India's first ambassador in Washington, Rama Rau, asked Octavio Paz if Mexico was an U.S. state. Paz blushed. Before Paz could elaborate, Rau added laughing: “Excuse me, Octavio, the Europeans do not know of geography and my fellow citizens know nothing of history… It was only a joke… We were also ourselves recently still a colony.”
Paz had to think of his fellow Mexicans: “They say also such stupidities when they speak of India.” Literature Nobel Prize winner and former Mexican ambassador to India Octavio Paz probably hoped to change these tendencies with his essay “In Light of India,” which was based on a lecture given at the invitation of Rajiv Gandhi in 1985. Paz formulated the topic of the essay thus: “How does a Mexican writer at the end of the twentieth century perceive the immense reality of India?” This detailed text concerns India's poetry, music, paintings, architecture, philosophy and, above all, the Islamic and Hindu religions.
This is no book for specialists, but rather an expression of the author's love for India. At the same time, “everything that I saw (in India) was the re-emergence of forgotten pictures of Mexico”. These comparisons are scattered throughout the entire book. For instance, Paz writes of their shared fondness for spicy food and dance, and often, Paz concentrates his attention on the colonial history. The path to independence for these countries was quite different, however, in both instances, European colonial powers, namely Spain and Great Britain, functioned, in the words of Paz, as “agents of unification.”
Superiority of weapons
Paz observed that the “clash of civilisations” ordinarily concerns itself with the hegemony of visions and views of the world and the beyond. The Mexican author attributed the success of the Spanish to the superiority of its weapons and the fact that the Aztecs confused the Spanish leader, Hernán Cortés, with a God. Remarkably, Paz did not take account of Tzvetan Todorov`s brilliant study “The Conquest of America”, which was first published in 1984. In this study, the French-Bulgarian philosopher accredited the success of the Spanish above all to their capability to see things from the Aztec perspective and, consequently, the ability to anticipate Aztec behaviour. The fact, that Hernán Cortés first sought a translator and only then gold, is, according to Todorov, not to be underestimated. With this act also begins western modernity. Interestingly, the pragmatic rationality of Cortés confirmed the Aztecs´ belief of Cortés' divinity, which for the Aztecs' made the imminent defeat an unavoidable fate. Unlike India, Middle America had never had contact with other peoples and cultures. Those who consider themselves to be alone in the world can believe a complete stranger to be a God. It almost seems as its misunderstandings that produce world-historic consequences must always also imply reference to God.
If Todorov is right, it could be said that India or rather its political elite — above all Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru who were both educated at the best English universities — could only gain Independence from the British when they understood British reasoning and had, in part, adopted it. This was evidenced especially in the acceptance and internalisation of British concepts like that of the nation — according to Paz “the great absence in the history of India” — and of democracy and the state; the knowledge of English, the language of the colonial power, also may well have allowed communication for the first time among the many peoples of India. Paz remarked that these European ideas were alien to the Indian people, as evidenced by the nonexistence of these concepts in the Indian languages. India reveals itself not in unity, but rather in its great variety. This was its informing principle. Paz writes that the 1857 uprising was still an unruly rebellion, not a “national revolt.”
Western import
Jawaharlal Nehru, who according to Gandhi was “more Englishman than Indian in his way of thinking”, and the Anglophile elite wanted independence for India to partake in western modernization and technical advancement. Gandhi, on the other hand, wrote once: “I am not the enemy of the English; I am the enemy of their civilisation”. At the same time he was convinced of the rightness and usefulness of the democratic principles, though democracy is not the traditional India, because it is rather a “western import”. For Gandhi, religious conviction was simultaneously also a political guideline and would ultimately bring success. It is the irony of history that the foundation for a modern India lay in the hands of a man who wanted old India back and who rejected advancement and western modernity.
Remarkably, Paz neglects the obvious conclusion that passive resistance is the genuine and appropriate form of resistance for such a traditional and deeply religious society. The unthinkable, the establishment of independence from the greatest imperial power on Earth by means of passive, patient suffering of the unbearable becomes a reality. In this passionate essay, Paz raises a monument for the liberator of India who, as it is well-known, was assassinated. He concludes: “It is a terrible law that each great historical creation is constituted on the blood of a righteous one: Mahatma Gandhi.”
Rüdiger Punzet works for the Goethe-Institut, Germany.
Translated by Alisa van Kleef.
