Everywhere now there are displaced people. Sometimes physically displaced, living and working far away from their roots and family. Sometimes mentally displaced, living amidst the breakdown of their cultural systems, holding a psychic map that does not match the territory they have to live in.
The physical displacement can be challenging but human beings are adaptable that way, we get used to the new physical landscape. The mental displacement on the other hand can be devastating and takes a very long time to heal, if it heals at all.
This brings us to Aatish Taseer's new book, The Twice Born. It is a curious book, raising as many questions as it answers. Aatish spends a good amount of time living in Benaras, India meeting with members of the Brahmin caste who dominate life there.
Displacement is the theme of the book and there are two kinds of displacement covered. One is the displacement experienced by these Brahmins struggling to come to terms with modernity. The other is the displacement experienced by the author himself.
Raised with a British style education in India based on the template left by the old colonial rulers, Aatish migrated to the West as so many Indians raised in this way do. However, even though he has lived in the West for a long time, the connection to India appears to still be there and he still seems to be searching for a place, the British templated education is not enough to provide a place in Britain or America. The heart it seems longs for something else, a place where all the pieces 'fit'.
So Aatish skillfully weaves the story of his displacement with the stories of the Brahmins he encounters. The Brahmins are the priestly caste in India. Small in number, they hold an enormous power in India's hierarchical society. Their values are of asceticism and the intellectual life of the mind. Many schools of Indian thought hold these to be the supreme human values.
This apex position has historically been maintained by reverence and also a complex system of caste hierarchies and rules, with complete social ostracisation and punishment fo breaking the rules. This punishment is applied not just to the offending individual but their family as well, ensuring that breaking the caste taboos is extremely difficult.
To the outsider these taboos will seem strange. For example it is sacrilege for a Brahmin to clean the plate of someone who is not a Brahmin. Their purity will be violated. To restore it many rituals would have to be performed; the lower caste person participating in the violation would be punished with great severity to ensure it did not happen again.
If we look at this from a modern perspective it seems absurd. What is the big deal with washing a plate? If hygiene is of concern, gloves will protect and there is always disinfectant. So why should this be such a terrible taboo?
This is a question Aatish finds himself asking, as he searches for that something special in the old way of living, that special thing that will make all the pieces fit. But even as he is drawn to aspects of the old tradition, he cannot help but be repelled by these other irrational and cruel aspects. That secret then, if it exists, is elusive, and he has to come back to the wasteland of modern living.
Aatish has made the journey that many like him, including this blog writer, have taken. This journey typically goes through some well-worn steps: raised as a bastard child of the British Empire, the subject wants to be Western in all aspects, and treats the native culture of his own land with indifference and/or contempt.
Having made it to the West, there is a honeymoon period, where one has arrived, and the cleanliness, prosperity, intellectual freedom and sexual freedom are heady pleasures. After this life comes back to normal-normal, and there is a slow realization that wherever you go you take yourself with you; that life in the West isn't all ham hocks and home fries, and the people raised in the West have their own set of problems too.
There then arises a sense of missing home and the warmth of old family relations, and the first awareness of displacement, that even though our hero was raised with this as the ideal, it is an alien landscape after all, one that needs to be adjusted to.
Along with that arises guilt at having abandoned the motherland, and a longing to find the authentic India and with it the authentic self.
So there is a return to India to find this authentic voice. After a period of struggle and reaching out to the old India the seeker has to see that the people living the old traditional way have their own set of problems too, they are in the end, just regular human beings.
So wherever we are the problems of life continue. Chastised the protagonist retreats to the safety of the west, with its reason based law and order, open society and distance from the rules and strictures of the old world.
The Brahmins of India are making a very different journey. Their passage is from the traditional to the modern as India adopts new tools and technologies and seeks to enter the modern prosperous world. The old rules are harder to enforce now; if you are eating in a company mess you can't be too fussy about who is washing your plate or whose plate it is your turn to wash.
But the conditioning is still of the old world and so there is tension and confusion. We can feel the agony in one of the characters interviewed in the book. He laments this intermediate state, that is neither fully of the old world nor fully of the new. This lack of a stable, complete map that fits the territory is intolerable. Either they should go completely back to the old or abandon it fully.
In Aatish's effort to find beauty in the old civilization we can also see the effects of the humiliation of worldly defeat that Rian Malan captured so well in his essay on the colonial legacy in South Africa. In our politically correct times it is impossible to say that the colonialists did have many ways that were better than the old culture and that these are ways that we want to keep. This is especially true when the wounds of defeat are so raw.
It is only after a few generations have passed, when the colonized have attained a sufficient social and economic state that the old humiliations can be looked at with dispassion.
So what is the solution? Where do these Brahmins and Aatish go to end their displacement? In the Brahmins' case, there doesn't seem to be any resolution except for a limping on, trying to make the most of this intermediate life.
In Aatish's case we know he has returned to America to resume his life with his husband. Is that enough, is the old world no longer needed now that the investigation is complete? We don't know, perhaps future books will reveal if it is. It is worth noting that so far all of his books have been about the old world, the old world has provided the fertile ground for all of his writing, the new world, not yet.
Can we do without history, roots, biological bounds to tribe, is this actually a fulfilling existence? Can we be anywhere men? It is an idea is very popular in elite global circles these days, that we are now anywhere people, or if are not quite so, at least that is what we should be. We should be people who can live anywhere, mix with anyone, who need only our personal de-racinated, de-culturalized preferences for which we have a plethora of apps to find ways to satisfy.
The French writer Houellebecq has been the master of exposing the dark side of this anywhere man in his novels. In his world, man without a transcendent base is left adrift in the sea of his preferences. The lure of hedonism fades quickly, the sexual marketplace is Darwinian and brutal, mere consumption alone gets old fast and the individual is psychically cutoff and isolated. Houellebecq theorizes that we are now at the end point of the age of Enlightenment. Man cannot live by reason alone and we have reached the limit of what a world based on reason can provide. Our atomization is unbearable and something will have to give.
So these are the competing viewpoints. If it is true that we human beings need the ritual, we need the sacred, we need others who share our sense of the scared to feel whole, then these the Brahmins of India have in spades. However these traditions and rituals are by definition arbitrary, they, by definition, exclude, which is anathema to the devotees of the anywhere man.
All of which raises another question, who is the book written for?
It is most definitely not for the Brahmins whom Aatish meets, who will not read his book. For them the traditions are still too real to do the kind of intellectual analysis of them. The old world is nothing if not complete in its psychic prescription, it does not need the kind of writing Aatish does.
Is it a form of catharsis, for Aatish to come to terms with his own history? We can certainly see some of that.
Is it for people like him, other westernized Indians, getting woke, struggling with the colonial humiliation that Rian Malan wrote of, hoping to better understand their past? We can sense some of that.
Is it for the people of the West, to explain India to them? There is definitely quite a bit of that too.
So that is where we are left at the end of the book - the not fully formed modern psyche looking back at the past with a mix of nostalgia, guilt, humiliation, longing, fear and disdain, being able to look back and analyze but never actually belong to it. And the cracking apart old world psyche struggling to come to terms with the intrusions of the modern world that demand new behaviors and new modes of perceiving. Limp along with all our brokenness, that is what we have to do.
All in all this is an excellent book, well worth the slow read.
P.S. For some great fiction capturing the experience of displacement, we need to look no further than Damon Galgut's In A Strange Room, a masterful collection of short stories of displaced people.