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The Twice-born
When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.Known as the twice-born - first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation - the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.The Twice-born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterised by the music of Aatish Taseer's prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.
275 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 26, 2018
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About the author
Aatish Taseer
11 books164 followersAatish Taseer has worked as a reporter for Time Magazine and has written for the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, Prospect, TAR Magazine and Esquire. He is the author of Stranger to History: a Son's Journey through Islamic Lands (2009) and a highly acclaimed translation Manto: Selected Stories (2008). His novel, The Temple-Goers (2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa First Novel Award. A second novel, Noon, is now available published by Picador (UK) and Faber & Faber (USA). His work has been translated into over ten languages. He lives between London and Delhi.
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September 16, 2019Taseer writes gorgeous, minutely detailed prose which makes this a very readable book, but the project has zero substance - he is out of his depth in this one, trying to find the 'soul of India' through learning to read Sanskrit and talking to 'referred' authorities about Sanskrit-Brahmin-Hindu-culture amidst a Rising Modi. A battle in his mind (and he thinks, in India) that rages between Hindu nationalism (translation: proud of one's 'pure heritage' that existed before any invasion, jeans or smartphones) and that of 'revenge and revival' (translation: beating the crap out of minorities). The authorities he picks for this search are 'spiritual, linguistic, intellectual leaders' of Hindu nationalism (translation: fundamentalist, racist and possibly militant Brahmins). They live in a glib bubble of never-having-worked/built-a-day-in-their-life suffering from perennial victimhood which is the source of their power and infamy, while also being disrespectful of country's magnanimous history, geographical reality and bipolar potential of all that India was and is and will be. They all sound like a combo of Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami Prof. Khurshid Ahmed sb., Hafiz Saeed and Hamza Ali Abbasi (jingoistic dim bulbs glorifying solitary religio-political pursuits, superiority of some mystifying 'grand design thought' that they believe only occurs to their creed or caste or religion, and persecution complex while lapping up attention from controversial remarks, justifying violence). It's a label and a crude and one-dimensional one at that (apart from being a mouthful), but the bottomline is: what have these guys created or built in the world? (seriously, what have Tripathi, Mukhopadhyay and Shivam built except for hot air balloons?) What do they have to show for all the mind-numbing arguments about superior heritage? The guys in Taseer's book have anointed positions not because they were talented or deserving, but because they were born in a certain race, religion, city, political climate and made moolah, prestige and honor from it. The only reason why they were chosen to be interviewed is because they are self-serving, divisive and angry old/young (Brah)men. Do they matter? Only to those who want to fuel cars on butter, or ride a donkey to work, since car was not created by Hindu mythology. (disclaimer: I love vegetarian, organic, home-grown stuff but that does not make me a terrorist). Their nostalgia over the great India and great Indian genius before "Huns, Shakas, Jews, Parsis, Muslims and British" came, reminded me of the myopic inferiority complex and humiliation some Muslims suffer when thinking of the Ottoman Empire and its Fall! Their saffron lungis and scarves reminded me of Tablighi Jamaat-followers' white headgear, loose shirt with large-sleeves and pajama-above-ankle attire gaining middle-class ground in Pakistan: symbolic piety hiding intolerant, rigid, unsmiling expression of might-is-right mentality.
There's a lot of biography in this - the childhoods of the referred authorities are given - all leading to the title of the book (the catchy "Twice-Born"), meaning the interviewees were 'reborn' by going back to the true Indian roots of thousands of years ago. But what does it really mean? These guys are influential hypocrites given a platform by Taseer. It's all talk, soundbite, and then Taseer's reaction on the soundbite, his theories about the soundbite, trying to find some mystical reason for the soundbite and his aversion to the environment of the interviewees, creating another soundbite. It's soul-souffle', instragammable (oh, the shots of Benares, Domhai festival and Shivam!) and tweetable ("India does not have freedom of thought because of West's monetary system and multinational companies") and guaranteed international talk show circuit outrage (a good looking author full of 'responsible shaming,' watched by millennials who have the attention-span and insight of a 2-year old).
I also did not like the 'Alice in Wonderland' feel of the project: Taseer goes around towns, rivers, offices, houses without research or any idea of the people, place, culture. It felt like one big giant reel of U.S. Admiral James Stockdale during vice presidential debate in 1992: 'Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?' What is relatable is the feeling that people who get educated in private or non-government schools are less patriotic, less religious-minded and given more respect than the government-schooled, lower economic class, who are brimming with inner-city culture and sense of brotherhood/ community, both representing the divide between haves and have-nots ("To be modern is to renounce India"; "the conflict is not between tradition and modernity, it is between modernity and spirituality."), but most of these interviewees were born rich or in 'elitist / religious-hawk' neighborhoods and have always had special class-status through religion. What have they missed out on? So even that argument is lost in the noise of 214 pages. Nevertheless, a guy should do research before going to Benares (or anywhere else). The book is post-Trump narrative non-fiction (translation: wing it).
Also, for all the outrage, shame and whining that Taseer displays over injustice of class system while hanging around Hindu religious fanatics, makes me wonder whether it occurred to him to go wash a public toilet, or work as a vendor or pick up garbage from street or be a farmer for a little while, to cut the distance he feels that exists between the ones born of superior class and the ones considered untouchable! It's very dandy to be a watcher of wrongs, instead of being a fixer. Does he expect a fundamentalist Brahmin to change his ways or is he searching for enlightenment through them? He's looking at the wrong place. It's very easy to write a book about some ill-mannered woman in an Italian restaurant scolding a waiter - a scene which can and does occur all over the world but which Taseer blames on Modi's India! His outrage is elitist in itself, borne out of airy fairy laments in swanky joints.
His view of India comes across as that of an expat's, not a citizen's.
Maybe the problem lies with me - I just don't 'get' it (a very cool sentence in the book somewhere is "Colonization of India by Indians themselves" - a statement which is true for every country on planet earth where multiple systems of economy and education and privilege exist, not just a capitalistic one). (I am not even going to go into the whole culture vs. civilization dribble that occurs at the end of the book......oh what the hell: "In Thomas Mann's view, Germany stood for culture, France for civilization. Culture is horror, Civilization is Logic. Bharat is culture. India is civilization." - if you agree with such philosophical mumbo jumbo, this book is for you).
Lo and behold! The synopsis Taseer lays out at the end: "I feared that India was in danger of making a catastrophic decision about her future. The country was at a special boiling point: the right quantity of uprooted semi-urbanized men; the right kind of populist strongman; the right level of ignorance and heightened expectations, resentment and anger; the right fantasies about the past - who knew what little achievement of nation building and democracy might not yet be sacrificed at the altar of a future too bright to behold?" (translation: Lane: 'Your mission should you choose to accept it, I wonder did you ever choose not to. The end you always feared is coming and the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions.' Cue: Friction by Imagine Dragons. Hunley: 'You had a terrible choice to make at Berlin, one life over millions, and now the world is at risk......') This book is paranoia, rage and fear that engulfs a clueless traveler.
Still, thanks to the publisher for the ARC. I liked reading it.
There's a lot of biography in this - the childhoods of the referred authorities are given - all leading to the title of the book (the catchy "Twice-Born"), meaning the interviewees were 'reborn' by going back to the true Indian roots of thousands of years ago. But what does it really mean? These guys are influential hypocrites given a platform by Taseer. It's all talk, soundbite, and then Taseer's reaction on the soundbite, his theories about the soundbite, trying to find some mystical reason for the soundbite and his aversion to the environment of the interviewees, creating another soundbite. It's soul-souffle', instragammable (oh, the shots of Benares, Domhai festival and Shivam!) and tweetable ("India does not have freedom of thought because of West's monetary system and multinational companies") and guaranteed international talk show circuit outrage (a good looking author full of 'responsible shaming,' watched by millennials who have the attention-span and insight of a 2-year old).
I also did not like the 'Alice in Wonderland' feel of the project: Taseer goes around towns, rivers, offices, houses without research or any idea of the people, place, culture. It felt like one big giant reel of U.S. Admiral James Stockdale during vice presidential debate in 1992: 'Who Am I? What Am I Doing Here?' What is relatable is the feeling that people who get educated in private or non-government schools are less patriotic, less religious-minded and given more respect than the government-schooled, lower economic class, who are brimming with inner-city culture and sense of brotherhood/ community, both representing the divide between haves and have-nots ("To be modern is to renounce India"; "the conflict is not between tradition and modernity, it is between modernity and spirituality."), but most of these interviewees were born rich or in 'elitist / religious-hawk' neighborhoods and have always had special class-status through religion. What have they missed out on? So even that argument is lost in the noise of 214 pages. Nevertheless, a guy should do research before going to Benares (or anywhere else). The book is post-Trump narrative non-fiction (translation: wing it).
Also, for all the outrage, shame and whining that Taseer displays over injustice of class system while hanging around Hindu religious fanatics, makes me wonder whether it occurred to him to go wash a public toilet, or work as a vendor or pick up garbage from street or be a farmer for a little while, to cut the distance he feels that exists between the ones born of superior class and the ones considered untouchable! It's very dandy to be a watcher of wrongs, instead of being a fixer. Does he expect a fundamentalist Brahmin to change his ways or is he searching for enlightenment through them? He's looking at the wrong place. It's very easy to write a book about some ill-mannered woman in an Italian restaurant scolding a waiter - a scene which can and does occur all over the world but which Taseer blames on Modi's India! His outrage is elitist in itself, borne out of airy fairy laments in swanky joints.
His view of India comes across as that of an expat's, not a citizen's.
Maybe the problem lies with me - I just don't 'get' it (a very cool sentence in the book somewhere is "Colonization of India by Indians themselves" - a statement which is true for every country on planet earth where multiple systems of economy and education and privilege exist, not just a capitalistic one). (I am not even going to go into the whole culture vs. civilization dribble that occurs at the end of the book......oh what the hell: "In Thomas Mann's view, Germany stood for culture, France for civilization. Culture is horror, Civilization is Logic. Bharat is culture. India is civilization." - if you agree with such philosophical mumbo jumbo, this book is for you).
Lo and behold! The synopsis Taseer lays out at the end: "I feared that India was in danger of making a catastrophic decision about her future. The country was at a special boiling point: the right quantity of uprooted semi-urbanized men; the right kind of populist strongman; the right level of ignorance and heightened expectations, resentment and anger; the right fantasies about the past - who knew what little achievement of nation building and democracy might not yet be sacrificed at the altar of a future too bright to behold?" (translation: Lane: 'Your mission should you choose to accept it, I wonder did you ever choose not to. The end you always feared is coming and the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions.' Cue: Friction by Imagine Dragons. Hunley: 'You had a terrible choice to make at Berlin, one life over millions, and now the world is at risk......') This book is paranoia, rage and fear that engulfs a clueless traveler.
Still, thanks to the publisher for the ARC. I liked reading it.
