Amherst Reads Transcript

Jennifer Aker: I'm Jennifer Aker class of 2000 and I'm here with Aatish Taseer class of 2003. So Aatish, you've had a remarkable publishing career so far. You're the author of six books, three acclaimed novels, a book of translations, and two works of non-fiction. And your first non-fiction book is called Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands and that explored your Muslim identity via your father's side. And now this is the book that you've just written called The Twice Born: Life and Death on the Ganges is a non-fiction book that takes a look at the most (?) Hindu face in India, in Benares. So I just wonder as my first question, when you were writing your first book about your Muslim journeys did you have in mind that down the road you would write a book that was more focused on Hinduism?

Aatish Taseer: No, I really didn't. I think the two are very different in one respect which is that I was estranged from my father, I was estranged from the Muslim side of my family. And so when I went in search of that and in search of him, I was traveling through unknown territory, I was traveling to learn. This book is very different because I grew up with the Sikh Hindu side of my family, I grew up in India, I grew up very much very close to Hindu religion. And I suppose if that first book was a book which travels across distances, this is a vertical journey. And quite paradoxically like statis is quite important and one is sort of excavating the distances that can exist between people who are very near to each other. I had to travel differently because I was traveling through territory that shouldn't be known to me and the fact that it wasn't represented a kind of phenomena that was interesting. I thought, how weird that this world of the Brahmins in Benares, it was down the road all the time. And there was something about the way that I grew up in India that had put it at a distance and that kind of historical phenomenon was part of what made me want to travel.

JA: Yeah, that's such an interesting distinction. I mean we should say yeah, so you grew up in India with your mother who is Sikh and your father, Muslim, who is now deceased, was sort of the inspiration for that first book as you say. I mean this book that you've written, The Twice Born is a beautiful and insightful book, it just received an admiring and thoughtful review in the New York Times. And you know what I admired about it so much is it's a very personal journey and we do become invested in the sort of near distance that you were just talking about, the distance from yourself or from India. So you grew up in Delhi, went to Amherst for college and you spent your adult life in both New York and Delhi and spent time in England. And I'm just going to read a few sentences from the beginning of the book, "My time in the West had given me an outside view of my world in Delhi, robbing my life there of its easy, unthinking quality. I thought I should do something by way of traveling or learning that would help me establish a connection with India at large." I wonder if there is a moment that you can describe to us that shows us this distance that you felt from India. Was there a moment when you were living your life in Delhi and you just felt that this place or this culture is not mine or it's not as well understood as I would like it to be?

AT: Well I think that actually this is what has existed all the time. I think that the way that I grew up in India, part of a kind of colonized world, I would have given my own existence and my life in the city a certain centrality and importance and more than that, in other parts of India, there would have been a kind of element of prestige placed on that life and so up to the point when I went to college, my own curiosity was kind of the defining feature of my relationship with the rest of India and there was nothing to set me straight. And it was in that moment of leaving and being able to see one's world from the outside that suddenly my position became kind of (?) or uncomfortable. And when I returned to India, I was deeply aware that I was living a life that seemed, in some ways, like a kind of pay limitation of life in the West. It was a sort of adjunct of Western culture, you know, everything was coming to us from elsewhere - movies, television, books. And all the time there was this kind of heaving, powerful country that was soon to declare itself politically that was like a foreign country to us. And one of the moments in the book where I find myself in this room where Brahmins have gathered and they're discussing a kind of esoteric branch of Indian linguistics in Sanskrit which is the ancient language of India. And it's not spoken at all, it's Latin or Greek. And suddenly this group of people sort of jumps into a long and a lengthy discussion in Sanskrit about this branch of linguistics. And it was like I knew of the Classical world in Greece and Rome, I knew of the Homeric schools and this was like a truly Homeric moment. And I thought it was so weird that someone with the kind of inclination I had and kind of intellectual curiosity should not have even known  about the existence of this life and had no means to know what these people are talking about or what their tradition is, to know about 20 centuries of literary production in India. And I was like, wow, if something would have happened to us to kind of breed this curiosity into the bone, as it were, and leave us in this position. And so that was a sort of wake-up moment for me in some respects.

JA: So I have maybe a two-part question. So why is it that say learning Sanskrit and going to Bedares is the solution to this problem and is it something that you think that you know everyone of your background in India should be doing? The world that you grew up in, this Westernized world, they're English speaking, is this sort of a solution you would prescribe for the country or at least for people like you?

