nau | english | rothfork | publications | God with an Elephant Head
If you fail to recognize
Your own heart,
Can you ever come to know
The great unknown? --Kalachand (in Bhattacharya)
Why did I want to go to India? Herman Hesse said we always journey East in leaps of sudden recognition, new incarnation; stumbling deeper into the blank pupil, the blind spot of the retina; falling into the black hole gnawing at the center of the wheeling galaxy (Shiva, do we collapse forever in your midnight smile?).
In the heyday of the Raj, after the Mutiny of 1857, half of England wanted to go, or was on the way, or on the way back. Thousands of white boys shouldering an imperial burden, eager for adventure; all escaping the bleakness of home; a few aspiring to the prestigious foreign service; and perhaps a few searching for a simpler world than the smoke and machine worlds of Manchester and Birmingham, struggling to surface from what Henry Adams called "the plunge into darkness lurid with flames" illuminating the "society of the pit." Yet, those to whom I mention India consider it treason. Is it not, as Kipling said of Calcutta, "The City of the Dreadful Night"; or as Kissinger said of Bangladesh, "a basketcase"; that is, one who has had all four limbs amputated as happened to some of the casualties of Napoleon's campaigns? Initially I suppose I wanted to go because it was as far away from the hog farms and spring mud of Iowa as I could imagine. Growing up on Polak Hill in what William Gass called "the heart of the heart of the country," I dodged Brueghel's vicious peasants; the Poles and Russians, who in a thousand chance ways evaded their places in the mass graves dug by Hitler and Stalin. And I knew the second generation German and Norse farmers, as dull as the corn they grew. I flinched from the ice in a thousand white faces.
Occasionally I saw an African in Morningside, mysterious in a blaze of red dashiki, a Methodist college student following Phillis Wheatley out of a pagan land. But a Hindustani? The very word conjured mystery and adventure; turbans and cobras and fakirs on nails; the essence of the foreign; a call to pilgrimage. Who knew a real Hindustani?
* * *
At the Catholic school I memorized the magic Latin and concentrated on God as a white circle. I stumbled with fishes to Golgotha on Fridays, whipped by the rosaries of old women in babushkas. I learned the technique of burning incense in a swinging censer and felt the threat of St. Blaise's cold candles on my throat, getting the magic to keep fish bones from snagging for another year. (Shiva, was your blue throat thrumming in some deep midnight tune, heard on the far side of the rolling planet even then?) At a Carmelite monastery, I marveled at the dreaming life, hidden, but present here on the very land of beef killers and auto mechanics. The hot sweating straw that I took from oat fields and dust was transubstantiated; sewn into white mattresses, spun by myth into Rapunzel's golden hair. And here it was; more than any book, a window to another world, a medieval world with straw matresses. Sandals and ropes, and huge rosary chains, and . . . beards! A skull on the dinner table but no chairs.
Some nun told this story to the sixth grade class. Two women were traveling in a city bus when they passed a church. One of them crossed herself and the other asked her why she did so. Obviously because God lived in there and one should not pass Him lightly. I don't know if the other woman, or the nun, had been reading A Burnt Out Case, but she said, if only she could truly believe that, she would crawl back there and never leave. An American pilgrim, she no doubt remained on the bus, comfortable enough in the belly of the machine. Like everyone else, she watched TV. And between Arthur Godfrey and Donna Reed, I hoped -- as though planning an episode of Twilight Zone -- that she saw a National Geographic Special about Tibetans who crawl to Lhasa, prostrating themselves at every step, wearing special mittens and knee bindings to keep them from becoming raw. Who would not crawl to God, if they knew where he was manifest as something more than a white circle in a gold monstrance or a promised retirement check?
* * *
And what of God with an elephant head? Ganesh, who removed the delusions and dreams of this world, bringing us to the smile of his dark father, Shiva? I was asking something like this of a fellow college student; actually he had graduated recently with a degree in art from the same flatland college where I was studying philosophy. He was now a graduate student at the University of Iowa, so I though he had escaped the blank horizon of prairie thought. I hoped he might tell me something genuine, deep, and perhaps only vaguely caught in the corner of his artist's eye; offering me the lowest rung of a ladder I would eagerly climb. But like an unexpected blow in the diaphragm, he took my breath away by his casual remark that Asian thought was all the result of malnutrition! It was like vodka or a blizzard. I could run my hand on the ideology of the peasant strung like barbed wire: thin and sometimes invisible, but nothing gets through. What can you say to the midland ag-scientist when the food is on the table? Is it not the bottom line? Doesn't everyone eat, even if there is a skull on the table? Remember the starving children in India. Bring your technique, for "nothing runs like a Deere."
