Ananta, Aurangabad, Khuldabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bishnupur.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784. For pictures, see greatmirror.com.
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Ananta, Aurangabad, Khuldabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bishnupur.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784. For pictures, see greatmirror.com.
For photos, see greatmirror.com
1.Ajanta
Some visitors to India return home and say they loved it. Others say they hated it, and still others, like me, straddle the fence. I hate India for the way it treats lower castes, Muslims, widows, servants, and—not to be overlooked—animals, but I love India because it contains everything.
I mean this in two ways. The first is that I returned to Washington, D.C., in 1982 from eight months around Hyderabad. I’d always thought that Washington’s uniformly truncated downtown office buildings were ugly, but now I became aware that the sidewalks were empty and colorless. If you wanted animation, you had to wait for the ludicrous parade of some VIP in a limo with escorts and sirens. You didn’t have to wait long.
But when I say that India contains everything I also mean that most countries are preoccupied with the future. Not India. It rushes forward with tremendous energy but remains saturated by ancient belief. That’s what makes all those cartoons of a guru on a Himalayan crag funny. He’s really there, and not just on a rock in the mountains.
I have a question for the guru. When I was a boy, people worried whether humanity could avoid exterminating itself with A-bombs or, a few years later, with H-bombs, which were apparently much better. In elementary school we regularly pulled the classroom shades and crouched under our desks. My only complaint was that my shiny dog tag had a blank space where it was supposed to show my blood type. The risk of nuclear annihilation hasn’t gone away, but in the 1960s it was shoved off the front page, in the United States at least, by people demanding their civil rights. That demand hasn’t gone away, either, but in the 1970s it had to make room, like nuclear Armageddon, for worries about population growth, environmental pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. Today’s crisis is climate change, which gives me pause because I remember when scientists worried about a new Ice Age. Then there’s the treacherous self-immolation of democracies around the world, at which point I turn up and overload the agenda by suggesting that we are trapping ourselves in a world in which we do not fit.
But we have trapped ourselves, and we have done it in the name of progress. I’m not saying that billions of poor people shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of progress, but we have not reckoned with its cost. Sir Francis Bacon seems not to have worried about this when, in the Novum Organum (1620), he urged us to learn the secrets of nature so we could command it. René Descartes assured us in his Second Meditation (1641) that, because mind and matter are separate, whatever we do to the material world has no effect on res cogitans, the “thinking thing,” which is to say, our conscious selves. In 1900, the historian Henry Adams came to the opposite conclusion. Looking at a giant electrical generator displayed at the Paris World’s Fair, Adams anticipated “the annihilation of all human values.”
That phrase comes not from Adams himself but from the late Lynn White, a historian of the Middle Ages who, writing about Adams, takes issue with him and argues that we should see technology as “a chapter in the conquest of freedom.” I think White is correct with respect to medieval technology, but there’s a big difference between a groaning waterwheel and a silently spinning dynamo. One we understand intuitively; the other we do not. For that reason, I’m with Adams.
I’ll pick just one of the consequences of our living in a world in which we do not fit. Listen to Franklin Roosevelt speaking, and you’ll notice that his sentences are much longer and more complex that the sentences spoken by politicians today. For this, it’s easy to blame schools sliding into illiteracy. We can also comfort ourselves with the thought that the speed of modern life demands brevity. A third possibility is that language is superfluous in a society dominated by mathematics, but I incline to the still gloomier hypothesis that cattle in the wild aren’t dumb until pens make them so. Ditto us. In our technological bubble, we perceive only the surface of things. In practice this often means reducing the value of everything to its price—in the extreme but pathetically typical case reducing the value of human beings to their net worth. I remember as a teenager saying that somebody had to be smart because he had made lots of money. An adult corrected me and said that the person I was praising was only smart at making money. Does that make sense? Does the guru on his crag have another kind of intelligence?
I have another question, too. If I deplore the loss of environmental freedom, and if I ask the guru for guidance, will he suggest an international conference? A multi-faceted, interdisciplinary program? An integrated package of policy proposals? It would be funny if he did: I’d have found a guru with a sense of humor. More likely, he’ll ask me, in four words, what I want. It sounds laughably simpleminded, but I think the guru is giving me the task of a lifetime. He’s asking me to escape the deluge of messages that over the decades have taught me what people want and what I want. The messaging rain that used to come from newspapers and television was powerful enough that I recall jingles and images from ads that I haven’t seen or heard in seventy years, but the advertising of that era is small beer compared to our digital ocean. And now guru says, obliquely, that the stuff I’ve been told I want isn’t what I really want. Of course he wouldn’t dream of telling me what that is.
Which brings me back to India, the best place for answers to the guru’s question. Over the years I’ve managed to see India’s big attractions: the Taj and Fatehpur Sikri, Khajuraho, Konark, Hampi, Mamallapuram, and so on. I’ve seen less visited places, too: the Dandeshwara Temple near Almora, Ramappa near Warangal, and the Badami caves east of Belgaum. I’ve gone out of my way for temples that few Indians visit, places like the Kalla-Gudi Temple in Devgaon, between Belgaum and Dharwad. Get to some of these lesser-known places and you’ll have them to yourself, maybe along with a holy man who’s ignoring you. I remember one old man dressed in rags and sitting by himself in the otherwise deserted ruins of Kalinjar, a fortress a hundred miles south of Kanpur. His only companion was a giant rock-cut image of Kali, dancing with skulls tied to her belt. I wasn’t afraid of her, though I sometimes wonder if I should be.
I’d seen Ellora, too, but had missed the Ajanta Caves, even though they’re only fifty miles north of it. My excuse—it’s an exceptionally good excuse in India—is that fifty miles isn’t always fifty miles. By the time I got to Ajanta, in 2019, it had a parking lot with cars to one side and buses to another. Visitors made their way from the lot through a gauntlet of tourist shops that you might find in a fantastically decrepit airport terminal. Surviving the maze, the visitors boarded one of the rattletrap shuttle buses that every few minutes took groups of people a couple of miles to a ticket office and restaurant. From there, the visitors either walked to the caves or paid to be carried on a doli, a chair lashed onto two poles resting on the shoulders of four men.
I avoided the crowd by starting a couple of miles away, at a deserted lookout at the top of a precipitous canyon. Hundreds of concrete stairs led down from here about five hundred feet to a foot bridge across the Waghura River. (That’s Waghura as in wagha, “tiger” in Marathi.) The river here makes a hundred-and-eighty-degree curve and is deeply entrenched though many layers of the flood basalt that sixty million years ago buried an area of India larger that California. One of the basalt layers is perhaps fifty feet thick. Long ago, wealthy Buddhists hoping for a pleasant next life paid workmen to excavate in this layer more than thirty caves as monastic retreats for use during the monsoon.
Coming down the steps, I could see the entrances to all of them. From the apex of the meander, the caves extended perhaps three hundred yards upstream, to the left, and a hundred and fifty yards downstream. The shuttle buses stopped another hundred yards downstream, out of sight. Knowing that I’d return the following day, I came down the stairs and did a run-through of the twenty caves open to the public, first those to the left, then those to the right.
About a thousand people visit Ajanta on a slow day, and, because the buses bring them in groups, they flow through the caves like rush hour traffic at a subway station, full of people one moment, empty the next. To shut out the chatter, I used headphones, which helped a bit. Sometimes the pianist I was listening to would pause and someone in his audience would cough. In a crowded cave, I didn’t notice, but when the cave was empty, I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder.
