On Sopan Joshi's Mangifera Indica

This year, for the first time in my life, the mango became something more than an exciting and consoling and sensuous gustatory experience for me—to the point that I almost ceased to regard it as an object of consumption.

My teacher was a mango tree, planted in the 1980s in the small yard outside the house that my parents built in Bhubaneswar. Over the years I had come and gone many times without ever paying much heed to the parallel universe that it had created and sustained within its boughs. But now that I had a small library on the rooftop, every morning began with a few minutes within its aura, somehow both serene and ecstatic.I took to reading with its long green leaves gently rustling in the wind: fine music for the mornings. In January, thousands of small green flowers, packed into conical panicles, burgeoned on its branches. Slowly, their stalks turned a sindoori red—the colour of creativity and passion, revealing just why Kama is said to choose mango flowers for his arrows. Squirrels, birds, chameleons, bees,ants, and spiders buzzed within its canopy, a small society of ardent arboreals.

When I plucked a tiny subsection of flowers and pressed down on it with my fingernail, the ethereal tart fragrance of kachchi kairi rose to my nose. A few weeks later, tiny green fruit began to appear on the stalks. Whenever I left for a few days and returned, they had plumped out a bit more, dangling in small clusters, fed by fragrant sap running up from roots 70ft away.

Slowly they began to ripen. Their sun-facing sides turned yellow first: a daily demonstration of how heat and light from a faraway star metamorphose into life and colour and taste here on earth. In April and May, after three months of fruition, they became ripe and began to fall all around the house, to the great delight of passers-by. Their heads and shoulders were stained by sap. I only ate a few. I didn’t want to. Watery and much less complex than the best mango varietals, they had nevertheless proved to be a revelation of all the wonders of life.

Perhaps the only way to make the entire cycle more mangivorous would have been to spend those mornings reading Mangifera Indica, Sopan Joshi’s exuberant and magisterial survey of the influence of the mango on Indian life and thought. Joshi’s basic thesis, which he illustrates with infectious verve and detail, is that to us subcontinentals, the mango is much more than a fruit, it is an entire culture: a path back to childhood, an emblem of longing and desire and ecstasy, a non-verbal code of civilisation and culture, a roadway into myth and history.

Despite being so deeply embedded in our imaginations for millennia here is something mysterious and elusive about the mango. For instance, there is the unpredictable way in which it propagates.Mangoes grown from seed, or beeji mangoes, are very rarely “true to type”—the seed of a gulab khas or imam pasand does not yield a tree that has the same kind of fruit—and need the aid of “kalmi” or grafting for mass-scale production for a consumer base as large as India’s. Again, there is the frequent disjunction between looks and taste: many of the best varietals are nondescript to the eye. There is a sense of insufficiency associated with mangoes, even when we can eat as many as we like. India is too big a country and the fruit too mercurial a personality for it to travel to distant markets. There will always be more varietals that we haven’t tasted than those that we have.

Among the lovely details that Joshi offers is that just like Indians themselves, south Indian varietals often do well when transplanted to the north, but the reverse is rarely true. Joshi sprinkles many such charming facts and references along his rambling journey (he drives a Harley Davidson to many far-flung mango orchards). In the seventh century CE, the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang travelled to Sarnath, where he mentions visiting a large vihara with a golden figure of a mango above the roof. “Buddha’s concerns were universal and existential,” glosses Joshi. “He needed the kind of metaphors that turn abstract ideas into imaginable forms.” In Jharkhand’s Chaibasa, Joshi meets Kunwar Singh Janko, a tribal in search of the land holdings of his ancestors in the sal forest. Two ways of identifying such lands are tombstones and old mango trees.

Even Gandhi, who resisted the call of sensuality and temptation all his mature life, struggled to eliminate mangoes from his diet. “We must get used to not treating it with so much affection,” he writes sternly in a letter from 1941. Mirza Ghalib would never have agreed. More than 35 kinds of mango are cited in his own letters.

The mango also has an extensive literature of its own. Much of it is throwaway journalism; another large part comprises highly technical and dry scientific papers. So it’s worth focusing on where Joshi breaks new ground. Most writers on the mango (myself included) have only situated the mango within a human-centric history of taste; Joshi opens out the frame to locate it within a history of life itself.“The influence of fruit (on life) is very deep,” he writes, as he shows how plants and animals and human beings have co-evolved over tens of thousands of years.

In this view of things, primates (the genus of living creatures which includes apes and human beings) developed colour vision to find the brightly coloured fruits of the tropical rainforest, the seeds of which in turn we dispersed far and wide—sometimes across entire continents. (On my first morning in Brazil a few years ago, I came across a mango lying broken open on a stone pathway on the island of Itaparica. I picked it up and it smelled like no mango that had ever come my way—it had become Brazilian.)

“We do not like to see ourselves as primates shaped by fruiting trees,” Joshi writes. We would rather believe today that it is we humans who have shaped and ordered the world of the mango. But the long-historical record proves otherwise. “It was the plants that began hitting on animals,” Joshi writes—a fact we still acknowledge when we raise a mango to our noses to detect whether it is ripe. Thinking about mangoes in the widest possible frame requires that we “lift ourselves out of human solipsism and join biology’s dance to the music of deep time.” At moments like this Joshi’s writing approaches the ecstatic tremors found in the work of Stephen Jay Gould, David Quammen and Timothy Ferris.

The other noteworthy aspect of Joshi’s book is his insightful survey, based on extensive legwork and discussions with mango growers and traders (whom he allows to speak in their own voice), of the problems that plague the Indian mango industry. Most mango orchards in India, he notes, are not tended by their owners; many were acquired in the years after independence as a way of evading the strictures of the Land Ceiling Act. Today they are given out on contract, but an indifferent landlord never made for productive and well-tended land. In contrast, the passion and sense of purpose and awareness of tradition found in the best mango-growers is truly life-affirming. 

It is always a big claim to say of a book that it will still be read in a hundred years. But it is hard to imagine that there will ever be a better literary companion to the mango than Mangifera Indica.

This essay appeared recently in Mint Lounge.

Understanding The Mind of the Young Indian Voter

"Understanding The Mind of the Young Indian Voter." 

This cover story written by myself appears this week as the cover story in The Week. It is accompanied by a long interview with Anwesh Satpathy, 20.

Travels in the Year of the Ram Mandir

"Jai Shri Ram!" All day long, the cry surfaces and reverberates in Ayodhya. It is the rallying call of the public along the wide walkway leading from the main road to the Ram Janambhoomi temple complex, hazy with construction dust and lined by workers with electric drills installing large pink concrete panels to screen off the mottled facades of the decrepit buildings on either side. It erupts with particular intensity among the shoals of devotees as they jostle on the narrow steps leading up to the Hanuman Garhi temple. It is spoken more gently after the moving morning aarti, offered to statues of Ram and Sita swaying gently on a swing, in the courtyard of the hundred-year-old Amava Ram temple with its crest of a giant bow -- and inside, its own glass-walled shrine to Ram Lalla, installed in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court judgment of 2019 -- where people gather in long rows at lunchtime a generous lunch of rice, dal, pooris and sabji provided for free by the temple's Ram Rasoi.

