The Twice-Born review: Aatish Taseer tries to eulogise Brahminical culture

In an interview to Mumbai Mirror in November last year, Aatish Taseer declared: “The story of Brahmins cannot simply be the story of Dalit oppression.” He was answering a question on what reaction he expected from “liberal” readers of the book under review who imagined Brahmins to be purveyors of caste oppression. Taseer went on to explain that in his book, he had tried to eschew the popular opinion about upper castes: “It’s a wicked political lie to make them seem like an undifferentiated upper class.” One wonders if Prime Minister Narendra Modi read this book; if he did, he would have found enthusiastic validation of the reservation he has recently introduced for upper-caste poor. Unfortunately for Taseer, other readers might simply be put off by his attempt to defend the indefensible.

Aatish Taseer

This book, as Taseer explains in the very first chapter, was a product of his father and Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer’s assassination in January 2011. “My father’s death was part of my reason for wanting to go back to Benaras,” he writes. He had been estranged from his father, who served as governor of Punjab from 2008 till his assassination. The senior Taseer had disagreed with the representation of their relationship in his son’s first book, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands. Taseer’s personal history makes his dislike for the radical variety of Islam evident: “my father’s killer would become a hero in Pakistan… It was practically impossible to bring him to justice.” But, his uncritical turn towards Brahminism is no less problematic.

Around the time Taseer returns to Varanasi to “discover” his roots, PM Modi has chosen the city to be his constituency for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Taseer calls Modi’s rise on the national stage a “historical awakening”. He describes the sweeping mandate the current government got as “a revolution at the ballot box”. He does not forget to mention the Gujarat riots when Modi was chief minister of the state, but it seems a bit like tokenism when he quite uncritically describes Modi’s election pitch: “Modi knew the historical wound left by Islamic invasions of India had a violent potential.” A little earlier, he writes: “The legacy of British rule in India was one fault line, the legacy of Islamic rule another.” To think of the influence of Islam on the subcontinent in the same breath as European colonisation is to fall into easy categories of the Hindutva rhetoric.

Some historians would argue that there was never an “Islamic” invasion of India — various groups of Afghans, Turks and Central Asians came to the subcontinent over centuries. Their primary motivation was never the spread of Islam — at least not in the same way evangelical Christianity was a handmaiden of colonisation. These invaders were not kind to the indigenous population of Hindus and others. But they were not kind to their Muslim brethren either; take, for instance, Timur sacking Delhi in 1398 and Nadir Shah sanctioning a genocide in 1739. Taseer seems to be completely ignorant or uninterested in such nuances as he tries to find “the country that lay beyond the seemingly impermeable confines of life in Delhi”. He did not need to travel to Varanasi for that; he could have stepped out of the Lutyens neighbourhood to find various contours of caste and religion even on the streets of the national capital.

There are inconsistencies and errors in the book. For instance, Taseer calls Rabindranath Tagore a Brahmin from Bengal. The Tagore family was, in fact, Brahmin in the 18th century — and according to some sources even converted to Islam for a while — but by the time Rabindranath was born 1861, his father Debendranath was a leader of Raja Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, a socio-religious movement against Vedic Brahminism and anti-caste. Such an error is ultimately harmless but others are not. For instance, Taseer observes a Hindu police constable guarding a mosque on the night before Holi in Varanasi and writes: “(they) had to balance their duty to the modern state with the primal demands of religion… It didn’t seem like much of a contest… I felt the ceremony would reclaim them.” Unfortunately, we hear nothing from the constables on duty; we know nothing of their emotions. All we get is commentary from a Westernised writer.

Taseer, in fact, admits to caste entitlement very early in the book: “in the India I grew up in, we possessed little knowledge of caste. I could not tell a Brahmin name… apart from any other.” This is the textbook definition of caste privilege. Contrast this with the suicide note of Rohith Vemula, where the aspiring science writer says: “My birth is my fatal accident.” As Taseer learns Sanksrit — he tells us more than once that he has spent a decade in this pursuit — and, to use his own words, is seduced by Brahminical culture, one is left wondering why he did not travel to other towns and villages in Uttar Pradesh itself, where he would have become familiar to the caste and religious fault lines growing stronger.
 

If there is anything to recommend in the book, it is the excellent quality of prose and Taseer’s ability to laugh at himself at times. For instance, very early, he describes how his mother, journalist Tavleen Singh, made him travel to Varanasi as a teenager when he wanted to backpack through Europe, and how looking back at a photograph, he finds himself to be like any other European backpacker passing through India. One can laugh with him at such moments. Unfortunately, such moments are rare in this book.

The Twice-Born  Life and Death on the Ganges

Author: Aatish Taseer

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Price: Rs 599 (Hardbound)

Pages: 248