I wonder if he thought of our conversation when, only a year or two later, those undernourished toy-men of Vietnam began sending our friends back, stuffed into plastic garbage bags? Did he question the American faith, wondering how all that hi-tech hardware could fail? If so, he had the answer: it could not. It was the politicians, the "human element," who lacked the will to win. Years later, I heard he was quite a success in Chicago, painting super-realistic hogs and rippling corn fields to hang as mirrors for Narcissus in the agri-tech board rooms and banks of the sprawling Midland Empire.
Riding in a bus in the Punjab, I was struck by the sight of a white inverted pot on top of a pole in a dal field. It matched what I read somewhere. It was a kind of visual magnet to attract the eye and thus, like a lightning rod, render harmless the evil eye, which otherwise might blight the crop. And even now, like the green sun, if I close my eyes, I can see the afterimage of black arms in an orange sari, a bent figure in an emerald rice paddy of Orissa, with palms and two or three crumbling maroon temples wherever the eye falls; the sea waiting just beyond the horizon. A beckoning, a ladder; how can it be said? How can I tell the woman on the other bus that I am getting off here? And what of a God whose third eye of fire glows between the eyebrows of a hundred million delicious women? The glowing ember; the sweat on the upper lip; the smooth belly exposed; the white teeth, hungry for more than Wonder Bread and white circles. (Where shall I find you, oh Shiva? Chanting with the refugees from America, from the TV century, Shivo-ham / I am Shiva? The Bauls say:
Look for him
In the temple of your limbs.)
* * *
Since the early ninth century, when Sri Shankara established pilgrimage sites, and no doubt long before that, Hindus have been indefatigable pilgrims. Dark, slight Tamils from south India climb to Shiva's ice lingam in Amarnath cave in the Kashmir Himalayas. Kashmiris go south to the bottom tip of the subcontinent, to Meenaskshi temple in Madurai with its fabulous gates that erupt in jungles of life; and to Cape Cormorin to pick up the multicolored sands, like the memories of their lives, brought there by different oceans. They stare off to Sri Lanka and marvel that the Monkey-God, more compassionate and dedicated to God than they, built the rock bridge that rescued Beauty. (And we all light the hundred million lamps of Diwali to welcome Rama home.) Maharastrians from Bombay travel east to Puri for the Jaganath festival. In times past, some would fall beneath the wheels of the cart, larger than many buildings, to be crushed like grapes into the wine of Paradise. In Puri the Gitagovinda, the Song of the Dark Lord, has been given to the Lord of the world every night, forming a chain without a break for seven hundred years. Each night, Krishna, the black God, searches the stars for his beloved Radha. And the sun rises over the Iowa cornfields each day because he finds her. And we light the small lamps of our lives from this light. Meanwhile, Bengalis go west to Elephanta in Bombay harbor to see Shiva Maheshvara. Heinrich Zimmer called it, "the face of Eternity." And everyone goes to Kasi, the shining city of Shiva, because death too is a pilgrimage.
Was there pilgrimage in following the cornfields of the heartland? In following the rows of black print on white paper? In following, faster than we can discern, the rows of seed-dots on the TV screen? The machine takes us in a circle, a carousel, while the Bauls of Hindustan sing:
Farming the splendid,
measured land
of this human body,
you raised the crop
the devotion to God.
In Woodbury and Plymouth and Ida counties, I saw only Dekalb and Pioneer seed signs: corn ears aimed like cannons and rockets; brightly painted good luck charms from the temples of agri-science; shields to deflect the evil eye; hands folded in prayer for money; mile-markers for the folded journey of tractors. The flatland, scratched by machines, raised . . . what? I don't know, maybe an eye for geometry and a longing for escape.
* * *
Every dozen years, when the stars are strung like pearls on the black neck of Devi, the Great Mother, Kumbha Mela occurs. "Mela" is a festival; "kumbha" means a pitcher. In a rather vague way -- perhaps like, and yet not very like, the "fat Tuesday" of Mardi Gras in relation to the Christian liturgical year -- Kumbha Mela celebrates the churning of the milk of life -- semen, blood, ocean, shakti, libido -- the cataract we call the Milk Way. This faintly glowing ember fell on Shiva's icy head as he meditated in the Himalayas. And today, lounging at an open window in my office on the fifth floor of the faculty building of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, feeling sleepy from the humid heat, I see Ganga flowing here in the flatland of Uttar Pradesh as a mother's milk. Vinoba Bhave asks, "If God is not manifest to us in Mother Ganga, where else shall we see Him?" Bread and water.