And even closer to the new Ram Mandir, it sounds thrice a day inside the small temporary shrine for Ram Lalla set up in 2020, approached through a winding barred corridor after multiple security checks, after the aartis of morning, afternoon and evening to which only 30 people are admitted by a very democratic first-come-first-served system. When after several attempts I manage to land an aarti pass, several family members send me WhatsApp messages of congratulation.

Many people on the streets, and almost all those walking on the Ram Janambhoomi Path to gaze at the new temple complex from afar, have the words "Shri Ram" or "Sitaram" stencilled on their foreheads in red on a base of yellow. This is the one mark of uniformity connecting a thrillingljy diverse array of tongues -- Hindi, Avadhi and Bhojpuri; Marathi and Gujarati; Telugu and Tamil -- dressing styles, and faces on Ram Janambhoomi Path. A substantial share of them are the weathered, statuesque faces of old India -- people who seem to have dipped their feet only lightly in the waters of modernity, and appear to possess a correspondingly large store of psychic space for the adoration of Ram and the moral universe of the Ramayana. 

The traveller looks at the faces around him and thinks: our paths will likely never cross again. When a boy comes running up and offers to stencil Ram on my forehead for 10 rupees, I do not refuse the badge of the moment. The stencils are themselves part of a giant new economy of Ram paraphernalia flooding the puja samagri shops of the city: wooden replicas of the new Ram Mandir, Jai Shri Ram plaques, Jai Shri Ram ballpoint pens, Jai Shri Ram car dashboard standees, Hanuman maces, Jai Shri Ram pennants, and Jai Shri Ram charan padukas.

All temple towns have two orders of reality: the shabby and clamorous world of the lok, and the ethereal and consoling universe of the dev lok. Ayodhya feels like it has three: the newest layer resembles a film set of an unsubtle blockbuster. The shutters of shops for several kilometres on the road from Faizabad to Mangeshkar Chowk are now painted with saffron trishuls, maces, and bows. New bus shelters broadcast pictures of Ram about to let fly an arrow. On the ghats of Ram ki Paidi can be heard the belligerent beat of Hindutva pop (including the hit "Yeh Rama Lalla Ka Dera Hai" by Shahnaaz Akhtar) blaring from loudspeakers to go with the traditional bhajans and kirtans. And there are locals kitted out as Ram, Lakshman and Sita by TV channels keen to provide a dash of theatre to their debate stages.

Under the grey winter skies of January, then, Ayodhya -- already steeped in the language and lore of Ram -- awaits its tryst with destiny. Will the city be able to bear the weight of aspirations suddenly invested in it? After all, almost overnight the actual residents of Ayodhya are fated to become a minority in their own city. Millions of Indians and NRIs, not to mention the ruling party and most of the mass media, are avid to transform themselves into Ayodhyavasis, as perhaps they were not to become the self-ruling, difference-cherishing people of a republic, reminded by Gandhi (always such a pressuring soul, and especially towards Hindus) that real ramrajya begins within oneself, that it requires great introspection and the abjuring of violence. 

That privilege, that legacy -- which for decades seemed a great gift -- now seems banal when compared to the chance to be the fervid, righteous praja of a new state and a new epoch, the fortunate generation chosen by Lord Ram to restore order and purity, a single source of authority, to a mongrel millennium.

Amidst the hail of Jai Shri Rams! in Ayodhya, one hears the murmur of the mild-mannered old town saying goodbye to itself. Its destiny is to be the beacon of a renaissance: to make India Hindu again, epic again.

“Bahut kasht hua hamarey sarkar ko”

On the banks of the Saryu, I come across a group of sadhus clad in shades of saffron, ochre and white, marching from the main road towards the river in a file, like ants on a trail, to take a boat ride. Unlike the local sants of Ayodhya -- many of whom, like Mahant Raju Das of Hanuman Garhi, spew insult and innuendo and espouse a Manichaean worldview in which all who are not for (their) Ram are against Ram -- this lot have the light-hearted and bantering manner of guests at a wedding out on a bit of sightseeing. 

And indeed that is who they are. They belong to a contingent of more than a thousand sadhus just arrived from Janakpur dham in Nepal, "jahan Sita mata ka janambhoomi hai," emissaries from "Ramji ka sasuraal," bearing truckloads of gifts from the kingdom of Mithila to celebrate the return of their king to his birthplace. What have they brought? "Gehna zevar, sona chandi, bartan bhara, chaul-daal, chappan-sattavan rang ke mithai" and, with a delightful touch of anachronism, even gas stoves. 

The events of the Ramayana may be from another epoch, but to most in Ayodhya they are not remote. The trails of Ram, Lakshman and Sita are still imprinted everywhere in the geography of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Nepal, and are part of a luminous and eternal present of a different dimension from the mundane past, present and future of the human soul sojourning briefly in this world in the body and on the river of history. With the men from Janakpur, as with so many others I meet, the Ramayana is the foundation and frame of reality; the life of this world merely a state of reflected light, as the moon to the sun. 

Our paths seem, paradoxically, to intersect at the same moment in history without us being part of the same age; this is the intractable jumble of samay and kaal that the post-independence Indian state, itself the product of a certain historical conjuncture and committed to contemplating time in secular terms, has found so difficult to accommodate and harmonise without capsizing under the current of cosmic time. To their way of thinking, both archaic and arresting, the world of men and women in society and history was once and forever aligned by Ram, with Ram, and was then cruelly uprooted. As the family members of Sita, they feel the feel the pain of their brother-in-law, exiled from his birthplace not for 14 years but five long and dark centuries.

"Bahut kasht hua hamarey sarkar ko! Panch sau barees...panch sau barees kasht kiye," exclaims Deen Dayal Saran, 62, barrel-chested, bearded, tilaked, turbaned, missing two front teeth, and all in all as charming a litigant as one could imagine. Very quaintly, Saran insists that Janakpur has an even deeper relationship to Ram now than ever before, because, being deprived of his own kingdom, "Ramji toh Janakpur mein hi reh gaye." He may have long been a resident of Janakpur, but seen the indelible contours of lineage, family, and marriage in Hindu thought he was nevertheless always first and foremost a visiting son-in-law, a "pahunwa."

To these men, as to millions of Indians, the new Ram temple represents the undoing of a traumatic rupture. The architects of this redemption are very clear.  “Ashirbaad dete hain Yogiji aur Modiji ko ke aaj hamari behen Sita apne ghar mein padhaar rahein hain. Kot kot hriday se dhanyavaad de rahey hain." 