January 4, 2021
This is a familiar V.S. Naipaul-style travelogue that takes the reader to the religious heartlands of Hindu India and particularly Benares, the ancient city that for centuries has been a monument to death and gateway out of worldly existence. The communication revolution has meant that even the remotest parts of India today have been penetrated by the modern world. As in countless other places this has forced a painful confrontation between reflexive tradition and a modernity that repudiates it. Faced with this trial, many Indians have reversed Nehru's acclamation of India's palimpsest history by trying to scrape the palimpsest down to the bottom layer, reclaiming what they seen as a pure and authentic Hindu identity to grasp onto amid the uncertainty and threat of the present. Like Islamic extremism, this return to the past is itself wholly modern. It brings along with it a bevy of decidedly untraditional behaviors, including the frequent resort to violence that authentic tradition held to be legally prohibited.
Tradition itself can only be perceived and described objectively by someone who has been pressed out of it to some extent. Taseer is in his own description a heavily Westernized Indian, for whom traveling between Delhi and Benares is almost like time traveling across centuries. "The loss of the idea of home had become a political force in our time," he writes in one poignant section. This is a universal theme not just in the postcolonial world, but even in the West, where many are struggling in vain to return to a nostalgic past. In India the break with the past has meant the gradual loss of a spiritualized sense of sense. The land of India, or Bharat, was itself holy in Hinduism. As the lights of the electronic devices in every village get brighter (though not brightly enough to deliver enlightenment) they blind the third eye whose spiritual opening was at the core of the traditional culture. If nothing else, perhaps it is comforting to people all over the world, from very different walks of life, to know that they are going through the same process of flux and disenchantment.
This book is well written and has some noteworthy passages. The underlying theme carries on the work of Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra.
Tradition itself can only be perceived and described objectively by someone who has been pressed out of it to some extent. Taseer is in his own description a heavily Westernized Indian, for whom traveling between Delhi and Benares is almost like time traveling across centuries. "The loss of the idea of home had become a political force in our time," he writes in one poignant section. This is a universal theme not just in the postcolonial world, but even in the West, where many are struggling in vain to return to a nostalgic past. In India the break with the past has meant the gradual loss of a spiritualized sense of sense. The land of India, or Bharat, was itself holy in Hinduism. As the lights of the electronic devices in every village get brighter (though not brightly enough to deliver enlightenment) they blind the third eye whose spiritual opening was at the core of the traditional culture. If nothing else, perhaps it is comforting to people all over the world, from very different walks of life, to know that they are going through the same process of flux and disenchantment.
This book is well written and has some noteworthy passages. The underlying theme carries on the work of Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra.
January 10, 2019
With the cultural heritage of three millennia at its back and which forms an unbroken thread to the present and possibly to the future too, India was felt to be intriguing to most visitors. Here, I definitely do not mean a person’s origin to classify him or her as a visitor. Many Indians have lost the ability to enjoy the captivating notes made by the strings of culture upon encountering a cultural experience from the bottomless reservoir in which it is welled up. Contempt is also an emotion exhibited by a few foreigners and natives who see in it nothing but superstition, casteism, and calcification of morals. Jawaharlal Nehru likened it to an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie has been inscribed and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. Traditionally, the Brahmins have been the custodians of India’s ancient knowledge and this book is an effort to gauge the amount by which they have changed in answer to the relentless onslaught of modernity on the time-honoured customs and traditions of Hinduism. Brahmins are thought to have two lives – one begins on their natural birth and the other with the rites of initiation into the order of priesthood. Hence they are called dvi-ja, the twice-born. The title is thus exceedingly suited to a book that studies the spiritual horizons of Varanasi’s Brahmins. Aatish Taseer is a writer-journalist born out of the union of an Indian journalist with a businessman-politician from Pakistan. This mixed parentage enables him to claim the legacy of both the Indian and Islamic civilizations.
Taseer maintains that India’s intellectual past plays no role in engendering its present and future. Both the old and the new thrive side by side in the country. An educated, English-speaking, westernized community is living with an ignorant, superstitious and doctrinally observant community steeped in tradition. The former is visible in cities such as Delhi and the latter more so in lesser towns like Varanasi (Kashi) and rural India. The two cities are only 800 km apart, but the real distance, the sense of travelling across centuries, is not physical. In place of the jet-setting fashion-lovers of Delhi, you see Sanskrit scholars – young and old – discussing about arcane concepts of linguistics in many of the smaller towns of the Indian heartland. This forms the basic dichotomy between India and Bharat existing in the minds of its people. The divide runs from just one or two centuries ago. India faced many societies coming in through the ages. Huns, Sakas, Parsis, Jews and Muslims arrived in waves of invasion, migration and cycles of trade. They assimilated into the culture of the country and its continuity remained the same. But with the advent of the English, the ‘thought’ content became powerful and its soft power enthralled the people who followed it. The ugliness of modern India, standing alongside the beauty of its past is enough to make one believe in the intangible India of mind and spirit.
The book does not explain why it chose Brahmins as the point of study in so many words, but drops hints on the motive. Brahmins constitute the intellectual superstructure that existed everywhere in India. Among the numerous castes divided into many classes, they stood out as the beacons of religious learning. As a percentage of the total population they are very small, but represent the underlying unity of Indian thought and spiritual life. This is especially so as every element of how you live, down to what and with whom you eat, is informed by the imperative of caste (p.86). What Taseer argues is that Brahmins constitute an aristocracy of the mind. Written with western readers in mind, this book presents many half-truths under the guise of first-hand experience. The source of a Brahmin’s prestige in society is claimed to be his autonomy though he lacks financial and physical strength. In Bengal, a family that accepted a donation or a gift is considered to be lower in rank. This observation is not in sync with actual facts. As a priest, he is bound to accept some honorarium from the clients.
If the author is to be believed, caste oppression is still rampant in India, though his examples fail to prove his point. Indian reforms on religion were not organic. Taseer avers that it took root in Bengal only due to the assimilation of western ideas and those apologists of Hinduism such as Tagore and Swami Vivekanand internalized a foreign criticism of their culture and pretended that it was their own. However, he concedes that Hinduism, with its great pluralism and none of the doctrinal strictness of the monotheistic faiths could never serve the needs of politics as Islam did in Pakistan and other countries (p.133). This is one of the reasons why democracy is well entrenched in the country. The book makes some startling remarks on the similarities of religious symbolism arching over different faiths. Taseer mentions that the linga (idol) of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in all its simplicity, reminded him of a rock half a world away in Mecca which exuded similar austere power (p.194). I don’t know how many pious Muslims would give their assent to this wild comparison!
Taseer takes great pains to view India as a ‘pure’ westerner. Whenever he visits a shop or a home, the readers are presented with a sickening description of the filth in the clogged drains, peeling plaster on the wall and the squalor of the streets in the usual formulaic pattern. Typical Indian conditions rendered by such authors include potholed roads too, but somehow our author seems to have missed it! However varied are his sources, the author does not come up with even a single soul who is progressive among his Indian subjects of observation. This is in spite of the fact that the ultraconservative priests were fully prepared to permit the author who is not of their religion to enter sacred premises, indulge him with earnest deliberations of their philosophy and to share food with him in their own homes.
A notable feature of the narrative is the unwarranted elaboration of the author’s personal preferences and experiences that are not at all relevant to the topic. One of them is his uneasy relationship with his Pakistani father. Taseer tells us about the lukewarm welcome he received at his father’s residence in his earlier book ‘Stranger to History – A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands’ reviewed here. This is quite understandable as his father who was already married only had a casual affair with his journalist mother who had gone to interview him at that time. Now, in this book he recounts the terrible loss he felt when his father was assassinated by his own bodyguard in Pakistan. Taseer also makes the readers aware about his unnatural gender preference for a spouse. This being a private and personal matter, there was no need to trumpet it from the rooftop. The author’s remarks also smacks of obvious political opinion cleverly disguised as a liberal’s outrage at the so-called atmosphere of intolerance in the country after Narendra Modi came to power. His vain criticism falls to the level of the absurd when he mocks even the Swachh Bharat initiative that promises to rid the villages of India of the evil of open defecation which the author was forced to perform at a friend’s home in rural Madhya Pradesh.
There is no original content in the book and it is not recommended.
Taseer maintains that India’s intellectual past plays no role in engendering its present and future. Both the old and the new thrive side by side in the country. An educated, English-speaking, westernized community is living with an ignorant, superstitious and doctrinally observant community steeped in tradition. The former is visible in cities such as Delhi and the latter more so in lesser towns like Varanasi (Kashi) and rural India. The two cities are only 800 km apart, but the real distance, the sense of travelling across centuries, is not physical. In place of the jet-setting fashion-lovers of Delhi, you see Sanskrit scholars – young and old – discussing about arcane concepts of linguistics in many of the smaller towns of the Indian heartland. This forms the basic dichotomy between India and Bharat existing in the minds of its people. The divide runs from just one or two centuries ago. India faced many societies coming in through the ages. Huns, Sakas, Parsis, Jews and Muslims arrived in waves of invasion, migration and cycles of trade. They assimilated into the culture of the country and its continuity remained the same. But with the advent of the English, the ‘thought’ content became powerful and its soft power enthralled the people who followed it. The ugliness of modern India, standing alongside the beauty of its past is enough to make one believe in the intangible India of mind and spirit.
The book does not explain why it chose Brahmins as the point of study in so many words, but drops hints on the motive. Brahmins constitute the intellectual superstructure that existed everywhere in India. Among the numerous castes divided into many classes, they stood out as the beacons of religious learning. As a percentage of the total population they are very small, but represent the underlying unity of Indian thought and spiritual life. This is especially so as every element of how you live, down to what and with whom you eat, is informed by the imperative of caste (p.86). What Taseer argues is that Brahmins constitute an aristocracy of the mind. Written with western readers in mind, this book presents many half-truths under the guise of first-hand experience. The source of a Brahmin’s prestige in society is claimed to be his autonomy though he lacks financial and physical strength. In Bengal, a family that accepted a donation or a gift is considered to be lower in rank. This observation is not in sync with actual facts. As a priest, he is bound to accept some honorarium from the clients.
If the author is to be believed, caste oppression is still rampant in India, though his examples fail to prove his point. Indian reforms on religion were not organic. Taseer avers that it took root in Bengal only due to the assimilation of western ideas and those apologists of Hinduism such as Tagore and Swami Vivekanand internalized a foreign criticism of their culture and pretended that it was their own. However, he concedes that Hinduism, with its great pluralism and none of the doctrinal strictness of the monotheistic faiths could never serve the needs of politics as Islam did in Pakistan and other countries (p.133). This is one of the reasons why democracy is well entrenched in the country. The book makes some startling remarks on the similarities of religious symbolism arching over different faiths. Taseer mentions that the linga (idol) of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in all its simplicity, reminded him of a rock half a world away in Mecca which exuded similar austere power (p.194). I don’t know how many pious Muslims would give their assent to this wild comparison!