Five of the caves are two thousand years old; the rest are five centuries newer. This age distinction is important, because the early caves served Theravada Buddhists, which is to say Buddhists for whom the Buddha was a man, not a god. The result is that there are no images of the Buddha in these caves unless someone came along later and added one. The later caves, on the other hand, served Mahayana Buddhists who, believing the Buddha to be divine, seem to have thought that the more images of the Buddha they had, the better. I much prefer the early caves, but what do I know? I can hardly use the word “aniconic” in a sentence.
All but four of the caves are viharas, or dormitories. Whether Theravada or Mahayana, the floorplans are square and thirty to fifty feet on a side. The ceilings are low—just out of reach—and flat, suggesting to anyone with claustrophobia the upper plate of a huge bookbinding press. Cells have been excavated in the peripheral walls as rooms for the monks. The cells are hardly larger than closets and are bare except for one or two benches carved out of the rock for a monk to sit or lie upon while meditating or sleeping. Light came from lamps fueled with butter.
The Mahayana dormitories, unlike the Theravada ones, doubled as temples, so in addition to the peripheral cells they have a shrine in the center of the back wall. Not much larger than the monks’ cells, the shrine contains a larger-than-life statue of the Buddha in the teaching position, with his right elbow at his side and with the palm of that arm facing outward with the tips of his thumb and forefinger joined to form a circle. Although the rock is strong enough that the caves don’t need internal support, the Mahayana dormitories also have a peristyle of floor-to-ceiling columns left in the bedrock.
All the dormitories, whether Theravada or Mahayana, were made by excavating a tunnel, then excavating branches perpendicular to the tunnel on both sides of it, then removing the rock between the branches. Four caves, however, were excavated by starting at a higher level and working not only to the sides but down. The openings to these caves are not horizontal slits in the cliff face but are instead higher than they are wide, and they lead into a church-like space with a barrel-vaulted roof that allows light to reach about fifty feet to the back of the cave. Two rows of structurally superfluous columns support the vault.
These four high-roofed caves are chaityas, or prayer halls, and they have room for perhaps a hundred devotees in front of a hemispherical stupa, in theory a reliquary monument of the Buddha. The stupas in the two Theravada prayer halls consist mostly of a truncated egg, or anda, resting on a cylindrical base. I would have liked to walk around them, but the Archaeological Survey of India has erected wooden barriers. Monks are allowed to cross, and I saw several sitting in front of the barriers and chanting from texts on the screens of cell phones exceptionally bright in the dim light. A guard made sure I didn’t join them. Ajanta has dozens of these guards, employees of a private security firm, and I couldn’t help wishing that somebody would go crazy just to give the guards something to do. No luck. Another sleepy day at a World Heritage site.
In contrast, the two Mahayana prayer halls are carnivals of ornament. Their stupas still consist of egg and base but have large, forward-facing statues of the Buddha, in one case standing and in the other sitting. The columns, capitals, and entablatures of these later halls are covered with dozens of images of the Buddha, some large, some small. The only undecorated surface in these later prayer halls, other than the floor, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and it’s plain only because over the centuries it has lost the wood sheathing that originally lined it. (About two hundred miles to the southwest, between Mumbai and Pune, there are similar caves at Lonavala that, astonishingly, retain their ancient sheathing.)
Most visitors, drawn to spectacle, seem to prefer the later prayer halls, but I consider them a distraction from the Buddha’s fundamental message. The classic statement of that message—that desire leads to suffering—is tremendously pessimistic, and I prefer inverting it to this: instead of seeking a thousand pleasures, then a thousand more, and then coming to regret that there is no time for a third thousand, focus on the pleasure I felt while patting a sandstone whale in the middle of Australia. If there’s anything to what I’m saying, Buddhist monks are happier than they look, because they have found what they really want.
There were no monks in the caves when the first Europeans arrived. That was in 1819, exactly two hundred years before my visit. Some British officers were on a tiger hunt, and local villagers took them to the larger of the two Theravada prayer halls and to at least one of the dormitories. Abandoned for over a thousand years, the cave entrances were choked with vegetation and piles of rock that had fallen from the cliffs overhead.
None of the officers seem to have written about the visit, but two years later one William Erskine read a paper to the Bombay Literary Society in which he referred to the caves as “newly discovered.” He continued: “very extensive excavations have recently been discovered both at the top and bottom on the Ajunta-pass. They have been little visited, on account of the difficulty of approaching them.” Erskine quotes a Captain Morgan writing that the caves “were described by the officers who visited them in 1819 as having sitting figures with curled wigs. No traces of the Brahminical religion were discovered. The paintings were in a decent state of preservation.”
One of the officers scratched his name on a prayer-hall column, along with the date, April 28, 1819, and his unit, the 28th Cavalry of the Madras Presidency. I looked around without success, so I caught the attention of a guide and diverted him for a moment from his group. Without hesitation, he shone his flashlight at a spot about seven feet above the floor, too high to reach without a ladder. The name was there in a line so fine it seemed to have been scribed with a nail. There it was, plainer than plain: Captain John Smith.
In 1824, a 21-year-old Lieutenant James Edward Alexander came by. Back at Sandhurst, he recalled the beehives hanging from the cave roofs. He also remembered “the fetid smell… from numerous bats (Verpertilio noctula) which flew about our faces” and “rendered a continuance inside, for any length of time, very disagreeable.” The bats are gone now, as are the bees.
Bees and bats weren’t the only problems. A soldier who was stationed nearby warned Alexander that “you will never return: for if you escape the tigers, these stony-hearted robbers, the Bheels, will destroy you.” Alexander, who travelled dressed as a Muslim and who was accompanied only by servants and a guide, did run into Bheels, a group whose name is now usually spelled Bhils. He wrote that his guns scared them off. (The Indian census of 2011 counted sixteen million Bhils, mostly in this part of India. They are officially classified as a “scheduled tribe,” outside the Hindu mainstream.)
Despite the bees, bats, and Bhils, Alexander wrote that he “was highly delighted with my excursion; and although many are the caverned temples which I have explored, and many which I wish to revisit, yet to none would I sooner return than to those of Adjunta.” Alexander lived another sixty-five years, but it seems he never returned to Ajanta. He was the leading force behind the transfer of a pharaonic obelisk from Egypt to London, where, as Cleopatra’s Needle, it still famously overlooks the Thames.
Alexander wrote of the Ajanta caves that “the pillars themselves are quite plain. Many of them are broken off, and have fallen on the floor.” Since then, they’ve been reassembled by the Archaeological Survey of India, which has worked at Ajanta since the mid-nineteenth century. The work has been done so skillfully that I wouldn’t have noticed the repairs if I hadn’t read about them. It may well be Captain John Smith scratched his name on a chunk of column lying on the cave floor.
The Archaeological Survey changed the way visitors approached Ajanta, too. The historic path was the way I had first used: down the slope facing the caves and then across the Waghora River at the neck of its curve, then up a short flight of stairs bookended by a pair of facing and kneeling elephants, almost life-sized and carved from the cliff. The dormitory cave at the top of the stairs was the first to be excavated, and it became the model. The farther the cave from that initial point, the newer. Then the Survey came along and numbered the caves starting downstream and working up. The logic was that visitors were now mostly coming from a road built downstream, but it’s confusing because the first cave visitors now saw, Cave Number One, was the last cave built, while the earliest caves built, near the stone elephants and midway in the set, are those numbered from Nine to Thirteen.
