The renowned Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz was, among many other things, a great Indiaphile. In his prose and poetry, essays and lectures, time and again he invokes India as the reference point. An important component of his eclectic sensibility was moulded by Mahayana Buddhism and Tantrism. The epiphanic moments of his greatest poems, though full of intense sensuality, are evanescent: the confluence of Tantrik plenitude and Buddhist emptiness. ‘We could not survive even if those moments had lasted one more moment,’ says Paz, in his superb poem ‘ Cuentos De Dos Jardins’, his farewell to India after seven- year tenure in India as Mexican Ambassador.
The present book pulls together into one volume ‘reflections, impressions and objections’ about India spread over his voluminous oeuvre. Though Paz approaches the riddles of India with insights derived from vast reading and ceaseless globe-trotting, he does not consider this book as a piece of scholarship. It is more a book of love than of scholarship, he says.
Paz was not the only Latin American writer fascinated by India. The great Brazilian poet Cecelia Merelles visited and wrote many poems on India. ‘An invisible wind passes between India and Brazil on a silent afternoon,’ she wrote. Gabriela Mistrel, Borges and Neruda were interested and had things to say about India. But none of them had the interest as sustained and engagement as deep with India as Paz.
What distinguishes Paz’s writings on India is the fact that he responds to the vestiges of our past and particulars of the present with a uniquely Mexican sensibility, which, far from being parochial, deeply enriched by the understanding of a variety of arts, literatures and cultures of Asia, Europe and Americas. One of the advantages of his perspective is that it is not coloured, colonial or an orientalist outlook. The biggest promise of Paz’s passionate book about India to present to us a sympathetic outsider’s view uncluttered with distortions inherent in the views of the colonisers or the colonised. To what extent does the book deliver this promise?
Paz is at his best in the first section of the book, ‘The Antipodes of Coming and Going.’ Paz says that India first entered him through his senses. The intensely sensory invocation of his visit to Mumbai and Delhi constitute the best prose tribute to these legendary cities. As an ardent lover of Paz’s poems, I know how some of the haunting images that come alive in this section - the Elephanta Caves, and Humayun’s Tomb for example are woven into some of his greatest poems. His descriptions are like epiphanies. This is how he recreates Humayun’s Tomb: ‘...as if geometry had decided to transform itself into flowing waters and colonades of trees is the mausoleum of Emperor Humayun...The soul of the deceased has disappeared ...and his body has become a small heap of dust. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into collections of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air.’ This is just one of the examples of how his passionate and sensual prose transforms actual spaces into visions of other spaces in space and other times in time.
The only other foreigner who presents to us images of Indian cityscapes is perhaps the Japanese novelist Yokio Mishima in his ‘Sea of Fertility’. He too highlights India’s this-worldly sensuality in all its immediacy - a far cry from the image of India as a transcendental realm.
The life of senses is bracketed in the present, in the here and now which escapes the non-stop deluge of time that floods it away into future-a non-corporeal abstraction. However, we are also condemned to place the life of senses into disembodied contexts of time and place, history and society.
The second and third sections of the book are explorations into Indian history and society. Though Paz’s reflections and observations are informed by his deep and passionate understanding of other societies, he also falls into the traps of generalisations one cannot help tracing back to Orientalism. Though it is difficult to combat the allurements of his seductive and impassioned prose in this section, a closer look exposes its shaky foundations. His point about the irreconcilability of pantheistic and polytheistic Hinduism and trancendentalist and monotheistic Islam on the Indian soil is well-taken. But his understanding of Hinduism as a conglomeration of Sanskrit scriptures and caste system is highly reductive. Further, he bases his interpretation of caste system on Luis Dumont’s book ‘Homo Hierarchicus’, which sees caste as an unchanging system unaltered by sociological dynamism. Though he acknowledges the significant and mediatory roles of Bhakti and Sufism in Indian history, his characterisation of Bhakti is oversimplified. According to him, the popularity of Bhakti is offset by the poverty of its philosophy, vis-à-vis Hindu philosophical texts. This inference stems from a poor understanding of the philosophical complexity of Nirguna Bhakti, in spite of Paz’s considerable familiarity with Kabir. Neither does he seem remotely aware of South Indian origins and ramifications of Bhakti. A deeper flaw of this section is the assumption and reduction of diverse religious traditions of India into a monolithic Hinduism.
Paz’s distinction between the ways Islamic and British rule impacted Indian society is original and insightful. He argues that with the exception of Akbar and Dara Shikoh, Islamic rulers always thought of Hindus as potential coverts whereas British rulers, driven purely by commercial and political motivations, evinced least interest in religious matters and sowed the seeds of secularism.
Writing later about the sea change brought about by British Colonialism, he explains that the consequent freedom movement came about because of nationalism emerging for the first time on Indian soil. By contrast, Sepoy Mutiny had failed because the spirit of nationalism was absent. Paz points out insightfully the basic contradiction between caste system and democratic value of freedom. Democracy brings about uniformity, not equality. It further erases fraternity characteristic of caste order, he argues. Skeptical about the future of Indian democracy, he seems to ascribe his fear to the rigidity of caste system. However, what he does not understand about caste system is its dynamism. Though a certain overall exploitive nature has proved constant, castes have combined or split themselves up time and again, thanks to a host of socio-spiritual efflorescence’s like Bhakti and Natha-Siddha cultures. Also, if India has not yet fallen victim to a state of total tyranny, it is because of the pulls and pressures of different caste and sub-caste groups for dignity and equality. Thus the evolution of democracy in India has taken a course different from Euro-American individualistic cultures.
Despite his passionate engagement with Indian art, music, literature and culture and his critical distance from Jedeo-Christian linear history nurtured in Europe to the disadvantage of cyclical cultures Asia, Africa and Latin America, Paz brackets Indian history within Western paradigms. The fundamental opposition he posits between linear and cyclical cultures is itself a Colonial imposition as Wole Soyinka has argued in the African context. We cannot open the secret treasures and the hidden dangers of India with such either-or keys. The parallelism that Paz draws between Mexican and Indian civilisations is fascinating. Both are chilli loving cultures. An integral part of Indian cuisine, chilli was Mexico’s gift to India. Both lands have been sites of ancient civilisations.
While being deeply critical of this theoretical matrix, I would love to read this book again and again for the passion and mind-blogging paradox of India, which Paz shapes into irresistibly charming and evanescent epiphanies such as:
Only
The light on the sea
The barefoot light on the sleeping land and sea
The author is a professor at JNU and a culture critic