Taseer takes great pains to view India as a ‘pure’ westerner. Whenever he visits a shop or a home, the readers are presented with a sickening description of the filth in the clogged drains, peeling plaster on the wall and the squalor of the streets in the usual formulaic pattern. Typical Indian conditions rendered by such authors include potholed roads too, but somehow our author seems to have missed it! However varied are his sources, the author does not come up with even a single soul who is progressive among his Indian subjects of observation. This is in spite of the fact that the ultraconservative priests were fully prepared to permit the author who is not of their religion to enter sacred premises, indulge him with earnest deliberations of their philosophy and to share food with him in their own homes.
A notable feature of the narrative is the unwarranted elaboration of the author’s personal preferences and experiences that are not at all relevant to the topic. One of them is his uneasy relationship with his Pakistani father. Taseer tells us about the lukewarm welcome he received at his father’s residence in his earlier book ‘Stranger to History – A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands’ reviewed here. This is quite understandable as his father who was already married only had a casual affair with his journalist mother who had gone to interview him at that time. Now, in this book he recounts the terrible loss he felt when his father was assassinated by his own bodyguard in Pakistan. Taseer also makes the readers aware about his unnatural gender preference for a spouse. This being a private and personal matter, there was no need to trumpet it from the rooftop. The author’s remarks also smacks of obvious political opinion cleverly disguised as a liberal’s outrage at the so-called atmosphere of intolerance in the country after Narendra Modi came to power. His vain criticism falls to the level of the absurd when he mocks even the Swachh Bharat initiative that promises to rid the villages of India of the evil of open defecation which the author was forced to perform at a friend’s home in rural Madhya Pradesh.
There is no original content in the book and it is not recommended.
March 23, 2019
It is a good book of beautiful prose but lacks depth of what is true Hinduism. It barely touches the surface of a faith / religion that is as old as mankind. Even Benaras -the holy city - was threadbare in this book.
Passable.
Passable.
July 23, 2021
I really enjoyed this book. Despite all elements that are contrarian - an outsider talking about Hinduism/rise of Hindutva, romanticization of poverty, etc. - I still liked the anecdotal style of the book, with several facts and figures from history which made it a fun read.
June 27, 2021
Aatish Taseer is a beautiful prose writer, and his description of India's people, landscape, history, religion is very rich and poetic. The book kept me engaged because it was interesting to see how a South Asian of mixed heritage (Indian mother, Pakistani father) was trying to come to terms with his own Indian identity through exploring Sanskrit and the North Indian Brahmin society. He was also doing this in the era of post-Modi, the rise of the BJP, Hindu nationalism, and a Hindu revival/renaissance and sadly the still stratified caste hierarchy in India. He wrote about a wide variety of scenarios with caste politics and it's strict hierarch that is well and alive, Brahmins and sites I understood as a Hindu - the Sanskrit, the Brahmin way of life, rituals, the rules, traditions, caste hierarchy, Kashi and it's spiritual significance to Hindus, and even the pain of seeing ancient Hindu sites destroyed by Muslim rulers. That is where it ended for me.
There are a few things to take note if you are not as well versed and knowledgeable about the current state of Hinduism in India and abroad. Because some of what Mr. Taseer is writing about was not entirely accurate and could be somewhat misleading. Hinduism is undergoing a revival and renaissance both in India and abroad. I see nothing wrong with that. Hindus were under foreign rule for 1000 years where ancient temples, great centers of learning and the like were destroyed. Historical trauma is there. What is wrong and why should Hindus be made to feel guilty for wanting to revive their ancient traditions, civilization and way of life? However, this should not be equated with all of us being Hindu right wing nationalists or Hinduism's revivalism with right wing methods, compromising secularim and anti-Muslim sentiment. Majority of Hindus (even those passionate about Hinduism's revival like myself) have no association with BJP, RSS or right wing Hindu nationalism.
Lastly, based on Taseer's account of Brahmin society in North India and Hindu culture in rural UP one would think Hinduism is decaying! I wish he had traveled through the Brahmin communities in South India and the spiritual landscape of South India. Down here Hinduism is very much kept alive through gurukul's, Vedic patashala's where young Brahmin boys are kept from a young age to master the Vedas and the like, vibrant temple towns, ashrams and great scholars of Vedanta and Sanskrit. One must note that North India suffered massive invasions and destruction over centuries and the South India was largely protected and left more intact.
The book has it's limitations, but overall well written!
There are a few things to take note if you are not as well versed and knowledgeable about the current state of Hinduism in India and abroad. Because some of what Mr. Taseer is writing about was not entirely accurate and could be somewhat misleading. Hinduism is undergoing a revival and renaissance both in India and abroad. I see nothing wrong with that. Hindus were under foreign rule for 1000 years where ancient temples, great centers of learning and the like were destroyed. Historical trauma is there. What is wrong and why should Hindus be made to feel guilty for wanting to revive their ancient traditions, civilization and way of life? However, this should not be equated with all of us being Hindu right wing nationalists or Hinduism's revivalism with right wing methods, compromising secularim and anti-Muslim sentiment. Majority of Hindus (even those passionate about Hinduism's revival like myself) have no association with BJP, RSS or right wing Hindu nationalism.
Lastly, based on Taseer's account of Brahmin society in North India and Hindu culture in rural UP one would think Hinduism is decaying! I wish he had traveled through the Brahmin communities in South India and the spiritual landscape of South India. Down here Hinduism is very much kept alive through gurukul's, Vedic patashala's where young Brahmin boys are kept from a young age to master the Vedas and the like, vibrant temple towns, ashrams and great scholars of Vedanta and Sanskrit. One must note that North India suffered massive invasions and destruction over centuries and the South India was largely protected and left more intact.
The book has it's limitations, but overall well written!
November 21, 2018
Aatish Taseer's take on what it means to be a Brahmin in modern India is a lyrically written eminently readable study. Taseer approach brings him in contact with subjects from a variety of backgrounds and age groups, the only commonality being their cast. Taseer is clearly an outsider looking in and attempting to understand the trials and tribulations of Brahminism and attempting heroically to connect with them, trying to understand their beliefs and motivations in keeping alive an old way of being. Ultimately Taseer's admission of his inability to truly connect with his subjects given the vast chasm between their backgrounds and his own upbringing is brutally honest and full of pathos.
But this is also ultimately where the book fails. Taseer brings in a relentlessly western lens to his very Indian subject, even in this he could have taken a less trodden approach, but he doesn't. The critique is limited to a ritualistic experience of the Hindu religion, with its festivals, caste systems and archaic beliefs. As a result he chooses subjects that are limited by the arc of this behavior pattern, how much ever learned they may seem to be. Yet, in its essence, Hinduism is the first and the most uniquely monotheistic religion in the world, Advaita Vedanta being the unsurpassed epitome of spiritual philosophy. There is also no doubt that there are a large number of Hindus, indeed Brahmins who have gone beyond the ritualistic shell of the religion and practice it in its true essence. Taseer could have easily gained access to many such people if he was willing set aside his preconceived lenses.
While there is no denying that rituals and belief, some of them abhorrent, are followed blindly and without question by the masses, a serious study of the religion requires one to go beyond, an effort sadly lacking in this book.
But this is also ultimately where the book fails. Taseer brings in a relentlessly western lens to his very Indian subject, even in this he could have taken a less trodden approach, but he doesn't. The critique is limited to a ritualistic experience of the Hindu religion, with its festivals, caste systems and archaic beliefs. As a result he chooses subjects that are limited by the arc of this behavior pattern, how much ever learned they may seem to be. Yet, in its essence, Hinduism is the first and the most uniquely monotheistic religion in the world, Advaita Vedanta being the unsurpassed epitome of spiritual philosophy. There is also no doubt that there are a large number of Hindus, indeed Brahmins who have gone beyond the ritualistic shell of the religion and practice it in its true essence. Taseer could have easily gained access to many such people if he was willing set aside his preconceived lenses.
While there is no denying that rituals and belief, some of them abhorrent, are followed blindly and without question by the masses, a serious study of the religion requires one to go beyond, an effort sadly lacking in this book.
February 3, 2021
"This is the only country in the world where one person can look at another and say, 'Oh, he looks like a servant.'"
Aatish Taseer is a gifted author - observant and empathetic. He is gifted but unfortunately not as recognised or revered. This may be perhaps because of his political leanings which are not pro-Congress (or pro-Left). And while he is averse to Hindu fundamentalism, unlike many other "liberals" he is not an apologist for the faults of Islam or his co-religionists.
This book looks on the malaise of caste by studying Brahmins in Kashi. On the positive side, there are a no. of character sketches and poignant observations. And he really makes you cringe sometimes with his honest description of effect of caste life in Uttar Pradesh , Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
However my rating is 3/5 due to a couple of reasons :-
a) Naipaul's books on India were superior and provided a much more comprehensive picture of India.
b) Pratap Bhanu Mehta's superb The Burden of Democracy has analysed the effects of caste on Indian society much better. Infact caste is a ladder in which each caste on the upper rung looks down on those below. This is not limited to Brahmins.
Nevertheless a good read and a reminder that a lot needs to be done on this front. Also, please do look up Taseer's The Way Things Were which was fantastic historical fiction.
Aatish Taseer is a gifted author - observant and empathetic. He is gifted but unfortunately not as recognised or revered. This may be perhaps because of his political leanings which are not pro-Congress (or pro-Left). And while he is averse to Hindu fundamentalism, unlike many other "liberals" he is not an apologist for the faults of Islam or his co-religionists.
This book looks on the malaise of caste by studying Brahmins in Kashi. On the positive side, there are a no. of character sketches and poignant observations. And he really makes you cringe sometimes with his honest description of effect of caste life in Uttar Pradesh , Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.
However my rating is 3/5 due to a couple of reasons :-
a) Naipaul's books on India were superior and provided a much more comprehensive picture of India.
b) Pratap Bhanu Mehta's superb The Burden of Democracy has analysed the effects of caste on Indian society much better. Infact caste is a ladder in which each caste on the upper rung looks down on those below. This is not limited to Brahmins.
Nevertheless a good read and a reminder that a lot needs to be done on this front. Also, please do look up Taseer's The Way Things Were which was fantastic historical fiction.
May 21, 2019
not really sure why I finished it.
scattered history and modern social commentary, but not very coherent.
ultimately, it seemed a self indulgence on the author's part.
scattered history and modern social commentary, but not very coherent.
ultimately, it seemed a self indulgence on the author's part.
May 16, 2020
I don’t know what to make of this, Taseer can definitely write well, and is clever, so I’d like to read something else of his to see.
He touches on matters that are too broad for such a slim volume, and it’s frustrating, when it is primarily his own struggle with his identity that works- but then he refers to issues within India and it just dead ends. Because it’s a personal exploration it’s a narrow lens, and that is what I found frustrating, that is perhaps unfair of me.
I wonder where his political allegiance really lies... I’m going to do the google and see if I can find out
He touches on matters that are too broad for such a slim volume, and it’s frustrating, when it is primarily his own struggle with his identity that works- but then he refers to issues within India and it just dead ends. Because it’s a personal exploration it’s a narrow lens, and that is what I found frustrating, that is perhaps unfair of me.