At Allahabad, the Yamuna (on whose banks Krishna called us with his flute), the Ganga (who is God as the Great Mother, and who also has her origin in Shiva's locks high in the Himalayas), and Sarawati (the invisible river of grace, a pure gift of love), converge, to pour into the vessel that is human.
Hsuan-tsang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, wrote an account of the Kumbha he attended in the seventh century. Nearly fourteen hundred years later I also came to the rivers at Kumbha, feeling like Ved Mehta, "as though I were sleepwalking through some celestial bazaar." The Delhi newspaper, The Statesman, said 150 lakh pilgrims were on the way; fifteen million people! Imagine fifteen million Americans coming to a dirty river bank where there was nothing to buy. Imagine fifteen million midland farmers walking to St. Louis to go into the dark waters of the Mississippi and Missouri before dawn, each wrapped in a flame of longing for Krishna's dark touch. I can hear the farmer of my childhood, listening to the liturgy of the 5 A.M. market report, laugh in disgust, saying, "heathen!" And see him so tenuously gathered, entranced in electric puja with the millions, sharing the bought vision of Super Bowl or Evening News, as the blizzard sweeps the empty land. What is so amazing is that at the same time, on the other side of the planet, the Bauls in the jungles of Bengal and at Ganga's breast at Kumbha, sing:
Scanning the cosmos
You waste your hours,
He is present
In this little vessel.
* * *
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is an Indian novelist. Of Polish descent, she grew up in England and married an Indian architect who took her to Delhi. She now lives part of the year in new York and part in India. In her novel, A Backward Place, she has Judy, a character searching for a new life in India, recall her old life in England: "One locked oneself up at home . . . and looked at the television and grew lonelier and lonelier till it was unbearable and then one found a hook in the lavatory," on which to hang one's self. Britishers -- as they are called in India -- consider Judy a traitor to the higher standard of living, which V. S. Naipaul endlessly reminds us, is collected in the flush toilet: "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets." One does not have to be Sigmund Freud to note the anal-retentive character of Naipaul's writing.
Nonetheless, "Judy liked being here. It was busy and crowded and yet at the same time peaceful. This was a paradox she discovered over and over again, wherever she went. One left the house and everywhere it was full of people, so much going on: little shops in which women bargained, men played cards on a bed pulled out into the street, students studied under a lamppost, holy men cried Ram Ram tapping with a long staff and rattling a tin, and film songs came out of a radio: yet always, above everything, the sky was large and beautiful, and one had only to look up and it was peaceful." As in an Escher picture, the familiar horizon can twist into a strange vertical dimension, opening a surprising new world. A pilgrim moves in more than one world. You may have to get off the bus and walk, whether you believe or not. For the journey itself may be the destination.
In a curious book written by a Chilean pilgrim, Miguel Serrano said, "in India everything is done in common, and the Indian is always surrounded by people. He lives, lovers, eats, sleeps, and dies communally." Western egos generally find this squalid and threatening. Living in Bombay, Naipaul said, "was like being denied part of my reality. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd. I felt the need to impose myself."
Walking, in mincing and hobbled steps -- as when burying Jesus in a side altar during Passion Week -- in Bombay's Crawford Market, is something like sex. It cannot be adequately described; you must walk there. Like an atom of water, you flow in a current of people. You watch the steps of the person in front of you, collapsing the distance, so that you are in step with him. I thought of the L.A. freeways and the sixty-mile-an-hour tension, ready to react instantly to the brake lights only a few yards in front of the windshield and vaguely recognized the sexual tension here, of a soft rear-end collision with a stranger. And like Naipaul, I felt a moment's paranoia. Breath fluttered in my throat; I thought, death must be like this. (And Shiva smiled; how can you fear the embrace of living flesh? Going down into the river of flesh?)
Rustom Bharucha, an "America-returned" Bengali, wrote about returning to Calcutta with his hard-won Western vision. He described people as misaligned or broken machine parts: "You are part of a mass of bodies. Your face could be pressed against the damp armpit of another passenger, your leg could be lodged in between the thighs of the person sitting directly in front on you. This is not an orgy. Your body is not assaulted: it is depersonalized." The tangle of bodies in the bus is more than matched by the tangle in Bharucha's mind. Like Naipaul, he has picked up the burden and joined the battle of America and the machine to repress the wisdom of the blood that is India by turning life into technique, a project. He has a diploma, his ticket out. So he hates the traffic of Calcutta that moves at foot-speed; the buses engulfed in a million bodies, and Bharucha engulfed in the bus, locked in the sweaty embrace of the village mother he is now ashamed of. You hear a similar rising pitch of adolescent ego-hysteria, as well as sheer ignorance, in Koestler, who found Hindus, "shapeless, spineless, non-individuals, drifting through the world of illusions towards the ultimate deep sleep of Nirvana."
