Video Night in Kathmandu (40 page)

I could to some extent sympathize with his muddle. For few countries engage the sympathies more powerfully than India. Yet so many opposites are so haphazardly blended together in India that it is hard to be unequivocal about anything. Contradiction provides the only consistency—in the people’s preservation of a British legacy they are glad to have sloughed off, in their fierce devotion to the clans whose pressures they resist, in the tangled intensities that bedevil every foreigner and find most eloquent expression in the agonized surveys of V. S. Naipaul. To many foreigners, every Indian seems a god or a demon; that, in a sense, is how India possesses them. “And are you liking India?” asks an Indian in Don DeLillo’s
The Names.
“Yes,” replies the narrator, “although I would have to say it goes beyond liking, in almost every direction.”

ALL NIGHT LONG
,
I heard, our relative howled and howled with pain. What he was going through, said my uncle, one would not wish on one’s bitterest enemies. The cries never ceased.

AS I
ATTENDED
more Indian movies, I came in time to discover another of their special pleasures (to be found in the West only at Coppola or Stallone or Boorman movies, or in such freak stunts as
The Long Riders):
the thrill of totting up the recurrences of a single surname in the credits. One poster advertised: “F. U. Ramsay presents Tulsi Ramsay and Shyam Ramsay’s
Saamri
, with photography by Gangu Ramsay.” Another show was made by Ramesh Sippy, assisted by Vijay Sippy and Al Sippy and produced by G. R. Sippy (none of them, of course, related to Romu Sippy, the producer I met who financed movies directed by his brother). In Rajasthan a pair of voluble rickshaw drivers started reciting the names of the First Family of Indian cinema
(their Redgraves or Carradines) as if they were the thousand names of God: “Shashi Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Raj Kapoor” (mercifully, they left out Tiger Kapoor, as well as Prithviraj Kapoor, the patriarch of the clan, whose image was shown, reverentially, before every one of Shashi and Raj Kapoor’s movies). And so the list went on indefinitely—Satyajit Ray begat the director Sandip Ray, Dharmendra begat Sunny Deol, and Lata Mangeshkar’s only rival, and possible successor, as the voice of India, was her sister, Asha Bhosle. After Dimple Kapadia struck it rich as a seventeen-year-old actress, up popped a look-alike sister called Simple Kapadia. Before long, one of my young cousins dryly remarked, there would doubtless be a Pimple Kapadia.

On screen too, the movies invariably paid their respects to the all-powerful and omnipresent Family, which had a way of turning every business into a family business. Mard, for example, had been supplied with a real father and mother, an adopted father and mother, a disguised father and an intricate set of duties to his motherland. “To me,” intoned the hero in his famously resonant voice, “Mother is everything.” His girlfriend knew she could expect to play only second fiddle in the orchestra of his emotions. And the same would be true of the Indian Rambos, I recalled, thinking back to Sippy’s description. Even newspaper horoscopes—the movies’ first cousin when it came to mass-producing dreams—tended to focus their advice, not on love affairs, but on family affairs.

The Family, indeed, seemed the strongest of all the forces organizing India’s swarming congregation of subsets. It was the power that arranged marriages. It was the binding force that protected people from the centripetal pull of the masses. It was the last word in Indira Gandhi’s
India.
And not only were the clans all-powerful; they were also huge. The typical Indian family tree resembles a banyan whose tendrils stretch in every direction and whose roots are cast halfway across the country. The family is the source of identity, and the extended family is the source of an extended identity stretched far and wide (in India, identity seems not to be diminished by being subjugated to a unit, as in Japan, but only strengthened). A typical sentence in India would begin: “Jaygopal’s brother’s sister-in-law’s cousin,” and the figure in question would be treated as a brother, worthy
of the same affection, open to the same demands. Before long, therefore, the family itself began to seem as many-headed and undifferentiated as the flood it had sought to dam. Family planning had never enjoyed much success here.

