India (28 page)

‘It was a widely shared feeling. That is why people went to English schools. I went to an English-medium school. But it was a very Indian school. It was run by people who were orthodox Hindus, but convinced that we had to learn English, science, technology. It was very stimulating. I remember lots of disagreement among my teachers about the future. Even Gandhi was a subject of controversy. Looking back on it, I am astonished that there were some people there, teachers, maybe half a dozen – and their wages would have been very low – who were actually driven by the desire to get people to learn. You got a feeling of mission. I remember one of my teachers who, for no reason I can imagine now, took a great deal of interest in me, gave me a book on the lives of great scientists, and did so out of his own pocket.’

‘Was he a brahmin?’

‘He was a brahmin. It was a brahmin-inspired school.’

I thought of the brahmin contribution to the independence movement, and the regenerative social ideas that had come with that movement. I thought of the brahmin contribution afterwards to science.

I said, ‘So the brahmins have in a way paid their debt back?’

‘I’m not sure they’ve paid it back yet. They’re responsible still
for many things on our social landscape.’ Subramaniam broke off here, to continue on a related theme. ‘A great social revolution took place in this state after independence, and it was as a consequence of independence. The social revolution was that the identity of the politically powerful classes changed in a few years. It was a bloodless revolution, but it was a revolution, though people outside India don’t know about it. Before independence, the administration in the state was in the hands of brahmins. A few years after independence, power changed hands – and I mean the way power changed hands in other parts of the world. The people who now sit in the offices are of a different social class.

The prime minister’s science adviser was saying the other day that the trouble with Indian science is that it is too much a brahmin science, and that we needed a more lower-caste kind of science. But the fact that so many brahmins are in science is only a development of history.’

‘Do you feel threatened?’

‘No doubt about it. Entrance to universities is not based strictly on merit. There are quotas for different classes. Many brahmins feel now that even education has become difficult. There are the quotas, and private colleges are expensive. It may partly be responsible for the large number of Indian professionals abroad.’

My thoughts, as I had driven down from Goa, through the untidy but energetic towns, full of the signs of growth, and then through the well-tilled fields at harvest time, had been of the Indian and, more specifically, Hindu awakening. If Subramaniam was right, there was a hidden irony in that awakening: that the group or caste who had contributed so much to that awakening should now find itself under threat.

Education and ambition by themselves would have taken people nowhere without an expanding economy. Perhaps, even, the expanding economy explained the shift in Indian education. For Pravas, an engineer, the expansion had started some time before independence, when the old British emphasis on law and order (especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857) had been modified by the idea of development.

‘Many people were sucked into that process. There was an explosive growth in India around 1930. It built momentum around 1947, had a big growth thereafter, and is now slowing down. In
1962, when I was thinking of universities and a career, I had a choice of professions and institutions. People today have to struggle hard. But these things have a positive side.

The average aspiration of the Indian is to grow under a shadow – and this is all right as long as someone else throws the shadow. In concrete terms, this means you look for employment, you try to get into structures created by other people. That’s how we got governed in the first place. The attitude is: “As long as the local environment is the same, I don’t care who is running things at the top.” I read something in a paper some time ago. It was to the effect that, before the British came to India, the Indians were like bees in a garden. And that’s fine, as long as someone else looked after the garden. And then of course the Britishers became both the owners of the garden and the gardeners, the
malis –
with those other guys, the bees, going happily from flower to flower.’

‘What about the positive side of the struggle today?’

That shadow area I talked about is becoming congested now. It is forcing people to go out on their own. It is forcing them to be entrepreneurial.’

Pravas came from far away, from the east of the country. His grandfather had been a priest, and his father entered government service as a clerk.

‘It is almost the standard Indian success story. My father would have got into the service in the mid-40s, the time at which the administration was just beginning to pick up. There was still not a lot of science and industry, or anything like that. But the structure was expanding. This was a precursor of development. When the real development came, there was non-traditional administration. Traditional administration would need police, soldiers, clerks and lawyers. Non-traditional administration needed industrialists, artisans, engineers, doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs. Because my father entered the service at the precursor stage, he wasn’t a scientist.’

