Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ahmedabad, 1966

A Place Within: Rediscovering India By M.G. Vassanji, Viking, Rs 599

India is where the West comes in search of reality, and after finding too much of it, the visitors tend to cloak the country in an alluring mystique. When Octavio Paz came to India for the first time in 1951, he felt overwhelmed: “The excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into — what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name….” Returning to India a decade later, Paz spent six years as the Mexican ambassador, and got a better grip over the anomalies in the people (“frank realism allied with delirious fantasy”). But he never quite relinquished the safety of the “balcony” — and the image of looking down from a distance precisely captures the limitations of Paz’s learned, even poetic, survey, In Light of India.

To write his new book, A Place Within, M.G. Vassanji almost self-consciously descends from the “balcony” into the thick of Indian life. The result is an excellent work, in league with classics like Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India. Vassanji’s sojourn does not extend from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, nor does he cover the hackneyed Benaras-Agra-big cities trail. Rather, he focuses on a few key states, Himachal Pradesh being a pleasant diversion, where he spends some ethereal months at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla. His style, best described as amorphous, is a fine synthesis of travelogue, history, and autobiography. (Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa also employed this mixed-up mode in Out of God’s Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land (2002), and made a mess of it.) Vassanji’s book, like Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign, is also about a quest for roots. But unlike Shepard’s wet sentimentality and self-indulgent excess that mar her potentially powerful work on the Bene Israeli community in India, Vassanji’s approach is consistently self-effacing.

The first half of the book, especially the section on Delhi, is somewhat thickly historical, although the prose remains luminous all along. Vassanji opens with a cursory account of his first visit to India in 1993 shortly after the Babri Masjid unrest. Although replete with close observations and startling details, it is evident that this visit was still too early for him to come to terms with the puzzle that is India. He keeps grumbling righteously about the reticence of ordinary Indians regarding the communal riots the year before. But there it is. Indians, unlike North Americans, are continually, and more brutally, exposed to the vagaries of fate, and being naturally resilient, they are not in the habit of analysing every misfortune to shreds.

This brief visit becomes the stepping-stone to a longer one 13 years later, when Vassanji not only goes back to familiar places but also runs into characters he had befriended more than a decade ago. As memories are exhumed and the past crumbles in the light of the present, Vassanji is assailed by an aching nostalgia. This may not be a work of fiction, but the imaginative sympathies of a novelist remain alive all along. Sitting inside the overcrowded compartment of a train in East Africa, Vassanji had once realized that “there’s nothing like an extended journey on land for thoroughly purging the spirit of North American puritanical cleanliness, of the fears acquired abroad: fear of contact, fear ultimately of the smell of people”. Journeys on Indian trains, “with strangers, facing each other for hours, watching and being watched all the time”, vindicate his African experience.

By the time Vassanji makes his extended trip to India in 2006, he has got over the discomfort of being “intolerably overexposed”. He feels liberated, but oddly vulnerable, experiencing “a sense of wonderful elation” at his “communally anonymous and ambiguous” identity, given away only by that “cipher of [his] very Gujarati last name”. Yet, having grown up in Dar es Salaam in the syncretic Khoja Ismaili community (that traces its origin back to India), he finds the prospect of decoding his religious identity daunting. “To tell people that politically and culturally you don’t subscribe to this gulf among the same people, and that in matters of faith you were brought up in a very local Indian tradition that was a blend of the two faiths [Hinduism and Islam], is to appear naïve or quixotic. It is to meet a blank stare, it is to end a conversation.”

This synthesis of cultures, where the Hindu pantheon is held in the warm embrace of Islamic beliefs, feels almost magical in an India torn apart by communal violence. Vassanji’s travels to the farthest corners of Gujarat, with the spectre of Godhra lingering on in public memory, constitute an epic journey in itself. In Baroda, he meets Mehmood Khan Pathan, muezzin of the local Jama Masjid and father of two of the brightest cricketers in Team India, Irfan and Yusuf Pathan. At Champaner, one of the worst hit villages in the 2002 clashes, he is taken to see Prahlad Shastri, who had incited the Hindus against the Muslims. At Somnath, where Lal Krishna Advani had started his notorious rath yatra in 1990, Vassanji is struck by ennui, although fascinated by the wedding of two monkeys, celebrated with great fanfare. Finally, at Paneli, close to Porbandar, where Mahatma Gandhi was born, Vassanji goes around looking for the ancestral home of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The result is telling. Out of thin air, comes a policeman, “a Gujarati Gillespie”, shouting, “There is no Jinnah here! If his house were here we would have burnt it! Go!”

In sharp contrast to this encounter are episodes of sublime mishmash. As Vassanji trudges uphill to the Kalika Mata temple in Pavagadh, he discovers that the Sufi shrine on the top has vanished, giving way to a new one to the goddess. At the holy site of the Khojas, the shrine of Imamshah in Giramtha, he meets an odd trio — a Sikh boy with Hindu parents. Once again, he finds out that “a complete usurpation” has taken place. The Khoja shrine is now ruled by a taciturn Kaka and his disciples. Yet people of diverse faiths still come to the tomb of the long-dead mystic, bringing their suffering, sorrows and pleas, hoping for understanding. It is a moving communion, surpassing violence and territorial fights. “Here stands a rational, rationalized being,” Vassanji confesses in an aside, “who is acquainted with spiritual longing but cannot yield to it.”

This unwavering allegiance to reason illuminated by emotion makes Vassanji a lyrical yet sane chronicler, one who scrupulously avoids high drama and neat endings. Standing on the edge of India in Kanyakumari he is filled with awe: “All that tumult, all that land mass, all that history behind you, the silent sea ahead of you.” But he knows “it is not quite like that”. The discovery of India “never ends”.