With Indian roots myself, I was, perhaps, more aware of the power of family here than in other Asian countries where it was no less suffocating or strong. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that in India the force took on a decidedly Indian flavor. I was amused to find that the Indians had smuggled into English such terms as “co-brother” (to designate one’s sister-in-law’s brother) and “cousin brother” (to denote the sex of a first cousin, and, better yet, to draw the cousin as close as a brother). In some of the local languages, the terms were even more precisely defined, with separate words for a father’s elder and younger brothers and special terms for uncles on one’s mother’s and one’s father’s side, as well as words to distinguish between mother’s sisters and uncle’s wives, blood uncles and uncles by marriage. Though India had a hunger for absolutes, it swarmed with relatives; before long, everyone came to seem related to everyone else.

The enveloping tightness that resulted might be responsible for much of the country’s warmth, the hospitality of its embrace; but it also seemed to lie behind many of the country’s antagonisms. If the large family made for an extended sense of alliance, it also made for an extended sense of enmity; thus a grievance against one Muslim would vent itself in an attack on all Muslims, a suspicion of all Sikhs assert itself in a mistreatment of one. If there was safety in numbers, there was also terror in numbers. So too, a typical office worker was often trussed up so tightly within an entangling net of obligations to this relative and that one, this one’s friend and that one’s in-laws, that he had no option but to ignore the general public, leaving the general public with no option but to make demands upon relatives of its own. In the end, the extrapolated sense of identity could smother an individual as much as it protected him.

Much of this, no doubt, was explained—and largely excused perhaps—by Hinduism, with its notion of collective identity. If all are simply parts of a single great Oneness, every individual is related to every other in the Family of Man. One touch of Siva makes the whole world kin.

This all-pervading sense of affiliation was brought home to me
in a wonderfully Indian way. Early one morning, I boarded an intercity bus, and found myself next to a gentle civil servant. He could not speak much English, but he summoned every syllable he could recall in order to welcome me to his region and to wish me well. He was not a rich man, he said, or an educated man. But he was a pious man, a Brahmin, rich in his belief. I need never fear, he assured me, for my Atman would survive the death of my body. It was all in the
Bhagavad-Gita.
He had followed the
Gita’s
injunction, he went on, by giving his son the name of God (so that in calling out to his son he felt that he was calling on God). And as he continued, struggling to share increasingly complex metaphysical truths in a language that he clearly found difficult, I commended him on his gallant conquest of English. “Oh yes,” he said happily, “your child learns English in school.” This was not what I had expected. “What I am saying,” he explained, “is that your son learns English in school.” I looked daggers at him. Was he making some licentious insinuation about my private life? Or, worse still, trying to marry me off to his daughter? “You see,” he went on, taking pity on my cluelessness, “I say ‘your child’ and not ‘my child’ because we are all one. If he is my child, he is also your child. And if I say ‘your child,’ I am not suffering from pride.”

In India, then, even complete strangers were related. But the connections did not end there. One sunny morning, a gardener in Bangalore invited me into his tiny hut. He had only one small room, and its simple decorations caught at my heart: American calendars that showed chocolate-box flowers, swans in flight, blond kids holding hands on a bench. The only other adornment in his modest hut was a large photograph of a beetle-browed lady, and of a couple at a wedding maybe forty years before. His wife had died five years ago, said the man in halting English, and ever since, he felt that he had lost his senses. He never wished to leave his home again; her memory was all he had to live for. And in the corner I noticed a humble shrine, richly decorated with pictures of the elephant-god Ganesh and other religious keepsakes. There too was a picture of the departed woman, to which each day her husband faithfully applied fresh makeup.

Where the soul was immortal, no relative ever died; the family just kept growing and growing.

But even there the clan did not draw the line. For not only did
the dead dwell among the living, but so too, as the gardener’s hut reminded me, did the gods. And the issue was further complicated by all the fakers and fakirs and holy men and charlatans who walked the streets, saying that they were nothing less than gods in men’s clothing, and adding, sometimes, that the same was true of all of us if only we would awaken to the fact. As the temples merged with the streets, the gods began mingling with mortals. In India, life danced with legend as gracefully as Krishna with the Gopis.

