IndiaStar Book Reviews:
Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India
by Paul William Roberts
Reviewed by Subhash Kak
IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine on the internet
Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India by Paul William Roberts Reviewed by Subhash Kak
India is a country that evokes very strong emotions. On any brief visit, one is enraged by the filth, the decay, the disorganization, not to speak of the heat and the dust. But when one has lived there for some time, a strange magic starts to work. It is like the seductive charm of a beautiful Gypsy woman in rags! What secrets lie buried in her chest? India is more than a palimpsest. It is as if each layer were alive and continually changing right before your eyes. How does one write about such a land without a stereotypical juxtaposition of the old and the new? How does one communicate the horror and debasement that has entered the soul of urban India and still be able to speak of the ancient springwells of its culture? Well the task may appear impossible but it can be done as shown in this magnificent book by Paul William Roberts, a British-Canadian writer. Recounting several journeys made over an eighteen-year period, Roberts is able to draw a powerful picture of India with its smells and sounds, bazaars and chai-shops, bug-infested cheap hotels and rationed electricity, gurus and drug-runners, penuried ex-rajas and movie-stars, country roads and camel rides, ashrams and whore-houses. But these are just the props for his marvellous gifts of story-telling. It is a very moving book which also manages to be funny and profound. Through his experiences he is not only able to describe the moods of the many Indias, he also paints the soul of the West. This book is not analytical like the travel books of Naipaul; for Roberts the story is told through suggestion and a torrent of feelings. In linear discourse, the same drama in the sky will be thunder to the blind and lightning to the deaf, but Roberts is able to capture in one sweep the many dimensions of his experience. This method literally transports us to India; we become his fellow-travellers. The journeys are peopled by fascinating characters: A seven-foot tall German tantrik in loin-cloth; a 300-pound woman who actually cooks her lunch on a pressure-stove in a crammed bus; sex-crazed followers of Rajneesh; old aristocracy reduced to penury; hippies in Goa; the Dom raja of the burning ghats of Benaras. There are also very acutely drawn sketches of his adventures in the Sathya Sai Baba ashram in Puttaparthi and the Ramana ashram in Tiruvannamalai. At the first ashram he rents a room for a year for just five hundred rupees, which is about four dollars a month. He is witness to several strange events including the disgorging of a huge crystalline egg by the Baba on the Shivaratri night. He is in a daze:
He travels to Goa with his friends and he draws a very perceptive portrait of its pleasure grounds. After a detour in the pleasure-ashram of Rajneesh, he is off on a trip to Swat in Pakistan to see the factory of his friend, a hippie drug-baron. Later, for some time Roberts is an English teacher in a college in Bangalore. When discussing Macbeth, one of his rustic students asks: ``If the Macbett is believing these sadhu womens when they are telling him he will be the raja, why is he not also believing them when they are saying his children will not take crown because the Banko's issues, they will be taking crown?'' He has no answer. He realizes that he needs to go beyond the world of plays to real life. He visits a maharaja friend in his palace in the remote town of Venkatagiri where in the middle of the night he is locked in a bathroom by mistake and he climbs out of the window to find himself in the bazaar in nothing but his underwear! Although the book has its gurus, the maharaja, the hippies and the movie-stars, it does not deal with hackneyed themes. Roberts brings a rare perception to his experience so that we are brought face to face with the universals of the human condition. Returning from India on his most recent trip, Roberts evokes an emotion familiar to expatriate Indians and others who have lived there for any length of time: ``As the plane left the ground, rising up over the central plains of India, heading out over Rajasthan, I gazed down at the fast-disappearing features of the land. The thousands of tiny villages; the mountains; the rivers; the jungles; the deserts; the temples; the great holy cities; and all these people---I was leaving them all yet again. On the headphones an Urdu ghazal singer was wailing out the Oriental version of country music: Whatever he sang about, ithad to involve broken hearts, broken dreams. I felt the bittersweet ache of love inside, too; felt my heart swelling up---as if wanting to embrace the whole world. India: I couldn't live with her, and I couldn't live without her.'' It is a remarkable book, one of the great travel books of our times. Not only does it evoke the mystique of India, it does so with great aplomb and style. There are shadowy characters in the book, but also celebrities such as Lady Sinha of Calcutta, Mother Teresa, Shobha De, Rahul Singh and Gurcharan Das. Paul Roberts informs us that he has enough notes on his travels in India to fill three books. Having see the brilliance of this first one, we can hardly wait for the material that lies buried in his notebooks. It is the perfect book to read this year, the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence. Written with great zest and sympathy, it shows why the attraction of India is something more than a longing for ahomeland. India may be an infuriating place but there is magic in its rhythms! |