The Twice-Born
Life and Death on the Ganges
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In The Twice-Born, Aatish Taseer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in an intoxicating, unsettling personal reckoning with modern India, where ancient customs collide with the contemporary politics of revivalism and revenge
When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.
Known as the twice-born—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India—and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of “Victory to Mother India!” and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence.
From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hindus' struggle to reconcile modern life with age-old traditions is at the heart of this ruminative study of India's identity crisis. Indian novelist and journalist Taseer (Stranger in History) visited the holy city of Benares on the Ganges River to meet members of the priestly Brahmin caste who study ancient Sanskrit literature. These "twice-born" students and professors embody, as Taseer sees it, India's cultural contradictions, as they are devoted to Hindu spirituality, but are aware of its distance from the scientific, materialistic Western worldview that India must pursue to achieve progress and economic development. Resentful and uncertain, they savor stories of magic and miracles, gravitate to Hindu nationalist politics, and cling to the caste prejudices that give them social prestige. Taseer probes his own deracination he's gay, agnostic, and the illegitimate son of an Indian woman, details that he doesn't discuss with his Brahmin subjects as part of a Westernized, English-speaking, subcontinental elite that's increasingly isolated and precarious. (He stoically recounts the assassination of his father, a liberal Pakistani politician, by a Muslim fundamentalist in 2011.) Taseer sets these meditations against a gorgeous, sinister portrait of Benares "the river was flat and oily; beggars circled... there was a darkling energy abroad in the city" with its religious fervor, funeral pyres, and floating corpses. The lengthy conversations about Hindu philosophy sometimes drag, but Taseer's wonderfully atmospheric rendition of landscapes and gnarled social psychologies make for an engrossing dissection of India's discontents.
