A Work Of Love

In fact, reading Octavio Paz on India is like emerging from a dense thicket into a well-lit open space made for tranquil reflection. Parts of this book are so engaging that they not only cover its own deficiencies but also underscore some of the weaknesses of this year's outpourings on India. Paz classifies his offering not as a memoir "but rather an essay that attempts...to answer a question that goes beyond personal anecdotes. How does a Mexican writer, at the end of the 20th century, view the immense reality of India?" The chief merit of this small, thought-provoking book lies in the direction its writer is coming from.

In 1951, the 37-year-old Octavio Paz, not yet the acclaimed poet he was to become, was serving at his embassy in Paris when he found himself suddenly posted to New Delhi to help set up Mexico's new mission in India. His first tenure was brief, its one lasting result being that he found an unknown Satish Gujral a scholarship to work under the modern Mexican masters David Alfaro Sequiros and Refino Tameyo, an experience that gave the young Indian artist a fresh impetus. But in 1962, Paz returned to India as the Mexican ambassador and spent over six years in the country, travelling extensively, meeting his future wife here and befriending a wide variety of writers, poets, painters and politicians. Of his passing acquaintance with Nehru, he laconically observes: "It was not difficult to guess that his two great passions were politics and women". Of Mrs Gandhi, who regularly consulted him on Latin American affairs, he is equally evenhanded: "It seemed clear that Indira, spurred on by the devil of politics, had lit the fire that consumed her". Quickly dispensing with the stuff of ambassador's journals, however, Paz gets on with the larger Indian themes that excite him.

These are principally the clash of historical and social traditions in the context of modern politics or India's "project of nationhood" as he calls it. Analysing at some length two main sources of Indian conflict—religion and caste—Paz traces the similarity of crises afflicting Mexico and India: "In both cases we are confronting a project (of nationhood) hostile to our own traditions. Modernisation begins by being a critique of our past." Just as Indians believe they are different from any other people, including any other kind of Asian, so he says, do Mexicans consider themselves apart from all Latin Americans: "It would not be an exaggeration to say that the fact of being Mexican helped me see the difference of being Indian—from the difference of being Mexican."

Paz captures the reader's attention by turns, through comparison, self-revelation and by springing the unexpected example. He jumps in where angels fear to tread and rakes up the subject of ancient gastronomic traditions. When his friend Sham Lal, the distinguished editor, pointed out that the chillie was a comparatively recent import into India, Paz traced the word to its Nahuatl origin, and concluded that it is most likely a Mexican export. Similarly, the word 'chico' is Spanish, and in Mexico the fruit is called 'chicozapote'. Could, therefore, the word for certain south Indian curries known as 'mole' be a corruption of the Mexican as in guacamole? Isn't the principle behind a chapati or tortilla the same—to scoop up food and use it as an edible spoon?

From the 17th century convent in the city of Puebla, where they invented the Mexican mole, he draws you into the life of Catarina de San Juan, a medieval saint much worshiped today. The Mexicans call her China Poblana—the "Chinese woman from Puebla"—but Paz believes she was a slave kidnapped by pirates from Cochin, who arrived in Puebla by way of Manila and Acapulco in 1621. Religious histories of divine figures are often dodgy, so you can buy St Catarina's story or leave it. But that's not the point, the point is the way Paz tells it, exquisitely enforcing for a few moments what the Romantics called the "willing suspension of disbelief".

Infinitely better told, in a chapter titled The Apsara and the Yakshi, is Paz's evaluation of Sanskrit poetry, especially erotic verse, with a wide selection of examples. It would be hard to find a more inspiring voice—clear, critical but passionate—explain its range and nuance any better.

In Light of India is not so much an essay as a rumination—a series of digressions really—upon two distant continents with the late 20th century poet-thinker cast in the role of interpreter and interlocutor. In the light of his own formidable intellect and poetic sensibility, it is not a surprise to find a voice that is simultaneously engaged and yet detached in its reflections on the human condition. Paz is only being modest when he calls this book a "child not of knowledge but of love". As he remarkably demonstrates once again, there cannot possibly be one without the other.