The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton

In this, another delightful book from Alain De Botton, of whom I’ve previously read How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, De Botton once again adroitly mixes personal experience, paintings, literature, and famous figures to explore different aspects of travel. Each chapter is “on”: “On Anticipation”, “On the Exotic”, “On Habit”, and so on. Each chapter is a self-contained essay that explores its chosen topic through a representative figure from history, such as Flaubert, Wordsworth, and Ruskin, to name three of the more familiar figures. Each chapter uses paintings and photography to supplement the words of the essay. “On Traveling Places”, for instance, explores works of Edward Hopper, best known for his work “Nighthawks" (not used here), but who also explored trains, gas stations, and hotel rooms along his way. Finally, De Botton includes his own experiences to provide a contemporary perspective and to sometimes test the ideas of those upon whom he has drawn. 

Part of the pleasure of De Botton’s project comes from his ability to meditate on travel from many different angles. In the opening essay, “On Anticipation”, he tells the tale of J.-K. Huysmans, who decided upon a trip to London from his French residence, only to abandon it after having made all of the necessary arrangements and consulted all of the guide books. After consulting the guidebooks, he decided he’d seen enough! Sometimes, indeed, the imagination of anticipation exceeds the reality of even the most alluring of destinations. In “On the Exotic”, the French novelist Flaubert travels to Egypt to stay and experience an alien world, while Xavier de Maistre writes about his travels around his bedroom, and then his view from his bedroom window in De Botton’s “On Habit” chapter. (De Maistre travels abroad as well.) But even within the limited purview of a bedroom De Maistre finds, upon careful and leisurely inspection, more interesting things either he or we could have imagined. 

De Botton contrasts the city with the country. Samuel Johnson found the Scottish highlands a wasteland that merely created annoyance, while not long after Johnson, Wordsworth sang the praises of the Lake District. Our views of what’s worth visiting and experiencing changes with time and varies according to our temperament. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt traveled the Amazon basin in the early 19^th century to catalogue all that was new to European scientists, loving the challenge and uniqueness of the journey. 

De Botton uses the paintings of Van Gogh to illustrate what might go unnoticed or unappreciated in a region and that can be newly (or perhaps first) appreciated only after viewing a painted facsimile of the scene. Of course, Van Gogh didn’t take a realist perspective, his cypress trees look as if they are on fire and his building are often all akimbo, but he forces us to take a new and closer look at what some once considered the boring countryside of Provence. By abstracting reality, we obtain a better appreciation of it. In a similar vein, Edmund Burke argues that we benefit when Nature overwhelms us with its grandeur and power in a manner that we label “sublime”. 

If you travel or you contemplate travel, De Botton’s book will serve as a meditative preparation, one that you can dip into at leisure, as each chapter constitutes a self-contained essay on some aspect of travel. We humans have been traveling and exploring our world for tens of thousands of years, and now, with travel easier than ever, we need to reflect upon its benefits and pitfalls. And in this, De Botton serves as an excellent guide.

The Case of the Love Commandos: A Vish Puri Mystery by Tarquin Hall

N. B. Cross-posted on Taking Readings

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve become quite a fan of Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri books. They satisfy on a couple of levels. They are neat little mysteries. One blurb calls Puri “the Indian Hercule Poirot”, while others compare him to Alexander McCall Smith’s “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series set in Botswana. Fun plotting (and sub-plotting), along with insights into Indian culture, make the books work. In fact, it’s this later point about the insight into Indian culture that makes the books so fun for me. Hall is an outsider who’s peaked behind the curtain or at least one who’s bothered to look. His comments on roadways and traffic, unique Indian phrases, Indian snacks, arranged marriages, exams—I could go on, but you get a catalogue of life here. For someone still trying to figure things out, observations that confirm my own thinking or that elucidate the strange are most welcome, especially when shared in such a fun format. 

This book in the series deals with arranged marriages, “love marriages” (not arranged), caste, and political corruption—issues that remain at the very heart of Indian society today. Vish Puri, long-time husband in an arranged marriage, isn’t convinced that the trend from arranged marriages to love marriages is necessarily a good one (nor am I entirely), but he nevertheless gets involved with an effort to the thwart an arranged marriage goes awry. Having gone down the rabbit hole, Puri finds himself dealing with the Dalits (once known as “Untouchables”), the lowest rung on the caste rung, which isn’t supposed to exist, but does persist still in varies guises. Throw in genetic testing and a large scientific research enterprise—well, you should have the picture by now. 