Cave One had hardly been completed before the entire site was abandoned. Walter Spink, an American scholar whose seven-volume study of Ajanta is unlikely to be superseded for a long time, writes that “after 480, not a single image was ever made again at the site.” He continues with telegraphic brevity: “Situation worsens. Craftsmen leave. Some monks remain for a few years. No donations at site ever again.” The Vakataka Empire, renowned for its support of the arts, had collapsed, and King Harishena (or Harisena), who had been a major sponsor of the later caves, was succeeded by kings whose names are unknown.
Cave One has a veranda with what Spink calls “loving couples.” King Harishena had sponsored the cave and, as Spink says, exercised “the prerogatives of kingship” to decorate it as he liked. The result was that “loving couples seem to proliferate, apparently quite innocent of the use of the cave as a monastic residence.” It’s less easy to understand why similar images decorate the entrance to Cave Twenty-Four, which was one of several later caves sponsored by a monk named Buddhabhadra.
Other sculptures at Ajanta are more in keeping with Buddhist teaching. Cave Twenty-Six, for example, one of the two later prayer halls, has a wall carving showing Mara, a notorious Buddhist demon. He rides an elephant straight at the Buddha and attacks not with spears but with beautiful women. It’s no use. The Buddha touches the earth with the fingertips of his right hand. It’s the iconic sign of his enlightenment.
Cave Seventeen has another warning about women. It’s in a painting now almost faded beyond recognition. This is a problem for all the Ajanta paintings, which once were arguably the glory of the caves. As early as 1879, James Burgess, head of the Archaeological Survey, wrote that “unfortunately the damp, bats, native and other ignorant visitors have wrought sad ravages among these pictures.” Several contemporaries of Burgess undertook the huge task of copying the paintings, but, as if cursed, almost all the copies have been destroyed, some in the fire that levelled London’s Crystal Palace, some in a fire at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and some in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake.
The painting I’m thinking about depicts a cannibalistic variant of Ulysses and Circe. Shipwrecked, Simhala and his crew are washed ashore on an island inhabited with irresistibly attractive women who want husbands. The men settle down and raise families. All seems perfect until—but of course—Simhala explores the far side of the island and finds an iron tower holding the previous batch of shipwrecked sailors-turned-husbands. They tell Simhala that the women are man-eaters and that the tower is a holding pen. As soon as the next unfortunates wash up, Simhala’s crew will be locked into the iron tower while they, the present occupants, will be eaten. Simhala hurries to the other side of the island and tells his crew what he’s learned, but the alluring man-eaters seduce their foolish husbands yet again. Simhala alone escapes to tell the tale.
It’s a great story, but it’s hard for religions to endure on a diet of misogyny and abstinence. Another painting in Cave Seventeen comes to the rescue with the Chaddanta or Chhadanta jataka, one of hundreds of stories of the Buddha’s earlier lives. In this one he is an elephant king with six tusks. He has two wives, one of whom becomes jealous and decides to kill her husband. She becomes a human queen and tells a hunter to bring her the tusks of the elephant king. The hunter fails to kill the elephant, but the Buddha pities him, cuts off his own tusks, gives them to the hunter, then dies in agony. The standard English version, published about 1900, concludes by saying that “at the remembrance of the Great Being she was filled with so great sorrow that she could not endure it, but her heart then and there was broken and that very day she died.” That sentence is hard to top. The queen dies because she realizes that she has killed what she really wants.
Part 2. Mumbai and Kolkata
My trusty Traveller’s Companion, published by the Railway Board of India in 1911, says that the Ajanta caves are thirty-eight miles from the nearest railway station and “well worthy of a visit.” Rereading the instructions—“pony chhukras and bullock carts can be obtained….”—I’m embarrassed to think how much I complained about the road from Aurangabad north sixty miles to the caves. It was being rebuilt and seemed to be all washboards and cobbles.
I was staying in Aurangabad, a name that translates as “the city of Aurangzeb.” He, Aurangzeb, was the last of the great Mughals, men famous for building some of the world’s grandest tombs—most famously the Taj Mahal—and Aurangzeb himself ruled India for almost fifty years at the height of Mughal power, yet he ordered that he be buried in an unmarked patch of bare ground next to the man he called his teacher. The grave is at Khuldabad, about fifteen miles northwest of Aurangabad, and it’s so plain that it distressed Lord Curzon. Punctilious about the deference due to India’s ruler, Curzon, who was viceroy at the time, asked the local prince, the Nizam of Hyderabad, to enclose the grave with a set of perforated marble screens, jalis. They’re still there. Aurangzeb doesn’t object, and neither do the pious Muslims who come by to offer a prayer. A blind attendant was reciting a text for them when I arrived. I didn’t say anything, but someone must have told him he had a foreigner because he switched to English and stopped only to ask, “Do you understand?” I said I did, but I was actually thinking about the letters that Aurangzeb in his late eighties wrote to his sons. About a century later, Warren Hastings of the East India Company obtained a translation from the Persian. Here’s an extract, published in 1786: “I came a stranger into this world, and a stranger I depart. I know nothing of myself, what I am, and for what I am destined.”
Who would have thought that the last of the great Mughals had existentialist moments? I don’t know if Aurangzeb knew the jataka of the six-tusked elephant, but I am sure the dying emperor would have batted me away if I had asked him to join me on a quick visit to Aurangabad’s Prozone Mall. When it opened in 2010, it was India’s biggest shopping center. The presence in the mall of a Fiat and Jeep showroom was a bit odd, but otherwise the place was familiar, with two floors on a square plan. There was an H&M from Sweden and a Marks & Spencer from England. Stores advertised Crocs, Batas, Adidas, and Levis. Posters said, “Life begins here.” I could tell Aurangzeb that the Prozone Mall is part of an economic and cultural change bigger than the Muslim invasions, bigger than the Pax Britannica, bigger than Independence. Those events barely changed the lives of most Indians, while the dream of the Prozone Life has changed the life of almost every Indian.
I imagine Aurangzeb turning away in disgust. So, too, the Buddha. So, of course, Gandhi. Not that their opinions matter much anymore. I’m reminded of a fortune teller who years ago came into a Delhi coffee shop one morning about four o’clock. There were no other customers, and so he read the waiters’ palms. He asked if I’d like him to read mine, but superstitiously I declined. I later asked one of the waiters what he had learned. “He said I will be prosperous, sir.” “Do you believe him?” I asked. “Not at all, sir. He is just for entertainment. I make my own future.” So much for the mystic East.
I flew to Mumbai, whose new and very flash airport signals India’s rush to the Prozone Life. The next morning I rented a bicycle. This wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounds even to me and rode south maybe two miles to the tip of Colaba. This is the southernmost point on the chain of islands that were gradually linked by the British to form the peninsula that is the historic center of Mumbai.
The northern half of Colaba is intensely crowded, but, once under the road-spanning sign that reads “Welcome to Colaba Military Station,” the view is mostly of walls and guarded entrances. Maybe someday the Indian military will concede that such locations have lost their strategic value, but I won’t hold my breath. Part of the reason for my skepticism is that almost at the tip of the peninsula there’s a waterfront club for military personnel. It’s reputedly very nice and certainly very off-limits. I couldn’t even peek inside to look for drinks served on relic salvers from the Raj.
