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Octavio Paz, who won the 1990 Nobel for his Spanish poetry, served as Mexico's ambassador in New Delhi from 1962 to 1968. In Light of India is a set of Paz's essays on his personal experiences and observations of the country's cultural history: "My education in India lasted for years and was not confined to books. ....It has marked me deeply. It has been a sentimental, artistic, and spiritual education. Its influence can be seen in my poems, my prose writings, and in my life itself." In the opening essay, "The Antipodes of Coming and Going," Paz gives his first impressions of Bombay and Delhi. Arriving, first, in 1951 as an attache to the Mexican embassy, Paz saw Bombay's Taj Mahal hotel as "the English dream of India at the beginning of the century, an India populated by dark men with pointed mustaches and scimitars at their waists, by women with amber-colored skin, hair and eyebrows as black as crows' wings, and the huge eyes of lionesses in heat." On Delhi's Qutab Minar: "The reddish stone, contrasting with the transparency of the air and the blue of the sky, gives the monument a vertical dynamism, like a huge rocket aimed at the stars...the original construction was the work of Prithvi Raj, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi. The tower was part of a temple that also housed the famous Iron Pillar, which has an inscription from the Gupta period (fourth century)." In "Rama and Allah," Paz, hailed by The Washington Post as "this century's intellectual conscience," regards Islam in India as "more than a historical paradox, a deep wound": "Between Islam and Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility....The separation had existed since the founding of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. With the exception of Akbar, none of the Muslim rulers, for seven centuries, made any real attempt to transform coexistence into a genuine reconciliation. Their religion would not allow it: idolaters must be either converted or exterminated." Paz's observation accords well with Sri Aurobindo's, who, before the partition of India, posed the question about Islam: "You can live with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live with a religion whose principle is 'I will not tolerate you'? How are you going to have unity with these people?" Sri Aurobindo cited the Koranic injunction (chapter IX, verse 5): "Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent [i.e. convert to Islam] and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave them free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful." In the same essay, Paz traces the origin of Sufi thought to Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240), whom he labels "the Spaniard." Ibn 'Arabi had been deeply influenced by the Buddhist concept of the void expounded in the writings of the renowned philosopher Nagarajuna. Ibn' Arabi's ideas reached Akbar's court in the sixteenth century, where, however, they were fiercely countered by the leader of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism, Ahmed Sirhindi. In Paz's words: "The greatest and most determined enemy of Akbar's ecclecticism was Sheik Ahmed Sirhindi, who was vehemently opposed to the Sufi pantheism of Ibn 'Arabi and his followers, and to the idea of a point of convergence for Hindu and Islamic mysticism." After Akbar's death, Sirhindi, the Sufi leader, urged Emperor Jehangir to force the Islamic conversion of the great Punjabi poet Guru Arjun Dev, the fifth guru of the Sikh. The Sufi's letter exhorted: "Honor of Islam lies in insulting Kufr and Kafirs... They should constantly remain terrified and trembling." Under the influence of the Sufi's cruel exhortation, Jehangir ordered public torture of Arjun Dev to death in 1606. Jehangir, in his autobiography, "Tuzuk-i-Jehangiri," wrote the following about Arjun Dev (pp.72-73): "He was noised about as a religious and worldly leader. They called him Guru, and from all directions crowds of fools would come to him and express great devotion to him. This busy traffic had been carried on for three or four generations. For years the thought had been presenting itself that I should put an end to this false traffic, or he should be brought into the fold of Islam...I ordered that his property should be confiscated and that he should be put to death with torture." Contrary to the propaganda of some Islamic apologists, Sufis in India fully participated in jihad. Many examples of Sufis' role in instigating jihad are cited in R.M. Eaton's scholarly work The Sufis of Bijapur (Princeton University Press, 1978), which Paz presumably consulted. Sita Ram Goel in The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India writes: "The sufi silsilas (orders) which travelled to India after the advent of Muinuddin Chishti were departments of the imperialist establishment of Islam. None of these sufis looked kindly at the Hindus, nor did the Hindus honour any of them with the exception of some simpletons who were taken in by the show of sufi piety or some self-seekers who were out to curry favour with the Muslim courts with the help of sufis." Even the Sufi center or "dargah" of Muinuddin Chisti in Ajmer stands on the ruins of a Hindu temple. In Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, Vol II, The Islamic Evidence (published by Voice of India, New Delhi, 1993), S.R. Goel citing numerous Islamic historians, includes 14 Sufis, 61 Muslim kings, and 63 Muslim military commanders "who destroyed Hindu temples in 154 localities spread from Khurasan in the West to Tripura in the East, and from Transoxania in the North to Tamil Nadu in the South, over a period of eleven hundred years." One of the Islamic historical documents Goel cites is Tarikh-i-Alai by Amir Khusru, the principal disciple of the Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya: "The whole country by means of the sword of our holy warriors has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. The land has been saturated by the waters of the sword, and the vapours of Hinduism have been dispersed. Islam is triumphant, idolatory is subdued. Had not the law (of Hanifa) granted exemption from death by the payment of jiziya tax, the very name of Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished." Paz's analysis of Hindu-Muslim incompatibilty finds further support in the recent writings of Muzaffar Alam, a contemporary Muslim scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University: "Indeed in relation to Hindus, it is difficult to distinguish between an orthodox theologian [of Islam] and a liberal mystic [Sufi]... An average literate Muslim believed that Islam and Hinduism belonged to two radically diverse traditions and that the twain would never meet." In one of his most illuminating essays,"The Apsara and the Yakshi," Paz expresses great admiration of Hindu philosophy, literature, and music. Quoting a verse from the Rig Veda's "Hymn of Creation," " The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom/know that which is, is kin to that which is not," Paz observes, "All that can be said about being and nonbeing are in those enigmatic and sublime lines." Paz assesses the enormous influence of the Panchatantra tales on the development of Arab, Persian, and European literature: "Many of La Fontaine's fables come from Indian sources, and the massive collection "The Ocean of Story" was the prototype for "The Thousand and One Nights." Although Western cultural historians have long acknowledged that Hindu philosophy and religion had a "profound influence on the West...examples of Schopenhauer, Nietzche, Emerson, Whitman, even Mallarme," Paz wonders at "the neglect of Sanskrit poetry as almost inexplicable and certainly unjust." Paz cites exquisite verses of Dharmakirti, Kalidasa, Amaru, and others. For example, the philosopher-poet Dharmakirti as philosopher, notes Paz, "reduces all rationalizations to absurdity; the poet Dharmakirti, facing the body of a woman, does the same to his own dialectic."
Paz finds classical Hindu music enchanting: "Ragas are soliloquies and meditations, passionate melodies that draw circles and triangles in a mental space, a geometry of sounds that can turn a room into a fountain, a spring, a pool." Paz met Nehru and Indira Gandhi during his ambassadorship in New Delhi. Like many other political analysts -- such as Arun Shourie, Khushwant Singh, and Mark Tully -- Paz blames Indira Gandhi for creating the Punjab problem: "It seemed clear that Indira, spurred on by the devil of politics, had lit the fire that cosumed her." Some of his other observations are surprising and erroneous. For example, Paz states that "India lacks a tradition of thinking critically." Paz needs to account for the development of the six classical systems of Hindu philosophy and the Buddhist critique of Vedanta. Paz also seems to be unaware of the tradition of Indian democracy, which has a long history. As Dr. B. R. Ambedkar pointed out: "Indian democracy was as old as its ancient village republics. India had political assemblies with elaborate parliamentary rules of procedures at a time when most of the rest of the world suffered under despotism or anarchy." This ignorance is curious since he was serving as a cultural attache in New Delhi in 1951 when the new constitution of India was very much in the news. Despite its faults, Paz's In Light of India makes charming reading. |
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