Vish Puri has once again not only cracked the case, but he’s cracked many a smile on my face. Informative, fun, and insightful, this book is a great read for understanding India while following the intrigues of the ace detective (and his mother!). 

Swaraj by Arvind Kejriwal

Since arriving in India in the fall of 2012, the continuing complaint we hear from locals, as well as in the press, is about corruption. From public opinion leaders to ordinary persons, many Indians believe that corruption cripples this great country. While many traits and trends hinder India, there is no doubt that corruption presents a major ongoing problem. 

Just before we arrived, a groundswell of anti-corruption demonstrations erupted nation-wide. Anna Hazare, the prophet of the movement, set the tone. As with many movements in democratic society, the success of the movement depends on a successful translation to electoral politics. Arvind Kejriwal, a former government worker, has provided the practical political guidance for organizing Hazare’s moral outrage. Kejriwal led the way by starting a new political party, the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man [sic] Party). In elections held in Delhi toward the end of last year, the Aam Aadmi Party led by Kejriwal scored impressively, and Kejriwal was asked to form a government. The government (coalition-based) didn’t last long. Like many new, outsider parties, they found governing much more challenging than campaigning. 

Before taking up governance, Kejriwal wrote Swaraj. Swaraj is the term that Gandhi coined for “self-rule”, and it served as a theme for the independence movement. Kejriwal uses swaraj as a rallying cry for the anti-corruption movement. Kejriwal argues that the nation needs to make major changes at the level of the panchayats (village or district councils). He argues that the panchayats foster corruption but have little power. Thus, a structure for decentralized decision-making becomes a vehicle of corruption.

Kejriwal’s book describes incidents of corruption and how the system fails to deal with such incidents. He points to examples of success in stemming corruption. He also details steps needed to make the system more responsive and less corrupt. I don’t have the knowledge to know whether his diagnosis centered on the panchayats is accurate—although the diagnosis of corruption seems unassailable—and whether his prescription will work if applied. The crucial remaining issue is whether the patient will take the medicine. Corruption exists because some, albeit a very few, benefit from it. The major parties, Congress (now ruling and most rife with corruption) and BJP (the party likely to form a new government this spring), both have long histories of problems and seem little interested in rooting out corruption. The upcoming elections have forced some acknowledgement of the problem by these two parties, but I get the sense that too many powerful leaders are happy to maintain the status quo. 

Kejriwal’s book raises an important question: whether a democracy such as India can address corruption as effectively as authoritarian China. The current leadership in Beijing has made a show of its intention to quell corruption (at least below the highest levels). We don’t know how successful they will be, but with a judicial system that’s less than meticulous about due process, Chinese efforts could prove effective. India, on the other hand, because of the dispersion of political power and the need for coalition building, may have a much more difficult time rooting out corruption even if the central government commits to doing so. Democratic government can root out corruption for the most part (the exception of Illinois and Chicago noted!), but it takes an effort. In the U.S., the Progressive movement, arising out of a growing middle-class, attacked and eventually took down political machines like Tammany Hall, but the question remains whether India’s middle class has grown enough to overcome the inertia of caste and class voting that remains the norm here for many voters. 

I hope that Kejriwal is correct in his diagnosis and that a cure—or at least limiting of the worst symptoms—succeeds.

In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss

 

In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss defies classification. Ostensibly it’s about travel, and it is, especially about what Hiss dubs “Deep Travel”. But Hiss is a talented writer and has an inquiring mind such that his book works much like Montaigne’s Essays: wandering here and there around a common theme. In some authors, of course, this can prove irksome and off-putting, but in this book, I gladly found myself following Hiss’s detours and by-ways as we explored Deep Travel.