Who carried the salvers? I think I know the answer, because as I cased out the premises I passed a tiny patch of non-military buildings behind a broken down stone wall. These informal houses were of brick, two stories under corrugated-metal roofs. They shared common walls, but each was painted in a different color: white, grey, blue, and shades of yellow. Colorful clothing had been hung to dry along the eaves. The men who lived here, I submit, worked at the military club. The dusty forecourt was occupied this morning with women, kids, and plastic tubs stacked up next to potted plants. Satellite dishes were bolted onto the roofs. The people using them knew about the Prozone Life.
The main tourist attraction in Colaba is the Afghan Church, built mostly to recall the loss of forty-five hundred British troops in the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842. An inscription in the apse recalls those “who fell, mindful of their duty, by sickness and by the sword in the campaigns of Sind and Afghanistan, A.D. 1838-1843.” An inscription at the other end of the church recalls the Second Afghan War, which ended in 1880 with a better result for the British government but not for the officers whose names are recorded on the wall—or for the enlisted men whose names are not.
There were no other visitors at the church, which is a little odd because a mile and a half to the north there are crowds throughout the day at the Gateway of India. You’d think this gimcrack imitation of a Roman triumphal arch would have been torn down as a hated symbol of Britain’s King-Emperor, but no, the arch, built about 1920 of concrete with a stone veneer, is famous for being famous. It’s Mumbai’s biggest celebrity. For proof, I point around the corner, where there’s a Starbucks.
There’s another Starbucks about a kilometer to the north at Horniman Circle, a small but popular public garden. Four identical office buildings from the 1860s wrap Horniman Circle. Each building is divided by a narrow passage into halves. Each half has three main floors, set back behind arcades. The arches on the ground floor are heavily rusticated; those above have the same dimensions but are smoother. The keystones on the ground-floor arches carry bosses with identical heads—Neptune, perhaps--complete with shaggy beards, caps that look like leafy salads, and brow ridges like Neanderthals. One floor higher, the keystones have identical female heads with impossibly sad expressions, as though fresh off the guillotine. The arcades at the ground level provide shade for pedestrians. On the upper floors they were designed to provide a space for workers to step outside for a bit of air. There’s a fourth floor, too, but its porch lacks the arcade and instead has a simple roof of corrugated metal sheets supported on iron poles.
I’m describing the buildings as they appear in a photograph from the 1870s. The photograph also shows Horniman Circle looking like a forest. The wide street circling the garden is completely deserted, except for one horse, a carriage, and a groom, or syce. A picture I took of the buildings about 1990 shows the ground-floor arcades plastered with signboards. The biggest is a Coca-Cola sign, and there’s an assortment of smaller signs for copy shops and industrial V-belts. It’s visual cacophony—no patch of wall left bare—and the arcades on the upper floors have all been enclosed to create more office space. Some shutters in the enclosed arcades are open, some are closed, and some are blocked by window-unit air conditioners. The buildings are badly stained by the weather, weeds are growing out of cracks in the façade, and the sidewalk has become a parking lot, with pedestrians forced into the street.
Thirty years later, in 2019, the invasive plants were gone. So was the stain. So were the window-unit air conditioners, except at the top floor. The tenants had changed, too. Hermés and Louboutin, purveyors of the Prozone Life, had shops on the ground floor. Upstairs now belonged to big institutional tenants including the State Bank of India. The traffic on the street was worse than ever.
Starbucks is just west of Horniman Circle. It’s in the Elphinstone Building, designed in Venetian Gothic, with interlaced arches. (The architect was Rienzi Giesman Walton—his name a splendid example of multiculturalism. Walton also designed the garden at Horniman Circle.) I sneaked past the guards and nonchalantly climbed to the fourth floor in hopes of a view from the top. No luck: all the arcades had been converted to office space up here, too.
The Elphinstone Building’s owner is Tata, the Indian conglomerate, and it was here, on the ground floor, that Tata in 2012 began its India-wide partnership with Starbucks. Howard Schulz, then the CEO of Starbucks, came to the store’s grand opening and called it “perhaps the most elegant, beautiful, dynamic store we’ve opened in our history.” His remarks were distributed globally and appeared on CBS news in the United States. They appeared in the UK’s Telegraph and in the small but loyal Times Colonist in Victoria, British Columbia. Certainly this Starbucks was big, and the designers were smart enough to emphasize the elephantine timbers supporting the building’s upper floors.
Tours of Mumbai always include the city’s tremendous Gothic heaps, chiefly the railway station and the clock tower of Bombay University. (Like the Bombay Stock Exchange, the university has kept its old name). There are other heaps on the tour, almost all built during or soon after the American Civil War, which was the best war ever for the Indian cotton industry. Most of the buildings were built by British architects living in India, but the eminent and prolific George Gilbert Scott found time, without ever leaving London, to design Bombay University’s famous clock tower and library.
Guidebooks are less likely to point out the building on MG Road that in the late nineteenth century was Bombay’s best hotel. If I give you the address and you track it down, you’ll think I made a mistake, because Watson’s has lost its name. It’s no longer a hotel, and is somewhere between a shambles and a ruin. The industrialist Jamshedjee Tata—the same Tata whose descendants signed the partnership bringing Starbucks to India—is said to have been denied a room at Watson’s on returning from a trip to England. As retribution he is said to have built the far grander Taj Mahal hotel half a mile away. I visited the Taj on India’s Republic Day in 2019 and found the lobby awash with handsome couples in suits and saris fit for a fashion show. The few foreigners in the lobby were letting down the side by wearing T-shirts and cargo pants.
There were no elegant suits and saris at the former Watson’s, now called Esplanade Mansion. The hotel had been built in a hurry in the 1860s with prefabricated ironwork sent from England. It had never been more than an iron-framed box, four stories above the ground floor, with exposed iron balconies and naked beams creating a sidewalk colonnade. The hotel closed in the 1960s, and the building was converted to lower-floor offices and upper-floor apartments. The building’s owner continued to live in it, but rent-control laws dissuaded him from spending money on maintenance, and tenants refused to let the city do repairs despite the building’s official designation as an endangered monument. Back in the 1990s there were signs pointing to high-court advocates in Chamber 137 and Cabin No. 23. Other signs pointed to the Maharashtra Council of Indian Medicine, to accountants, estate agents, and sales agents for mysterious products. There was an electrical switchboard with dozens of meters and a jungle of wires. Thirty years later, in 2019, it was still there, and the place hadn’t burned down.
All of which brings me back to the four buildings on Horniman Circle, because they, like Watson’s, show both the best and the worst of the British in India. The best, because a set of four identical office buildings can be built faster and cheaper than four different buildings. True, the Horniman Circle buildings were not built as cheaply as Watson’s: nobody really needs keystones with Greek gods. Still, the Horniman Circle quartet, like Watson’s, embodies the practical rationality that gave India its telegraph lines, railways, and post office. The same devotion to efficiency gave India universities, research institutes, and scientific accomplishments such as the discovery that the Anopheles mosquito is the malaria vector. Near Hyderabad there used to be an old park bench honoring Ronald Ross, who figured that one out. “A very great man,” I recall it saying. It was only a few miles from one of India’s nuclear-research organizations.
