India – The Book-Butterfly

William Dalrymple: The Golden Road

It is not only the Silk Roads that are rising again, as Peter Frankopan proclaims in a forceful last line that gave me goosebumps. Rising, too, are buried or forgotten histories that have now resurfaced to challenge centuries of unquestioned narratives.

Frankopan’s The Silk Roads was an eye-opener, but The Golden Road takes this non-Eurocentric view of ancient and early medieval history to an intriguing direction by revealing India as a catalyst that transformed the world.

The evidence lies in the art discovered in Afghanistan’s mountains and caves; in the archaeological treasures of an ancient Egyptian seaport; in Baghdad where the knowledge of ancient India converged with that of ancient Greece and Abbasid viziers were Sanskrit-literate; in Spain where Sa’id Al-Andalus championed Indian contribution to mathematics and astronomy; in Pisa where Fibonacci popularized what we call “Arabic numerals” but which are actually Indian; in Roman texts, some written by Pliny; in the jungles of India, or in its museums that appear to hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the Roman Empire; in China’s overlooked history where once upon a time it looked to India for enlightenment; in Sri Lanka and Central Java where Indian Buddhist literature achieved peak expression in architecture; in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat which Dalrymple refers to as the most spectacular of all Indic temples, and where one can find the oldest inscription that represents the number zero; in Brahmagupta’s 7th century writings that made him the first mathematician to record his exploration of the properties of zero, defining it as a number akin to the other nine rather than a void; in the numbers that dictate our most advanced technology to those we use in simple day-to-day calculations, “arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language…”

[…and also in, if I may add, the Philippines where currently displayed in the Ayala Museum as part of the Gold of Our Ancestors exhibit is an intricately crafted, four-kilo gold sash from 10th to 13th century Mindanao that massively echoes the sacred thread, or upavita, in Hindu culture. (Dear William Dalrymple, or your cute son, Sam, please come to the Philippines to look into this? Haha)]

To engage in this book is also to question why India’s extraordinary role in world history has been subdued. The pulsating arteries of India’s influence that crossed continents and oceans, “spread not by the sword but by the sheer power of ideas,” has been brushed aside. It has never even been given a name. William Dalrymple calls it The Golden Road.

Although I prefer the William Dalrymple who does not make the “I” completely disappear in his travelogues, thereby giving his text a more endearing and personal touch, I like how this history book is not tediously academic and does not promise to be all-encompassing. Its readability serves as an introduction for those who would like to have a general idea of these trade, cultural, and intellectual routes that seem to have a life of their own apart from — although intersecting at times — the often romanticized Silk Roads.

The prolific stream of fascinating history from Dalrymple’s writings makes this reader feel fortunate to be alive in this age of rediscovery and information. The generosity of his work is encapsulated in my favorite line from this book: “The possession of knowledge is not weakened when shared with others but made more fruitful and more enduring.”

Unboxing William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road

I am eternally grateful, Anna. It is, indeed, beautiful: This kindness, this kinship, this love among reading friends. 🤍

Finally! I can’t wait to walk down this golden road!

William Dalrymple: City of Djinns

A friend sent me a signed copy of Dalrymple’s The Golden Road from overseas a few months ago, and it still hasn’t arrived thanks to our lousy postal system. But as I wait, another friend lends me her copy of City of Djinns. It’s comforting to know that I won’t run out of Dalrymples (and kind, reading friends).

City of Djinns is Dalrymple’s second book after his debut, In Xanadu. Published only four years apart and yet the Dalrymple of Djinns is already so much wiser and more thoughtful than the one in Xanadu. It is one of his best books. City of Djinns is a precious gem in a brilliant bibliography that is a testament to how a series of meaningful travels can profoundly ripen a person and a writer.

And Delhi, this book’s chosen city, is one such city that seems like a heaving anarchy on the surface; but as this book’s adept writer shows us, if one dares to steep oneself in its murky river of humanity, one comes out of it acquiring a thousand and one lessons about the layers of its incredible history, about different faiths and cultures, and about the rise and fall of empires.