Hiss doesn’t ever definitely define Deep Travel, but this is another potential defect that signals that the search is still underway. As a preliminary, we can say that Deep Travel is that journey, around the corner or around the world, that alters our consciousness. Our mind, in its structures and perceptions, alters as we face a new landscape. Thus, while walking home during the 2003 NYC blackout, the familiar hyper-city of NY changes without the flow of electricity, and Hiss experiences views and perspectives that he’d never encountered before. He also draws on the work of others, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose meditation from a bridge crossing a river in the Balkans provides a verbal portrait of this same type of experience. Hiss transitions from experiences of travel as such into psychology, beginning with the great fountainhead of American psychology, William James, and then drawing upon the more recent insights of the late Edward S. Reed, an “ecological psychologist”. Indeed, a list of psychologists, anthropologist, paleontologists, and other writers and thinkers could go on for some length. Hiss explores here and there ideas as they occur to him. Hiss uses places with similar abandon for launching his insights: New Jersey swamps, NYC streets, Balkan Rivers, the primeval African savannah: so many references to place and ideas makes this into a buffet of ideas.

A lot of the latter part of the book concerns human origins and how we developed our brains that allows the psychology of Deep Travel to develop. Hiss argues that along with concentrated attention, daydreaming, and flow, humans developed a “wide-angle awareness” that allows us to scan and consider our environment with the use of our bi-pedal stance and stereoscopic vision. He relates this to the way cats can leisurely pause to wait for prey to place themselves in a position of exposure; that is, not ready to pounce and not indifferent, but widely alert, something called SMR (sensorimotor rhythm). (EEG leads on cat skulls first gave us this insight—I love the image.) One riff that Hiss takes on this is that exploring for knowledge, such as of place, has a built-in pleasure reward (like sex and food) that promotes such behavior.

It’s difficult to review this work because its ideas are so many and diverse as they array around this general topic. For some, this is a hindrance (see William Dalrymple’s critique in his NYT review), but for me, with Montaigne as a model and sufficient rewards for following Hiss’s curiosity, I really enjoyed the book. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the curiosity to follow him around in this journey of a book—and who has a yen to experience Deep Travel.

Cross-posted in SNG Thoughts blog

A Review of 80 Questions About India by Murad Ali Baig

Can your questions about India be answered in 80 questions? How about the same number of questions as the total number of Hindu deities (which I understand, by one count, to number 330,000)? Thus, while 80 questions may seem inadequate, it provides a good start. 

Unlike many fine books that deal with contemporary India, Baig’s book starts at the beginning—the beginning  of humanity. Thus, we get deep history. If this seems excessive, you’ll have to understand that Baig has really written two books in one. The one deals specifically with the long and complex history of India. The other deals with religion in general and the role of changes in religion over time. Baig notes that the simple spiritualties morph into complex, exploitive organizations dominated by a priestly class. This plays out in India especially, as a priestly class (Brahmins) come to dominate Hinduism. India also contains Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity, each revealing rather simple origins that transform into more complex and often oppressive organizations. During this transformation spirituality suffers, Baig argues. 

Baig goes into deep history because it bears upon India today. The caste system, officially abolished, still lingers as an underlying attitude across a great deal of society. Resentment of “conquerors”, outsiders, and others perceived as aliens, propels the Hindutva movement, which promotes India for Hindus (to the exclusion of millions of Muslims and others). Baig’s work exemplifies Faulkner’s observation that “the past is never dead. It’s never really past.” 

For those interested in a deeper appreciation of India’s past, beyond the issues of contemporary economic growth and social change (but very relevant to these issues), Baig’s book is a welcome guide. Even-handed, judicious, and well researched, it’s an excellent addition to anyone’s quest to understand the enormity of India.

Better Late Than Never: A Review of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Only 38 years after receiving the assignment, I've completed it. I’ve now read A Passage to India. 

I received the assignment to read the novel for my Modern Fiction course taught by David (“First Blood”) Morrell. The book was near the top of the reading list, and in a semester that began with a mistake (I misread my transcript), I had to read more works than I had time for. In the words of the Panda, I “had to be strategic”. Fortunately, Professor Morrell told us about the echo, the Freytag triangle, and how this novel helped create the transition to modern fiction. Anyway, it was enough to do well in the course. Within the last year, of course, this omission began to haunt me. Shouldn’t I now read this classic? Well, I again procrastinated. I’d seen the movie years ago (and remember virtually nothing about it), but mostly I wanted to focus on reading about other aspects of India, both longer ago (Moguls and rajas) and the recent past and contemporary India. Thus, until recently, I’ve avoided reading about the British Raj. Now, however, perhaps for the mere fact that Indian Summer had been looking at me for so long (my books look at me longingly and pleadingly when I don’t pay attention to them), I decided to read Forster's classic. Then, when I saw a good edition of A Passage to India (Penguin, with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra), I bought it  and moved it toward the top of the pile. 