Yet rationality implies lines, ranks, rows, grids. We’re back to the standards and rules for Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s twin deities, Comfort and Respectability. Look at the four buildings at Horniman Circle and tell me they aren’t as boring as those at Glasgow’s Park Circus. When I went inside the Elphinstone Building—the one with Starbucks—I found that the main staircase opened on a square airshaft. It wasn’t big enough to be called a courtyard, but it was big enough for a peripheral walkway on each floor, with corridors leading to various offices. The space was spick-and-span and freshly painted in cream and a green like the flesh of an avocado or of a hospital corridor that makes you queasy.
Thinking of that airshaft and the busy offices around it reminds me of Gustav Mahler on his death bed. His last words are reported to have been, “So many notes.” Mahler might have meant that there were another ten symphonies on the way, but I doubt it. I think he was echoing that most famous phrase from Ecclesiastes. So many notes; so many bundles of office files wrapped up in red tape; so many ways to waste time and so little time to figure out what we really want.
I flew on to Calcutta. As late as 1962, Pan American World Airways described Calcutta as “the commercial metropolis of modern India,” but the airline had already dropped the city from its network. British Air, which continued flying to the city longer than any other European airline, gave up in 2009. A local travel agent called that event “a disaster for aviation in the east.” In 2019, you could fly out of Mumbai on BA, KLM, Lufthansa, Swiss, United, and Delta.. None of them went to Calcutta.
Struggling to stay afloat, the leaders of West Bengal decided to change some place names. So Calcutta became Kolkata while Dalhousie Square, named for the man who had brought the telegraph and railways to India, became BBD Bagh. The three letters come from the three men—Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta, and Dinesh Gupta—who in 1930 assassinated Norman Simpson, a medical doctor serving as Bengal’s inspector-general of prisons. He was working in his office in the Writers’ Building, the nerve center of the Bengal government and still today overlooking the square. One of Simpson’s killers died on the spot; the second was wounded and died in hospital; the third was hanged the next year. The judge who sentenced that third assassin was himself assassinated in his own courtroom, and his assassin was shot dead on the spot.
Trees make it impossible to get a picture of the entire façade of the Writers’ Building. (You can’t just stroll inside, either, but where can you do that anywhere nowadays?) The cornice carries an assortment of sculptures badly stained by the weather. One is a woman identified as Justice. She sits on a throne and is flanked by two men, one English and the other Indian. Implacable, she seems unaware that her left hand has fallen off.
Nearby, there’s the High Court, a fine example of Victorian Gothic architecture. There’s Metcalfe Hall, more or less copied from the Erechtheion, next to the Parthenon. There’s Raj Bhavan or Government House, once the home of the East India Company’s governor-general and later the home of the viceroys until the British moved their capital to New Delhi. It’s a modified version of Kedleston Hall, the ancestral home of the Curzon family, and I suppose it amused George Curzon to find that he knew his way around even before he stepped inside.
All these buildings are outgunned bys the Victoria Memorial, opened twenty years after Victoria’s death. Built on a scale to surpass the Taj Mahal, the building is roughly three hundred feet square and has corner towers, grand entrances north and south, and curved colonnades east and west. A monumental rotunda houses a marble statue of a young Victoria. Two hundred feet north of the building and in an extensive park, there’s a bronze of the queen in stolid maturity. Two hundred feet south of the building but still in the park, there’s a statue of an unrealistically beautiful Curzon. It was he, ever mindful of prestige, who pushed for the creation of the Memorial. On another day, he ordered the restoration of the Taj Mahal, and of course he requested the jalis or carved screens wrapping the grave of Aurangzeb.
On holidays, thousands of Indians crowd into the Victoria Memorial. Many climb up a spiral staircase to the drum of the dome, from which they can gaze down at the statue of the young Victoria. It’s a strange thing to see, given India’s intense pride in its bloody fight for independence. You could argue that the crowds come to see another monument famous for being famous, but if I look for the germ of the thing I come to this: the crowds come to gaze at a woman who lived the Prozone Life. It’s the flipside to the six-tusked elephant. Instead of finding happiness by focusing on your heart’s desire, happiness here is imagining you can buy your heart’s desires, plural. Happiness in the Victoria Memorial is having all the things you’ve been told you want and have come to believe you want.
3. Bishnupur
But I had not come to Kolkata for the Victoria Memorial. Been there, done that. Instead, I planned to rent a car, cross the Hooghly River, then follow Highway 2 west. I’d drive a dozen miles to Dankuni, then switch to Highway 15 for twenty-five miles to Champandanga, then continue back on Highway 2 for fifty miles to the temple town of Bishnupur. I wasn’t sure why Google Maps insisted that these ninety miles would take four hours, but I should have known. India has innumerable roads that once ran through villages but in recent decades have been left to thread a path through villages that have become towns and then cities. Little Dankuni, which I had never heard of, now has a quarter-million people, but Highway 2 is still a village road in a state where lane discipline exists only on English-language signs that most people cannot read.
Fortunately, my reservation for a self-drive car proved fictitious, and so I wound up with a driver. He hadn’t been to Bishnupur before, but he had Jio. I suppose there are ten or twenty people in India who haven’t heard that name. It refers to a venture of Mukesh Ambani, whose name generally appears in English in front of that fawning, almost groveling phrase, “India’s richest man.” With almost four hundred million subscribers, Jio is destroying Vodaphone and Airtel, and with Jio, Lady Google talked us through various twists and turns. We never got lost. Once we got to Bishnupur, she told us to turn left onto an impossibly narrow street. The corners were so tight that we could barely clear them, but the lady knew her way around. The driver went back to Calcutta, and the hotel manager found a bicycle for me.
Bishnupur is near the Dwarkesvar River, which joins the Damodar, which joins the Hooghly, which is to Kolkata what the Hudson is to New York City. This being January, I could walk across the Dwarkesvar and not get wet above the knees. On the plains stretching away from the river, the horizon was dotted with trees growing through a carpet of rice paddies. A thin layer of fog covered the rice as lightly as a cashmere shawl.
Groundwater, pumped electrically, has disrupted India’s traditional, monsoon-dependent crop calendar, and I saw not only young rice but the stubble left by the previous crop. Other fields were being harvested by men doing it the hard way, with sickles. When they had finished cutting a field, the crop was piled up in bunches about the thickness of a wrist, the most a man can grasp in one hand.
The men eventually gathered the piles into bundles as large as a chest freezer. Somehow hoisting it overhead, they carried the headload to a cart on a nearby road. The field was now reduced to stubble arrayed in the neat lines created a few months earlier by transplanting. This practice of transplanting increases yields by letting rice seedlings get a head start on weeds, but one person needs about ten days to transplant a single acre, so the work is usually done by gangs of women. The Japanese have developed mechanical transplanters that are slowly making their way into India, and so the final scene from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, with the villagers singing as they transplant, is a picture retreating into Asia’s past.
Combines for harvesting and threshing rice do exist in India, especially west of Delhi, but around Bishnupur I saw only two. One was for sale at the local John Deere dealer. India is a big market for Deere but rarely for American-sized equipment. Try tractors of fifty horsepower or less, used mostly to pull the rotary cultivators that now prepare many fields for transplanting. A plastic canopy in bright Deere yellow shades a driver who manages without an air-conditioned cab. At least the driver has a job: Bishnupur’s landless laborers, who have worked in rice paddies since the beginning of time, are slowly losing theirs.