Thankfully, their manner is triumphant without being gloating; they seek the return of a lost utopia, but are without the hubris, partly encouraged by the moral schema of the Ramayana itself, of those who would believe that good is all on their own side and evil is entirely outside there somewhere. For now, it is a time to shower praise on the entire universe, to create a mood of mischief and laughter, singing and taking videos of one another, as one would at a wedding. 

As we float down the river in the company of the boatman and a life-size pink teddy bear (every boat in Ayodhya seems to have a cuddly toy), every man produces a new item for the litany:

"Sarju Mata ki...!"

"Jai!"

“Janakpur dham ki...!”

“Jai!”

“Janaki Maharani ki...!”

“Jai!”

“Janak ke jamai ki...!”

“Jai!”

“Ramji ke babu ki...!”

“Jai!”

"Ramji ki bahin ki..." (laughter)

"Jai!"

Heard in Ayodhya and Varanasi in the first half of January

"Pachas saal angreji saasan mein kuch bhi nahin kiya. Aur oo! Dus saal rahkar bhi kitna kuch kar diya." 

An RSS worker and a seller of nimboo chai on the ghats of Banaras, of Prime Minister Modi

"If you do not accept the ideology of Hindutva today, you are immediately seen as being the product of a colonial mindset."

Young journalist from Delhi, at a cafe in Ayodhya

"The credit for bringing the Ram Mandir project to fruition rests with only three people. First, Ashokji Singhal. Second, Narendra Modi. And third, Narendra Modi. Of course, the credit for awakening the Hindus and turning the Mandir movement into a mass cause goes to LK Advani. But Advani was not prepared to embrace the consequences of his own rath yatra. Advani and Vajpayee were both cowards. They could not take the matter the whole distance despite coming to power. For daring to do that, the credit goes to Modi."

Retired professor, Varanasi

"Even after gaining access to education, the people of India did not learn to think logically. They remained highly emotional. So we could not become a real democracy. We remained only a representative democracy."

A schoolteacher, Ayodhya

"More and more people are coming to my shop these days asking for history books about India. But of the right kind -- not the leftist or Romila Thapar kind of Indian history."

Rakesh Singh, owner of Harmony Bookshop, Varanasi

"Papa! Bachava! Bandar ghoom rahey hain."

Young boy, Ram ki Paidi, Ayodhya

Kabir and his Rama

The poet Kabir deserves to be counted alongside Rumi and Julian of Norwich as one of the greatest mystics of the last millennium. From the fifteenth century onward, his Hindustani-language poetry has resonated across north India, where verses and phrases from the corpus of poems attributed to him are known to just about everybody. Kabir’s power derives from a syncretic, independent-minded reading of God and religion, particularly Hinduism and Islam, that is not only compelling on its own terms but has proved ideologically useful for modern liberal projects like the secular Indian republic. That power can best be experienced in a slim book of translations by the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.

Kabir was a low-caste Muslim weaver who was born and lived all his life in the holy city and bustling metropolis of Banaras (now Varanasi). He stands in Indian literary history at the center of an enduring religious and philosophical movement called bhakti, which stresses transcendent spiritual devotion without distracting rituals and doctrine.

Many translations of his work into English exist, from the slightly orotund, Victorian versions composed by the Bengali Nobel poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore in the early 20th century to the Americanized versions in the 1980s produced by the poet Robert Bly. But Kabir’s famed iconoclasm, speed of thought, slashing paradoxical style, metaphorical zest and rhetorical brilliance have rarely been rendered into English better than in Mehrotra’s versions.

Kabir is that rare thing: a skeptical, disillusioned poet who nevertheless speaks in a voice of rapture and entrancement. His work can be situated within a long tradition of Hindu thought that asks penetrating questions about the nature of perception, and insists that what we think we know through our senses about the nature of reality is merely maya or illusion. Or, as he says in a poem not included in this collection, “The knowledge that knows what knowledge is:/ That’s the knowledge that’s mine.”

Here is one of his sallies upon the subject in Mehrotra’s brief, bleak and astringent rendition:

The mind’s a shortchanging

Huckster with a crafty

Wife and five

Scoundrel children.

It won’t change its ways.

The mind’s a knot, says Kabir

Not easy to untie.

The mind’s “wife” here is the body, the “scoundrel children” the five senses. Mehrotra’s cunning deployment of enjambment—the breaking of a phrase or sentence across a poetic line—propels us from one line to the next, re-enacting, in the four-line opening sentence, the way the mind pieces together the meaning of the world from the messages of the senses, before knocking it out with the clean, flat declaration of the line that follows.

Mehrotra is one of those translators who is not just a facilitator of the original, but almost a competitor. His use of the unclassical and perhaps anachronistic word “huckster” shows us both what he takes from and brings to Kabir’s poetry, which is to allow his own poetic mind to take off from the basic message and conceptual frame of Kabir’s Hindi lines, without hankering after a word-for-word fidelity. At many points in this book his use of a clipped, colloquial idiom (“Friend/ You had one life/ And you blew it”; or “I’ve taken a shine to this thug”) perfectly realizes Kabir’s tart message. Mehrotra’s bucking, slangy versions attempt ambitiously to make Kabir sound in English as Kabir must have sounded to the Hindustani audiences of his day.

To those audiences, Kabir’s verse must have come as a jolt. Like Socrates or Thoreau, Kabir delights in asking questions from first principles. He is the scourge of what one might call metaphysical preening, of the certainties that on closer examination turn out to be hollow. This is especially powerful when Kabir applies it to the grand social distinctions of medieval Indian society—like the caste system—that under the light of his corrosive intelligence seem trivial.

In the first of a series of rebukes to yogic practice, he says, “If going naked/ Brought liberation/ The deer of the forest/ Would attain it first.” To Brahmins, the self-appointed elite of the caste system, he asks, “If you say you’re a Brahmin/ Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,/ Was there a special canal/ Through which you were born?”

Here he is, mocking those who are always speaking of salvation:

Let’s go!

Everyone keeps saying,

As if they knew where paradise is,

But ask them what lies beyond

The street they live on,

They’ll give you a blank look.

The booming opening line seems ever more ironic when found reduced to the “blank look” of the close.

Although Kabir frequently chastises the godly, it is not that he is godless. Rather, the God that he believed in was—to use the majestic phrase of one of his other translators, Vinay Dharwadker—“the God beyond God.” In his poems he frequently enjoins his auditors to cast away the masquerades of conventional belief and to put their faith in “Rama.” But this Rama is not the historical prince of the Ramayana epic or the idealized Hindu god of many attributes who derives from that epic.

Rama, in Kabir’s verse, is rather the luminous personal god within each man, who becomes available once he learns how to go beyond the colorful constructs of the human religious imagination and “open the inward eye.” Mehrotra’s rousing versions perfectly capture the message, at once sardonic and ecstatic, of a great poet who insists that “Looking heavenwards/ For heaven is to look/ In the wrong direction.”