And so how was it? Outstanding. 

Forster’s novel creates complex and sometimes puzzling characters set in a society and landscape that he evokes with beautiful and insightful prose. The central characters, the Moslem physician Dr. Aziz and the British schoolteacher, Cyril Fielding, struggle and fight for every moment of friendship that can break through barriers of culture and personal insecurities. Indeed, the central incidents occur early in the novel. These events concern a visit to the Marabar caves and whatever happened (or didn’t happen) to Ms. Quested there, the subsequent trial, and its effects. These events take up the first two-thirds of the book, but the story continues beyond that attempting to appreciate the individuals and circumstances from which the problems all arose. 

Forster is hard upon the administrators of the British Raj. If anyone thinks that Forster is a cheerleader for the Raj, that person is sorely mistaken. Forster, who visited India on two different occasions (and who perhaps had an Indian lover) displays the vile racism that had developed among many of the Brits. Fielding is an exception, and yet even he must deal with ambiguities and misunderstandings that could frustrate even the most sympathetic of souls. The characters of Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Professor Godbole each have complex if lesser roles that create a true richness in the story.

Finally, I should remark on how Forster uses the landscape to help set the tone of the story. Writing as I am now from central India and having lived here the last 10 months, I know how heat, dust, random mountains, ravines and (often dry) watercourses mark the landscape and impress themselves on those who, like me, come from such different circumstances. Forster’s language, which creates wonderful conversations, takes a poetic turn when describing some of these landscapes and the attendant weather.  

So now, 38 years after I received the assignment, I can mark it complete. I get no credit for that now—other than the enjoyment and perspective that I received from reading a great novel about this complex land. This is now the credit I most want.

A Review of Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tonzelmann

One of the benefits of reading history is that you don’t have to be an academic historian to succeed in the field. Indeed, from Herodotus and Thucydides to Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Parkman, and Henry Adams, up through many successful and worthwhile practitioners writing today, we have a wealth of non-academic historians who enlighten and entertain us with graceful prose. (I realize one might argue about Adams, since he taught Medieval History at Harvard for a while, but I don’t believe that his major works were written while in the academy or for the academy.) Our move to India led me to discover William Dalrymple, who writes beautifully about contemporary India and the Middle East, as well as having written very highly regarded histories set in India and Afghanistan. In fact, via a piece that he wrote for the wonderful Five Books site, I discovered Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. 

The title might prove misleading, since the “secret”, as the author notes within her work, was not so much a secret as a little-known or little-discussed (but not completely unnoticed) situation. The “secret” was that the wife of the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had a love affair with the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Of course, this love affair (the details of intimacy remain unknown) unfolded against the huge historic panorama of Independence and Partition. As Dalrymple notes in his remarks about Von Tunzelmann, in focusing on these three actors, she tells the immensely complicated story of Independence and Partition in manner that provides a sense of the immensity of the problems and undertakings without enmeshing us in details that would overwhelm most readers. In addition to focusing on the triangle formed by the Mountbattens and Nehru, she also deals deftly with other significant players such as Gandhi, Jinnah, and Patel in India, and with Churchill, Attlee, and others back in Britain. 

Von Tunzelmann does an excellent job of setting the scene for the momentous events of Independence and Partition by first establishing the biographies of the main players. Lord Mountbatten, for instance, is from a German family that married into the British aristocracy. Mountbatten, known to friends like such as two British kings and Noel Coward, as “Dickie”, appears in some ways the embodiment of an upper-class British twit. His naval career is in some ways a disaster (such as running a ship aground and having one sunk from underneath him), but it nevertheless leads him to the position of Allied Commander for Southeast Asia during WWII. While inept in some ways, and enamored of pomp, circumstance, genealogies, and medals, he’s also quite charming and persuasive. And, lest you think him a poor cuckold, his marriage to Lady Mountbatten, Edwina, is an “open marriage” from near the beginning. Both carried on rather open affairs and had a complex relationship, to say the least. Edwina, especially in her youth, couldn’t help reminding me of Princess Diana: a rather repressed young woman whose marriage to a much more sedate man seems to have released a rather marked free-spiritedness. But like Lady Di (after demotion), Edwina found a serious and very successful calling helping out in London during the Blitz and maintaining a very active, hands-on roll in India and Pakistan dealing with the human misery found here both before and after Partition. The third person of our triumvirate, Nehru, had morphed from a young, Indian-British dandy (Cambridge and all) into a national leader. He underwent an arranged marriage and never seemed very happy about it. His wife, an apparently pious woman in contrast to his militant (if publicly restrained) atheism, died relatively young, so that Nehru was a widower at the time he came to know Edwina in the mid-1940s. 