“The civilization I belong to — the civilization of Delhi — came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilization flourished for one thousand years undisturbed until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place,” laments Twilight in Delhi author, Ahmed Ali.

India was where the sun finally set on the British Empire, and this book is another witness to how much the Partition — the British Empire’s parting gift to the Indian sub-continent — wreaked havoc on this particular city, whose towers, ironically, used to be, “The resting place of the sun”.

Delhi is not a destination and subject for the faint-hearted. It takes a Dalrymple to deftly paint the interplay of light and dark, of myth and truth, of what was and what is.

William Dalrymple: The Age of Kali

In Hindu cosmology, world time is divided into four great epochs called the Yuga Cycle: Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga, and the Kali Yuga. As the cycle progresses through the four stages, the length of each yuga decreases, but social and moral decay multiplies. We are believed to be in the Kali Yuga, the age of conflict, sin, and disintegration.

This sets the tone for the book, so that a few pages in, I felt relieved that I did not read this before, or during, my trip to India.

“This book covers so many sensitive areas that it is bound to raise a few cries of protest and dissent, particularly from Indians understandably touchy about criticism from abroad; but it is a work of love. Its subject is an area of the world I revere like no other, and in which I have chosen to spend most of my time since I was free to make that choice,” writes Dalrymple in the introduction.

But as I read on, I began to regret not reading this before, or during, my trip to India! Unlike the three other Dalrymple books in the Vintage Departures edition, this is less travelogue than a compilation of articles and essays about the Indian subcontinent, from north to south and east to west, which are more political in nature.

Published in 1998, it includes interviews with Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan, and figures from opposing sides of caste wars and political parties. It is, therefore, a crash course on a part of the world that, despite its significant advances, is still reeling from the British Raj, the Partition, and religious discrimination. As an outsider and common reader, I have yet to encounter a more readable and insightful work that encapsulates caste and gender prejudice, corruption in government, the justice system and the economic obstacles of the subcontinent in a single book.

Dalrymple rarely waxes poetic here, but this book stamps his authority in the field of journalism. As I read this amidst horrifying world events and the filing of certificates of candidacies by movie stars, social media influencers, and crooks here in the Philippines, I can easily believe that we are, indeed, in the Age of Kali.

Sheesh Mahal (Mirror Palace) and a passage from Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”

“…Your project reminds me of all the great Persian mirror art… Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe—France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the Shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirrors, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches… I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how these mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred… it means, in my humble opinion, we got to cubism hundreds of years before Braque or Picasso or any European. That maybe we’ve been training for a long time in sitting in the complicated multiplicities of ourselves, of our natures.” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Currently reading Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! and this passage reminded me of the 16th century Sheesh Mahal (“Mirror Palace”) in Rajasthan, and the photos I still have not uploaded from the India trip.

I have not read historical evidence, but I was told Sheesh Mahal’s mirrors were transported from Belgium by Elephants.

Traveling Companions in India

“A small bookcaseful of the right books, and you are set for life.” — Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey

Friends can tell when I have re-attuned to daily life because I become a bit scarce on social media, and I return to writing about (or not about, in the case of Vikram Seth) the books I have read.

This is the India-themed reading stack for June that has spilled over to July. Not too different from the way India spills beyond what you have allotted for it. India has a way of spilling over from a journey and into a life.

But it’s time these books are homed into the sections where they belong, in close proximity to each other, in a library organized by political geography. And I can’t do that without at least writing a few lines about each one.

These particular books deserve exhaustive reviews, but for the time being, I will have to be content with abridgments of why they accompanied me on my trip and what I loved best about them.