AT: So it's not everybody's solution but I think there is something weird about being a writer in a particular geographic place and not being able to read writers who've come before you and who've walked in the same place, in the same environment. We would consider that weird in England, for instance, if a writer was to start out right now and the entire literature of England from literally Beowulf to kind of Dickens was closed to him. He had no means to access it either linguistically, it was not part of his intellectual atmosphere, it didn't nourish him. We would think that was an absurd situation. And it was an identical situation that I found myself in in India as a writer unable to draw on literary voices that had come before me. And so it was my solution. It was an expression, I think, of a much deeper, much wider problem but I was a writer, I was interested in literature, I was interested in books that had been written before me and so it became my way of kind of opening up what should have been my intellectual inheritance but that had been withheld. And the first route for me to do it was, I was learning Urdu and the first book was a book of translation where I translate a kind of early 20th century writer and so that was my first kind of source into this literary inheritance. And then obviously, I soon became aware that Sanskrit would unlock a kind of even deeper level of writing and would give me a literary voice of the past which I think writers do need that. I think when Elliot talks about writing with all of Western literature in one's bones as if it was kind of simultaneously existing, I think that one's bones can be quite weak if you don't have that kind of nourishment from some source. And so that's really what I was doing.

JA: Right so it's a very language based literary approach to closing this (?) makes sense for someone as a writer. Now before we go much further, I just want you to take a moment to explain what and who is a Brahmin and what is their relationship to Sanskrit. And to sort of set the scene of this group of people and scholars who you are interviewing and spending time with throughout the book.

AT: Right, so the Brahmins are the kind of highest caste in the kind of four part division of society into the priesthood, then we have warriors, then we have merchants, and we have the Shudras or people who do sort of no forms of work, I mean there's no other real way to say it but it's a kind of four part division in society. They call them the Varnas and they've often been misunderstood as castes but these are ancient classifications. The Brahmins sat at the top of this system and they're often described as a priesthood but they're not really just a priesthood, they're a kind of intellectual aristocracy, and aristocracy of the mind if you will. And they carried out all kind of work such as they were grammarians, they were historians, they were poets. They were people who had a monopoly on the life of the mind and obviously that can be very problematic as it is in India, a great amount of power accrued to them because of where they stood in relation to the rest of society but they also produced a dazzling body of work and of literature and stuff. So it's a complicated picture. And I thought I would use the Brahmins of Benares as a prism to explore a kind of deeper fraction within society and I used a sort of deeper metaphor which is the Brahmin is twice-born. He's born once at the time of his physical birth and then again when he's initiated by right into his caste. And then the other sense of the twice-born is the idea of ancient cultures reborn as modern nations and I thought these two things could have a sort of metaphorical relationship and it would allow me to enter into the kind of birth time that an ancient country like India feels as it reconstitutes itself as a modern nation. And then that's the experience of great parts of the old non-west. And so that was the aim.

JA: Right, yeah. I can see that. Now you described the Brahmins as this very powerful and influential class of people, but the Brahmins that we meet in this book are all some sort of loose ends or these young men who are learned in some way but economically don't have much support. They're not sort of the strong powerful class that we might imagine. Can you explain what's going on there and how it happened that these previously powerful caste has really lost its foothold.

AT: Sorry, the Brahmins that I was interested in, because I'm dealing with the conflict between tradition and modernity, are very much still part of the world of tradition. And they pay the price for not being, kind of, (?) with like modern life in India. And so they're sort of shut out of the Westernized life of cities. But at the same time, Brahmins who've assimilated into that, like literally almost every one we can think of who's a kind of well known Indian is in (?) you just (?) in the ground sort of famous intellectuals of today and they will, to a man, be Brahmin. And very much in India in bureaucracy, in positions of power, you see the Brahmins are a very very strong, very rich, very successful community. Some of the people we talk about kind of driving the Silicon Valley sort of scratch under the surface and you'll find the (?) Brahmin. They still are a very powerful community. But the people the I'm dealing with are still locked in the world of tradition. And for that, they are at a distance from power and that's part of my thesis.

JA: Right and they are distanced from the power and they don't have the English language skills like the other people that you were just mentioning. And in fact, you have sometimes quite funny exchanges with some of these men and there's a particular example or encounter that I want you to talk a little bit about. You meet a man whose last name is Mishra and you wrote, "My trouble communicating with Mishra gave me a forecast of what was to be one of the ironies of this journey. Those in any tradition with most impact were often the least able to speak of it." So can you tell me about your interaction with him and at what point in the conversation did you realize he didn't have a common vocabulary because of the different backgrounds that you came from?

AT: Yeah, it's such a kind of curious moment because like again, this is what I mean about the distances that can exist between people that are very near to each other. You know, he was from a town only a few hundred kilometers from Delhi, we had a language in common, we could communicate but when he started to ask me about any of the Pillars of Life - marriage, family, worship it was as if we were completely talking across purposes. And I remember there was one instance where he asked me about marriage and finally we're like kind of... he sort of breathes a sigh of relief, almost happy that I'm at least willing to enter into marriage. And then very quickly he says, well are the families having a conversation. And then I say to myself, "What do you mean, the families" And he's like, "Oh, well are your families in discussion?" Because for him, marriage is an alliance between families. And I think, oh my god, no, I would make that decision myself. And he looks like totally appalled. Like fascinated but appalled. And he says to me, he says, "I've never met anyone in my life like you." And it was really all he could say because he was about to go to the river to ritually bathe, as people of his caste and background had done for 25 centuries, and so there was still, he represented a kind of continuity. And I seem to him a total alien and when I said I was from Delhi or from India, he looked at me in complete disbelief.