The Indian Novel as an Agent of History

This essay appears in my recent book My Country Is Literature

Human beings experience their lives as embedded not just in time, but in history. And we deploy a variety of modes and instruments to make a personal map and mood of history: individual experience and cultural memory, political ideology and historiography, myths and legends, the news on TV and the chat at the barbershop. Among these ways of constructing or examining the past, a somewhat late-arriving one in India—only about 150 years old—is the novel.

But what is so noteworthy about the novel as a lens on history? It might be argued that even as a form of story, let alone history, the novel does not enjoy great currency in India, for it is neither an indigenous form nor a mass one. Cinema has far greater mass appeal, and the stories and narrative conventions of epics like the Ramayana inform everyday life and moral reasoning much more than any novel does (notwithstanding the apparent desire of nearly every educated Indian to write a novel, ideally bestselling).

Yet if the novel deserves to be studied as a site of Indian history, it is because Indian history itself is one of the great subjects of the novel in India. A preoccupation with Indian history—its pleasures and possibilities, its continuities and its fractures, its burdens and its freedoms, its shape and its mysteries—is a thread running through the work of some of the greatest Indian novelists of the past century and more, across more than two dozen Indian languages and literary traditions. In the great diversity of narrative forms and interpretative cruxes generated by the Indian novel, there lies, waiting to be unpacked by the active reader, a wealth of wisdom about Indian history—and therefore about how to live in the present time as an Indian and a South Asian, as a modern person of the 21st century and as a citizen of the first century of Indian of democracy. (Some of these possibilities are apprehended or activated by characters in novels themselves, allowing us to experience vicariously, or in advance of actual historical fact, difficult dilemmas and choices in our own lives.)

Consider Fakir Mohan Senapati’s enormously sly, satirical and lightfooted novel Six Acres and a Third (1902). The plot of Senapati’s novel revolves around a village landowner’s plot to take over the small landholding of some humble weavers. But this is also the Indian village in the high noon of colonialism, and the first readers of Senapati’s story would have delighted in the many potshots taken by the narrator against new and perplexing British institutions or perverse intellectual fashions, administered and advanced by a new class of English-educated Indians. ‘Ask a new babu his grandfather’s father’s name, and he will hem and haw,’ the narrator chirps, ‘but the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily roll off his tongue.’

The story appears to be generating, then, an argument about history and about political resistance. India must rid itself of its colonial masters, it seems to say, because they have delegitimised many of the traditional knowledge systems and truths of Indian society, and in the process made the modern Indian self-imitative and inauthentic. (The argument persists in today’s debates about ‘westernisation.’)

But this raises a new question, one that is not lost on Senapati. Was traditional Indian village society itself ever very wise, just, or balanced? As the story progresses, we see that anti-colonial sentiments have not blinded the narrator to the need to subject his own side to the scrutiny of satire. When we hear that ‘The priest was very highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women,’ and that ‘The goddess frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything’ the complacency and mystifications of Brahmanical Hinduism are also laid bare, as is the credulity about those who would place their faith in such a system.

Senapati’s irony is particularly effective because of its double-sidedness, and leads to a point useful as much in our time as his own. That is: criticism of a clearly marked-out ‘other’ (to Indians in the early 20th century, the British; to Hindu nationalists today, Muslims and Christians) often legitimises a sweeping and complacent faith in one’s own worldview; that the search for truth or meaning in history must remain a charade if not accompanied by the capacity for self-criticism. The novel’s argument, buried in its details and never overtly stated, is liberating not because it is comforting or inspiring, but precisely because it is disenchanted. Fiction shows us how human beings are themselves fiction-making creatures, and must therefore take special care to scrutinise what they believe to be foundational truths.

A different kind of novelistic irony—cosmic rather than comic—radiates from This Is Not That Dawn, the English translation of Jhootha Sach, the Hindi novelist Yashpal’s thousand-page novel from the 1950s about Partition. The story tracks the lives and loves of Tara and Jaidev, a pair of siblings, across the worlds of Lahore and New Delhi in the years both before and after Partition. In so doing, Yashpal’s novel generates dozens of alternative views of that cataclysm from viewpoints male and female, Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Pakistani (at the very moment that these new highly charged and adversarial identities are coming into being), prospective and retrospective.

Each character’s position or dilemma carries its own distinctive charge of hope, memory, conviction, doubt, naïveté, prejudice, fatalism, cynicism: a vast narrative collage of human beings swimming valiantly with and against the tides of history. If the narrator himself has something to say about the logic or validity of the breaking up of India, it remains parcelled out among the characters, and must be intuited by the reader.

In fact, although the book faces up squarely to the tremendous violence and horror of Partition, the feeling we take away from Yashpal’s novel is not that of an entirely tragic story. Of course, Partition destroyed a particular shared and longstanding, if uncodified, sense of what it meant to be Indian. But as we perceive from the quest of the protagonist, Jaidev Puri, to start his own newspaper rooted firmly in a rejection of religious partisanship of either a Hindu or Muslim stripe, what it means to be Indian would, in a new democratic and secular republic, have entailed building upon a new foundation in any case. At certain junctures in history, the novel shows us, tragedy and moral progress may be inseparably mingled.

As we can now see more than seven decades later, the new Indian republic has faced many challenges in remaining secular (and indeed democratic). Perhaps, in retrospect, we might say that it asked too much of the first citizens of independent India, who might have preferred political independence while remaining wedded to their old ways of social organisation. A splendid insight into the tensions between the hierarchical imperatives of Hinduism and the egalitarian impulses of the new Indian democracy might be found in the novels of the great Kannada novelist UR Ananthamurthy, and nowhere more convincingly so than in his early novel Samskara (1965), published when Ananthamurthy was just 33.

Samskara is, as the title indicates, about rites for the dead. Its plot turns on the dilemma posed by Naranappa, a man even more troublesome dead than alive. Naranappa is a member of a small agrahara, or settlement, of brahmins in rural Karnataka. The brahmins are, for the most part, almost stereotypically true to type: they live off alms and donations, perform rituals for the rest of the community, interpret the sacred books, and uphold through both poetry and penance the values of an ancient (and apparently eternal) hierarchical social order.

But Naranappa has gone rogue, profaning the tradition, provoking his neighbours with orgies of drinking and meat-eating, living in sin with a woman of a lower caste. There is no taboo he has not traduced. If he has not been excommunicated, it is only because the agrahara’s leader, the wise and compassionate scholar Praneshacharya, has long waged a war to reform his demoniacal nature. When Naranappa suddenly passes away, a question of profound significance comes up, one on which the entire world order seems to turn. Must the dead man be cremated with all the respect due to a high-born Brahmin? Or will the brahmins who survive him themselves be polluted by performing the last rites of someone who devoted himself to ‘kicking away at brahmanism’? It is Praneshacharya who must decide. Confused, the man widely known as ‘the Crest-Jewel of Vedic Learning’ turns to his palm-leaf manuscripts for guidance. What precedents exist for a conundrum such as this?

