Book Review

The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, ARROW BOOKS first published in 1986

No Full Stops in India by Mark Tully, Penguin Books published in 1991

Nine Lives – In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury published in 2009

These three books published over a period of twenty five years could be read as a continuing narrative of Europeans at discovering the much eulogised – some would say stereotyped, cliché ridden and over - hyped – “real India”, which one must admit, many westernised, English educated and “Modern Indians” might wish does not exist; and indeed most of them even hope would soon be erased from the social landscape as it contains within itself all that is retrograde which impede the progress of the nation. Though not devoid of faults, especially in their enthusiasm for upholding the innate wisdom of the poor and deprived, these authors do not view the poor in condescending light and proffer solutions to their plight by advocating an early embrace of modernism. Their descriptions of the poor and the lives they live are largely sympathetic. In fact, these authors do suggest that the poor should be allowed to come out with their own solutions with minimal assistance by the do-gooders.

City of Joy is a narrative of the lives of people in a slum in Calcutta – now Kolkata – “ Anand Nagar” as experienced by the catholic priest Stephen Kovalski. Belonging to a family of coal miners in the Polish city of Krasnik in southern Poland, young Stephen was witness to strikes by miners, accidents, violence and death. All this happened in his life too, after the family migrated to southern France. But, what exactly prompted him to be a missionary? The suicide of his father and the desire to achieve by other means what he had attempted to accomplish by violence. And, what made him to decide to live in a slum in a poor country like India. His home was a gathering place for many North Africans, Senegalese, Turks and Yugoslavs. Once a Senegalese had challenged him, “You’ve always been saying you’re close to us, but do you really know anything about us? Why don’t you go and live in an African shantytown?” The die was cast.

What about Anand Nagar? “Three hundred thousand people stranded in this mirage city” is how the author describes it; and it was the world’s densest human habitation. The author’s description of the social geography of a slum is very accurate when he writes, “A slum was not exactly a shantytown. It was more like a sort of poverty-stricken industrial suburb inhabited by refugees from rural areas. Everything in these slums combined to drive their inhabitants to abjection and despair: shortage of work and chronic unemployment, appallingly low wages, the inevitable child labour, the impossibility of saving, debt that could never be redeemed, the mortgaging of personal possessions and their ultimate loss sooner or later. They also had to contend with the total lack of any reserve food stocks and the necessity to buy in minimum quantities – ten pice worth of salt, 20 pice worth of wood, one match, a spoonful of sugar – and the total absence of privacy with ten or twelve people sharing a single room.” But was it only poverty and squalor which characterised the slums? No says the author. “the miracle of these concentration camps was that the accumulation of disastrous elements was counter-balanced by other factors that allowed their inhabitants not merely to remain fully human but even to transcend their condition and become models of humanity.”

What are these positive factors? “The people in these slums actually put love and mutual support into practice. They know how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity towards beggars, cripples, lepers and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon; Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbours and old people were cared for and revered by their children.” Most of these features are absent in urban and modern lives, but still we feel more civilized their our counterparts in these decrepit dwellings!

The rest of the book is an elaboration of these basic features of slum life, which one must say, is not without its share of mutual suspicion, treachery, conflicts, violence and even death. But the people and characters inhabiting anand nagar such as Hazari Pal, the proud Bengali peasant who moves to the streets of Kolkata to be a rickshaw puller, Selima, the Muslim woman with four children living in the ‘house’ adjacent to Stephen’s, the Hindu priest from distant Tamil Nadu who also acts as a match-maker, the selfless Bandona, who stands besides the missionary in all his difficulties, the lepers who inhabit the secluded, outlying areas of this slum, the eunuchs who come home only at night..... are the ones who pass in front of us for a fleeting moment. They are not the ones with whom we interact intimately or even attempt to do so. But their lives, like ours, are inhabited by wives, husbands, children, relations, friends, enemies, festivities, marriages and death. Though living under extremely frightening conditions, their lives may look different to us, but the humanity which resides in them is not dissimilar to ours. Perhaps, this is the lesson one carries after finishing this deeply disturbing, yet at the same time a very enchanting book!

William Dalrymple sets out explore the role of religion in modern India and the challenges posed by modernity to religious life in the country. In his own words, Dalrymple seeks to answer questions such as, “What changes and what remains the same? How is each specific religious path surviving the changes India is currently undergoing?” and the big, but the old, tired question, “Does India still offer any sort of real spiritual alternative to materialism, or is it now just another fast developing satrap of the wider capitalist world?” These questions are sought to be answered through an exploration of the unique lives lived by seven Indians. What did he find these holy men concerned about? Dalrymple found the holy men discussing and agonising over the same eternal quandaries that absorbed the holy men of classical India, thousands of years ago: the quest for material success and comfort against the claims of the life of the spirit; the call of the life of action against the life of contemplation; the way of stability against the lure of the open road; personal devotion against conventional or public religion; textual orthodoxy against emotional appeal of mysticism; the age old war of duty and desire.

