Books

Soul-searching odyssey

India’s Unending Journey — Finding Balance in a Time of Change by Mark Tully; Rider Books; Price:Rs. 495; 278 pp

Our erstwhile masters who know India can be divided into two broad categories — those who hate the place and those who love it. As for the former category, one can hardly blame them. The squalor, chaos, indiscipline and sheer bad manners which characterise contemporary India are light years removed from the order and splendid uniforms of the civil lines and cantonments of the British Raj. Contemporary India is also the mirror opposite of the neatness, order, tolerance, good manners — and rule of law which is still very much in evidence in little England to which Brits have profitably retreated after the loss of their huge empire.

Then there is the other lot — Indophiles — who for some mysterious reasons ranging from the easy availability of household help to the fawning and groveling to which even the most sophisticated Indians succumb when they interact with the somewhat down-at-heel and faintly ridiculous inheritors of the master race which ruled India (with, it must be admitted, considerable style, equity and discipline), love everything about it. The fact that they can transcend the disorder and inequity which is a defining feature of India 60 years on, is projected as broad-mindedness and an ability to look beyond the superficial. Feted and felicitated wherever they go, the small minority of Brit indophiles whose every inanity is received as wisdom, has good reasons to love India and Indians, a substantial number of whom wish the British Raj in India had never ended.

By volition and commitment, the highly respected Sir Mark Tully, former BBC television correspondent and India analyst, who seems to have made this country his home of choice, falls into the second category of homo britannicus. Sir Mark is nothing if not sympathetic to the efforts of contemporary India to get its growth engines revving and roaring. Meanwhile he is as mindful of the complexities and diversities of the country, the excuse of selfish, corrupt incompetents who have monopolised the nation’s political spaces for creating the widespread artificial shortages of food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, roads and transport and virtually every accommodation required for the comfort and well-being of the citizenry. Moreover, Tully — who studied theology at Cambridge — is highly conscious and appreciative of the deep spirituality, plurality, spirit of tolerance etc, which in his opinion pervades Indian society even to this day. His inner eye which enables him to look beyond the obvious has compelled him to write several books including No Full Stops in India, India in Slow Motion and the Heart of India, explaining India to the West, and to Indians themselves.

India’s Unending Journey — Finding Balance in a Time of Change, is Tully’s latest oeuvre, which as he explains in the very first sentence of the book is "about living with the uncertainty of certainty, about accepting the limits to what we can know, and being willing to question our beliefs". In fact this book is less about India’s unending journey than it is about Mark Tully’s unfinished journey in the quest for spiritual solace and fulfillment.

Like most foreigners from homogenous cultures, Tully is fascinated by the religious, linguistic and cultural plurality of India. According to him there’s much that westerners can learn about tolerance and accommodation of diversity from this often ridiculed country. In particular, believers and especially dogmatists rooted in the eternal verities of the revealed religions — Christianity, Islam and Judaism — who tend to be certain that their scriptures provide all the answers and all ye need to know, could take more than a few leaves from the Hindu scriptures, says Tully.

The author’s exploration of India’s unending journey begins with a visit to the temple town of Puri on the occasion of karthik purnima, when the resident deities are manually hauled across town by devotees in massive chariots (from which the English word ‘juggernaut’). Here Tully experiences an epiphany. "What I have learned from India might be summed up in that old-fashioned word ‘humility’. Acknowledging the role of fate in our lives, accepting that our knowledge will always be limited, seeking to discuss rather than dogmatise, appreciating that we always need to be examining ourselves if we are to maintain the desired balance — all these acts (sic) surely require humility," he writes.

Proustian style, this epiphany transports the author back to his formative years in the elite public school Marlborough and at Cambridge University, (where he read theology), was schooled in rigid Christian dogma and taught to despise all religions, especially Hinduism. India’s Unending Journey is all about how Tully sahib unschooled himself of dogmatism while travelling inter alia to Puri, Raipur, Delhi, Khajuraho, Darjeeling and Varanasi and interacting with sages and savants therein.

Somewhat misleadingly titled, this book is actually part memoir of the author, in particular his search for spiritual enlightenment. From India’s Unending Journey we learn that Tully was born into a Calcutta box wallah family, received a typically upper class boarding school education in Blighty, signed up with the heart of the establishment (BBC) and morphed into a typically British liberal who returned to India, went through a divorce and has a live-in girlfriend.