I wonder where his political allegiance really lies... I’m going to do the google and see if I can find out
January 21, 2019
The underlying tension between 'Bharat' and 'India' is on your face in Varanasi. It manifests itself not only in the twice-born but every person born in a Hindu family. The caste system needs rationality even for its irrational existence and Brahmins still are the torchbearers although not the only ones in the caste hierarchy. The conflict between traditional and modern work view is more vociferous among Brahmins than in any other caste because of the obvious social advantage. The most learned of the Brahmins are either confined to their narrow world view to defend their heritage, and is remarkable to see their integrity to the notion, or are in denial to accept the slow but steady decay of the knowledge structure that could have benefited immensely had their been possibilities of non-Brahmin world view. Being born in Brahmin family and from Varanasi, I could not agree more with Aatish's sensitivity and understanding of the Dvij.
March 14, 2019
Remarkably insightful
I have been visiting India for 50 years, lived there for 5 and have a university education in
comparative religion. Even so, this book had me riveted and I finished it in a single go. What insight and masterful writing! I think the author had the advantage of being a bit outside the culture but accepted because of birth and language. He makes good use of that. I am certainly going to read more of his work. What an interesting mind!
I have been visiting India for 50 years, lived there for 5 and have a university education in
comparative religion. Even so, this book had me riveted and I finished it in a single go. What insight and masterful writing! I think the author had the advantage of being a bit outside the culture but accepted because of birth and language. He makes good use of that. I am certainly going to read more of his work. What an interesting mind!
April 18, 2019
I was born in Tamil Nadu and never spoke any Hindi. I am part of the English speaking, westernized caste of people he talks about and is part of. Banares, Sanskrit and Hinduism as he speaks has never been part of my heritage. This book has helped me see this and feel I’m not alone in trying not to be in Limbo between some arbitrary imaginary roots and “western” civilization.
May 11, 2019
Does not relate to the truth. Very fictional and biased writer. He needs to come out of his ivory tower before writing about a culture.
May 26, 2019
Absolutely brilliant narrative by taseer brining out the struggles of old Bharat and new india.
June 23, 2019
Aatish Taseer’s writing is so beautiful that you feel guilty to turn the page. His words should be read and read again.
July 2, 2021
Compared to V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, Aatish Taseer's travelogue of India is far less critical, far less acerbic—and somehow far more irritating.
His gutlessness, his obsequiousness, his hemichordate spinelessness and putty-like irenicism annoyed me! Where Naipaul's 1964 wasp-and-acid essay on India was presented with cunning persiflage, logical analysis and a refreshing parrhesia; Aatish Taseer's interviews with most of his Brahminical characters were by contrast insipidly anodyne, to the extent that they might as well have been monologues when it came to the sermonic lack of critical faculty.
But how can one blame the Brahmins for their lop-sided rants—when it was the author's lack of opposition which goaded them into free pontification, having found their pulpit in a placid and ahimsic audience? Naipaul's gift was his ability to see all the stupidity of India (which is often ignored and passed over by placatory and guilt-ridden foreigners; or acclimated and insecure natives) and criticise his subject while maintaining a continuous force of mercy and love, a narrative sunbeam which haloes India, despite its filth, its self-absorption, its superstitiousness and fractiousness and transparent obscurantism—in an impersonal and flattering light.
Naipaul excelled critically not simply because of his non-collaboration with gobar but because of his mercy, always retaining a magical distance from his subject with a cosmological constant of joy. His technique reminds of Valmiki's tale: Rama had to defeat Bali, who was blessed the ability to drain half his opponent's strength in battle—rendering him nigh invincible against any vis-a-vis foe. To solve this conundrum Rama shot him in the back; and his moral cowardice was drained into Bali, paradoxically endowing Rama with moral superiority (alright, that's my interpretation.)
Naipaul played the role of Bali: his unrelentingly honest opprobrium of India exposed himself to the barbs of his own endearing irascibility, submerging both critic and subject into the same miasma of ignominy. Naipaul's nastiness was functional, revealing, insightful, funny—and delightfully equal.
By contrast, Mr. Taseer played the role of Bali's victim and allowed his interviewees to pile bullshit on us until we could barely budge underneath; whereupon Taseer would give us a minor epitaph of whispered soliloquy to reveal, psst, that he disagreed. Disagree to their face, then! Was my constant protestation. Where Naipaul made us understand India by prodding her relentlessly, and love her anyway for all her flaws which he illumes with relish and humour—Mr. Taseer simply passes his lens over her; her flaws are included as a mere accident of panorama, like a documentary of African savages in mutual slaughter—ultimately leaving us with nothing but a sense of impotent distaste for both cameraman and subject.
Significantly, Mr. Taseer in his interviews presented no case at all to defend the West from the charges levelled against its lack of spirituality(self-absorption) and inner peace(mental vacuity)—which we must protest the West does indeed possess in empty spadefuls—or lack of concern about the true nature of the cosmos, which we must concede is indeed the domain of Brahminical investigation—if we accept their premise that reality is an illusion. The passionate explorations of scientific inquiry, with the wide-eyed wanderlust for the mysterious universe into which we have found ourselves awakened—is then nothing compared to a bunch of saffron-robed sages sitting around on yoga mats, vibrating with prehensions of the infinite.
But the stridency of the Brahmins was hardly their fault when the author, who as a cultural amphibian, never sought to mediate their misunderstandings. To better describe my frustration, imagine an inversion into the following scenario: Mr. Brahmin interviews a group of Native Americans who decry the other India for their rampant avarice and materialism—citing for evidence the worship of Lakshmi Devi (the Hindu goddess of Wealth) and the ceremony once a year where the rupee is adulated with mantras—while Mr. Brahmin sits dumbly, unprotestingly, wobbling his head before this hot tirade of denunciations like a dashboard puppy. Then, in a spurt of defiance evinced much later and much further away Mr. Brahmin gives short shrift to the reader, in the burst appendix of afterthought—that he in fact disagreed with Mr. Kokomo's assertion that all Hindus partook of urine of the cow. This strange view, after all, was unfairly impressed upon Mr. Kokomo by the Executive Minister of Health of India and his party members who continue to recommend—with increasing shrillness—the consumption of gaumutra!
It is not merely the author's reticence which damns both the Brahmins in our view and the West in their view, but also his lack of inquiry. One does not get a solid sense of the foundation of their religious beliefs, which seemed entirely lacking in sophistication; and I wonder if this was truly the case or simply a symptom of Mr. Taseer, who had failed to press interesting questions. The author mentions Tagore's 1910 Gora: a dull little novel whose critique of caste was already three decades dépassé in post-renaissance Bengal—and I question to what extent such strict casteist beliefs hold true today in Uttar Pradesh—has 'intellectual' casteism really recrudesced, a century after Ambedkar burned the Manusmriti? India's woes continue to be—if I may suggest—not the result of a regressive and hidebound Brahminical caste, nor—as some may suggest—the lack of random Brown Sahibs picking up trash like performative dung beetles on a Sisyphean Everest, a symbolic and pointless act so typical of India—in fact, India's woes are the result of an attitude problem. Her history is an archive of pain, and like a sullen teenager remembering her torments at the hands of a bully; rather than better herself seeks to be different from the bully; seeks pointless symbolic acts like name-changes and resurrecting ancient 'sciences'; seeks to be goth not gora; rejecting everything associated with him and thereby ironically making him the nucleus of her identity. The ex-bully is moving forwards, and so India moves the other way—shuffling backwards.
The insularity of 'spiritualism' is exemplified by the Brahmin Tripathi, who claims with sagacious sad eyes, that “I don’t think there was anyone who understood the West like Gandhi. And he understood his own culture too.” Tripathi reveals the Brahmins' ignorance of both the West and India in his ignorance of Gandhi, who in The Story of My Experiments with Truth records:
I did not feel at all sea-sick… I was innocent of the use of knives and forks… I therefore never took meals at table but always had them in my cabin… We entered the Bay of Biscay, but I did not begin to feel the need either of meat or liquor… However, we reached Southampton, as far as I remember, on a Saturday. On the boat I had worn a black suit, the white flannel one, which my friends had got me, having been kept especially for wearing when I landed. I had thought that white clothes would suit me better when I stepped ashore, and therefore I did so in white flannels. Those were the last days of September, and I found I was the only person wearing such clothes.
Naipaul observes:
“That is the voyage: an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten, with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer. The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete. Southampton is lost in that embarrassment (and rage) about the white flannels. The name of the port is mentioned once, and that is all, as though the name is description enough. That it was late September was important only because it was the wrong time of the year for white flannels; it is not a note about the weather. Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike the heat and monsoon of Gujarat and Bombay; and the next date he is precise about is the date of his departure.
No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance. The London of 1890, capital of the world—which must have been overwhelming to a young man from a small Indian town—has to be inferred from Gandhi’s continuing internal disturbances, his embarrassments, his religious self-searchings, his attempts at dressing correctly and learning English manners, and, above all, his difficulties and occasional satisfactions about food...”
And Gandhi, like the Brahmins, was as blind to India as he was to the West: he never perceives India except in flashes of disturbed reactions; he never analyses what he does perceive to draw complex conclusions—his mind is best described as a slum whose size is shrunk by spiritual shortcuts. As a result, the Mahatma's ignorance of Hinduism, Indian history and reality was systematically absolute; and the Hind Swaraj was a work of insanity which might as well have been written by a Hindutva Gwyneth Paltrow on mescaline.
However, one thing the skeletal pied piper was not—as the typical dupe of post-colonial theory might leap to charge him of a lesser crime—was an inventive and shrewd hypocrite. The truth behind the celebrity anorexic's well-documented inconsistencies was more banal: he was simply stupid, and was one of the many unoriginal weirdo godmen at the time suckling at the availability cascade of cranky ideas (such as Raja Yoga, Tilak's Ganapati Puja, and the mystical developments of Sri Aurobindo who ventriloquised for Mirra Alfassa—a genuinely original thinker) and by Darwinian process fell into the leadership of an already massive revolutionary front, driven by religious unrest and the fiscal turmoil of Indian industrialists. In a sense, the dhoti-wrapped mummy was to Indian godmen what Harry Potter is to children's literature—mass movements abhor a vacuum, the figurehead falling into the prow of the ship was aleatory but inevitable.
Today the bagatelle has given us Baba Ramdev and Sadhguru, and at the prow—the Prime Minister Modi: who thinks there was stem cell technology in Vedic India, and that Rama flew in an aeroplane.
