IN THE FLOW
Though Aatish Taseer’s book appears to be about the Brahmins of Benaras, it is also about the continuing aftershocks of colonialism, about India and Bharat, and the persistence of caste
the monastery for the caste and sexual purity she embodies. It shows up too in the chapter entitled The Dharma of Place. In Shivam’s house in his native village, the tension builds up as the author and his lower caste driver near the end of their meal. The Brahmins can’t (won’t) wash Mukesh’s plate. What about the author’s plate? In an acute earlier paragraph that unveils the amorphous nature of caste Taseer muses that he seems to be excepted from the laws of pollution:
“Shivam’s village, save for the odd family of the warrior caste, was exclusively Brahmin. I knew this without quite knowing what it implied. What, for instance, did my presence in the Brahmin household denote? My father was Muslim, and since religion in India is patrilineal, my staying overnight in the house should have been an unspeakable defilement, but strangely, it wasn’t. I seemed, perhaps on account of my being English speaking, to be exempt from the rules of caste. Shivam did, however, make one small adjustment as the village approached: he stopped calling me by my conspicuously Persian name and rechristened me with a reliably Hindu alternative: Nitish. “
The scene with its undertow of ghastly comedy recalls, as do many incidents featuring caste/religious ‘code-mixing’ in contemporary India (Rehana Fathimasurya Gayathri at Sabarimala comes to mind), incidents from Rahi Masoom
Raza’s irregular gem Scene 75 (translated by Poonam Saxena; published by Harpercollins) where an Amjad Ali passes himself off as Gaurishankar Lal Krantikari, a Ramnath is actually Peter (or vice versa, you forget which) and Ghaffar Kanpuri is also Ram Manohar Kanpuri!
The wide intellectual sweep of The Twice Born includes everyone from Koestler, Alice Boner, Nehru, Gandhi, and AK Coomaraswamy to Bhasa, Bhartrhari, and Kalidasa via KA Abbas. The writing has a lyrical quality that makes you want to wander the streets of Varanasi once more, even will yourself to gaze at the fearsome Manikarnika Ghat, that mountainous perennially-burning pyre.
If you have any complaints at all about The Twice Born, which often feels like homage to VS Naipaul, like a book that could have flowed from the late writer’s India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), they are about Taseer’s tendency to include too many descriptions of teeth and to use words like umbrageous (trees) and nacreous (eyes). But this is a minor quibble.
The Twice-born makes the reader think about religion, caste, culture, India and the idea of modernity, and most rewardingly, about where she stands in relation to all these.