Lessons of the East
The National Review, December 25, 1995
by Jonathan Foreman

I was walking around the lake in the Hindu holy city of Pushkar in Rajasthan when a fat Brahman clutched my shoulder. "Come and be blessed," he urged me. It was a lovely evening and the whitewashed ghats were turning pink. As I hesitated he pulled me down the steps to the water's edge, grabbing a handful of white flowers on the way.    

"Five hundred rupees okay?" He took my shocked silence as a bargaining ploy. "Okay, okay, three hundred rupees," and he began to whine a prayer. Every few seconds he threw some flowers into the murky waters of the lake and repeated in English, "Three hundred rupees."     

When it was over&$151;it took about a minute—I balked at paying $ 10 for a dubious blessing I hadn't wanted. I claimed to have only fifty rupees in my wallet. The Brahman offered to send an assistant—who materialized from behind a pillar—back to my hotel with me to collect the balance. But the spirits, or Karma, or the stars were with me. Just as the youth stepped forward to take my arm a family of German tourists appeared at the top of the steps. The Brahman's eyes lit up and his assistant scrambled up to secure richer pickings.     

Everyone who goes to India knows that charlatans like the Maharishi and the Bhagwan Rajneesh made fortunes fleecing gullible Western devotees. But we all hope that the holy men we meet will turn out to be the genuine article. We like to think that, unlike credulous Californians ready to sign away their trust funds to the first Sadhu they meet on the beach at Goa, we know real spirituality when we see it. Yet all over India, and especially on the Marijuana Trail that begins in Goa and flows up through Puna to Delhi, Dharmsala, and Manali ("where it grows in the wild!"), you see young foreigners listening rapt to bearded frauds. These are people who would not give a second's audience to a priest at home, let alone buy him dinner in return for an evening's guidance.     

Ask them why and you get a look of amazement. Surely you can't ask anyone to take seriously the mumbo-jumbo of something as discredited as Christianity. "Look at our society," they say, with its greed and pollution and racism. Well then, I told one nose-ringed beauty in a cheesecloth blouse, why don't you look at this society? People dying in the street, children sold off as prostitutes in the cages of Bombay, the brutal occupation of Kashmir, sectarian slaughter, a blanket of laziness and despair that means that nothing ever gets maintained or fixed or cleaned, and a total indifference to human suffering that adds an extra dimension to all the greed, pollution, and racism.     

She looked pained. That's different. Did I not realize that it is ridiculous to judge a religion by the society it informs? And anyway, it's the Indians' tranquillity amid all the poverty and suffering that's so beautiful. In other words, the utilitarian criteria go only one way, a habit of thinking that hardened in the 1960s. Ever since then it has been widely accepted that the East is wise, that its superstitions and medicinal magic are gentler and more effective than our own.     

As a result, many people who go to India are determined to see only beauty and wisdom. It is a tempting way to travel, soothing the claims of conscience and answering pangs of sympathy with pollyannaish rubbish about "acceptance." It allows people who would otherwise have to painfully thicken their skins and harden their hearts over a period of weeks or months to cut out their empathy at its source. "Oh, it's so lovely. Look at the colors!" I heard an upper-class Englishwoman exclaim in the old city of Jaipur. In the foreground of the street scene which so delighted her, a skinny, bedraggled little girl in bright yellow pajamas, not more than five years old, was picking soggy bits of paper out of the gutter and putting them into a huge plastic bag. Her job. This was an Indian gutter, so a few feet away a hairy black pig was rooting at some cow dung.     

Ironically this selective blindness is also the way that many Indians deal with the suffering around them: they choose to see it as picturesque or not at all. But unless you yourself believe in reincarnation, India is a catastrophe, a nightmare of poverty, filth, and cruelty.     

The roots of the catastrophe are religious and cultural. Unlike its neighbors, India is a rich country. It grows enough food to feed itself. Yet people still starve. It has the technology to build rockets and atomic bombs; yet it fails to provide sewers and electricity to its capital city. Leprosy, virtually eliminated in the poorest parts of Africa, still claims thousands of victims in a country that exports doctors to the West. India's woes are not developmental or technological; they are failings of the imagination and the heart.     

Cross the border to Pakistan and you discover in Lahore a city where the streets are not filled with dung, where legions of the poor are not forced to sleep on pavements and in stations, where trains and buses don't crash with almost comic regularity as they do in India. Pakistani society is often violent, misogynistic, and beset by fierce ethnic and religious divisions, but it lacks the fathomless callousness of its rival. Yet it is to India that the Western pilgrims go, clutching their Bhagavad Gita and holding fiercely to the conviction that their own traditions lack "relevance."     

In his famous essay "Notes on Nationalism" George Orwell included a section on "transferred nationalism," about the sort of people who despised parades and banners in London but wept at the sight of a red flag or goose-stepping Nazis. Today we see the same phenomenon with the spiritual impulse, with medicine, and with philosophy. The more irrational and bizarre and (above all) foreign the belief, the less critical people become. If a practice or an institution has been sanctified by time over there, "it has a lot to teach us."     

Of course, foreigners in India make certain exceptions to the principle of credulity. Western women especially dislike the way a schoolboy sexuality&$151;puritanism and prurience combined—makes the groping of females endemic. They find it difficult to empathize with arranged marriages or (except in the case of committed apologists like Mark Tully) the burning of widows. And when they've been in an accident they usually decline the cow dung believed by many Hindus to have antiseptic properties.     

But in general they buy what V. S. Naipaul called "the crooked comedy of India's holy men." They swallow it together with all the ludicrous excuses for deprivation, inefficiency, and brutality that are still peddled by India's political elite. One wonders why half- digested morsels of Oriental religion and philosophy are so enticing even (especially?) amid misery and suffering. Have Western traditions, our sciences and theologies, failed so dismally?     

You could cast your mind back fifty years to the liberation of Auschwitz and answer that question in the affirmative. But those who dabble in Indian mysticism are not moved by great questions of good and evil. They are prompted by a malaise that afflicts only those who have the good fortune to live in peace, freedom, and prosperity. Our inherited culture has not failed these people --let alone our society as a whole. If anything, they have failed to understand and explore our inheritance. Having taken for granted or abandoned the faith, ritual, and magic that was their birthright, they seek these things elsewhere, even in the most unlikely and unhappy places.