Even farmers without combines have moved past the old threshing method of slapping bunches of rice stalks against a stone table the size and shape of an elephant’s foot. Years ago I saw it done that way in South India, but not around Bishnupur now. Instead, electricity drive motors connected to metal barrels mounted on metal frames that support them horizontally at about knee height. The barrels look like porcupines, but rather than having quills the barrels were covered with stout wires bent into a U-shape with both ends welded to the barrel. Nothing sharp. Just loops sticking out two inches. In operation, the wires are a blur.
A woman would hand a bundle of stalks to a man who pressed the grain end of the bundle against the spinning barrel. Perhaps fifteen seconds later, he handed the now-threshed bundle to another woman. A mountain of blonde, still unhusked rice grew in front of the machine, while the second woman helped build a mountainous stack of straw that would last until used, maybe months later, as cattle feed.
These simple drum threshers, like the Deere machinery, are one more indicator of India on the road to the Prozone Life. So was a road sign I saw as I cycled down a quiet road to a ferry across the Dwarkesvar. “This Road is Maintained by P.W.D., Govt. of West Bengal.” The sign, in English, was in better shape than the road, and it reflected the India-wide perception that English is the language of success, measured in rupees. I have talked to many engineers in India’s public-works departments but never found one who wasn’t fluent in English.
The ferry across the Dwarkeswar River was no more than a bamboo platform mounted on a skiff. There was room for a couple of motorbikes or half a dozen people who didn’t want to get their feet wet. The nearest bridge was at Bankura, fifteen miles upstream; the nearest downstream was thirty miles away, at Arambagh. In the monsoon, the ferry would be an adventure.
The fields near the river were mounded into ridges for potatoes. I don’t think of potatoes as a sign of the Prozone Life, but that’s my mistake. West Bengal, which traditionally did not grow potatoes—they’re native to South America, after all—now grows twice as many as Idaho. It isn’t a subsistence crop: it’s sold to the growing number of Indians who, pursuing the Prozone Life, enjoy aloo this and aloo that. Industrial-sized concrete warehouses store the coming year’s seed potatoes and keep them cool so they don’t sprout. When I came by, the previous year’s potatoes were being taken out and readied for sale as seed.
I saw yet another indicator of the Prozone Life five minutes from the ferry. It was the letters MIT high on the façade of the Mallabhum Institute of Technology. That name comes from the Malla kings, alias the Bishnupur Rajas, who with varying degrees of independence ruled the region called Mallabhum for a thousand years, from the seventh century all the way through to the establishment of British rule in 1760. The three letters, set above an image of Vishnu, were not wry humor. I expect that some graduates of the school work for IT companies in Silicon Valley.
Two miles from the school, Bishnupur itself covers only one square mile but is home to seventy thousand people. Half of them seem to be on the streets all day, but the compression is most intense on the west side of town. The crowd thins out to the east, which has most of the town’s approximately thirty temples, which were what had drawn me here.
These temples are much less famous than the Ajanta caves, but in 1998 they made it to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. (The Ajanta Caves have been there for fifteen years, since 1983. That was the year the Great Smoky Mountains made the list. The Taj Mahal, too.) The Bishnupur temples are almost all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which perhaps explains why they seem not to have impressed Joseph David Beglar. Born to an Armenian father in Dacca and educated as an engineer, Beglar became an assistant to the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India, and in 1870 he made an official tour of Bengal. In his published report, Beglar wrote that Bishnupur was “famed as an old place, and certainly contains very many temples and other old remains, but their age is not such as to merit detailed notice of them.” He adds that “the sculpture, as may be readily guessed, is not very chaste.”
The town’s temples are faced with thousands of carved terracotta panels, but I saw nothing to give Ajanta a run for its erotic money. Perhaps I was insufficiently observant, because the sensuality of the Malla kings once horrified orthodox Hindus. Pika Ghosh, an art historian, has written how the people of Bishnupur, following their rajas, engaged in ecstasies of devotion. She quotes one unhappy Brahmin: “The worship of our gods and goddesses is abandoned… They dance and cry like mad men… They have charmed the people by their songs and music.” Ghosh writes that the temple style at Bishnupur evolved from one-story to two-stories to accommodate private ceremonies for the elite. The temples are controlled today by the Archaeological Survey of India, and the interiors of even the ground floors are off-limits, so visitors have to imagine what went on upstairs. The town’s last rapturous festival was held in 1932.
I had trouble sorting out the temple forms, but help came from a book by David McCutchion, who taught English in Calcutta in the 1960s. Before dying of polio in India at 41, McCutchion took twenty thousand photographs of Bengali temples. He also developed a taxonomy for classifying them He describes one of Bishnupur’s most famous temples, the Keshta Raya, as C/2/b (i). That decodes as jor-bangla with char-chala tower. In English, that’s twin Bengali huts with a four-eave tower.
To get a better picture of this temple, we can imagine copying it in bamboo. We begin by making a cabin with a footprint measuring twelve feet by twenty. The ridgepole ends will be about twenty feet off the ground, but we’ll compress the ridgepole so it bows upward like the top of a haystack. We’ll compress the poles forming the eaves so they, too, bow upwards, and we’ll similarly bend the rafters tying the ridgepole to the eaves. The whole roof should look like it’s stretched to bursting with rice, the staff of life.
Now we have to make a duplicate cabin. When it’s complete, we’ll push it close to the first cabin, long wall to long wall with a gap of two feet. We’ll block the gap with a square central tower with a hipped roof. The tower will be about ten feet square and will rise about ten feet above the top of the curved ridgepoles of the two cabins. The tower roof must also bulge.
Now we must build the temple again, this time in brick. At the long wall on the south side of the doubled temple, we’ll make an entrance of three arched openings separated by two columns. The columns will be thicker than the openings on either side of them, and their shape will be stacks of polygons alternating with squares. There’s a porch behind them with a narrow single door, barred shut, leading to a shrine for Vishnu. Did I mention that Bishnupur is a variant of Vishnupur, the city of Vishnu? I thought not.
We’ll add a single locked, metal door under the northeast gable for access to the tower above, then on the north side we’ll copy the triple entrance, except that this entrance, added for symmetry, is blind and leads nowhere. Finally, we’ll put an Archaeological Survey of India iron fence around the whole thing, along with a ticket kiosk. Outside, a few electric autorickshaws will wait for customers. Voilà! We have a C/2/b (i) or jor-bangla with char-chala temple. Its most distinctive feature for an outsider is the roof. The appeal of a full belly is so powerful in this part of the world that some of the warehouses in Bishnupur have sheet-metal roofs similarly forced into curves.
I’ve forgotten the hundreds of terracotta panels that we have to place on the walls and the entrance columns of the temple. Most measure about eight inches by ten. The subjects, cut with about an inch of relief, include people hunting, fighting, dancing, playing musical instruments, working with cattle, caring for children, and, plain as day, Europeans in boats and carrying muskets. It’s no mistake: Keshta Raya was built in 1655, about twenty years after the arrival of the East India Company.
The figures on the walls of Bishnupur’s temples are not executed with great precision, but they once were brightly painted, which probably made the details sharper. Now the surface is mostly down to the cinnamon color of the local clay, which I like very much but which would probably appall the temple builders, who likely shared the fondness Indians today have for bright colors. I saw one new home in Bishnupur painted mango yellow with trim in prune-plum purple. I saw another in teal with accents of purple, and a third in apoplectic pink offset by a butter yellow.