From Koestler to Kissinger, these are the Prussians. From Naipaul to Bharucha, these are the Aryan Brahmans. They are all men talking to other men; the "tough-minded" of William James; white boys; engineers. In Richer By Asia, Edmond Taylor said: "The sahibs seemed to differ only slightly from other men, yet their mental world was the world of another race." No doubt the master race. Who indeed is drifting in a world of illusions? Let them also claim Manchester and Auschwitz and gulags and Hiroshima when they call Calcutta "The City of the Dreadful Night." (Shiva, do I hear your conch, the roar of your electric silence? When will it awaken me from this dream of the flatland where one letter follows another, leading to another, and another . . . ; the pilgrimage of the computer, the journey of the circle?)
In Heat and Dust, another of Jhabvala's Englishwomen, gone native, feels Shiva -- the Dravidian black bull, the dark of the moon -- trample the glass world of words: "I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space -- though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my own walls to look at and my books to read." Here are lives; people rather than books and TV and computers. The Bauls sing:
The eyes see
And the skin feels
The dust and the dirt.
Tasted on the tongue of life,
The lord of love is true.
In my city of Kanpur -- an evocation of Krishna -- amid the millions, I sometimes see a very striking naga sadhu. These are naked (naga) holy men (sadhu) who have given up everything down to and including the very shirt on their backs to find what is there beneath schooling and advertising and jobs and fear. This naga was dark, a rather small athletic looking man who wore chains around his waist, across his chest and back, and around his neck. I never caught his eyes, which were focused on some not too distant horizon to which he was walking without time to lose. I think we all silently thanked him for the object lesson, reminding us of our bondage and the chains we wear. He was not, as you might think, anomalous. I recall another young and totally naked sadhu, jiving down the thronged streets of Krishna's dirty city, in tempo with his own mantra, oblivious to the thousands who generally ignored him. And with this image I conjured another. I imagined a naked white farmer, dressed in his Sunday tire chains, rising from a truckstop dinner of roast beef, corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, to walk down State Street in Chicago. A ridiculous and impossible figure, yes. If he appeared he would be whisked off to an asylum. I had sat through long nights in the mental ward of a midland hospital, an orderly who listened to the desperate, intense raving of farmers, cut from the herd; in the middle of the night the TV was full of static. But I had also been inside monasteries. I knew there were white peasants wandering in cornfields on expensive machines who dared not venture beyond the plowed ground and barbed wire. Cattle farmers bereft of Shiva, the bull the toreador can never master, and Gauri, the cow who manifests the qualities of both mother and wife; who could they cry out to for deliverance? Who comes naked to show them their bondage? What would they say to India who whispers only to herself:
My heart,
Dress yourself
In the spirit of all women
And reverse
Your nature
And habits . . .
My farmer of the white forehead grumbles, "Queer! Heathen!"
* * *
I cannot explain India, how the streets with their throngs exude life and love, even though life is so desperately hard. Sarah Lloyd, an English traveler who recently spent two years in India, writes of returning to India. "The first hint of homecoming had taken place on my departure at Heathrow Airport, where I had stepped into a plane full of Indians. The effect was instant: I smiled and relaxed. Such a thing could never had happened to me in English society: on the contrary I can go into a pub, or a restaurant, or a supermarket, or even a university and feel an overwhelming desolation and alienation."
This incident is not striking, but it was how it happened to me. A man was standing in a long queue for a circus ticket in Calcutta. He was poor, skinny, dressed in a none too clean kadhi (cotton homespun) kurta and pajamas. He invited me to come to the circus. I thought Calcutta was itself a huge circus, so I told him the queue was too long. He smiled, offering to stand in line, obtain my ticket, and then collect me, just a mother would do for her child. (Lovely Shiva, wearing the moon in your midnight hair, did you turn your third eye on me then, breaking the chains with moonlight?) I remembered Joyce's "Araby" and the disillusioned Catholic kid, and the bleached land on the other side of the planet, and the twentieth century money machines . . . and I loved India.
