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For
Uma
Khemchand
Clinton
and for
Katherine
○
Incarnators all
INTRODUCTION
India’s history is a curiously unpeopled place. As usually told, it has dynasties, epochs, religions, and castes—but not many individuals. Beyond a few iconic names, most of the important historical figures recede into a haze, both for people outside India and for many Indians themselves. This book is an experiment in dispelling some of the fog by telling India’s story through fifty remarkable lives.
The essays in the book move headlong across twenty-five hundred years of history, from the political and moral preoccupations of India’s earliest historical personality, the Buddha, to the late-twentieth-century capitalist imagination of the industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani. On the way, we meet kings, religious thinkers, freedom fighters, poets, painters, mathematicians, and radical social reformers.
Jawaharlal Nehru famously described this past as a palimpsest, where each successively dominant culture, religion, or group left its traces, never quite effacing what came before it. It is a beautiful image, evocative of the country’s deep civilizational stratigraphy, but I’ve come to think of it as too passive. To me, India’s past is an arena of ferocious contest, its dead heroes continually springing back to life and dispatched to the front lines of equally ferocious contemporary cultural and political battles. So this book is also concerned with the afterlives of historical figures: the often intriguing ways in which they are put to later use by government officials, entrepreneurs, and tribal leaders across the Indian interior, or in physics labs and health clinics, on hip-hop tracks and in yoga studios, across the East and West.
The subcontinent on which these stories unfold is the only place where each of the world’s four great religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) has at different times ruled large areas. Through religious collisions and philosophical and ethical explorations, many of the individuals in this book were part of intense arguments that have been kept going for millennia: about what kind of life is worth living, what kind of society is worth having, which hierarchies are morally legitimate, what role religion has in the political and legal order, and what kind of place India should be.
Such arguments have kept India in a permanent (and, on balance, productive) state of openness about what the country and its people are. A civilization able to produce a Mahavira, a Mirabai, a Malik Ambar, a Periyar, a Muhammad Iqbal, and a Mohandas Gandhi is a place open to radical experiments with self-definition. It is particularly worth recalling that history and creative energy at a moment when some in India seek to transform the ferment of ideas over what India is and should be into a singular religious concoction.
Of course, much about Indian history still remains unknown and disputed, especially for the period before 1000 CE. About the lives of Indian women, apart from a few queens, the records are distressingly sparse right through to the twentieth century. Even now, much of India’s history is endangered: some of who we were and what we’ve done sits in uncatalogued heaps, often in languages few still know. Still, in the past few decades, we’ve made significant advances in our ability to make sense of the Indian past, through developments in archaeology, philosophy, mathematics, art history, and literature. I draw on this important work as I try to track the fifty figures in this book: to see how they navigated the intellectual confluences and the practical constraints of their times, and made choices that changed, in small and large and sometimes unintended ways, the circumstances of the figures who succeeded them.
Many of the essays in the book are driven by arguments, ranging from the nature of power to how to live a healthy life to the conditions of individual liberty. Here’s one argument to start with: that India’s nonfictional past is sufficiently complex, unexpected, and rich in inspiring example that fictionalized heroes are a little redundant. By insisting that figures from India’s past be preserved in memory as saints, above human consideration, we deny them not just their real natures, but also their genuine achievements.
* * *
If you don’t yet know the arresting stories behind some of the names I’ve mentioned (say, Malik Ambar, a gifted seventeenth-century Abyssinian slave turned Deccan warrior king; or others you’ll encounter in this book, such as Chidambaram Pillai, a dogged Tamil nationalist who took on the steamship might of the British Empire), that is perhaps not accidental. Who gets remembered, how history is told, and who gets to tell it are all matters of political dispute in India. Some historical icons are so staunchly defended against scrutiny that libraries whose collections have enabled scholars to write about those icons have been attacked. Books thought insufficiently reverent toward cherished figures are pulped and banned, their authors threatened, silenced, or worse.
As I chased down often-elusive lives in far-flung communities and at archaeological sites, in archives and in texts, I sometimes found an absurd gap between the superhero guises that some figures are forced to don today and the searching, self-critical natures that animated them in their own lifetimes. The impulse to make Indian historical lives exemplary and didactic goes back a long way—right to the Buddha, at least. It’s an ahistorical habit of mind mirrored by those who exalt India’s culture as ineffable and spiritual—something that turns out to go back quite a long way, too.