Bishnupur has at least one privately owned temple, and its owners have kept it brightly painted. It’s the Sridhara Mandir, probably built in the nineteenth century. It has a square footprint and measures about twenty feet on each side. There are towers at each corner and a much larger central tower, which is a miniature of the ground floor and so has its own five towers including its own central tower, which may or may not be accessible. Once again, all the eaves are curved.
I have no idea what color the Sridhara Mandir was when McCutcheon saw it—his photos are black-and-white—but painting was in progress when I saw it, and all but one face was in a pink so strong that if you saw it on your plate you’d wonder what the salmon had been fed. Now I wonder if the paint had been chosen by a cook, because the trim was a pale lemon. No effort was being made to pick out with different colors the carved details in the panels, but this was probably a cost-saving measure. Two men from the family that owns the temple came by and were obviously proud of it. The porch in front of us was decorated with fresh flowers, and the owners said they were slowly getting the funds to replace several missing panels. Each cost about a dollar and was made at a nearby village.
I visited a dozen or more Bishnupur temples, and it’s easy to conclude that they belong to a different world than the Ajanta caves. Where the caves encourage the sense of being part of something, the temples celebrate the parts themselves. Where the caves call for shuffling off the imprisoning shell of the ego, the temples anticipate fun in the busy Prozone Life. One place offers a version of knowledge, while the other praises action.
But recall the Bhagavad Gita, India’s concise summary of the human condition. Vishnu in the form of Krishna consoles Arjuna, horrified by the deaths he will soon cause in battle. Krishna tells him not to worry, because the men Arjuna is about to fight are fated to die tomorrow. So much for free will. Even if we put our weapons down and refuse to perform in the play, nothing will change.
If you can accept this teaching, there is no conflict between the Ajanta Caves and the Bishnupur temples. Arjuna learns that the warriors on tomorrow’s battlefield are infinitesimal specks, less than grains of sand, in a world beyond human comprehension. The Ajanta Caves have nothing to add to that. And what then becomes of all the activity on the walls of Bishnupur’s temples? Those images depict more microscopic fragments, the Prozone Life reduced to a flea in a dog’s ear.
But do we accept this teaching? I have a hard time with it. That’s because I was a teenager during the Eisenhower presidency. These were the years when the United States was at the apex of global power, or at least at the apex of its belief that it was at that apex, and so it also the nadir of the willingness of Americans to think about, as the mocking phrase has it, the “meaning of life.” Why think about the meaning of life when you’re already in the catbird seat?
Vishnu, however, surprised me with some unexpected advice in this matter. It happened in Bishnupur’s town museum, a two-storied, pumpkin-colored block from about 1970. I have mixed feelings about museums, especially big ones, but this one was small, and since I was unlikely to come back, I figured I might as well do a quick run-thorough.
Some of the museum’s exhibits had been donated by farmers plowing their fields and bumping into what they thought at first was a rock; others emerged on their own from the shifting sands of the Dwarkeswar. Photography was conspicuously prohibited. I would have tried to sneak a few, but the curator was so dedicated I’d have felt like a skunk.
I wound up fixating on one object. I don’t know how I picked it—for all I know it picked me—but I wanted to remember it so badly that I even tried sketching it, a hopeless exercise. The object was a block of sandstone that had been carved in the eleventh or twelfth century. It had begun as a slab twelve inches wide, eighteen high, and two or three inches thick. The top had been rounded into a semicircle. A few inches at the base of the stone had been broken off entirely, and the lower corners of the remainder had been broken off so that the lower two-thirds of what remained was a shaft three inches wide.
What was left had most of Vishnu from the knees up. Maybe half the thickness of the stone was the residual slab, while the other half of the thickness was the emergent god. His thighs were there on the shaft, along with his hips and torso. His neck, head, and headdress were in the fan-shaped top, where they were framed in clouds and angelic figures. His arms were missing, but one of his hands, detached from its arm, survived in the fan; he had it raised to hold an iconic mace. Sand had scratched his forehead and nose, but his cheeks and chin were in good shape. So were his ears. His almond eyes were calm, and despite the club he had a trace of a smile on his perfect lips.
In Sri Lanka, the last step in making a statue of a god is the carving or painting of the eyes. They’re always left for last, and the nētra pinkama, literally the “eye ceremony,” is a solemn—some say frightening—moment, because it’s the moment when the stone becomes alive. Nonsense, I say: you might as well believe that tunnels run for miles around Great Zimbabwe, but this Vishnu, sequestered behind glass and beyond the reach of my fingertips, spoke. I was minding my business and just looking at the stone when I heard what I took to be Vishnu saying, “Be happy.”
I’m perfectly capable of dismissing this as a hallucination, but I’m also smart enough to know that naming something doesn’t explain it. Wherever the voice came from, I heard those words so clearly that if there had been other people around, I would have looked to see if they had heard them, too.
Perhaps those other people would have thought that Vishnu was doing his bit to promote the Prozone Life, but after bumping into Uluru, the walls of Great Zimbabwe, the woodwork of Saxon villages, and the courtyard houses of Hebron, I knew that he was saying something else. He was saying that, as horses must run and elephants bathe, so human beings must find the places where they are not the carcass that steps on the bathroom scale and forever pursues comfort and respectability, along with some fun.
Confident in my superiority as a Western visitor, I might have dismissed Vishnu’s advice as ecstatic claptrap. I might have told him that I am a package measuring so many kilos and so many centimeters and that I am dedicated fulltime to pursuing the Prozone Life. I could tell Vishnu that I also see the future, at least the near future. We will live in immense, cubical towers stuffed with thousands of apartments whose walls are fitted not with windows but with glowing screens. We will eat food grown in a high-rise hydroponic factory. We will run around in self-driving electric vehicles, at least until running itself itself becomes obsolete. In short, as Isaac Asimov wrote in 1964, people “will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.” I fear that Asimov was being straight and not in the least ironic. If I was feeling brave, I could tell Vishnu that if he didn’t like this future, he could lump it.
Vishnu might just be impressed by what a good student I had been: “Congratulations! You’ve learned your lessons so well that you no longer question what you’ve been taught.” This would annoy me—I don’t like condescension, even from a god—and I might with some curtness shift gears and tell Vishnu that the world is in a world of trouble and that Being Happy is immoral. If I’m not going to devote my life to disarmament, social justice, or environmental issues, I should at least fight to get the United States back into UNESCO. I should fight to enlarge the list of places on the World Heritage list. I should fight to protect the places already on it. I could even fight for a television series intended to build public support for the program. Not a series about Yellowstone and the Serengeti: they have enough defenders. I mean the places we’ve built and where we belong and which are as natural, as I’ve said before, as cat’s whiskers. These are the places reminding us where we belong.
Defending myself, I could cite chapter and verse in the Bhagavad Gita, where Vishnu in the form of Krishna tells Arjuna to do the right thing, without regard to motive or consequence. Here’s a modern translation of Chapter 18, Stanza 23. Krishna says that “obligatory action, performed without any craving or aversion by a man unattached to results—this kind of action is sattvik [balanced and harmonious].” Don’t quite follow? Here’s the same stanza in another recent translation. “Action restrained and unattached, performed without hate or passion, without desire for the fruits—that action is said to be pure.” Gandhi, while in a British prison, made his own translation. Here’s his version of the same stanza: “That action is called sattvika [balanced and harmonious] which, being one’s allotted task, is performed without attachment, without like or dislike, and without a desire for fruit.” And here, because Krishna’s advice begs repetition, is the stanza as it appears in the first translation ever made of the Gita to a European language. The translator was Charles Wilkins, an officer of the East India Company and the first European to learn Sanskrit. Here’s his version, published in 1785: “The action which is appointed by divine precept, is performed free from the thought of its consequences and without passion or despite, by one who has no regard for the fruit thereof, is of the Satwa-Goon (the quality of balance and harmony).”