I cannot explain India, for India is not an idea as America is. She is not a project nor an experiment nor a machine. She is your mother. India is simply life, often conscious of itself; as Jhabvala says, heat and dust, a backward place. It is rasa: flavor, taste, sex, sorrow. And that is why it is eternal, why we all journey East going home to Kasi, the shining city, the city of burning, desire, and death. This is where we are going; it is the pilgrimage we make even while preoccupied with trips to the cinema, to the bank, to work.
In his strange book, Miguel Serrano describes the primitive vision of the Hindu, so deeply sunk in the unconscious, in primal experience unmediated by machine technology, and hence in life: "almost alone in the world, he is still entirely in rapport with nature." He says, "For this reason, probably no one is so well fitted to survive catastrophe [loss of the urban, technical world] as is the Hindu. His civilization is one of jungles and mountains." (Shiva, plowing the flatland, will I come to jungles and mountains, and your serene smile on the other side of catastrophe?)
Grudgingly flying to the white land of words, with a jumble of impressions to sort through like note cards, I stayed for a time in Mission Viejo, one of the Brahman enclaves of pure money in the City of Angels. It seemed a mirror image of Fatehpur Shikri: deserted and hence clean. Mercedes zipped past as in a city of robots. In the bathroom of the house where I was staying, I found bronzing cream, a kind of perfumed money in a plastic tube to turn white people temporarily brown. A few pale souls congregated in a puja of money at shopping center space ships. Fat white kids fed a week's wages into machines to kill and eat TV things. I felt the catastrophe. It was a fleeting recognition, hard to keep in mind, that above the smog,
The stars and the moon eternally move,
with no sound at all.
Each cycle of the universe
in silence prays,
welling up with the essence of love.
Then I was sitting at the dean's dinner table, a bit drunk, waiting for the inevitable interrogation, "why did you like India?" Treason. I thought of Henry Adams, "floundering between worlds passed and worlds coming," paralyzed between them. And I thought of the Namdharis who tattoo the name of God on every inch of their skin, shaving their heads for more room, on every inch of their clothes, chanting his name in every breath. I mumbled, "It is a religious society." I could not imagine what images he might evoke to interpret that for he was a man of the machine. I did not know what my words meant either. Instead of struggling for language and communication, I thought of Edward Hopper's grain elevators in the clean winter light -- Shiva's lingam of the midland -- and of the Taittriya Upanishad which says God is food, the sustenance of all life; and the grain in those linga; and the icy white flat pressed-down wheat circle of my childhood God. (Shiva, what shall I say?)
The Bauls say:
A man unknown to me
And I,
We live together
But in a void--
A million miles
Between us.
And so we walk on, spinning in this Milky Way, pilgrims on tractors in cornfields of longing; pilgrims racing through meals of words and marriages and Mercedes; stringing barbed wire karma around gardens of money. We gnaw the gold chains on our throats and our teeth crack; we watch in the lens of TV for the light at the end of the tunnel. We send our mothers to antiseptic white nursing homes. Tell me, whose city is the "City of the Dreadful Night"? Who prays to the dark God to annihilate this bondage?
* * *
WORKS CITED:
Adams, Henry. The Education of
Henry Adams. New York: Modern Library, 1918.
Bharucha, Rustom. "Calcutta: Notes on a Homecoming." Georgia Review 34.3
(Fall 1980): 520-34.
Bhattacharya, Deben, trans. Songs of the Bards of Bengal. New York: Grove, 1969.
Bhave, Vinoba. Talks on the Gita. 6th ed. Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan,
1978.
Hume, Robert Ernest, trans. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. 2nd ed. London:
Oxford U. Pr., 1931.
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. A Backward Place. Delhi: Orient, 1965.
________. Heat and Dust. Delhi: Hind, n.d.
Lloyd, Sarah. An Indian Attachment. London: Futura, 1984.
Koestler, Arthur. The Lotus and the Robot. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
Mehta, Ved. Portrait of India. New York: Penguin, 1970.
Naipaul, V. S. An Area of Darkness. New York: Vintage, 1964.
Serrano, Miguel. The Serpent of Paradise: The Story of an Indian Pilgrimage. Trans.
Frank MacShane. Delhi: Vikas, 1963.
Taylor, Edmond. Richer By Asia. New York: Time Magazine Press, 1947.
Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Ed. Joseph
Campbell. Princeton U. Pr., 1946.
Home Background Education Publications Teaching NAU English
NAU HomeEmail: john.rothfork@nau.edu 09.26.05