The other focus of the book was on some rather appalling caste-based beliefs—of which justifications reminded me of my own childhood when my mother, pointing at some drooling degenerate in a wheelchair, claimed that their condition was due to karmic accretion from a previous life. I know that the intellectual atmosphere in India has rapidly deteriorated and pseudoscience is crescendo (transmorgrifying into the recent Covid tsunami which has whelmed the nation—and prepare, I say—for a superior third wave) but I find it odd that Mr. Taseer had not at least sought out a Brahmin who doesn't believe in congenital caste—or at least tell us that he tried to, to whatever extent—and failed. I also do not understand the categorical selection of five very similar Brahmins to interview and follow around when practising Brahmins make up such a small percentage of the population. Certainly, twice-born (inaugurated Brahmins) is in the title, but a fleeting panorama from other castes or urban folk to whom caste is a fading concept, would have done much to dispel the insularity and made for a more balanced and—more importantly—a more interesting book. The inane modishness of Modi also cannot be discussed seriously, as the author attempts to do, without the suffrage of representatives from the majority populace who are not Brahmins.
As it is, the scope of the book is far too narrow, and far too repetitive as one fanatic's views are hardly distinguishable enough from the next's to require elaboration. Like a snow white corpse (called a 'burster' in forensics) floating down the Ganges, this book is at maximal bloat. When it comes to an evaluation of the voices of India, with insight, wit, and assize—a single page from Naipaul's Indian trilogy is worth ten in this book—if you haven't read that, do so. As to how to proceed afterwards, I recommend reading Twice-Born if you're interested in:
1) A contemporary account of events in India
2) With a focus on the Ganges
3) And detailed descriptions of Varanesi rites
4) And a muddled window into how upper-caste religious literalists think, act, think that they act.
Oh, and 5) a few diary excerpts from the unfortunately named Miss Boner, which were mind-numbingly insipid.
Otherwise, I'm afraid you should give this book a pass. I regrettably report that it's rather insignificant, in terms of elucidating either the highly polythetic diversity of Hinduistic beliefs, or the more recent fad of Sanatana and other narrower but deeper delves into Hindu monism. I am also unsure who the target audience of the book is supposed to be; as basic Hindu concepts are always explained—which suggests a foreign audience—and yet if that were the case then I do not feel nearly enough attention is drawn to the filth around the Ganges—which is dying from pollution, largely due to a religious conviction that Ganga Ma is so spiritually pure that her material deterioration is an illusion, that all manner of rubbish and manure can be cast into her and she would self-cleanse (the love of the symbol had detached from the meaning, and boomeranged back to strangle the meaning—obhaggavibhaggo vipatito seti—how often love kills the beloved when the beloved is idolised!) Indeed, there was a typically one-sided sermon by a Brahmin on how pious people entering a filthy temple barefoot would be protected from sepsis—a similar belief held about the Ganges which infects 140m people with dysentery killing 600k per annum, mostly children told to bathe in and drink its holy waters—which have coliform superbug levels a thousand times above the acceptable level for agriculture.
To a foreign reader who knows very little about India, the ailing Ganges is a glaring omission, and even to a native reader such cultural scotoma would have been silly. To neglect to mention the serious rubbish, human excrement, and industrial run-off sedimenting the Ganges—would make even less sense than if the author had kept shtum on peepal trees, black-faced langurs, and sandalwood paste—by the logic that an Indian would already be familiar with such things and observation superfluous. Either the author is being egregiously reticent, or he's genuinely inattentive. Indeed, actual problems are often sidelined in lieu of the author's foppish consternation over the aesthetic incongruity of modern technology with Indian architecture—the Samsung washing machine in Satna is fretted about in much the same serious manner as the plaintive complaint, a hundred years ago, that the democratisation of India was akin to the grafting of a sprig of oak over the teak, ironically, by the colonialist Lt. Colonel Howard-Bury. One wonders at the reverse racialism from Indians themselves, where Indians apparently do not deserve nice things because nice things are un-Indian.
Indeed, Mr. Taseer distinguishes between civilisation and culture—civilisation is defined by such tenets as quality of life, scientific objectivity, civic sensibility, stability and the respect for individual dignity—civilisation is Samsung washing machines—whereas culture is usually a confusion of ethical and aesthetic self-perpetuation—culture is Ravana with twenty-four different aeroplanes in his prehistoric airport of Ceylon, which when left unsupervised fly crashing into civilisation. Marxist Lysenkoism, Liberal denialism of racial I.Q., and the Indian insistence on Patanjali Ayurved over test-based medicine—are all examples of cultural impingement on civilisation and the empiricism which informs it. Indeed, the present investment into the research of panchagavya, frustrating many Indian doctors—mirrors the country's 1970s cultural obsession with 'intermediate technology', where enormous resources were lavished into upgrading bullock carts as indigenous alternatives to the foreign bicycle. Culture supersedes civilisation; Indianness supersedes usefulness.
Finally, the prose is acceptable, and is hyper-descriptive (useful if you're doing research) but lacks a distinctive style or personality. As it stands, Mr. Taseer's language was just skilled enough for me to get through without being bored.
In fact, I wouldn't have bothered to review this travelogue at all had I not noticed some other reviewers' appalling comments about Mr. Taseer's husband and father. While reading, I was starved for some sense of who Mr. Taseer was—beyond his vacuous and nattering internal turmoil as a Westernised Indian, the sort of anglophone soul-searching angoisse bemoaned by EVERY. SINGLE. ex-colonial writer which I'm by now rather sick of. Taseer kept the bits of biography so minimal (less than four percent of the travelogue) that he left me feeling slightly adrift, and what he did reveal was much-needed anchorage.
His father, to my unmitigated surprise, was Salman Taseer—the Pakistani governor of Punjab who was assassinated in 2011 for denouncing the country's blasphemy laws, with great moral courage—having been in full conscience of the risks. On the other wedding-banded hand, Taseer's American husband was mentioned in the book because he is an important part of his life, which I think for most people who are not meticulously plotting the accidental death of their spouse—is hardly a surprising inference. Both characters help define the author's identity, that of a half-Pakistani Indian who is Westernised, deracinated and drifting down the Ganges like a burster; and whose married life is only possible in the West. The father's assassination adds to the theme of death in the subtitle, whereas the husband represents life and the gap between East and West—especially revealing was the author's automatic deception, when asked by one of the Brahmins as to his marital status.
Indeed, the discussion of these two significant people in the author's life gave the book a sense of self, continuity, and was natural, minimal and unobtrusive—or would have been unobtrusive to some readers had the father not been Pakistani, and the spouse not been male. What might have been perceived as 'trumpeting from rooftops' was in reality 'speaking at street level at a normal volume'; and the princess-and-pea complaints reveal the current socio-political atmosphere of India, in an unintentional and highly unfortunate epilogue to the book.
His gutlessness, his obsequiousness, his hemichordate spinelessness and putty-like irenicism annoyed me! Where Naipaul's 1964 wasp-and-acid essay on India was presented with cunning persiflage, logical analysis and a refreshing parrhesia; Aatish Taseer's interviews with most of his Brahminical characters were by contrast insipidly anodyne, to the extent that they might as well have been monologues when it came to the sermonic lack of critical faculty.
But how can one blame the Brahmins for their lop-sided rants—when it was the author's lack of opposition which goaded them into free pontification, having found their pulpit in a placid and ahimsic audience? Naipaul's gift was his ability to see all the stupidity of India (which is often ignored and passed over by placatory and guilt-ridden foreigners; or acclimated and insecure natives) and criticise his subject while maintaining a continuous force of mercy and love, a narrative sunbeam which haloes India, despite its filth, its self-absorption, its superstitiousness and fractiousness and transparent obscurantism—in an impersonal and flattering light.
Naipaul excelled critically not simply because of his non-collaboration with gobar but because of his mercy, always retaining a magical distance from his subject with a cosmological constant of joy. His technique reminds of Valmiki's tale: Rama had to defeat Bali, who was blessed the ability to drain half his opponent's strength in battle—rendering him nigh invincible against any vis-a-vis foe. To solve this conundrum Rama shot him in the back; and his moral cowardice was drained into Bali, paradoxically endowing Rama with moral superiority (alright, that's my interpretation.)
Naipaul played the role of Bali: his unrelentingly honest opprobrium of India exposed himself to the barbs of his own endearing irascibility, submerging both critic and subject into the same miasma of ignominy. Naipaul's nastiness was functional, revealing, insightful, funny—and delightfully equal.
By contrast, Mr. Taseer played the role of Bali's victim and allowed his interviewees to pile bullshit on us until we could barely budge underneath; whereupon Taseer would give us a minor epitaph of whispered soliloquy to reveal, psst, that he disagreed. Disagree to their face, then! Was my constant protestation. Where Naipaul made us understand India by prodding her relentlessly, and love her anyway for all her flaws which he illumes with relish and humour—Mr. Taseer simply passes his lens over her; her flaws are included as a mere accident of panorama, like a documentary of African savages in mutual slaughter—ultimately leaving us with nothing but a sense of impotent distaste for both cameraman and subject.
Significantly, Mr. Taseer in his interviews presented no case at all to defend the West from the charges levelled against its lack of spirituality(self-absorption) and inner peace(mental vacuity)—which we must protest the West does indeed possess in empty spadefuls—or lack of concern about the true nature of the cosmos, which we must concede is indeed the domain of Brahminical investigation—if we accept their premise that reality is an illusion. The passionate explorations of scientific inquiry, with the wide-eyed wanderlust for the mysterious universe into which we have found ourselves awakened—is then nothing compared to a bunch of saffron-robed sages sitting around on yoga mats, vibrating with prehensions of the infinite.
But the stridency of the Brahmins was hardly their fault when the author, who as a cultural amphibian, never sought to mediate their misunderstandings. To better describe my frustration, imagine an inversion into the following scenario: Mr. Brahmin interviews a group of Native Americans who decry the other India for their rampant avarice and materialism—citing for evidence the worship of Lakshmi Devi (the Hindu goddess of Wealth) and the ceremony once a year where the rupee is adulated with mantras—while Mr. Brahmin sits dumbly, unprotestingly, wobbling his head before this hot tirade of denunciations like a dashboard puppy. Then, in a spurt of defiance evinced much later and much further away Mr. Brahmin gives short shrift to the reader, in the burst appendix of afterthought—that he in fact disagreed with Mr. Kokomo's assertion that all Hindus partook of urine of the cow. This strange view, after all, was unfairly impressed upon Mr. Kokomo by the Executive Minister of Health of India and his party members who continue to recommend—with increasing shrillness—the consumption of gaumutra!
It is not merely the author's reticence which damns both the Brahmins in our view and the West in their view, but also his lack of inquiry. One does not get a solid sense of the foundation of their religious beliefs, which seemed entirely lacking in sophistication; and I wonder if this was truly the case or simply a symptom of Mr. Taseer, who had failed to press interesting questions. The author mentions Tagore's 1910 Gora: a dull little novel whose critique of caste was already three decades dépassé in post-renaissance Bengal—and I question to what extent such strict casteist beliefs hold true today in Uttar Pradesh—has 'intellectual' casteism really recrudesced, a century after Ambedkar burned the Manusmriti? India's woes continue to be—if I may suggest—not the result of a regressive and hidebound Brahminical caste, nor—as some may suggest—the lack of random Brown Sahibs picking up trash like performative dung beetles on a Sisyphean Everest, a symbolic and pointless act so typical of India—in fact, India's woes are the result of an attitude problem. Her history is an archive of pain, and like a sullen teenager remembering her torments at the hands of a bully; rather than better herself seeks to be different from the bully; seeks pointless symbolic acts like name-changes and resurrecting ancient 'sciences'; seeks to be goth not gora; rejecting everything associated with him and thereby ironically making him the nucleus of her identity. The ex-bully is moving forwards, and so India moves the other way—shuffling backwards.