Vishnu might smile—“Why, the fellow was listening!”—but he would then gently mock me by saying that all this talk about good works was just my karma talking. This was cut deep, because many years ago a bank manager in India asked me what I thought of his country. I told him I loved it and hated it. He asked why the hate. I pointed to a mutilated child begging outside the door, his spine deliberately broken by parents who wanted to guarantee him an income for life. The manager replied, “That is his karma.” Foolishly attempting to spar, I asked why, if that was the case, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time, bothered with all those programs seeking to alleviate poverty. I was sure I had him, but without missing a beat the bank manager said, “That is her karma.”
In the spirit of fair play, Vishnu might then offer a few questions of his own. Will I admit that I sometimes run around my house looking for my keys? And isn’t it true that I sometimes hunt for my sunglasses or my reading glasses, only to find that I am already have them on the top of my head or, worse, am already wearing them? I imagine Vishnu reminding me how in the shower I occasionally can’t remember if I have already washed my hair. Just to be sure, I do it again—whether for the first or second time I’m never sure.
Then (and you can see him sneaking up on me here) I imagine Vishnu asking if I remember how I felt at the base of Uluru or touching the stones at Great Zimbabwe. I would have to confess that I don’t. I don’t even remember how I felt when he spoke to me in the Bishnupur museum. I know something remarkable happened in these places, but I cannot reproduce the feeling by force of will. At which point Vishnu lowers the boom and asks if it wouldn’t be wiser to put first things first. Be busy if you must and do good if you will, but find the places where you belong or you will never discover what you really want. If you can’t find do that, you’ll spend your life seeing with your ears. When the museum closes for the day and Vishnu is alone with his companions, he looks around and says, “We need to think about classes for slow learners.”
Portfolio of Possible Illustrations
Photo 1. Ajanta overview
Photo 2. Cave 12, a Theravada dormitory
Photo 3. Cave 16, a Mahayana dormitory
Photo 4. Entrance to Cave 10, a prayer hall
Photo 5. Interior of Cave 10, a Thereavada prayer hall
Photo 6. The entrance to Cave 19, a Mahayana prayer hall
Photo 7. Cave 26, a Mahayana prayer hall
Photo 8. The original entrance to the caves
Photo 9. Pillar at entrance to Cave 24
Photo 10. Mara, mounted on an elephant, attacks the Buddha
Photo 11. Aurangzeb’s grave
Photo 12. Unofficial housing embedded in the Colaba Military Station
Photo 13. One of the four identical buildings around Horniman Circle
Photo 14. The Esplanade Mansion, formerly Watson’s Hotel
Photo 15. Sculpture atop the Writer’s Building, Kolkata
Photo 16. Rotunda of the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata
Photo 17. Maturing paddy near Bishnupur
Photo 18. Paddy on its way to the thresher
Photo 19. Electrified paddy threshing in Bishnupur
Photo 20. The Dwarkeshwar ferry
Photo 21. The Syama-Raya Temple
Photo 22. Keshta-Raya, Bishnupur
Photo 23. A Bishnupur warehouse
Photo 24. Keshta-Raya Temple relief showing Europeans with muskets
Photo 25. A new house in Bishnupur
Photo 25. Shyama Raya Temple, Bishnupur
Photo 27. Bishnupur town museum
Sources of Quotations
“the annihilation of all human values,” in Lynn White, “Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered,” The American Scholar, 1958, p. 186.
“very extensive excavations have recently been discovered”, Transactions of the Bombay Literary Society, 1823, p. 520.
“the fetid smell… from numerous bats”, Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1829, p. 362f.
“after 480, not a single image”, Walter Spink, Ajanta: History and Development, 2005-2009, vol. 4, p. 45.
“situation worsens, craftsmen leave” Spink, ibid., vol 5, p. 6.
“the prerogatives of kingship”, Spink, vol. 4. p. 15..
“loving couples seem to proliferate”, Spink, vol. 4, p. 45.
“unfortunately, the damp, bats, natives…”, James Burgess, Notes on the Bauddha Rock-Temples of Ajanta, 1879, p. 1.
“And at the remembrance of the Great Being”, “Chaddanta Jataka” in E.B. Cowell, ed., The Jataka; of, Stores of the Buddha’s Former Births, 1895-1913, volume 5, p. 31.
“well worthy of a visit”, Abdur Rasheed, compiler, The Travellers’ Companion, 1911, p. 7.
“I came a stranger into this world”, Jonathan Scott, A Translation of the Memoirs of Eradut Khan, 1786, p. 8.
“Calcutta is still the commercial metropolis of modern India.” Pan American Airways, New Horizons World Guide, 1961, p.456.
“a disaster for aviation in the east”, quoted by Sanjay Mandal in The Telegraph (India), March 28, 2009.
“famed as an old place”, J.D. Beglar, Report of a Tour through the Bengal Provinces…”, 1871, p. 203.
“the worship of our gods and goddesses is abandoned”, quoted by Pika Ghosh in her Temple to Love: Architecture and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal, 2005, p. 16.
“…men will continue to withdraw from nature,” Isaac Asimov, “A Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” The New York Times, August 16, 1964.
“Obligatory action, performed…,” Bhagavad Gita, Translated by Stephen Mitchell, 2000, p. 186.
“Action restrained and unattached,” Bhagavad Gita, translated by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin, 2012, p. 139.
“That action is called sattvika,” Mahadev Dasai, The Gita according to Gandhi, 1946, online at mkgandhi.org/ebks/gia-according-to-gandhi.pdf, p. 216.
“The action which is appointed by divine precept…” The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon, translated by Charles Wilkins, 1785.
Further Reading
Ajanta
Benoy K. Behl, The Ajanta Caves: Artistic Wonder of Ancient Buddhist India, 1998.
James Fergusson and James Burgess, The Cave Temples of India, 1880.
Dieter Schlingloff and Monika Zin, Guide to the Ajanta Paintings, volume 1, Narrative Wall Paintings, 1999, and volume 2 Devotional and Ornamental Paintings, 2003.
Walter Spink, Ajanta: History and Development, five volumes, 2005-2009, esp. volume four.
Kolkata and Bishnupur
James Alexander in Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1829.
J.D. Beglar, Report of a Tour through the Bengal Provinces of Patna, Gaya, Mongir and Bhagalpur, the Santal Parganas, Manbhum, Singhbum, and Birbhum, Bankura, Raniganj, Bardwan, Hughli: in 1872-73, 1878.
William Erskine in Transactions of the Bombay Literary Society, 1823.
W.W. Hunter, The Annals of Rural Bengal, 1868.
Pika Ghosh, Temple to Love, 2005.
Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, 1995.
George Michell, ed., Brick Temples of Bengal: from the Archives of David McCutchion, 1983.
L.S.S. O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers: Bankura, 1908.
Abdur Rasheed, compiler, The Travellers’ Companion, 1911.
Jonathan Scott, A Translation of the Memoirs of Eradut Khan, 1786.