Such a Long Journey, Rohinton Mistry

Several Mistry volumes wait on my shelf. And yet, this is my first time to read him. I was not sure where to begin. All I instinctively felt was that a Mistry perspective was necessary for a more encompassing idea of India. I ended up choosing his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

Contemporary Indian literature that come my way overflow with the repercussions of British colonialism, the partition, or the relationship of India’s Muslim and Hindu populace. But this is a seldom explored perspective of India’s modern history through the Parsee experience — an exciting realization for someone who is enamored with Iran! (As most of us know, Parsees are descendants of Zoroastrians from Persia who fled to India as a result of the Arab Conquest.)

It is set in 1971, the year of the Indo-Pakistani war and the Bangladesh Liberation War. Centered on Gustad and his family, this is a story of ordinary lives enmeshed in extraordinary times. It teems with the humor, the pains, and the realities of living. This is a book for readers who do not skim over the prose but find beauty in taking time to appreciate details pregnant with cultural understanding.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple’s name is often identified with lyrical prose and India, so this choice does not need any expounding. Although I was wrong in thinking it would be an easy read. I thought it would not be too emotionally affecting and would balance out the heavy themes of The Raj Quartet. Three stories in, I was already sniffling and wiping away tears inside my room in a Jaipur haveli.

This resulted in the decision that I would not read the nine stories straight, that I would read them in-between other books, in between deep breaths, in between exploring the land in which these stories are set, and that it would be the book I’d carry in my sling bag throughout my whole stay in India.

The nine lives that Dalrymple immortalizes from his travels flow from a pen of empathy and genuine curiosity, always with the intention to “humanize rather than exoticize”. It is a portrayal of nine characters that break free from standardized religions, and which represent different sects and personal beliefs that the author hopes to have escaped “many of the clichés about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much of Western writing on Indian religion”; they are also manifestations of how, despite the exponential rate of change and modernization in the country, an older and more diverse India survives.

It is a book I would highly recommend even to those who are not planning a trip to India. Its lessons in faith and tolerance are relevant and enduring.

Jaipur Nama, Giles Tillotson | Banaras, Vertul Singh

“There is a beautiful word in Bengali — boi, which literally means a book. The word was commonly used in the vernacular for cinema and later came to be picked up by the Bengali elite while referring to an artsy movie and continues to be used to imply films. It has a deep connotation in that cinema is not just seen, it is also read. While walking through a city, one also reads it…” — Vertul Singh, Banaras

These two books have these in common: I purchased them from independent bookshops in Jaipur; they concentrate on a single city in India as the subject for the entire book; and they are books a reading traveler would benefit from tremendously when traveling to Jaipur or Varanasi.

While I learned so much about Jaipur from Tillotson’s Jaipur Nama, was thoroughly entertained by it, loved the passages on Jaipur’s architecture, and saw with my own eyes the wonders described in its pages, I was inscrutably drawn to the tone of Singh’s Banaras. There seemed to be an imploring strain that made itself heard to me, beckoning me to Varanasi, waiting for me to read the city beyond book pages, asking me to look into its soul.

Pyre, Perumal Murugan

Rajat Book Corner’s shelves were cascading with the best selections. They had Pamuk, Mahfouz, Proust, recent literary prize winners, the Indian greats, among many others. So you can imagine the argument between my other selves against the practical one who kept whispering firmly, “Just one book, just one book.”

After a while of intense internal struggle, I finally went with something I hadn’t seen in Philippine bookstores: Pyre, a 2023 longlister of the International Booker Prize written by Perumal Murugan.

“Good choice,” said the man at the counter.

“Thank you,” I answered, thinking it was something he always said to bookstore clientele.

“It’s a great book! We discussed this in our bookclub.” That’s when I realized he meant it. He had read Pyre. To my surprise, he added, “Wait. I think this is a signed copy. The author signed it when he came here.” And indeed, it was!

Pyre was the only book from this stack that I was able to finish reading within 24 hours, but the ending left me stunned for days!

This is powerful storytelling, but it is, by no means, a pleasant read. It feels claustrophobic and asphyxiating: But that’s how prejudice is. That’s how ignorance and intolerance feels. That’s what hatred is.

