even the stray dogs had a knowing and watchful look. It was strange: there was never a man who knew more about India and, yet, knew India less, than Toby. He was like one of those men who fall in love with the idea of a woman, while all the time insulating themselves from her reality. At Oxford, a student of his, a girl from Bengal, had said, ‘Professor Ketu, it’s as if you rather wish modern India didn’t exist.’
And, laughing, he had replied, ‘Don’t we all?!’
Toby’s deep knowledge of classical India made the real India remote, made it more concept than reality. For there are few places where the past continues as seamlessly into the present as India and, yet, where the people are so unaware of it. All around him Toby saw the remnants of the Sanskritic past: there in the names that were compounds, the analysis of which he would do silently in his head; there, in the low-lying colonies that had dressed themselves up in grand names from the Epics, to which his mind could not help but go; there in the nursery down the road that had named itself after Indra’s capital; or in the chemists that had taken for themselves the names of the twins who were physicians to the gods; and there in the people’s language, which even in English adopted words like ‘only’ and ‘just’ to compensate for lost particles of stress and emphasis – words such as ‘hi’ and ‘eva’ and ‘khalu’ – that had come down to them from Sanskrit.
Everywhere he looked, Toby could see, under layer upon haphazard layer of borrowed and vernacular language, the glorious and systematic bedrock of Sanskrit. It held for him all the frustration and excitement of seeing beneath a thick encroachment of slum and shanty the preserved remains of a far grander city, of gridded streets, sophisticated sewage systems, of magnificent civic architecture. But, thrilling as it was – to find extant around him the language he had dedicated his life to – it was a private thrill. For as much as the language limped on, as much as it was still visible under the vulgate, all awareness of it had gone. It was not apparent to those living among it; it was there in the form of ruins, and nothing more. The people, moreover, had no means to assess its beauty and this could produce either embarrassment or false pride.
The knowledge of decay made Toby seem passive when it came to India. The country already, to so large an extent, existed for him privately, in his mind and imagination, that he let all of it become illusory, all shadows on the wall of a cave, all a pale emanation of some far grander and irrecoverable reality. He was like a man who, having known the forum in the days of Trajan, returns to see it as spolia on people’s houses.
That attitude – his aloofness – made him for all the wrong reasons attractive to people of a certain class in India. They confused his distance, which came from an uncompromising love for what had been lost, with their own deracination. For them, he seemed to answer a need: to both be in India and to stand at a distance from it. The members of this class, who were already set apart from the rest of the country by the loss of language, by privilege, of course, and by what had come to seem almost like racial differences, had no desire to shed their distinctiveness. They clung to it, in fact, wanting nothing so much as to remain inviolable and distinct: foreigners in their own country.
And yet – strange as it must seem – they had a corresponding desire to make a great show of their Indianness, to talk of classical dance recitals, of concerts, of textiles, and spirituality. To throw in the odd precious word or phrase of Hindustani, to upstage their social rivals with a little bit of exotica so obscure that no one could be expected to know it. India was their supreme affectation! They wore it to dinner, as it were; and, of course, the ways in which they were truly Indian – their blindness to dirt and poverty, their
And, laughing, he had replied, ‘Don’t we all?!’
Toby’s deep knowledge of classical India made the real India remote, made it more concept than reality. For there are few places where the past continues as seamlessly into the present as India and, yet, where the people are so unaware of it. All around him Toby saw the remnants of the Sanskritic past: there in the names that were compounds, the analysis of which he would do silently in his head; there, in the low-lying colonies that had dressed themselves up in grand names from the Epics, to which his mind could not help but go; there in the nursery down the road that had named itself after Indra’s capital; or in the chemists that had taken for themselves the names of the twins who were physicians to the gods; and there in the people’s language, which even in English adopted words like ‘only’ and ‘just’ to compensate for lost particles of stress and emphasis – words such as ‘hi’ and ‘eva’ and ‘khalu’ – that had come down to them from Sanskrit.
Everywhere he looked, Toby could see, under layer upon haphazard layer of borrowed and vernacular language, the glorious and systematic bedrock of Sanskrit. It held for him all the frustration and excitement of seeing beneath a thick encroachment of slum and shanty the preserved remains of a far grander city, of gridded streets, sophisticated sewage systems, of magnificent civic architecture. But, thrilling as it was – to find extant around him the language he had dedicated his life to – it was a private thrill. For as much as the language limped on, as much as it was still visible under the vulgate, all awareness of it had gone. It was not apparent to those living among it; it was there in the form of ruins, and nothing more. The people, moreover, had no means to assess its beauty and this could produce either embarrassment or false pride.
The knowledge of decay made Toby seem passive when it came to India. The country already, to so large an extent, existed for him privately, in his mind and imagination, that he let all of it become illusory, all shadows on the wall of a cave, all a pale emanation of some far grander and irrecoverable reality. He was like a man who, having known the forum in the days of Trajan, returns to see it as spolia on people’s houses.
That attitude – his aloofness – made him for all the wrong reasons attractive to people of a certain class in India. They confused his distance, which came from an uncompromising love for what had been lost, with their own deracination. For them, he seemed to answer a need: to both be in India and to stand at a distance from it. The members of this class, who were already set apart from the rest of the country by the loss of language, by privilege, of course, and by what had come to seem almost like racial differences, had no desire to shed their distinctiveness. They clung to it, in fact, wanting nothing so much as to remain inviolable and distinct: foreigners in their own country.
And yet – strange as it must seem – they had a corresponding desire to make a great show of their Indianness, to talk of classical dance recitals, of concerts, of textiles, and spirituality. To throw in the odd precious word or phrase of Hindustani, to upstage their social rivals with a little bit of exotica so obscure that no one could be expected to know it. India was their supreme affectation! They wore it to dinner, as it were; and, of course, the ways in which they were truly Indian – their blindness to dirt and poverty, their
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