British imperialists liked to suggest that Indians were indifferent to their history (and inept at independent thinking to boot) because of their attachment to doll-like gods and caste rituals. Indians saw things differently, of course: the colonizers had pillaged the subcontinent’s historical resources with the same voraciousness with which they had plundered the teakwood and tea, unmooring their subjects from their traditions and pasts. Beginning in Bengal after the turn of the twentieth century, successive generations of nationalists struggled to gain control of their own history. And after Independence was won, in 1947, a host of long-suppressed claimants (regions, castes, religious communities) pushed for the primacy of their own favorite leaders within a new Indian pantheon. One of the most predictable acts of newly elected state or national governments was, and is, to rewrite history textbooks to their liking. The country’s current ruling ideology aspires to define India as a Hindu nation, and to endow it with appropriately Hindu antecedents, with the inevitable simplifications that involves.
Despite such a tricky political climate, or maybe because of it, this seemed a crucial moment to explore the Indian past, in search of a little more complexity and nuance. It is often said of India that, given all its tensions, it’s a miracle it holds together. To me, that’s partly explicable, and some answers can be found in the intellectual and cultural capital embodied by the lives I’ve chosen for this book.
One striking feature of India’s history (and one running theme of this book) is how many imaginative struggles have been
waged against what remains a profoundly rigid society. Sometimes—as with the sixteenth-century ruler Krishnadevaraya, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the painter Amrita Sher-Gil—the battle against conformity has been inward and psychological. Sometimes it has been outward, against the social order, frequently assuming the form of an assault on the hierarchies of caste. From the Buddha and Mahavira onward to Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar, we see some of India’s most original minds engaging with this system of social oppression, which has elicited condemnation for almost as long as it has existed, yet has time and again been able to absorb, and even gain a degree of immunity from, such critiques.
While I was working on this book, some other figures whose stories I’d grown up with became more affecting to me than the legends. Crouched alongside pit looms in a neighborhood of Muslim weavers, I better understood the urge of the fifteenth-century poet Kabir to break free and smite the houses of the powerful. Listening to Indian policy makers, I grasped anew the devilish utility of Kautilya, the mysterious political thinker from around the turn of the Common Era, whose ideas about rulership might have offered Stalin a lesson or two. I sensed more clearly the Brahminic rage at Ashoka’s Buddhist-inspired message when, at Sannati, near the excavated Buddhist site of Kanaganahalli, I came across a stone tablet inscribed with his edicts. It had for centuries been turned facedown, its center smashed out and the stone appropriated as an altar in a Hindu temple. I gained fresh appreciation for the military intelligence of the seventeenth-century ruler Shivaji when surveying from one of his forts the arduous landscape he had conquered, and fresh respect, too, for how the twentieth-century diplomat Krishna Menon changed India’s standing in the world despite personal anguish laid bare in intelligence files and private letters. And I encountered the uncanny modern cadences in the poetry of Basava, a twelfth-century social visionary.
* * *
Occasionally, as I traveled around for this project, I overheard kids cheerfully explaining to their friends what I was up to: “He’s telling the story of how India became number one.” Indeed, it’s a habit of national histories to justify the present as the perfect and necessary outcome of what came before. Yet as I pursued the stories that make up this book, my own thinking sometimes veered in the opposite direction: I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present and remind us of future possibilities that are at risk of being closed off.
Meanwhile, though, new possibilities have undeniably opened up. As recently as a few decades ago, what happened in India was often considered peripheral to what used to be called the first world. Those of us who wrote about the country had to make arguments for its relevance to, for instance, the larger story of democracy. Then, as India’s presence in the global economy, and its culture and politics, became more visible, much of the writing about it was driven by perplexity: Where was India going? What did it want?
Today, India, in both its positive and negative aspects, is far less peripheral to discussions about the world at large. Given that, I hope the ideas and arguments embodied by the fifty people featured in this book help complicate not just the stories Indians like to tell themselves, but also those the world tells about us—and about itself. India’s most compelling minds have often been forced to exist in splendid isolation; I’d like to see them restored to their rightful place in the world: as figures engaged with other individuals and ideas across time and borders. In this way, I think readers might better grasp that many concepts the West sees as unique to itself actually have parallels, resonances, and counterarguments in other parts of the globe.
Attempting to tell in fifty lives the history of any nation, let alone one as vast and various as India, is an exercise designed to provoke. But the impossibility of being representative, or all-inclusive, has also given me freedom. I’ve chosen to leave out some familiar names, to allow space to bring in a few others who should be more widely known, a choice with which I think one of the figures I have excluded, Nehru, would have agreed.
In this happily partial exercise, one of my criteria for inclusion was the light that old lives might shed on urgent issues of the present. So, nearly all the lives in this book illuminate, in some way or another, pressing contemporary questions: about the position of women in society, about the nature of love and sexual choice, about cults of personal political power, about claims to water and land, about racial prejudice, about economic inequality, and even about the mechanics of the universe. Yet I also hope that readers will argue strenuously about the fifty names I’ve chosen—to dispute those who have been left out and to make alternative selections.
