries and finally only a trickle reaches the Afghans. The UN needs to have transparency regulations, provide accounts and pay attention to the bottom line. Most importantly, the author calls for a provision to fire staff when times get tough. The aid agencies would have done better if they had at least provided a car for Saran’s travel in Afghanistan!

 

The book’s title and beginnings are exciting, but the narrative gets lackadaisical once the going gets tougher. Often the script degenerates to a plain travelogue with nothing to enhance the historical content. The author has connections to very high places and scholars, but entirely fails to capitalize on it as far as the quality of the content is concerned. On the other hand, she has been successful in delineating the currents of identical cultural streams that unite central Asia with the Indian subcontinent. Even though separated by religion, they show similarities in the attitudes to life and the way to treat guests. The word ‘mehman’ for guest is common everywhere outside China. Altogether, we reach a conclusion that the book has failed to deliver what it promised in the title.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star