The nine lives explored range from a wandering Jain nun, a theyyam dancer of Kerala, a temple dancer in Karnataka, Phad singer of Rajasthan, a Sufi saint, a Buddhist monk, a Tamil idol maker, a tantric and a Baul singer. Dalrymple quite often succeeds in connecting the ideology informing the religious lives of these practioners with the actual lives led by them. One example being his reconciliation of the life of the Jain nun with her religious ideology. The Jains, Dalrymple informs us, conceive of karma as a fine material substance that physically attaches itself to the soul, polluting and obscuring its potential for bliss by weighing it down with pride, anger, delusion and greed, and so preventing it from reaching its ultimate destination at the summit of the universe. To gain final liberation, you must live life in a way that stops you accumulating more karma, while wiping clean the karma you have accumulated in previous lives. Dalrymple recollects the wandering num telling him, “How the people think of our lives as harsh. But going into the unknown world and confronting it without a single rupee in our pockets means that differences between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, all vanish, and a common humanity emerges. As wanderers, we monks and nuns are free of shadows from the past. This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a wonderful sense of lightness, living each day as it comes, with no sense of ownership, no weight, no burden. Journey and destination became one; thought and action became one, until it is as if we are moving like a river into complete detachment.” One may question such forms of detachment helping the advancement of goals of modern societies, but the correlation helps us in understanding the secluded lives lived by the Jain saints.

Another chapter which is of interest is the “The maker of Idols”. Dalrymple’s quickly captures the distinct landscape of the Kaveri delta when he says that there are few places in the world where landscape and divinity are more closely linked than in southern India, where each village hosts innumerable gods, goddesses and spirits. He also acknowledges the fact that there are few sculptors who have achieved the pure essence of sensuality evoked by the Chola sculptors, who have celebrated the beauty of human body. What function does the eroticism of these idols perform in the sensual lives of its devotees? William relates how the last act of the priests, before they close the doors of the inner shrine, is to remove the nose jewel of the bronze idol of Shiva’s consort lest the rubbing of it irritate her husband whey they make love. This removal ensures the preservation and regeneration of the universe. This was nearly 1000 years before Sigmund Freud’s birth!

The religious sect which lives closest to its professed beliefs is that of the Bauls. The Bauls believe that God is found not in a stone or bronze idol; or in the heavens, or even in the afterlife, but in the present moment, in the body of the man or woman who seeks the truth; all that is required is that you give up your possessions, take up the life of the road, find a guru and adhere to the path of love. This profession is similar to the wandering Jain nun, Red fairy and Ma Tara described in the book. One is, therefore, tempted to assume that this tradition of careless abandonment is the dominant religious tradition of the country. If the wandering Jain nun, Red fairy and the Bauls represent the spiritual dimension of the religious practices in the country, what are the material dimensions of these traditions? Like the slum dwellers of Kolkata, this tradition must manifest in actually putting love and mutual support into practice. We must know how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to a stranger, how to show charity towards beggars, cripples, lepers and even the insane..

Mark Tully riles egalitarianism for most of the ills afflicting India. The journalist in him quickly grasps the basic malady when he says that the people the poor have elected have ‘ruled’ rather than ‘represented’ them. His solution is that India should not ape the west and it must keep its genius intact. He approvingly quotes Mahatma Gandhi as saying, “My Swaraj is to keep intact the genius of our civilization. I want to write many new things but they must all be written on the Indian slate. I would gladly borrow from the West when I can return the amount with decent interest. And, again Tully quotes Radhakrishnan writing, “The characteristic genius of the Indian mind is not to shake the beliefs of the common man but to lead them by stages to the understanding of the deeper philosophical meaning behind their beliefs”

Some would argue that this is dangerous irredentism; falling back on social structures which are oppressive, just because the new paradigms are not working or not working well enough to benefit everybody. Perhaps one must distinguish between the ‘benevolent old” and the “malevolent old” just as one could easily differentiate between the “benevolent new” and the “malevolent new”. Mark Tully narrates stories in which both kinds of the old have clearly survived. If the “Kumbh Mela” is of the former kind, “Deorala Sati” is of the malevolent kind. The message seems to be that the past would consume us if the present practices fall short of people’s expectations.

Mark Tully also alludes to the fact that age old religious practices such as attending a “Kumbh Mela” could fulfil modern needs. He poses this question to Sant Bax Singh, the former M.P. of Allahabad and elder brother of V.P. Singh, at the Kumbh mela: “Would it be right to say that bathing in the Ganges is like a sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace?” To which Sant Bux replies: “The needs of an Indian or any human being, are the material plus something else. For the pilgrims, the Ganges washes away all sins. Krishna lived on the banks of the Jamuna and made the greatest love ever made; beyond both sin and love is wisdom and that is what the invisible Saraswati represents. A bathe fulfils an inner need without the need of a psychoanalyst.” There could not have been a better defence of the Kumbh!

Mark Tully carries forward the concept of accepting the poor as they are and empowering them to solve their problems themselves. After witnessing the squalor and chaos just outside his hotel, he writes: “When faced with the poverty of India, the temptation is to despair. I have always tried to guard against that. It is futile and does not help the poor. Despair is also frightening when you love the person or the country you despair of. The strength of India lies in the resilience of the poor. They are to be admired, not pitied. The poor may be fatalists, but that does not mean they have despaired. “ It is in this never say die spirit of the poor to live that the policy makers administrators and the assorted NGOs must find sustenance for their upliftment.

At the end of the story about the tribal artist who has made it big in Bhopal after he was discovered by the Artist Jagdish Swaminathan, Tully quotes Verrier Elwin, the Anthropologist to describe the existence of an old world in Central India: “Amid the weary decline of the great Gond race, he (the Pradhan) still stands out, jovial, original and witty. While the Gond now thinks the sum of human ambition is to be a railway clerk, an Excise Inspector, the Pradhan still believes that life itself matters more than life’s achievements, that a poem is more important than a file, that to know how to make love to your wife is a much more important bit of knowledge than how to read or write”

Both the Mr. Chidambaram and the Naxalites must read Verrier Elwin!