JA: It's kind of a fun moment and it so well illustrates many of the themes you were just talking about. I wonder if you can sort of step back and describe Benares as a city and what it felt like for you to live there. I know you made several trips, I'm not sure how much time cumulatively you spent there. But it makes quite an impression on one.

AT: Yeah.

JA: Can you just describe what the city is like and how you navigated a day to day life there.

AT: Well it's wonderful because it's set on the Ganges and it's a moment where the Ganges makes a bend towards its (?) in the Himalayas, in the high Himalayas. And that bend is considered very auspicious because the Ganges is flowing North for a moment and Benares is set in a crescent shape along that river. And unlike cities in the West, riverine cities in the West, there are no two banks here. The city very consciously gazes into kind of an abyss, into a sandbank. And, for me at least, I try to understand that in my own way and I thought that the idea of Sunyata which is the idea of emptiness, it's a part of Hindu philosophy. In fact Kumaraswamy has this lovely description where he says that before the artist begins his work, he must concentrate on the idea of the abyss because it's by the fire of the idea of the abyss that ego consciousness is obliterated. And so you have this city that gazes every morning into this emptiness from which the sun rises and people come into the river and bathe. And it's full of the sound of bells and so it's a very enchanting moment. At the same time, Benares is a very difficult city. It's got a kind of darkness to it which people actually refer to by the word (?) which is related to the English word (?) and this kind of underlying darkness of the city manifests itself in all kinds of like, people can feel very uneasy there. It's uneasy because there's an atmosphere of religious ecstasy, it's incredibly squalid and dirty. It really can grate on your nerves and many time I would encounter visitors there and they're like, god, I feel just this sort of heaviness here. And obviously the people of Benares know about that heaviness and in fact you have to go and propitiate a very fierce form of Shiva who is the god of destruction because if you don't, the city can almost turn against you. So it's got a very powerful personality.

JA: Yes, that really comes through. At one point, you call it a darkling energy, which was a phrase that really stuck in me. As much time as you did spend here talking to people, you did not actually study Sanskrit in Benares, is that right? You were instead studying in New York and in Oxford and I wonder if you can just say briefly what that journey has been like, how you've been studying, and are you still studying?

AT: Right, well that seems peculiar on the surface that one would go all the way to the West to study Sanskrit. It's not actually as strange as it seems because for a long time now, the senses of idolity of Indian learning, the books that have been coming out of that India, books like Language of the Gods in the World of Men by Sheldon Pollock, a lot of this work is happening everywhere. And there was a moment in the beginning of the book where I did consider learning Sanskrit in Benares and for me that would've felt like my sort of insinuating myself into the life of tradition which was not really my tradition anymore. And so it was far more true to who I am that I would study in the Western way with a sort of intellectual distance, a certain critical distance. And yes, for the last ten or 12 years, since 2008, it's been very much part of my life. And, in a sense, as I move away from India, the relationship with Sanskrit becomes even closer because it's my way of connecting with a country that I no longer live in.

JA: And you are able to, in your own studies, it very much the thing that you do on your own, is there a community of people that you study with? How do you approach that sort of individual study versus feeling connected to a community or is that community connection no longer really important to you? What's important to you is to have this access to all this literature?

AT: No, I've been very close to the Sanskrit department at Columbia under the sort of leadership of Sheldon Pollock and I've been a private student there, on and off, for many years. And so every now and then I'll have that discipline of the classroom to kind of just sort of brush up on my linguistic ability. But I do also then take time away and read on my own and so it then becomes sort of part of one's life.

JA: And, in a larger sense, your home is firmly in New York now. This is very (?) that you still travel quite a lot. How would you describe your relationship with India at this point and how do you see it unfolding over the next couple decades of your life?

AT: My relationship with India, at the moment, is a little bit like the relationship between the mother and the son in your novel, Jennifer, there's a kind of deep estrangement kicking in.

JA: (laughs)

AT: So India is in the throes of a very big change. There's been a Hindu nationalist leader who's come to power and an atmosphere has been created. It's very virulently masolistic, very anti-muslim. And I'm not a religious Muslim, I'm not a practicing Muslim, but my father was Muslim and so there is a mood in India that I can't really participate in. And so I am actually very grateful for this life in New York, in America, because it saved me from living in India which I just don't think I could have done any longer.

JA: Well I think that's a great place to end and I want to thank you so much for talking to me about this book which I truly enjoyed.

AT: Thank you so much.