Upon the horns of this beautifully counterbalanced conflict—dead against the living, hedonism against self-restraint, profaner against pardoner, sexuality against textuality—Ananthamurthy sets down an allegory of Indian history with a particular resonance for the 20th century, and indeed the one after. For although the novel appears to be set in the unchanging Village Time of old India, in actual calendar time we are somewhere in the 1950s, in the levelled world of the new Indian democracy, that has made its touchstone not the books of revelation, but a constitution thrashed out by human beings.

Slowly, our view of the dead man’s misdemeanours changes colour. Perhaps Naranappa, underneath the obvious provocation of his saturnalia, represents the spirit of the new freedom, blowing away the fossilised thinking sanctified by the centuries. In openly falling in love and living with a low-caste woman, Naranappa shows a greater humanity than that required merely by ‘keeping the faith.’ Unlike his compatriots, flapping cantankerously in manacles of jealousy and moralism, he thinks on his feet and with his body.

Even the spotless Praneshacharya finds himself morally discombobulated by the age: his righteousness is founded upon a deep social conservatism, and he thinks through the foundational categories of purity and pollution, which find no place in the new social compact. The brahmins, we see, are prisoners of history, huddled in a cocoon of hypocritical piety; never daring to live beyond the ‘duties a brahmin is born to.’ Teaching all other castes to keep their own boundaries, they preside over a sterile society, when the age demands a new moral creativity. When they face a dilemma, they delve into their palm-leaf manuscripts, not into themselves. Praneshacharya begins to perceive this, but is powerless to act upon his intuition. Until his body does. On a trip deep into the forest to seek out an answer at the feet of a god, he encounters Naranappa’s voluptuous companion and ends up sleeping with her.

Now Praneshacharya, too, is a sinner, forced to confront his own repressed carnality. ‘I suddenly turned in the dark of the forest,’ he ruminates. Smarting with shame but rapt with a strange exhilaration, he takes to the road, both running away from himself and in search of himself. Ananthamurthy’s finespun prose, rendered in exquisite cadences by his late translator AK Ramanujan, tracks with great rigor the inner monologue of Praneshacharya as he arrives a new vision of the self. And as we follow Praneshacharya there, we see that we have reached a point not just metaphysical but metafictional. In place of the Sacred Books, perhaps it is the novel that contains the wisdom and the doubt that India needs for a new age in its history (which would make Ananthamurthy a kind of novelistic Naranappa). It’s a startling story, one as provocative for its time and place as those of Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot must have been in theirs.

As these examples show, the work of novels is not confined to mere representation of historical realities (although this is where they may start). Rather, a novel may be a creative intervention in history in its own right—an actual agent of history, passing on to the reader who passes through its narrative field both its diagnostic powers and visionary charge. Indeed, from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to UR Ananthamurthy, Bankimchandra Chatterjee to Kiran Nagarkar, Qurratulain Hyder to Salma, Phanishwarnath Renu to Amitav Ghosh, novelists have generated some of the most layered and sophisticated visions of Indian history produced in the last two centuries. Yet as a group they fall into no school or political camp—some of them possess a conservative rather than progressive sensibility. What unites them is their interpretative power and their ability to illuminate and complicate the particular historical crux they focus on.

It would appear that there is something inherent in the novel form—the persuasive power and freedom of a story when compared to a discursive argument; the prospect of linking the world of the self with that of the community and society; the freedom to rove in spaces of the past that we cannot access by means other than that of the imagination; the potential to think dialectically in exchanges between characters or switches in perspective between the narrator and the characters—that makes the space of the novel a particularly fertile ground for historical thinking.

And when they are themselves reinserted into the canvas of Indian history, it seems to me that the projects of the Indian novel and that of Indian democracy (both fairly new forms in Indian history) appear uncannily similar—and perhaps similarly unfinished. As Indian democracy has over the last seven decades sought to fashion a new social contract in a deeply hierarchical civilisation, so the great Indian novel has attempted not just to address but also to form a new kind of reader/citizen, alive to both the iniquities and the redemptive potential of Indian history.

Mahatma Gandhi and the Art of Travel

On January 9, 1915, a lawyer and community organiser from Gujarat called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (at 46, already in late middle age) stepped off the ship SS Arabia at Bombay Harbour. Gandhi had spent the previous two decades in South Africa, where he had made a name for himself representing the civil cases of the prosperous merchants of Indian origin there and the struggle for political rights of indentured labourers of Indian origin in a society divided on racial lines. Before that, he had also spent a few years as a (fairly mediocre) student in England.

In between these two stints abroad, Gandhi had already made one brief, unsuccessful attempt in the 1890s to return to India and set up his own legal practice. One reason for his failure then was his own diffidence; another, the fact that, as an Indian who had travelled abroad across the “black waters”, he was seen as having lost caste in a highly stratified and cloistered social world. Indians of that time preferred to deal with somebody uncorrupted by contact with the great unknown.

Though he returned to India a successful and even wealthy man, Gandhi’s travels had not made him arrogant, but rather more curious and more humble, even at the age of 46. It’s worth noting that he had promised his political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, that he would not speak or write on India for a year, till he had travelled around the country and acquainted himself with its problems.

During his sojourn in South Africa, Gandhi had discovered something enormously liberating about the life of émigrés. The boundaries drawn by Indians at home between themselves were blurred, and sometimes entirely abandoned, by the solidarities and hardships of being Indians abroad – which experience, for the rest of his lifetime, was to be expressed in Gandhi’s optimism about the ability of Indians to transcend their differences and work together.

Gandhi’s early life in Gujarat, then, and his outlook as a devout Hindu, were orthodox; his life experience for an Indian of the time, unusually heterodox. Among the protagonist in the movement for Indian independence (which he transformed within a decade from a primarily upper-class, small-scale campaign to a mass movement), no one possessed a sophisticated sense of the possibilities and civilizational blind spots of both India and the West – or such a willingness to turn the harsh light of criticism upon his own country (and indeed himself).

Through his capacity to combine homegrown ideas with those from around the world, Gandhi forged, first abroad and then at home, a creative new political philosophy called “satyagraha”, or “truth-force” – a compound of nonviolence, active resistance, and demanding self-scrutiny that was to become part of the basic vocabulary of modern political resistance. He came to it by way of the theories of Tolstoy and Ruskin, as also the Bhagavad Gita. To this day, Gandhi's thought holds a prominent place in the world’s sense of what it means to be Indian (even if its ideals are today under siege in India itself).

South Africa, as many have argued, was the making of Gandhi. The scholar Judith Brown put it well when she wrote, “Gandhi's twenty years in South Africa were not just his apprenticeship as a political mobilizer. They also provided the time and circumstances in which he formulated his attitude to India and the West; and this, far more than his political capacity and experience, was to mark him out on his return to India.”

One might even say Gandhi's travels had ennobled him. Having fought for the cause of Indians in South Africa, many of them Muslim, he could not bring himself to divide Indian society reflexively into Hindus and Muslims, as so many of his companions in the independence movement did explicitly or privately. He sought an independent Indian nation-state that would be home to all the faiths of the subcontinent.