The insularity of 'spiritualism' is exemplified by the Brahmin Tripathi, who claims with sagacious sad eyes, that “I don’t think there was anyone who understood the West like Gandhi. And he understood his own culture too.” Tripathi reveals the Brahmins' ignorance of both the West and India in his ignorance of Gandhi, who in The Story of My Experiments with Truth records:
I did not feel at all sea-sick… I was innocent of the use of knives and forks… I therefore never took meals at table but always had them in my cabin… We entered the Bay of Biscay, but I did not begin to feel the need either of meat or liquor… However, we reached Southampton, as far as I remember, on a Saturday. On the boat I had worn a black suit, the white flannel one, which my friends had got me, having been kept especially for wearing when I landed. I had thought that white clothes would suit me better when I stepped ashore, and therefore I did so in white flannels. Those were the last days of September, and I found I was the only person wearing such clothes.
Naipaul observes:
“That is the voyage: an internal adventure of anxieties felt and food eaten, with not a word of anything seen or heard that did not directly affect the physical or mental well-being of the writer. The inward concentration is fierce, the self-absorption complete. Southampton is lost in that embarrassment (and rage) about the white flannels. The name of the port is mentioned once, and that is all, as though the name is description enough. That it was late September was important only because it was the wrong time of the year for white flannels; it is not a note about the weather. Though Gandhi spent three years in England, there is nothing in his autobiography about the climate or the seasons, so unlike the heat and monsoon of Gujarat and Bombay; and the next date he is precise about is the date of his departure.
No London building is described, no street, no room, no crowd, no public conveyance. The London of 1890, capital of the world—which must have been overwhelming to a young man from a small Indian town—has to be inferred from Gandhi’s continuing internal disturbances, his embarrassments, his religious self-searchings, his attempts at dressing correctly and learning English manners, and, above all, his difficulties and occasional satisfactions about food...”
And Gandhi, like the Brahmins, was as blind to India as he was to the West: he never perceives India except in flashes of disturbed reactions; he never analyses what he does perceive to draw complex conclusions—his mind is best described as a slum whose size is shrunk by spiritual shortcuts. As a result, the Mahatma's ignorance of Hinduism, Indian history and reality was systematically absolute; and the Hind Swaraj was a work of insanity which might as well have been written by a Hindutva Gwyneth Paltrow on mescaline.
However, one thing the skeletal pied piper was not—as the typical dupe of post-colonial theory might leap to charge him of a lesser crime—was an inventive and shrewd hypocrite. The truth behind the celebrity anorexic's well-documented inconsistencies was more banal: he was simply stupid, and was one of the many unoriginal weirdo godmen at the time suckling at the availability cascade of cranky ideas (such as Raja Yoga, Tilak's Ganapati Puja, and the mystical developments of Sri Aurobindo who ventriloquised for Mirra Alfassa—a genuinely original thinker) and by Darwinian process fell into the leadership of an already massive revolutionary front, driven by religious unrest and the fiscal turmoil of Indian industrialists. In a sense, the dhoti-wrapped mummy was to Indian godmen what Harry Potter is to children's literature—mass movements abhor a vacuum, the figurehead falling into the prow of the ship was aleatory but inevitable.
Today the bagatelle has given us Baba Ramdev and Sadhguru, and at the prow—the Prime Minister Modi: who thinks there was stem cell technology in Vedic India, and that Rama flew in an aeroplane.
The other focus of the book was on some rather appalling caste-based beliefs—of which justifications reminded me of my own childhood when my mother, pointing at some drooling degenerate in a wheelchair, claimed that their condition was due to karmic accretion from a previous life. I know that the intellectual atmosphere in India has rapidly deteriorated and pseudoscience is crescendo (transmorgrifying into the recent Covid tsunami which has whelmed the nation—and prepare, I say—for a superior third wave) but I find it odd that Mr. Taseer had not at least sought out a Brahmin who doesn't believe in congenital caste—or at least tell us that he tried to, to whatever extent—and failed. I also do not understand the categorical selection of five very similar Brahmins to interview and follow around when practising Brahmins make up such a small percentage of the population. Certainly, twice-born (inaugurated Brahmins) is in the title, but a fleeting panorama from other castes or urban folk to whom caste is a fading concept, would have done much to dispel the insularity and made for a more balanced and—more importantly—a more interesting book. The inane modishness of Modi also cannot be discussed seriously, as the author attempts to do, without the suffrage of representatives from the majority populace who are not Brahmins.
As it is, the scope of the book is far too narrow, and far too repetitive as one fanatic's views are hardly distinguishable enough from the next's to require elaboration. Like a snow white corpse (called a 'burster' in forensics) floating down the Ganges, this book is at maximal bloat. When it comes to an evaluation of the voices of India, with insight, wit, and assize—a single page from Naipaul's Indian trilogy is worth ten in this book—if you haven't read that, do so. As to how to proceed afterwards, I recommend reading Twice-Born if you're interested in:
1) A contemporary account of events in India
2) With a focus on the Ganges
3) And detailed descriptions of Varanesi rites
4) And a muddled window into how upper-caste religious literalists think, act, think that they act.
Oh, and 5) a few diary excerpts from the unfortunately named Miss Boner, which were mind-numbingly insipid.
Otherwise, I'm afraid you should give this book a pass. I regrettably report that it's rather insignificant, in terms of elucidating either the highly polythetic diversity of Hinduistic beliefs, or the more recent fad of Sanatana and other narrower but deeper delves into Hindu monism. I am also unsure who the target audience of the book is supposed to be; as basic Hindu concepts are always explained—which suggests a foreign audience—and yet if that were the case then I do not feel nearly enough attention is drawn to the filth around the Ganges—which is dying from pollution, largely due to a religious conviction that Ganga Ma is so spiritually pure that her material deterioration is an illusion, that all manner of rubbish and manure can be cast into her and she would self-cleanse (the love of the symbol had detached from the meaning, and boomeranged back to strangle the meaning—obhaggavibhaggo vipatito seti—how often love kills the beloved when the beloved is idolised!) Indeed, there was a typically one-sided sermon by a Brahmin on how pious people entering a filthy temple barefoot would be protected from sepsis—a similar belief held about the Ganges which infects 140m people with dysentery killing 600k per annum, mostly children told to bathe in and drink its holy waters—which have coliform superbug levels a thousand times above the acceptable level for agriculture.
To a foreign reader who knows very little about India, the ailing Ganges is a glaring omission, and even to a native reader such cultural scotoma would have been silly. To neglect to mention the serious rubbish, human excrement, and industrial run-off sedimenting the Ganges—would make even less sense than if the author had kept shtum on peepal trees, black-faced langurs, and sandalwood paste—by the logic that an Indian would already be familiar with such things and observation superfluous. Either the author is being egregiously reticent, or he's genuinely inattentive. Indeed, actual problems are often sidelined in lieu of the author's foppish consternation over the aesthetic incongruity of modern technology with Indian architecture—the Samsung washing machine in Satna is fretted about in much the same serious manner as the plaintive complaint, a hundred years ago, that the democratisation of India was akin to the grafting of a sprig of oak over the teak, ironically, by the colonialist Lt. Colonel Howard-Bury. One wonders at the reverse racialism from Indians themselves, where Indians apparently do not deserve nice things because nice things are un-Indian.
Indeed, Mr. Taseer distinguishes between civilisation and culture—civilisation is defined by such tenets as quality of life, scientific objectivity, civic sensibility, stability and the respect for individual dignity—civilisation is Samsung washing machines—whereas culture is usually a confusion of ethical and aesthetic self-perpetuation—culture is Ravana with twenty-four different aeroplanes in his prehistoric airport of Ceylon, which when left unsupervised fly crashing into civilisation. Marxist Lysenkoism, Liberal denialism of racial I.Q., and the Indian insistence on Patanjali Ayurved over test-based medicine—are all examples of cultural impingement on civilisation and the empiricism which informs it. Indeed, the present investment into the research of panchagavya, frustrating many Indian doctors—mirrors the country's 1970s cultural obsession with 'intermediate technology', where enormous resources were lavished into upgrading bullock carts as indigenous alternatives to the foreign bicycle. Culture supersedes civilisation; Indianness supersedes usefulness.
Finally, the prose is acceptable, and is hyper-descriptive (useful if you're doing research) but lacks a distinctive style or personality. As it stands, Mr. Taseer's language was just skilled enough for me to get through without being bored.
In fact, I wouldn't have bothered to review this travelogue at all had I not noticed some other reviewers' appalling comments about Mr. Taseer's husband and father. While reading, I was starved for some sense of who Mr. Taseer was—beyond his vacuous and nattering internal turmoil as a Westernised Indian, the sort of anglophone soul-searching angoisse bemoaned by EVERY. SINGLE. ex-colonial writer which I'm by now rather sick of. Taseer kept the bits of biography so minimal (less than four percent of the travelogue) that he left me feeling slightly adrift, and what he did reveal was much-needed anchorage.
His father, to my unmitigated surprise, was Salman Taseer—the Pakistani governor of Punjab who was assassinated in 2011 for denouncing the country's blasphemy laws, with great moral courage—having been in full conscience of the risks. On the other wedding-banded hand, Taseer's American husband was mentioned in the book because he is an important part of his life, which I think for most people who are not meticulously plotting the accidental death of their spouse—is hardly a surprising inference. Both characters help define the author's identity, that of a half-Pakistani Indian who is Westernised, deracinated and drifting down the Ganges like a burster; and whose married life is only possible in the West. The father's assassination adds to the theme of death in the subtitle, whereas the husband represents life and the gap between East and West—especially revealing was the author's automatic deception, when asked by one of the Brahmins as to his marital status.
Indeed, the discussion of these two significant people in the author's life gave the book a sense of self, continuity, and was natural, minimal and unobtrusive—or would have been unobtrusive to some readers had the father not been Pakistani, and the spouse not been male. What might have been perceived as 'trumpeting from rooftops' was in reality 'speaking at street level at a normal volume'; and the princess-and-pea complaints reveal the current socio-political atmosphere of India, in an unintentional and highly unfortunate epilogue to the book.
January 19, 2020
I'm a bit conflicted on this one. On the one hand, it's gorgeously written and the personal stories that Taseer describes and even the various people he meets are fascinating. I was most anxious to read about the way Taseer would describe these Brahmins' relationship with Hindutva politics, and I ended up being kind of surprised. Taseer shows how even if these people are proud of what they perceive to be the Brahmin way of life, they don't all agree about whether Modi will serve their interests. Taseer also revisits some of the Modi fans later into Modi's tenure, and many are discouraged - it goes to show the importance of economic matters over ideological ones, at least when the state isn't persecuting you for your identity. I kind of wish this book had included some more interviews with Brahmins after 2014, but since the book has multiple focuses, that might have put too much weight on Brahmins' opinions of contemporary politics.