The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott

And now, the portion of this stack that took me longest to finish — The Raj Quartet: Four volumes of what is often declared as the nonpareil narrative of the dissolution of the British Raj.

The claim was convincing enough for me to take the massive tomes along for the ride even if that was all I heard about it. As I slowly turned page after page, I increasingly understood that it is necessarily heavy. It is, as Scott himself wrote, “The luggage I am conscious of carrying with me everyday of my life — the luggage of my past, of my personal history and of the world’s history.”

In Hilary Spurling’s introduction, she writes, “Scott did not condone the Raj. He looked long and hard at its many failures, its inhumanity, its smugness, self-righteousness and rigidity.” And although it is written in a Tolstoyan sweep, it finds a Filipino parallel in Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun in the way it shows how India’s War of Independence was not merely a confrontation between the Indians and British, but also between British and British, and between Indian and Indian. Scott lays open the lives of the unrecorded men and women, the lives that fall under the gray shadows, the ones “historians won’t recognize or which we relegate to our margins.”

Imagine this, a sketch. The first volume an outline on which Scott would continue to color and add contrast in the succeeding volumes, peopling it with new characters and adding the Second World War as another layer of complexity against an already rich and tumultuous Indian tapestry.

The first page of Volume I reads, “This is the story of a rape.” Reading about rape is not something a solo female traveler would intentionally do on a trip. But I was astonished by how Scott’s writing carried me through anyway. It made Volume II inevitable, wherein, all of a sudden, the characters became so fully dimensional you could touch them!

It was not lost on me that the first two volumes ended with two women giving birth but with grave consequences on the women. A metaphor for the birthing of nations, perhaps? Volumes III and IV continued to consistently reveal the multifacetedness of human beings, of nations, of identity, and of history. By the end of it all, I could only close my eyes, sigh, and try to take it all in, then whisper to myself, “What a journey!”

Rohinton Mistry’s Gustad once wondered, “Would this journey be worth it? Was any journey ever worth the trouble?”

Whether the question refers to journeys in literature or other lands, you won’t really know the answer unless you take it. Take it.

How not to write about books and their authors

Vikram Seth. His bearing was elegant and cosmopolitan even as he walked barefoot across the centuries-old stone floor of the family courtyard.

I had just arrived from an 8-hour road trip. I was groggy from the Bonamine. His manners and speech were refined. I was smitten. I allowed myself the harmless attraction because: I could blame the Bonamine, I knew nothing about him, the attraction was one-way, I was leaving the city the next day, and I would never see him again.

He shook my hand firmly, checked the haveli logbook and complimented my penmanship. I had only written my name and “Udaipur,” but perhaps the combination of the letters with my handwriting looks slightly elvish.

I had booked a smaller room, but because the haveli was not fully-booked, he assigned me a more spacious room — the room he had as a boy. Of course, it had dreamy windows overlooking the courtyard and the sky.

He introduced himself as Vikram Seth. I squealed inside, “Like the author?” I immediately checked if they were one and the same person. Because of his air of profundity, I wouldn’t have been surprised had he turned out to be the writer. But Google came up with a different face. The author will have to forgive me: This Vikram Seth was younger and more good-looking.

When I had freshened up and settled down, he asked if I had tried Kingfisher beer. I indulged in a mug and a conversation. Theirs was the only garden in a radius of several kilometers, he mentioned. Friends thought it laughable, he said, to keep it when building a modern hotel extension on that garden can be more lucrative.

“I’m glad you kept the garden,” I said. “It’s proof that you treasure things that are more valuable than money.”

He nodded thoughtfully and smiled. I left for Udaipur early the next day and never saw that smile again.

But I did not feel wistful. It was not love. It couldn’t have been. And it’s easy to practice anasakti, non-attachment, whilst traveling (and groggy on Bonamine). But now I’m wishing that I were a better practitioner of anasakti and traveller of life than I am in and of India.