‘What sort of things did your father read?’

‘He retained quite a lot of tradition. He chanted
mantras
. My grandfather was a good old classical ritualistic purohit, according to what I’ve heard. Performing the rituals was his profession. Whereas with my father, if you want to trace the transition, the mantras were chanted out of familiarity, reverence, a way of
expressing your gratitude to God – you had these mantras reverberating in your head since childhood. I make no difference between that and the young man today in a video or audio surrounding who chants, formally and informally, Hindi film songs.

‘My father is taller than I, and he makes a good sight sitting there cross-legged, chanting, with his back straight. I think the posture is beautiful. My father is seventy-six, and his back is still straight. But with my father the chanting of the mantras has been, in quotes, “degraded” from a livelihood to pleasure. Oral pleasure, if you like; nostalgia; a protection against fears. A gamut of feeling – all this I call pleasure, since it’s done out of volition.

‘We lived in a small princely state in the east. My grandfather was one of the priests of the royal family. Not really a big king: it was a feudal kingdom of maybe 100 or 200 square miles.’

A small princely state in the east, a priest serving the ruling family. I said, ‘That is really old India.’

Pravas said, ‘The degree of cultural change that I have personally gone through and digested would break a person elsewhere. When I was a child, and we went to visit my ancestral place, we would go in bullock carts – it was the only mode. Or walk. That was as recently as 1960. You wouldn’t have what we think of as a bathroom. You would go down to the river.’

‘Were you aware of hardship?’

‘At the time it seemed normal. Everybody did that in the village. And for years, going back to the village after I had left it, going back for a day or so, it was more like a picnic. Before you recognized you were deprived, you were out.

‘Most of the kings in those days had a policy of encouraging a certain amount of intellectualism. It was a cause for pride. In direct terms that meant they made sure that their people, the priestly caste, the intellectuals, didn’t have to depend on other people for their security. So they gave a piece of land to the purohits. A gift of land to a purohit or anybody else couldn’t be taken back. It was a gift in perpetuity. It would have been considered a sin of the lowest order to recover a gift. In that kingdom there were between five to 10 priestly families. The religious rituals were very specialized. Some purohits did certain things, and other purohits other things.’

‘They were privileged people?’

‘Yes and no. The piece of land wasn’t much. It was a subsistence
piece. It was only to see that the person didn’t die. It was something to fall back on, but nothing more than that. The purohits didn’t have a lot of clothes. They had two dhotis or something like that. Compared to the tradesmen, people selling grain or timber or oilseeds or oil, they would be poor. Compared to the beggars, they were well off.’

‘So the brahmins were kept by the kings in an ambiguous position?’

‘If you look at it from the economical point of view, then of course it looks incongruous. But it had a logic of its own. The brahmins had status and royal protection. The king would deal severely with any act of aggression against the priests. And the kings would encourage intellectual exchanges. Debates, chanting,
yagnas
or big pujas, with brahmins from other kingdoms as well, perhaps – everybody competing, or co-operating in a competitive sense, to show their own excellence. Sometimes you would have a thousand brahmins sitting and chanting, but with each man keeping an ear for who was singing well or badly. It’s precisely what happens at scientific or intellectual conferences today.

‘The internal factor is that the priestly community was born and brought up with the psychology that they didn’t expect more. It’s so much part of the internal system that it’s gone down to the folk level. The Lord Vishnu has two wives – Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom. The two wives would naturally be at loggerheads – a depiction of the fact that the intellectual life seldom goes with wealth: you have to choose one of them. So, by a combination of circumstances, this priestly class didn’t look for riches, and they wouldn’t be given riches. A perfect matching of interests.

‘In my father’s life the balance was of a different kind. He didn’t have an assured security, like my grandfather. He had to work to provide for his family. His life was half ritual, half the struggle for survival. The balance was between the two.