Fittingly this soul-searching journey ends in the holy city of Varanasi on the author’s seventy-first birthday. In this ancient temple town "where communities remain different but live together", he finds confirmation that "there is not one but many different certainties".

Well, good for Tully, but I wish the book had been more accurately titled so that one didn’t have to wade through an ocean of theological mumbo-jumbo to discover that it’s not about India at all, but yet another tedious tale of a westerner’s search for enlightenment in the squalid alley-ways and burning ghats of old India.

Between two worlds

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid; Penguin Books; Price: Rs.295; 184 pp

In the post 9/11 world where any Muslim — the liberal and well-educated included — with even sneaking sympathy for Islamist terrorism or terrorists is viewed with extreme prejudice, the Reluctant Fundamentalist is an unlikely bestseller. Unlikely because in chapter 5 of this slim 184 page novel — currently on the New York Times bestseller list — the protagonist Changez, a Princeton-educated Pakistani living and working in New York, smiles as a television news channel beams images of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre collapsing into a heap of rubble. Horror, anger, disgust, disbelief seem the natural emotional responses to this great tragedy, but Changez can’t but feel "remarkably pleased". He was "caught in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees".

Mohsin Hamid, one of the few Pakistan-born authors writing in English to have won critical acclaim in the West, takes readers into the minds of educated, liberal Muslims who stop short of outright condemnation of Islamist terrorists and loony jehadists bringing disrepute to Islam and Muslims around the world. In his debut novel Moth Smoke, which won several awards including the New York Times Notable Book of the Year prize, Hamid explored the tragic dilemma of contemporary youth in Pakistan struggling to find a balance between traditional mores and the pressures of westernisation. In the Reluctant Fundamentalist he moves the action to New York where he sets the liberal and westernised Changez against the backdrop of the 9/11 attacks, a defining event which forever changed the West’s relationship with the Islamic world.

Changez’s character is so carefully crafted that readers appreciate if not empathise with his dilemma of living in a religiously, ethnically and culturally fractured but simultaneously globalising world. His bitterness with America and its hegemony of the world, particularly over Islamic countries, develops gradually until you’re not shaken by the politically incorrect "smile" episode. He is in fact an indirect victim of the scary fanaticism of 9/11 and the consequent rise of a mountain of distrust between his two worlds — he is singled out at airports for humiliating security checks; has to endure searching looks of his colleagues at work and becomes a target of racial slurs and is finally assaulted in a parking lot by a white American.

This is particularly hurtful because Changez is not the typical Muslim Americaphobe — madrassa educated, overtly religious, alienated, violent and intolerant — who abhors the very existence of the Great Satan. In fact he is a product of the American education system and a beneficiary of its largesse. From an affluent and well-educated family in Lahore, Changez is admitted into the Ivy League Princeton University on a generous scholarship. Graduating summa cum laude, he is snapped up by the country’s most respected employer — Underwood Samson — a much sought after valuation firm which puts price tags on companies ripe for acquisition. He lives and works in New York, a city where he is completely at home.

Conspicuously successful at work, he is handpicked by his indulgent boss Jim for the best assignments, and is clearly headed upwards in the firm. To round off the Americanisation of his hero, Hamid makes him fall in love with an upper class American woman, Erica — through whom he gets access to the upper echelons of Manhattan society.

But this relationship is doomed from the start as Erica is too much in love with her dead lover to reciprocate Changez’s affection. This tragic love story is finely balanced against the social tensions and political upheavals 9/11 has triggered across the world. As his personal life disintegrates with a depressed Erica confining herself to her father’s posh penthouse apartment and later to a rehab centre, so does his career at Underwood Samson. Changez is too overwhelmed by the turbulent events of the external world — US military strikes on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and a nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan — to fully concentrate on his work. While Erica battles the ghosts of her past, Changez is torn with the guilt of having accepted the largesse and hospitality of the US — a country which is threatening to wipe out his country of birth, childhood and loved ones.

He quits his job, returns to Lahore, where his highly-prized American degree gets him a lecturer’s job in a top-rung college and becomes a vociferous critic of American policy in the Islamic world. By this process of self-effacement he reclaims his identity as a Pakistani Muslim. But by making Changez strongly denounce terrorism and violence, and by finely balancing a personal tale of unrequited love with tumultuous political events, Hamid creates a complex, but likable reluctant fundamentalist.