Having grown up reflexively obeying the codes of Hindu social life – including marriage to a child bride – Gandhi returned to India transformed by his experiments in thought and morality. From now on (as we see in his autobiography, one of the twentieth century’s greatest books), he was determined to move the giant edifice of Hinduism back in dialogue – and if necessary in conflict – with the call of the individual conscience. He was eventually to pay the price for this with his life.

What can Indians today learn from Gandhi’s attitude to travel? From the time of Gandhi’s return to India onwards, a great change has come about in the size and character of the Indian diaspora. Indians began to leave the country in ever-greater numbers, on terms more amenable than those of indentured labour; no longer were they resented for their departure, or rejected on their return.

Everywhere they went, they came together to form small replicas of the beloved world they had left behind. Some lapsed into conservatism, nostalgia and a partitioned mental life, while others, like Gandhi, embraced the challenge of refashioning many of their values and beliefs in the light of their new experiences–and often brought the results home. 

The story of the homecoming, more than a hundred years ago, of the greatest overseas Indian in history makes for an eternally resonant parable. As Gandhi proved, sometimes the best way of knowing oneself and one’s civilization is by going away.

A version of this piece was first published in Bloomberg Opinion. 

On Nico Slate's Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet

There are two kinds of people, the saying goes: those who eat to live, and those who live to eat. But over the course of a lifetime, each one of us is perhaps both kinds of person. One could just as easily discern a pattern in which human beings typically eat with a bias toward pleasure, taste, excess and conformity in the first half of their lives, before gradually listing towards seeing food through the prisms of health, nutritional value, novelty, and diversity, as well as dietary questions of a social and political nature and a sense of the importance of tradition in cooking and eating. Hyper-aware and pleasure- virtue-signalling moderns, we are sometimes both these people on the same day.

But whichever way you look at it, our relationship with diet and consumption is profoundly detailed and layered, encompassing our deepest, most primitive instincts, our childhood memories, centuries of culture and tradition, and large social and political crosscurrents. As our relationship to our own bodies and to the world changes over the course of a lifetime, so does our thinking about food.

And modern consumer society makes huge demands on our eating lives — both in the negative sense of continuously presenting us with scores of tempting food choices, many of them unhealthy, that we must discipline ourselves to resist, and in the more positive one of offering us culinary possibilities from the entire world and the chance to grow and learn from the experience of traditions not our own. In England, when I combine in a single morning a visit to Sainsbury’s with the South Asian and East Asian and Caribbean supermarkets, I often come away with the same feeling of gastronomic pleasure and possibility that I did intellectually as a student when I visited the Cambridge University Library (home to a few million books, and therefore all the knowledge acquired by humanity).

But I also find myself asking many questions, as I’m sure you do when you shop for food. Pleasurable though it is to eat, what is the carbon footprint of the Chinese pear or Brazilian mango in my shopping bag? Do microwave meals cut down time in the kitchen and allow harried parents a spot of leisure, or do they help create a convenience culture of culinary illiteracy and dependence on processed food? What food system is better for farmers and food sellers: The highly consolidated, corporatized, imports-oriented model of the West or the much more diversified and localized but disorderly one of India, with its millions of small farmers with a deep relationship to the land but without proper access to (or any power over) markets and often themselves living in food insecurity? With every meal that I put on the table, what ripples in the food universe do I create or participate in?

These questions have acquired a deeper resonance for me since reading Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet, the American scholar Nico Slate’s deep, wise book about the eating life of one of the moral giants of the modern world. Very few people think of Mahatma Gandhi as an authority on food. His emaciated figure seems, if anything, to suggest a lifetime of ignoring the rich and varied culinary delights of the Indian subcontinent. And, of course, he was vegetarian too; he never knew the pleasure of a Lucknowi galouti kabab, a Bengali daab chingri, a Peshawari raan, a Konkani surmai rava fry, or a fiery Kerala crab roast. Sad.

But, as Slate shows, Gandhi was, in his own way, an extremely ambitious eater -- even a peculiar kind of gourmet -- continuously experimenting with new foods and new dietary combinations throughout his life. Although brought up in a strict vegetarian environment, he lived for 25 years of his adult life in vegetarian-unsympathetic England and South Africa, becoming part of the small vegetarian and radical countercultures in these countries (meaning that, even while eating less food than most, he had a more varied and cosmopolitan diet than most).

Food was an integral part of Gandhi’s politics and spirituality. Sometimes he changed his diet to identify with an oppressed community, such as when he started eating mealie pap, a corn porridge that was a staple of the Blacks of South Africa, after first resisting it when given it in jail. When the relationship between sugar, slavery and empire became clear to him, he stopped eating sweets. And when he wanted the people of India to rise up unitedly against the British Raj, he launched an agitation for their right to produce their own salt, a basic necessity of life that was produced and heavily taxed by the state.

A critic of many aspects of modernity, Gandhi also criticized the growing industrialization of food culture. He pointed out that eating highly processed food was not only unhealthy, but that it could also insulate the consumer from inequalities and injustices in the chain of production. The raw food, organic food and local food movements of our time can all find an ally in him.

Gandhi strived all his life for mastery of his palate, believing that gluttony was a symbol of indiscipline and spiritual corruption, not to mention unhealthy and unseemly in a world where so many people do not have enough food to eat. He was highly impressed by those who kept fasts, believing that fasting was not only good for health, but that it also developed self-mastery. Sometimes, Slate points out, his austerity and quest for dietary perfection could become obsessive — almost an egotism of sacrifice and renunciation. Yet he was alive to the social and pleasure-giving power of food and — for someone who ate so little — he gave, or attended, a surprisingly large number of dinner parties.

Most importantly, unlike many food (and other) crusaders of today, Gandhi was not arrogant and inflexible about his moral positions on diet. For such a passionate vegetarian, he was a greatly tolerant one. To those who defended meat-eating, he asked only that they make an effort to eat less meat. “Understanding Gandhi’s diet," writes Slate, "is… to connect two of history’s perennial questions: How to live and what to eat.” It might be hard for ordinary people like you and me to subject their diet to such rigor and moral ambition. But we could all do with inviting Gandhi, metaphorically speaking, to dinner.

And two old posts on The Middle Stage: on Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Gandhi, and on Gandhi's autobiography.

On Upendranath Ashk's Girti Deevarein

In the novel form’s capacious chest of mysteries, one intriguing phenomenon is the attraction of so many novelists who call themselves realists to protagonists who are anything but. (Of course, they can be “realists” in different senses, but equally, sometimes they are not.) Like all paradoxes, this one too points to an important truth.