Von Tunzelmann keeps her narrative moving, weaving the personal lives of the Mountbattens and Nehru together to meet in the momentous years of 1947 and 1948 and then apart again. In addition, she keeps the big picture in focus. Her passing remarks and judgments, such as how Gandhi’s peculiarities, irrelevancies, and standing in world opinion alternately retarded and forwarded the cause of independence and Hindu-Moslem relations, leaves one wanting more, but not at all disatistfied. (Gandhi’s life and role in all of this, of course, fills volumes.) She also remarks on the irony that I noticed immediately upon coming to India: Gandhi’s likeness adorns all denominations of rupee notes. A rather ironic honor for an ascetic who thought all India should follow his austere example. 

Von Tunzelmann writes with a light but perceptive hand. She deftly manages the many facts, or where evidence lacks, caution and restraint marks her prose. She also displays a light sense of irony appropriately deployed. In this description of the Indian Assembly at the turn of midnight that marked Independence, she writes: 

            As the chimes sounded and the unexpected blast from a conch shell startled the delegates in the chamber of the Constituent Assembly, a nation that had struggled for so many years, and sacrificed so much, was freed at last from the shackles of empire.

            Yes, Britain was finally free. 

She’s not being cute or coy here: her narrative has established the draining demands of Empire upon the war-impoverished Brits such that most—except Churchill and a few other die-hards—realized and wanted desperately to unload the burden that India and Empire represented. 

If one enjoys reading a history that interweaves the personal into the grant narratives of empires, nations, and peoples, as many a great novel as done, then you can’t expect to find a more engrossing account of the extraordinary people and events portrayed here. An outstanding work. 

Interesting note: The cover photos on my copy of the book purchased here in India shows the Mountbattens standing together with Gandhi; in the U.S. editions, they are pictured on the cover with Nehru, who's laughing. 

Gandhi: Two Books to Guide

Sitting alone in a motel room one night in Hawarden, Iowa, after working a long day blacktopping roads, I turned on the TV and came across a movie about this man Gandhi. I only caught the end, but I learned that he was a saintly man and that when mortally shot by an assassin, he uttered the words “God, God, God”. (To what extent this is accurate, I don’t know, although I think that the actual recitation would have been “Ram, Ram, Ram”.) In any event, I don’t recall if I’d heard of this man before, but the brief exposure the film piqued my curiosity. (N.B. This was well before Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film biography, Gandhi.) I went on to read Louis Fisher’s biography, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1948) and then Erik Erickson’s Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, a consideration of Gandhi from Erickson’s unique psychoanalytic perspective. After that flurry of interest, college and an introduction to a wider world of ideas and experiences led me off in other directions—until now, when I find myself in Gandhi’s homeland. I look upon his continence each time I hold a piece of paper money. 

The 20^th century is marked by a handful of titanic political figures. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao comprise a trio of titanic evil marked by war, genocide, and mass murder. Yet each is a complex, daunting, and fascinating human being embedded in their unique times and cultures. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were titans in liberal democracies who rose in response to the crisis of the Great Depression (FDR) and WWII (WSC). Each led his respective nation into and through the war. Together they led their nations into a mutual alliance that triumphed by the end of the 20^th century. Both of them were immensely complex figures, certainly not angels, but canny politicians and strategic thinkers. And then there is the titan Gandhi. Gandhi, the rather unassuming young man turned barrister, turned activist, turned ascetic, turned politician, turned saint, turned father of the nation. One might argue that he proves more difficult to grasp than any of the other titanic political figures of the 20^th century. 