‘In certain communities you are supported by the scaffolding of the society. If you are in a merchant caste, dealing in oilseeds or cotton straw, and you wish to graduate to dealing in radios, the scaffolding is the same. You only change the commodity. There is a group movement there. Whereas, in a case like my father’s, he wasn’t moving with the society – the society wasn’t moving in a coordinated
way. Quite a lot of young men were doing the same thing at that time, but all of them were doing it individually. Not only did my father have the difficulty of clearing the way, but every time he moved back, to my grandfather’s house, there would have been conflict. It would have been like moving between a hot and a cold room.’

‘What sort of conflict?’

‘In the older society, you would keep your purity both genetically and externally. You would only marry certain people, and you wouldn’t have contacts beyond a certain point with people of a lower caste. You wouldn’t be able to eat food cooked by someone of a lower caste. Eating was considered a sacred activity. Food was looked upon as a sacrifice to the gastric juices. There were rigid prescriptions about the time you could eat, in what direction you faced while eating, who served, and how much you ate. Food was dissected to the last detail. Different classes of people ate different amounts. For instance, in the scriptures it is prescribed that for intellectuals doing very little physical work the right amount of food would be the rice cooked from a handful of rice grains held in the fist.

‘Hinduism is a trinity-based religion – there are three options for everything. So food was of three kinds –
sattvik, rajasik, tamasik
. Sattvik foods encouraged intellectual pursuits, clarity of mind, purer thoughts. Sattvik foods were very light – most grains, a certain amount of clarified butter, the lighter vegetables. Rajasik food is work-oriented.’

(From Deviah I later had a more comprehensive list of sattvik foods: leafy greens, milk, curds, butter, rice, wheat, most sprouts, most pulses (except a kind of dal), sweet potatoes (but not potatoes), fruit. From Deviah I also learned that rajasik food was more than work-oriented. Rajasik food encouraged both valour and passion, and Deviah gave this list:
urad
dal, meat, wine, spices (true brahmins don’t get on with spices). As for tamasik food – which Pravas with apparently brahminical scruple didn’t go into (and about which, fearing the worst, I didn’t press him, not wanting him to go off on this detour) – Deviah said it encouraged sloth. Strangely, though, the tamasik list that Deviah gave seemed quite subtle, with some elements of the rajasik; and some of its vegetables seemed to be light enough for the sattvik diet. This was Deviah’s tamasik list: onion, garlic, cabbage, carrot, aubergine,
potatoes, urad dal, meat. Urad dal and meat were both on the rajasik list.)

Pravas said, The sattvik is mind-oriented. Such people were expected to do what they did because it should be done, and not because you get a reward. Such people did what they did out of an internal motivation. Brahmins were identified with the sattvik tendency. Therefore they couldn’t eat certain foods.

‘The whole thing was ritualized in every way. For example, if your father was alive, you shouldn’t face south when you ate. This wasn’t an all-India prohibition, but it was more than local. So it was a serious matter if the shadow of a lower-caste person fell on your food. If it happened while you were eating, that was that. You stopped eating. The food became impure. And I forgot: nobody should touch you while you were eating, and you had to eat in a certain posture. Some people were so “orthodox”, in inverted commas, they couldn’t even hear the voice of a lower-caste person while they ate. These people ate deep within their houses.’

‘Would they get angry if they had to stop eating because of the shadow or the voice?’

Pravas said with a smile, ‘Brahmins are not supposed to get enraged. They would just stop eating. Rage is not considered a brahminical quality. Though a large number of the brahmins I know, 80 per cent, say, are very short-tempered.

‘So my father moved between these hot and cold rooms, as I’ve called them. It was a perpetual struggle for him. He had to face a lot of questioning when he went back to my grandfather’s. Had he been eating food cooked by non-brahmins? Or wearing the right kind of dress? That was important in those days. My grandfather never wore long trousers; he wore the dhoti. My father wore half and half – dhoti and trousers. But the food business wasn’t a joke for them. In that value system it was sacrilege to break any of the rules.