It was kind of weird to read a book that focused just on Brahmins. Taseer did mention the inherent injustices of the caste system, especially by examining individual Brahmins' relationships with non-Brahmins (such as through Islamophobia and notions of untouchability). But in a system that oppresses Dalits and lower caste people, I think it felt odd that most of the people that Taseer interviews are Brahmins. He is trying to portray a picture of Brahmin life from their eyes, but I think it is incomplete without first hand accounts of what Brahminism represents to those that are affected by untouchability and other caste discrimination. I hope to balance this myself with some works by Dalits that I will read for class this semester, such as Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.
It was kind of weird to read a book that focused just on Brahmins. Taseer did mention the inherent injustices of the caste system, especially by examining individual Brahmins' relationships with non-Brahmins (such as through Islamophobia and notions of untouchability). But in a system that oppresses Dalits and lower caste people, I think it felt odd that most of the people that Taseer interviews are Brahmins. He is trying to portray a picture of Brahmin life from their eyes, but I think it is incomplete without first hand accounts of what Brahminism represents to those that are affected by untouchability and other caste discrimination. I hope to balance this myself with some works by Dalits that I will read for class this semester, such as Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.
June 8, 2020
I would highly recommend this book for both the prose and the content. The book was elegantly written and the writer has tried to portray the intellectual life of the Brahmins in India as well the issues faced by them and India with the clash of modernity and tradition which started with the advent of the British Raj and which carries on today due the overwhelming impact of Western cultural influence which seeps into the most rural India by the ubiquity of the cell phone.
The writer has a great admiration of the Brahmins culture of learning and education, and has sympathy for the struggle they face to square that with the India of today.
However he does point to the cruelties of the caste system and the defensiveness in dealing with Western scientific developments by reaching to ancient text to show that these inventions were predicted by Indians centuries ago. I also enjoyed his dissection of some of the intellectual conundrums caused by the clash between the modern and tradition in India.
Finally the languid prose does serve as a travelogue to Benares with his observations of the surroundings and the interesting people that he met.
The writer has a great admiration of the Brahmins culture of learning and education, and has sympathy for the struggle they face to square that with the India of today.
However he does point to the cruelties of the caste system and the defensiveness in dealing with Western scientific developments by reaching to ancient text to show that these inventions were predicted by Indians centuries ago. I also enjoyed his dissection of some of the intellectual conundrums caused by the clash between the modern and tradition in India.
Finally the languid prose does serve as a travelogue to Benares with his observations of the surroundings and the interesting people that he met.
February 11, 2019
I have been an admirer of Taseer’s languidly elegant writing from the first book I read by him. To see the mysticism of Benares, the essence of Brahminical culture with its dichotomy of castes with the essential notion that all men are born equal, the real struggle of a culturally decaying Bharat with an aspiring to be modern civilisation of India from the worldview of Taseer is refreshing and enchanting. Taseer neither views the scene with the detachment of an European or American nor sees him as an essential part of the scene, hence giving his unique perspective. As I make the painful effort to pick the right grounding from the Hindu Culture to not get carried away with the material entanglements of the modern world that come my way, yet leave the archaic ideas of the past in there, this book echoed with my dilemma spectacularly.
January 18, 2020
Good writing flawed by bias
Two stars for the use of language. Aatish Taseer is an excellent writer. But there it ends. The whole book reads like a polemic against Modi and a repudiation of what he conceives to be Hinduism. For the latter, it is difficult to blame him entirely, for he's been to a Muslim father and a Sikh mother (neither of whom appear to be our have been particularly staunch in their faith) and his Western upbringing prevents him from giving up the shell that lets him from experiencing and, thereby acquiring a degree of understanding, of Hindu faith. I find the book rather biased, even if one leaves out the ranting against Modi.
Two stars for the use of language. Aatish Taseer is an excellent writer. But there it ends. The whole book reads like a polemic against Modi and a repudiation of what he conceives to be Hinduism. For the latter, it is difficult to blame him entirely, for he's been to a Muslim father and a Sikh mother (neither of whom appear to be our have been particularly staunch in their faith) and his Western upbringing prevents him from giving up the shell that lets him from experiencing and, thereby acquiring a degree of understanding, of Hindu faith. I find the book rather biased, even if one leaves out the ranting against Modi.
March 7, 2020
Aatish is living in American (the son of an Indian mother and Pakistani politician who is murdered bc of his views) when he wants to investigate the power in the rise of the Brahmin right. Living on the Holy Ganges in Varanasi, he explores a lot. However, his POV is often limited to individual's experiences, though the stories are often fascinating.
November 5, 2019
A book that promises much but just skims the surface. The best parts are excerpts of Alice Bonner diaries form the early 20th century
January 6, 2020
The author’s search for his roots by learning Sanskrit and his fascination with the ‘twice born’ elite of Brahmins was not one I personally found engaging.
March 15, 2019
The Twice - Born
Aatish Taseer
Non-fiction
HarperCollins India
248 pages
Rating : 3.5/5
In Mapu's generation, the sense of loss must have been painful enough to warrant a desire for return. In my generation, the memory of loss had been erased. It had been sublimated into a quiet, passionless aversion to ones own culture. A dullness of mind, an almost wilful ignorance.
The upbringing could make New York feel culturally nearer to my Delhi than to Benaras, and it could put centuries between those living next to one another, making foreigners of people in places they had never left.
After completing every book by Aatish Taseer, I cannot help but compare the sources which his writings come from to the sources of V.S. Naipaul's art - a complex identity. An identity which searches for something we don't know, gracefully drags us through this journey only to leave us in a spot of bother to find our own answers. But the journey so diverse, tender and heartwarming, you tend afford the luxury to forgive the lack of closure.
The Twice - Born is yet another manifestation of this idea. The title refers to Brahmins, meaning those who have two births, one - the biological and second the spiritual - when they imbibe the bramhin way of life.
Taseer, sets out to Benaras - the most pious city of India in a hunt to learn Sanskrit and to somewhat find the roots of this holy civilisation or in more cliched words to find the 'real' India. He deals with the duality of the modern 'India' and traditional 'Bharat', encapsulating the subtle complexities of two drastic worlds with unique beauty and fault lines of their own.
He walks us into the essence of Benaras, which is a permanent entity of history through various heirarchies of humans from the city, an ever-flowing and temporary entity! His encounters and conversations with people he meets on his journey through the city makes up for the crux and soul of this book.
Diving into the city through brahmins and intellectuals, Taseer has beautifully captured the limited essence of culture, it's quirks, realities and mental schisms of this part in India. But the narrative lacks the linear flow of thought making it a start and stop experience of his graceful and sharp writing.
Along the way, the author also takes us through the evil of caste system ingrained in the Indian society. He also touches upon and makes recurrent commentary on the right wing politics of the BJP - RSS tangent using Benaras as a reflection or sample space of the repurcussions of rightist politics in India.
The realms of magic, death and life in the city and generally are discussed in depth throughout but fail to take you towards and endpoint often putting you in a spiral of preachy paragraphs with no tangible conclusion.
The book manages to account for the social fabric to some extent in the first half, but slowly fades as we start expecting more from the narrative. Taseer possesses an exceptional talent of untangling complex things and stories in fluent and sharp ways. The writing is beautiful and retains the succinct, free flowing and accurate nature as seen in his previous work 'Stranger To History', 2014.
All in all, a beautiful compilation of unconnected stories of people and places through a journey of a man always seeking something.
This book has got me curious and excited about Taseer's works that will come in future. I would like to see him writing such quality books which are not through himself as the central character. A different approach and outlook because you always expect more and new things from authors of such calibre.
Happy Reading!
Thank you, HarperCollins India for sending across this interesting review cooy.
Aatish Taseer
Non-fiction
HarperCollins India
248 pages
Rating : 3.5/5
In Mapu's generation, the sense of loss must have been painful enough to warrant a desire for return. In my generation, the memory of loss had been erased. It had been sublimated into a quiet, passionless aversion to ones own culture. A dullness of mind, an almost wilful ignorance.
The upbringing could make New York feel culturally nearer to my Delhi than to Benaras, and it could put centuries between those living next to one another, making foreigners of people in places they had never left.
After completing every book by Aatish Taseer, I cannot help but compare the sources which his writings come from to the sources of V.S. Naipaul's art - a complex identity. An identity which searches for something we don't know, gracefully drags us through this journey only to leave us in a spot of bother to find our own answers. But the journey so diverse, tender and heartwarming, you tend afford the luxury to forgive the lack of closure.
The Twice - Born is yet another manifestation of this idea. The title refers to Brahmins, meaning those who have two births, one - the biological and second the spiritual - when they imbibe the bramhin way of life.
Taseer, sets out to Benaras - the most pious city of India in a hunt to learn Sanskrit and to somewhat find the roots of this holy civilisation or in more cliched words to find the 'real' India. He deals with the duality of the modern 'India' and traditional 'Bharat', encapsulating the subtle complexities of two drastic worlds with unique beauty and fault lines of their own.
He walks us into the essence of Benaras, which is a permanent entity of history through various heirarchies of humans from the city, an ever-flowing and temporary entity! His encounters and conversations with people he meets on his journey through the city makes up for the crux and soul of this book.
Diving into the city through brahmins and intellectuals, Taseer has beautifully captured the limited essence of culture, it's quirks, realities and mental schisms of this part in India. But the narrative lacks the linear flow of thought making it a start and stop experience of his graceful and sharp writing.
Along the way, the author also takes us through the evil of caste system ingrained in the Indian society. He also touches upon and makes recurrent commentary on the right wing politics of the BJP - RSS tangent using Benaras as a reflection or sample space of the repurcussions of rightist politics in India.
The realms of magic, death and life in the city and generally are discussed in depth throughout but fail to take you towards and endpoint often putting you in a spiral of preachy paragraphs with no tangible conclusion.
The book manages to account for the social fabric to some extent in the first half, but slowly fades as we start expecting more from the narrative. Taseer possesses an exceptional talent of untangling complex things and stories in fluent and sharp ways. The writing is beautiful and retains the succinct, free flowing and accurate nature as seen in his previous work 'Stranger To History', 2014.
All in all, a beautiful compilation of unconnected stories of people and places through a journey of a man always seeking something.
This book has got me curious and excited about Taseer's works that will come in future. I would like to see him writing such quality books which are not through himself as the central character. A different approach and outlook because you always expect more and new things from authors of such calibre.
Happy Reading!
Thank you, HarperCollins India for sending across this interesting review cooy.
February 6, 2019
I was hesitant to read this book, as I feared, that it will make me painfully aware of my lack of understanding of my own culture and religion. And it did. However, the author has taken care of people like us, the first chapter is called “Foreigners in their own land”. The essence of it is captured in this phrase: Nehru had written of “Spiritual loneliness”, he puts it down to having become “a queer mix of the East and the West, out of place everywhere. At home, nowhere.