Two books of late, both by authors who attended and presented at JLF, have provided me with new insights into Gandhi. Richard Sorabji’s Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments in Ancient Values (2012, 203 p.) delves into Gandhi’s thought through the lens of the ancient Stoic philosophies. In Sorabji, a British academic born of Indian immigrant parents, one could not find anyone more qualified person to make this comparison. Sorabji is a revered scholar of ancient philosophy and a wonderfully precise thinker and writer. Sorabji makes his case through careful consideration of Gandhi’s writings and Stoic teaching, while acknowledging from the beginning that Gandhi was not acquainted with Stoic thought (except perhaps to the extent of some fleeting exposure to Epictetus). While Sorabji cannot locate any direct Stoic influence on Gandhi, he does note a number of other well-documented influences: Socrates, Jesus (Mathew’s Gospel and the Sermon on the Mount, in particular), Thoreau, John Ruskin (Unto this Last), Tolstoy (e.g., The Kingdom of God Is Within You), and the Bhagavad Gita are the most prominent and influential. (Gandhi was very well read man, and he continued to expand his reading while jailed.) In addition to knowing what Gandhi read, we have what he wrote, which is immense. Indeed, Sorabji argues that Gandhi qualifies as a philosopher because he led a very examined life, and he did so publicly in order to invite comment and criticism. 

Despite the lack of a direct connection between the Stoics and Gandhi, the comparison proves quite fruitful because both traditions (Gandhi alone, I think, can constitute a tradition) attempt to deal with love, emotion, and our engagement with the wider world. Our current, popular notion of Stoicism is quite warped in relation to the ancient practice. We think of Mr. Spock as the ideal Stoic, at his best when he allows his emotions to overcome his rational mind. But this understanding, along with any sense of Gandhi as bound by any absolute standards, misses the very carefully considered analysis of emotions (including love and care) that mark these two traditions. Sorabji’s thorough, point-by-point consideration of the particulars of each position, takes us deeply into each. And, as I believe, each tradition has a rich vein of wisdom that we should mine, the book proves very worthwhile. 

In perusing the speaker list for JLF,  I came across the names of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, and I learned that they are retired (but very active) University of Chicago political scientists who have written very extensively about Indian politics (and whom are part-time Jaipur residents). Upon checking, I learned that my trusty Kindle could deliver Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home (2006) to me, and I purchased it. This book of essays considers Gandhi, his life and thought, from a number of different angles: his critique of modernity, his reception in America, the effect of Nehru’s different relation to modernity on partition, the ashram as public space, and importance of courage to Gandhi and his movement. Each essay mines its topic carefully and with revealing and insightful conclusions. By referencing political thinkers with whom I have prior acquaintance, like Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas, the Rudolphs help better situate Gandhi and his project in my existing political taxonomy. 

Perhaps the only contention I have with their work is their designation of Gandhi as postmodern. I often worry that the term “postmodern”, along with its predecessor, “modern”, is too slippery. But even setting aside that concern (which can certainly be addressed by careful acknowledgments up-front), this designation of Gandhi as postmodern seems to reach too far. One can argue more persuasively that Gandhi is pre-modern: his dedication to spinning and village life hardly smack of 19^th century ideals, not to speak of 20^th or 21^st century norms. Gandhi and those he draws upon, like Ruskin and Tolstoy, are certainly critics of modernity that demand a hearing, but none of them strike me as having provided a compelling counter-narrative (although I’m sadly not well enough acquainted with Ruskin’s work to say that with certainty). Ashrams and village life may have their place in postmodern world, but only as one alternative in plural world. People in India and around the world have voted (and are voting) with their feet by leaving villages and migrating to cities for reasons economic and cultural. While I have a homespun (khadi) vest, I don’t delude myself that I and about 1.1 billion fellow humans here in India can cloth ourselves adequately without the aid of mechanical looms. People want the benefits of economic development and of (at least some) cultural freedom that the traditional (pre-modern) Indian life that Gandhi extolled can’t provide. Indeed, I perceive the village (and villagers transplanted into Indian megacities) as a huge and difficult challenge to India, especially for young Indian women who aspire to some level of gender equality and greater personal dignity, it appears to me that the pre- modern village mentality is a mortal threat. What Gandhi did not provide, and that we must, is a way through the problems of modernity, the problems of environmental degradation, rampant consumerism, and social alienation. In their place, we are challenged to establish new forms of meaning and society consistent with Enlightenment values. Gandhi as a critic of modernity and as a philosopher of personal values holds some sway with me, but Gandhi as political visionary does not. (N.B. Gandhi’s political heir, Nehru, did India no great favors with his modernist and statist political vision.)

I’m looking forward to reading more about Gandhi and grappling with the enigma of this amazing man, and I can do so with the greater insight having read these two excellent books.

Cross-posted on Taking Readings.