From Cervantes onwards, naïve protagonists in fiction, their hearts full of great dreams and noble ideals, believing that a more just world can be realised, often rudely schooled in worldly truths by the cynical, provide a point of view on human nature that eventually unsettles the reader just as much as their fictional milieu unsettles them. Of course, they may come across as purely comic if they, like Don Quixote, refuse to learn anything at all. But equally, should they learn to adapt themselves completely to their circumstances, we sense something tragic about their pragmatism, like that of a parrot that has made peace with living in a cage. And so their education has not been in vain, for even as these characters become more worldly-wise, we feel the need to defend or rescue exactly what they are abandoning. It is a good template for a story...I feel it myself as I write this schema out.

Something like this narrative arc – one says “something” because this 500-page novel is nevertheless only a fragment of a massive, seven-volume story, and much remains to be realized in the “future” of the story – appears in Girti Deevarein (Falling Walls) by Upendranath Ashk. Ashk was one of the leading lights of Hindi literature in the twentieth century, and remains, alongside Premchand and Yashpal, one of the realist Hindi novel’s holy trinity. The Girti Deevarein series was his great novelistic project: the story of five years in the life of a highly sensitive young man that he hoped would also become a portrait of the age.

Here is a writer, therefore, who is no hurry at all. (How was he to know that his first readers in English would be reading him decades later in a time when there is time for nothing, and especially not novels?) For three or four hundred pages, all we are given are the torments of the provincial young protagonist, Chetan, in the town of Jalandhar as he flaps, stumbles, falls, and gets up again, buffeted by the storms of family, education, livelihood, poverty, marriage – and his own questing self, which will not allow him to accept easy answers to his questions, even as it cannot reject the dictates of convention.

Brutalized by a belligerent, hard-drinking father who is nevertheless perfectly secure about his place in the world, Chetan knows he can never become the same kind of man. But has no sense of what kind of man to become instead. He needs time to grow into a place of independence, but meanwhile time is a rope steadily twisting tighter knots around him: a wife who does not represent what he wants in a woman, a job in a newspaper that bears no resemblance to what he seeks from work. He is tormented both by his feelings of towards women who cross his path – most notably his own sister-in-law, Neela – and by his inability to do anything about them. Not having a strong sense of self, he repeatedly places his trust in older men who seem to represent some kind of power or virtue. But each one of these engagements leads him only to a further revelation of “the duplicity of the age.”

Above him, another figure seems to proceed much more serenely: the narrator, building up in painstaking (and occasionally pointless) detail the surfaces and structures of lower middle-class life in undivided Punjab in the nineteen-thirties. We are in a universe of galis and mohallas, charpoys and turbans, thundering patriarchs, downcast mothers, the frames of karma and dharma, the Arya Samaj and the Congress party, a glass of milk before bed and one set of new clothes every year. Men prefer the company of men, women only open up to other women, and both sexes sublimate their unactable yearnings in story or song or silence. Late in the book, at a restaurant in Shimla, we learn that Chetan “tasted salad for the first time in his life” – a novel taste in a world where milk reigns over not just meals but metaphors, and the prevalent theory of parenting holds “that the curses of a mother and father are like drops of milk and ghee.”

Daisy Rockwell, Ashk’s greatly involved and touchingly partisan translator (she has also written a critical biography of the writer, and published a collection of his stories called Hats and Doctors), has elsewhere compared Ashk to Proust. The resemblance is certainly worth contemplating. Both writers wrote a seven-volume novel sequence that remained unfinished; the theme of In Search of Lost Time is also the development of a nervous and questing young man into an artist; and both protagonists return obsessively to the fevered climate of their childhoods.

But the fundamental difference between the two writers is that Proust’s story is told in the first person by the protagonist, who by the force and beauty and peculiarity of his obsessions succeeds in converting us to his poetic vision of reality, while Ashk’s narrator shows us Chetan from the outside as the prisoner of his circumstances, and reality in Ashk’s world remains stubbornly prosaic and mean. The workings of memory are central to the narrative method of both writers. But the dozens of flashbacks into Chetan’s childhood in Girti Deevarein reveal not just of a character who seeks refuge from his own present, but also a writer wrestling with his own rather rudimentary technique and generating more mass than meaning.

About a hundred pages from the end, though, the writing suddenly takes wing, and Chetan’s difficulties with the world suddenly begin to be marked by insight rather than incoherence. Glimmering observations begin to appear about the relationship between art and life, self and society, religion and morality. Trying, for instance, to compare the boy Chetan’s genuine love of nature with the adult Chetan’s equally genuine love of art, the narrator observes that “with art, he found what he couldn’t attain in nature: self-expression” and that “Art is really the daughter of nature.”

The story builds up to a devastating denouement. After having meditated for long upon his discontents, Chetan decides that he is at fault for the emotional distance between him and his wife. He resolves to make a genuine effort to scale the wall of gender difference so deeply built into marriage by tradition, and make his wife not his slave but his friend.

Just then, though, comes the news that Neela, his sister-in-law, is about to be married off at a very young age. And Chetan remembers that it was he himself who, having nearly committed a misdemeanour with Neela, had advised her father to have her married off and in so doing, congratulated himself on his own powers of restraint.

Now, attending the wedding, he sees that the girl is being married off to a well-off, well-over-the -hill widower. Yearning for a genuine soulmate himself, he has just ensured that another human being will forever be denied one. Yet again Chetan feels hapless, but there is a difference: he feels hapless for the sake of someone else. And in the same breath he ceases to lie to himself.

The naked truth appeared before him. He was in love with Neela. Despite a year and a half of married life, he loved her….Intelligence, religion, morality, society, marriage – all those walls which in reality had kept his desire hidden from him had fallen in his imagination.

Watching these walls fall so dramatically, one moves from asking more of Ashk to asking for more Ashk.

A new book: My Country Is Literature

I have a new book out this month: My Country Is Literature — a book of literary essays, some of them first published here on the Middle Stage. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and has over 60 essays on writers and books (including a great many Indian novelists from across the history of the Indian novel) and a long introduction, "The Books of My Twenties, or, How I Became A Literary Critic," that is a memoir of my life in book-reviewing.

Two excerpts from it — one, a passage about the relationship of literary criticism to the essay and of the novel to life, and two, some memories of my father, who taught me to love books and to treasure libraries — are here and here. Here is a paragraph from it:

A book is only one text, but it is many books. It is a different book for each of its readers. My Anna Karenina is not your Anna Karenina; your A House for Mr Biswas is not the one on my shelf. When we think of a favourite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters who touched our hearts, the rhythm and texture of the sentences. We recall our own circumstances when we read it: where we bought it (and for how much), what kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the story began to intermingle with scenes from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation or allowed us to make our peace with some great private discord. This is the second life of the book: its life in our life.

It's a book about all the pleasures and glories of being a reader and trawling the boundless seas of literature. If you know of someone, especially a young person, who loves books, please present them a copy.

Shakti Maira and the Promise of Beauty

"Saundarya drishti – an eye, a sense, an instinct for beauty – is a quality naturally available to every human being.”