For that’s how I see Incarnations in the end: as an open invitation to a different kind of conversation about India’s past, and its future. Among my hopes is that, after finishing the last of these fifty portraits, a reader might share at least some of what I’ve come to feel strongly: that India’s capacity to change itself, and to challenge its own dogmas (and sometimes those of the wider world), is not just a historical relic. It’s a still-available capacity, one more necessary than ever.
1
THE BUDDHA
Waking India Up
Fifth century BCE
The sun has slipped behind the tarpaulin roofs of a Mumbai slum. Day laborers are streaming home from ten-hour shifts working on construction sites or tending the gardens of nearby private schools. In this particular web of slum lanes, many workers are Dalit, the untouchables of old—a status so low they were not even part of the caste order. Most months, their financial situation boils down to what people around here call “earn and eat.” But for two years, some of these families set aside what little they could for bricks and mortar, and now they have a deep-blue room, five meters a side, that stands distinct from all the other hand-built homes in the slum.
A temple devoted to the Buddha—many slums in urban India have one. This particular place of worship is tucked behind a scrap shop. In the West, the Buddha is often seen as an extinguisher of his own personality, the original Impersonal Man. Indeed, after attaining his enlightenment, it is said that he referred to himself as tathagata, “gone.” In modern India, though, his legacy has helped hundreds of millions of low-caste citizens become newly present, allowing them to emerge from the Hindu caste system’s iron cage. He is far more surprising, it turns out, than the conventional image—or the one of a placid sage sitting in the lotus position, half smiling—lets on. Although many aspects of the Buddha’s life remain elusive, he is perhaps the first individual personality we can recognize in the subcontinent’s history.
Fifteen-year-old Vijay watched his father lay bricks for the little blue temple. “Buddha had no caste, so I have no caste,” he says. “It’s better this way.” His older brother Siddhartha chimes in: “Buddha was for equality.”
Siddhartha is one of a dozen boys in the slum who were named after the Buddha, a man born Siddhartha Gautama near the foothills of Nepal’s southern border with India, probably in the fifth century BCE. In his lifetime, the Buddha created a spiritual philosophy that has rightly been called one of the turning points in the history of civilization. Less known, but perhaps equally important, were his rational challenges to reigning beliefs about caste and religious authority. Some scholars see him as a social subversive, some as a wry critic of self-important merchants, priests, and kings. To others, he was primarily a philosophical, and even political, experimentalist, one who explored new ways of organizing and conducting human life.
The religion that began with his experiments eventually spread throughout Asia, from the western edges of Afghanistan to Japan, gradually becoming what it is now: the fourth largest in the world. But in India it flourished for a millennium, and then all but disappeared, for reasons that are still mysterious. Only in the mid-twentieth century, as British colonial rule gave way to an independent India, was the Indian Buddha revived in the place of his birth, dusted off and reclaimed for his political utility as much as for his ethics. To several of the fathers of the moder
n nation, the Buddha provided a rational faith that could be weaponized against the hierarchies that still warp Indian society. Today, the Buddha continues to inspire people such as Siddhartha and Vijay in their struggles to assert their own individualities.
* * *
Evidence for civilization on the Indian subcontinent dates back to at least 2500 BCE, when city settlements began to develop in the Indus Valley, in today’s Pakistan. From these sites, archaeologists have excavated many objects, but the script of this civilization remains unintelligible to us—if it is a script at all. The composition of the earliest Vedas, the oldest sources of Hindu thought, seems to have begun roughly a millennium later. Beyond these hymns to the gods, though, we have no physical evidence of this world; and neither from the Indus Valley sites nor in the Vedas can we feel the pulse of any historical individuals. It’s only a thousand or more years after the Vedas were composed, with the arrival of the Buddha, that real personalities appear to us on the stage of Indian history.
Even before it began to be written down, the story of the Buddha was given permanence in painting and sculpture. In the oldest of the caves at Ajanta, in western India, are probably the earliest-surviving representations of the Buddha’s life: vivid frescoes, some of which date back to the first century BCE. “There, in front of you, are the oldest Indian faces in existence,” the writer and historian William Dalrymple says. “They inhabited a world incredibly different from ours. Yet you can look into the eyes of these people, of individuals, and their emotions are immediately recognizable.”
Although scholars still debate the Buddha’s exact dates, with an elastic range for his death that stretches from roughly 500 to 400 BCE, it’s clear he lived in an era of remarkable invention worldwide. Within the space of a couple of centuries, Confucius articulated his social philosophy in China, written versions of the Old Testament crystallized in Palestine, and Socrates conducted the dialogues that would lay many of the foundations of Western philosophy. On the Gangetic Plains of northern India, iron tools, writing, and coinage were producing and circulating new wealth. Trade contacts with Persia and western Asia were creating cosmopolitan cities, bustling with commerce and competing ideas about how to live a good life. Many of the forms of Hinduism familiar to Indians today, as well as many conflicting worldviews, also took shape in this period.