So forgive me if the only thing I can tell you about this book that I got from the Jaipur Sunday Book Market for 200INR/140PHP is that it has some poignant lines that accompanied me on days when I waited indoors for the sun to soften, and that British composer Jonathan Dove set the poems to music in a song cycle of the same name. And forgive me, if all you learned from this post is this: How not to write about books and their authors.

The transmutation of India into a memory…

And just like that, I am back home, and immediately started teaching a series of online students in the US within the hour I arrived.

When people ask about my trip, I find myself answering that it was eye-opening, very much like reading a satisfying book.

I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I knew what it would be like. I soon learned that what I had in mind was a narrow-minded, stereotype-based, and extremely ignorant idea of India and its people. And to think I read! To think I’ve been lugging books, including all 2000 pages of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. How much more if I didn’t?

But the beautiful thing about being a reading traveler is that we do not read or travel for the certainties; and reading and traveling is an intuitive acknowledgement of an ignorance that we treat with a book or a trip.

It was Emerson who wrote, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” A great book does this. India does this. But only, perhaps, if one pays attention. India has expanded the way I think about places, people, and even design.

“Thank you,” one guide said earnestly, “for paying attention.” After I repeatedly refused his offer to take touristy photos of me, “So you’re not a Tiktok girl, huh? Most of the time people are only interested in having their pictures taken, they don’t even listen anymore.”

We have stereotypes of Indian men and they have stereotypes of us. Fair enough. But would you believe that two of the most cultured, educated, and refined men I have ever interacted with I encountered in a father and son duo in Jaipur? Would you believe that I felt more safe and respected in the company of my guides, drivers, haveli owners, hotel staff, than in one provincial event that I attended back home where a senior and former politician (someone I’m supposed to be able to trust) undressed me with his eyes? But that’s a story for another day. I have way better memories now.

Like this memory of a Mughal garden across the Yamuna River, yet unravaged by the claws of Agra’s over-tourism, where one can spend the entire afternoon reading and contemplating, or gazing at the Taj Mahal.

Just like that, the transmutation of India into a memory has begun…and what a memory to relish!

Five Indian Forts

Although the stories about these places are just as intriguing and twisted as Game of Thrones, what may look like promotional shots for season two of House of the Dragon, are photos of five out of approximately a thousand forts in India that are triumphs of strategy and engineering.

Amber Fort: The most picturesque. Jaigarh: Where one will find what used to be the largest cannon in the world, and along with Amber Fort and Nahargarh, has the best views overlooking the city of Jaipur and the sunset. Chittorgarh: The largest living fort in Asia, and where I was congratulated for being named “Mira” and being a musician, as Chittor residents are devotees of the mystic musician, Meera, or Mirabai. Agra Fort: The only Mughal fort among these, commanding a majestic view of the Taj Mahal, standing since 1530 and is still being used by the Indian Army up to this day!

June 2024 – The Taj and Other Mahals

The sky is despondent in Agra. I also saw an Indian vulture perch on the Taj Mahal and camouflage itself against the cornelian and onyx marble inlay. It has made me pensive. Maybe it should. After all, two of the main sites here are mausoleums: The Taj Mahal and the Tomb of I’timād-ud-Daulah, often misnamed “Baby Taj”, despite being the predecessor.

So little is said about the latter, but it literally sets in stone the transition period of Mughal architecture from red sandstone to intricately inlaid marble. Its details made me gasp! And to my surprise, no one else was in sight!

But the Taj, the Taj… when you’ve seen it so many times in friends’ pictures, and in books, you think you already know what it looks like. Nothing prepared me for how much it moved me! Something stirred in me when I came closer, when I felt the inlaid precious stones with my fingers, when I looked through the delicate lattices carved from entire slabs of marble… now I know what Victor Hugo meant when he described architecture as, “the handwriting of the past.”

We all know the story: 20,000 workers, 24 hours a day for 22 years. Its maintenance workers of today are descendants of the original construction workers 17 generations down. All these, to eternalize this handwriting of love… which, of course, Mumtaz never read, or laid eyes on.