In the face of this ever-swelling swarm of gods and people and relations, a typical Indian could easily feel dwarfed—either buried within the exfoliating structure of the family or simply lost inside the shuffle. But unlike the Japanese, who seemed to have acquiesced in the sacrifice of personal identity, quite a few Indians appeared to hunger for it. Educated Indians are famous for their worship of degrees and diplomas, and for their preoccupation with keeping up with the times, and with the Patels. Many middle-class people I met seemed frankly unembarrassed about presenting themselves as walking entries for Who’s Who, and some, I heard, even went so far as to print up calling cards that read “BAABF” (Bachelor of Arts—Appeared but Failed). In India, line jumping had been turned into a fine art, and one-upmanship a popular pastime. This was again, no doubt, symptomatic of a culture that is not by its nature reticent or retiring. But I suspected too that intrusiveness breeds pushiness and that where the pressure of huge numbers and frightful odds is intensified, so too is the longing for distinction.

STILL
,
I HEARD
,
day after day, my relative could not pass a night without screaming out his pain.

WITH PERSONAL DISTINCTION
so elusive amidst the press of the all-consuming crowd, many a common Indian of the masses could only look upward—to the heavens, or to the giant screen. It therefore seemed no coincidence that many movies took their inspiration from traditional myths, throwing fantasy and reality together as liberally as any Shakespearean romance. And it seemed only fitting that every film began with a consultation of an astrologer and a holy
muhurat
ceremony that included the singing of religious songs and the ritual breaking of a coconut.
For in many ways, the movies fulfilled a role scarcely different from that of religion: to an audience not grown too cynical for belief, they brought heroes who were avenging angels, heroines who were full-breasted goddesses.

Thus the divisions between make-believe and reality, between reality and myth, became increasingly foggy. Appearing before the people again and again as a redeemer, with a face five feet high and a ten-gallon gift for heroics, an actor might well disappear within his divine role, hastened on his way by the latter-day mythmakers of the gossip rags. Off screen, moreover, superstars really did live in the manner of all-powerful gods; for his role in
Mard
, Amitabh had earned $500,000, as much as an average Indian would make if he worked for 2,500 years.

When an actor died, therefore, it seemed as if a god had died. While I was in Bombay, the actor Sanjeev Kumar, then in his late forties, suddenly passed away. Within twenty-four hours, the national television network had cobbled together a twenty-five-minute tribute to the Everyman who had come to seem like something more. Rajiv Gandhi issued a public message of sympathy. Thousands gathered outside Kumar’s home to pay their final respects, some of them sobbing uncontrollably; and, within three days of the death, a government motion was raised to name a street after him. As had happened on a far grander scale when Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash (his demise changing his status from widely suspected rogue to full-fledged martyr), it had taken death to confirm Kumar’s status among the immortals.

The greatest figure in the pantheon, however, was Amitabh. His divinity had been recognized even at birth, hagiographers noted, when he was given the name of the mythical King of the Land of the Pure. In 1982, when he suffered a near-fatal accident while performing a stunt, the whole country was stricken: one man walked three hundred miles backwards to persuade the gods to spare his hero, while thousands of people gathered outside his hospital to pray for his recovery and the Prime Minister herself canceled a foreign trip to rush to his bedside. When at last the fallen star arose from his deathbed, many took it to be a kind of resurrection. “God Is Great—Amitabh Lives!” said the signs on the streets; they could as easily have said “Amitabh Is Great—God Lives!”

To his new part, as to all the others, the resurrected star rose like a hero. Every morning, he held mass prayers at home before thousands of prostrate devotees, and the word went around that he could heal the afflicted. When the Hindi cinema released its first 3-D movie, it was Amitabh who came on screen beforehand to still the worries of startled moviegoers and give the project his blessing. Even a respected newspaper asserted, in a peculiarly Indian allusion, somewhat askew but nobly Shakespearean, that “Amitabh continues to stride the scene like a modern Colossus.” Why, even his name, in Sanskrit, meant “Infinite Life”! Much of this reflected nothing more, perhaps, than the power of images on an unsophisticated audience ready to take their gods where they found them (the towering hero was often shot from below in order to increase his stature). But it also seemed to reveal a deeper, more widespread hunger for heroes. I could think of no American star who could command the same kind of worship from old and young, rich and poor, housewife and illiterate villager.