“For a long time,” Aatish Taseer writes, “I had a recurring dream of the ancient Indian city of Benares, superimposed onto the geography of New York”. That's how the book begins, with a sense of duality. During the course of the book, the author (Who is gay and has a Pakistani father : wondering why I mentioned this? I too was wondering why was it necessary to cover this in the book in a longish way) travels to Benares to learn Sanskrit, observes the city as a first timer and has conversations. Most of these conversations are with Brahmins and that is the main stake of the book. These conversations are well played out and the interpretation of the same, is left to the readers. Barring a few of these chats, most are pointing towards a rotting culture and Brahmins who are struggling to come to terms with their fading glory.
The first part of the book is a self-discovery for the author. Growing up in Delhi, studying and working in New York...and then he comes back wanting to connect with his roots and his culture. The emotion in this part of the book is captured beautifully. But, then his trip to Benares to learn Sanskrit begins and he starts to speak "of" these people. He writes about them, but the connect is clearly missing. At some point, the book becomes a travelogue.
Taseer writes beautifully but he lost me after some point, as his interest in these people wean off and then it's just a book to be completed.
Passages from the book, highlighted in my Kindle and hopefully in my mind :
What struck me that afternoon was how automatic my incuriosity about old India has been.
“Being interpreters, we have also lost the style and confidence that comes to people who know their own culture before they know others.’
Brahmins are sometimes described as members of priesthood, but this is not quite right. Historically Brahmins were grammarians, logicians, writers, poets, astrologers and scientists. They were men of the mind.
As Gandhiji said in his address at BHU, “ It is a matter of great shame and deep humiliation for me, that I am compelled this evening, under the shadow of this great college in this scared city of Benares, to address my countrymen in a language that is foreign to me and them. Let's aim for a free India and for that we should have our educated class, not as if they were foreigners in their own land but people who can speak to our heart.
https://richareadseverything.blogspot...
“For a long time,” Aatish Taseer writes, “I had a recurring dream of the ancient Indian city of Benares, superimposed onto the geography of New York”. That's how the book begins, with a sense of duality. During the course of the book, the author (Who is gay and has a Pakistani father : wondering why I mentioned this? I too was wondering why was it necessary to cover this in the book in a longish way) travels to Benares to learn Sanskrit, observes the city as a first timer and has conversations. Most of these conversations are with Brahmins and that is the main stake of the book. These conversations are well played out and the interpretation of the same, is left to the readers. Barring a few of these chats, most are pointing towards a rotting culture and Brahmins who are struggling to come to terms with their fading glory.
The first part of the book is a self-discovery for the author. Growing up in Delhi, studying and working in New York...and then he comes back wanting to connect with his roots and his culture. The emotion in this part of the book is captured beautifully. But, then his trip to Benares to learn Sanskrit begins and he starts to speak "of" these people. He writes about them, but the connect is clearly missing. At some point, the book becomes a travelogue.
Taseer writes beautifully but he lost me after some point, as his interest in these people wean off and then it's just a book to be completed.
Passages from the book, highlighted in my Kindle and hopefully in my mind :
What struck me that afternoon was how automatic my incuriosity about old India has been.
“Being interpreters, we have also lost the style and confidence that comes to people who know their own culture before they know others.’
Brahmins are sometimes described as members of priesthood, but this is not quite right. Historically Brahmins were grammarians, logicians, writers, poets, astrologers and scientists. They were men of the mind.
As Gandhiji said in his address at BHU, “ It is a matter of great shame and deep humiliation for me, that I am compelled this evening, under the shadow of this great college in this scared city of Benares, to address my countrymen in a language that is foreign to me and them. Let's aim for a free India and for that we should have our educated class, not as if they were foreigners in their own land but people who can speak to our heart.
https://richareadseverything.blogspot...
June 6, 2019
Benaras. One of the world's oldest city. The city of death. The city of Shiva. The city where Buddha gave his first sermon.And the city of the Twice-born. "Dvija" in sanskrit. Brahmins are believed to be born twice i.e. biologically and spiritually.
The author belongs to Macaulay's "class of interpreters" who grew up among the elites of Delhi. To understand his roots, he travels to India's most sacred city:-Varanasi. The city, despite being only 800 kms from Delhi, is centuries apart. Here, the clash between modernity and tradition is most conspicous. Almost all the characters we meet in the book consider modernity to be a danger to their tradition. The realities of caste and the yearning for a "lost" civilization is commonplace among the learned of the "real" Bharat. These men do not acquire their knowledge out of intellectual curiousity but out of a desire to maintain continuity of their tradition.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the book is its discussion of the invidious realities of caste system, which the author encounters first hand.
The inhabitants of this city of life and death perplex the author through their deeply held superstition, which any rational person would reject as a delusion. Yet these "delusions" and fantasies about the glory of the past are quite simply an attempt to revive that old culture. The constant claims about western inventions being a part of India's glorious past is actually an effort to heal the pain of invasions, which too many indians continue to feel. Perhaps VS Naipaul was correct when he called India a "wounded civilization". It may not hold true for every Indian but it is true for many.
Aatish Taseer's simple but elegant prose makes this book a must read. Bear in mind that this is a deeply personal book and must be read at such. It is the story of an individual's attempt to connect with his own roots.
The author belongs to Macaulay's "class of interpreters" who grew up among the elites of Delhi. To understand his roots, he travels to India's most sacred city:-Varanasi. The city, despite being only 800 kms from Delhi, is centuries apart. Here, the clash between modernity and tradition is most conspicous. Almost all the characters we meet in the book consider modernity to be a danger to their tradition. The realities of caste and the yearning for a "lost" civilization is commonplace among the learned of the "real" Bharat. These men do not acquire their knowledge out of intellectual curiousity but out of a desire to maintain continuity of their tradition.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the book is its discussion of the invidious realities of caste system, which the author encounters first hand.
The inhabitants of this city of life and death perplex the author through their deeply held superstition, which any rational person would reject as a delusion. Yet these "delusions" and fantasies about the glory of the past are quite simply an attempt to revive that old culture. The constant claims about western inventions being a part of India's glorious past is actually an effort to heal the pain of invasions, which too many indians continue to feel. Perhaps VS Naipaul was correct when he called India a "wounded civilization". It may not hold true for every Indian but it is true for many.
Aatish Taseer's simple but elegant prose makes this book a must read. Bear in mind that this is a deeply personal book and must be read at such. It is the story of an individual's attempt to connect with his own roots.
April 24, 2024
The profound commitment displayed by an individual with Sikh and Muslim lineage towards the study of Sanskrit, coupled with his journey to Kashi to delve into the intricacies of the language, is undeniably praiseworthy. Throughout the narrative, glimpses of maturity and brilliance shine through, rendering the insights and commentaries contained within the text worthy of revisiting.
Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that Aatish's perspective is heavily influenced by Brahminism, a notion that occasionally proves irksome as it recurrently and unnecessarily asserts itself. A broader exploration of societal dynamics beyond the confines of Brahminical influence, particularly through travel to southern regions, could offer a more nuanced understanding. In these areas, it becomes evident that the perpetuation, endorsement, glorification, and exploitation of casteism often occur at the hands of non-Brahmins and, regrettably, by opportunistic politicians.
Contrary to common misconceptions, the essence of casteism does not solely revolve around untouchability; rather, it is aimed at fostering a participatory society wherein each individual is assigned a designated role. However, while theoretically acknowledged, the dignity of labour principle often relegates certain tasks to a status deemed inferior, thereby creating societal stratification. This contrasts with the class system prevalent in (albeit not so illustrious) Britain.
It is imperative to exercise caution against lending undue credence to the narratives propagated by a select few regarding untouchability and the characteristics attributed to caste. Such voices of ignorance and prejudice can be found in various echelons of society, ranging from the opulent halls of Buckingham Palace to the corridors of power in the White House and even amidst the sacred precincts of Kashi.
Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that Aatish's perspective is heavily influenced by Brahminism, a notion that occasionally proves irksome as it recurrently and unnecessarily asserts itself. A broader exploration of societal dynamics beyond the confines of Brahminical influence, particularly through travel to southern regions, could offer a more nuanced understanding. In these areas, it becomes evident that the perpetuation, endorsement, glorification, and exploitation of casteism often occur at the hands of non-Brahmins and, regrettably, by opportunistic politicians.
Contrary to common misconceptions, the essence of casteism does not solely revolve around untouchability; rather, it is aimed at fostering a participatory society wherein each individual is assigned a designated role. However, while theoretically acknowledged, the dignity of labour principle often relegates certain tasks to a status deemed inferior, thereby creating societal stratification. This contrasts with the class system prevalent in (albeit not so illustrious) Britain.
It is imperative to exercise caution against lending undue credence to the narratives propagated by a select few regarding untouchability and the characteristics attributed to caste. Such voices of ignorance and prejudice can be found in various echelons of society, ranging from the opulent halls of Buckingham Palace to the corridors of power in the White House and even amidst the sacred precincts of Kashi.
February 21, 2020
I loved the book for its lyrical beauty, it's earthiness. The author both a part of and removed from the narrative. The tales and anecdotes are non-judgemental - and that is no feat. This book reveals Varanasi in layers. As a reader you are invested in every tale as it unfolds. The politics is seen, observed and described from the social view point and not vice versa. The narrative flows smoothly and at no point jeers or takes a wayward turn.
Read the book for its beautiful prose, it's unbiased observation of city, its social fabric and it's politics, that has been both maligned and revered with equal fervour. And, read the book to form a very distinct perspective. The book made me revisit Varanasi after two decades and seek out the places frequently mentioned. I try to then picture those conversations as my eyes searched for the faces that the narrative had brought alive in the mind's eye. This is a book of its time, a testimony that will become a reference point for future generations to discover their socio political past.
Read the book for its beautiful prose, it's unbiased observation of city, its social fabric and it's politics, that has been both maligned and revered with equal fervour. And, read the book to form a very distinct perspective. The book made me revisit Varanasi after two decades and seek out the places frequently mentioned. I try to then picture those conversations as my eyes searched for the faces that the narrative had brought alive in the mind's eye. This is a book of its time, a testimony that will become a reference point for future generations to discover their socio political past.
May 10, 2019
Having never even travelled to India, I’m not an adequate judge of Taseer’s portrayal of its current problems (better read reviews by those with more background). However for me it was an eye-opening look at how colonialism and Western culture have created a conundrum for westernized Indians and a backlash in the country. That can take the form of trying to preserve or recreate Hindu/Indian culture, but it can also take more negative and violent form against local Muslims. Taseer focuses on Benares as Hinduism’s holiest city; he seeks to learn Sanskrit and interviews Brahmins (the twice-born) who are trying to keep that culture alive. Along the way he uncovers some of the nastier aspects of Hindu nationalism and of the continuing adherence to caste. Taseer is an eloquent writer and this gave me much food for thought, not just about contemporary India.
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