The painter and sculptor Shakti Maira reclines in an armchair, and in a patch of morning sunlight, in his family home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Delhi’s Greater Kailash I. “And further, the experience of beauty is such a vital part of the human sense of well-being. Sadly, we have become so acculturated today to the idea that well-being is basically economic. And the idea of beauty has become mainly about looking good, or at the most about visual experience. Today we are constantly taking in-breaths in our lives…and I’m not sure that the experience of beauty is possible without the capacity to take out-breaths.” 

As Maira looks around the room, it is not difficult to see the beauty in him. In profile, his head and broad shoulders radiate the nobility and classical proportions of a Greek bust from antiquity – an effect only accentuated when his serene gaze trains itself back onto you. During our conversation he frequently takes my name, as if to emphasize that, even if he is doing most of the speaking, this is a dialogue. His use of a meditation metaphor reveals the basic ground of his thought; his widely admired art is intensely focussed on ideas of inner harmony and balance. His smile is mischievous, but underneath it there is something enigmatic that reminds one of the face of the Buddha. This is only his temporary residence – his mother, who lives on the ground floor, is 95 and he wants to be near her – but it is lined with beautiful objects, including many made with his own hands, such as his distinctive long human figurines in wood and metal. (“When I think of human beings I see them as feeling, perceiving, imagining creatures, but deeply rooted in the earth. That may be why their bodies look like the trunks of trees.”).

Beauty, clearly, has never been far from Maira’s thoughts. At 70, he has lived many lives – including two decades in corporate life in America before returning to Delhi at the turn of the century – and has won accolades for both his painting and his sculpture, not to mention a book about aesthetic experience and spirituality called Ananda.

His new book, The Promise of Beauty, is notable for being both an emphatic act of assertion and a graceful gesture of self-effacement. Although there are in it dozens of pages of vivid, magisterial writing on the meaning and experience and history of beauty – Maira belongs to that line of protean Indian fine artists who are as comfortable with words as with paint and wood – the bulk of the book is devoted to a set of eighteen long conversations. A cast of eminent scientists and philosophers, poets and painters, dancers and ecologists, architects and politicians are engaged by Maira on the subject of beauty: how and why we experience it, and what it can and should mean to us. 

Most Indian readers will know some of the names in the book – Muzaffar Ali, perhaps, or Vandana Shiva – but the range of the cast and the continuum of science, art, economics and ecology along which the subject is explored will surely be a surprise. If our instinct for beauty is innate, Maira asks, to what extent can it be further trained? Are ideas of beauty cultural constructs, or are some things universally beautiful? Is beauty a static or a dynamic state, a state of balance or of sublime disruption? Are there many dimensions and planes to beauty – sensual, intellectual, spiritual – and how might we climb this ladder of beauty? Is the experience of beauty confined to human beings, or might animals, too, have a sense of aesthetic delight? When we experience something beautiful, what exactly is going on in the brain and what can modern neuroscience tell us about it? What are the aesthetic theories of India and how do they compare to those of the West? Is the world of economics and the active enemy of a beauty-centred existence, or can there be an economics rooted in respect for beauty? Must beauty have any place in policy-making? Why are the modern fine arts so suspicious of beauty? If our experience of beauty is closely tied to the quality of attention we bring to songs, paintings, or people, doesn’t beauty lead out naturally to ideas of responsibility and care? Are beauty, truth and goodness inextricably linked, or can each of these exist without the other?

Maira’s interlocutors are clearly provoked and delighted by these questions, for they throw themselves wholeheartedly into the dance he proposes. The biologist Pushpa Mitta Bhargava wonders if we find some forms in nature especially beautiful because we ourselves are part of the world of such forms (something we often forget in our sense of separateness from the world produced by the alienating sophistication of our consciousness, itself an object of beauty in its own right). The scientist Rupert Sheldrake dwells on the beauty of flowers and fruits from a evolutionary perspective – they are beautiful in order to attract pollinators – and riffs on the idea of beauty as a web of interconnected relationships, an idea echoed by the poet Ruth Padel when she speaks of humans as “membraneous beings” who are constantly navigating between what is inside and outside them. 

These are magnificent, memorable encounters: the more that people say on the subject, the more, it seems, there is left to say. The philosopher Roger Scruton compares the bliss of beauty to the experience of love – “It wells within us but is directed outwards and involves a self-giving of the person who feels it.” The architect Gautam Bhatia ruminates on why modern Indian cities are so ugly when the older facades amidst them are so much more harmonious, and what contours a new imagination of the beautiful Indian city might have. The filmmaker Muzaffar Ali describes the vision of beauty at the core of Sufism (“Beauty, especially in Sufism, is a continuous battle between the visible and the invisible”). It’s like a one-book literary festival on one of the richest and deepest of human themes, with Maira playing the role of a shrewd and sagacious Master of Ceremonies.

The conversation is not all amiable: Maira’s interlocutors resist or elude him, too, which friction generates productive channels of its own. Padel rejects his attempt to give beauty a very transcendent, even salvific, status in human affairs, allowing for nothing more ambitious than “Beauty is a working okayness.” The painter Anjolie Ela Menon finds Maira’s vision of beauty as gladness, well-being and balance somewhat underwhelming, pointing out that at the pinnacle of beauty, “there is ecstasy” – the ecstasy, for instance, of love-making, which has no connection with making the world a better place or the lovers more truthful people. 

The Promise of Beauty is idiosyncratically written: after every two or three chapters, Maira pauses to take stock on the advances that have been made, and to draw together some of the strands of what has been said with his own thinking on beauty. “Beauty is more than a concept,” he writes, “and is best taught through lived experiences of mind and body.” Some of the best moments in the book are when takes us into such experiences of his own. There is the state of alertness, wonder and centeredness that comes with the casting of a bowl in a pottery studio. And the devastating and yet cleansing experience of releasing the ashes of his 26-year-old son into the waters of the Ganga, and then, a year later, of taking up some clay from the banks of the same river, further downstream, to use on a canvas – an experience that leads organically to “a renewed wholeness” as life, time, and art form ever-new patterns and combinations.

“I would say that my life has been and continues to be blessed by beauty,” Maira writes in the book’s concluding pages. But while there is much beauty to be found in the world, “my most profound experiences of beauty have come in meditative quietening, when I have found access to the mind’s inherent spaciousness, its light, peace and well-being.”

Maira’s overall diagnosis, his sense that there is something profoundly out of joint in our world today, is, I think, correct. For all the freedoms and energies and aspirations released by post-liberalization India, there is today in our civilization also a crisis of beauty.  We are harrowed by the chaos and violence and pollution of the city without being able to change anything about it, bemused by our own unending gush of material needs that thrill to the invitations everywhere to indulge them, out of touch with the continuity and consolation of traditional Indian forms, and diminished by our inability to pay close and sustained attention to anything by the white noise of our smartphone lives. 

If we were to pause and “allow our instinct for beauty to become more manifest in our lives,” he believes, we would be able to make a new compact with ourselves and each other. “To live in beauty might be a good working definition of a happy and healthy life at all levels of existence.”