Ka by Roberto Calasso, trans. Tim Parks Cape 447pp, £16.99 in UK
Robert Calasso's latest book is subtitled "Stories of the Mind and Gods of India"; the word-order is significant, because this is no mere compendium of Hindu lore but a fastidious attempt to unravel the conceptual knots from which Indian myths are constructed. I stress this at the start because the publisher's blurb states baldly that Calasso "doesn't explain . . . this mental world". Furthermore, Cape claims that "Calasso invites us to understand India on Indian terms . . . through India itself". Given that the author is not Indian but Italian, such a pretension might seem rather impudent, even imperialist; after all, why do we need a westerner to "explain" India when we have Narayan, Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy?
I believe that Calasso's undertaking is simultaneously more modest and more complex. If The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony explored the Grecian roots of our culture, Ka celebrates the marriage implied in the concept "Indo-European". Far from mitigating the unfamiliarity of his materials, he enhances it by retaining Sanskrit literation so that we sometimes fail to recognise even those words and names that are relatively familiar to us. Simultaneously he draws our attention to etymological residues of "the perfect language", Sanskrit, coiled within our own "Vajra [Inira's thunderbolt] .. . is connected with vegeo, `to be wakeful, vigilant' .. . `Vegetation' and `wakefulness' share the same root." The result is to evoke an otherness, a geographical and temporal remoteness, implicit in our vernacular itself. If "the limits of our language are the limits of our mind", then perhaps in our ethnocentrism we have underestimated both kinds of limit.
This stratagem extends to the presence of western writers and thinkers within Calasso's text. Locke, Hegel, and Fenelon are all named, unexpectedly. Wittgenstein is adduced in relation to the Indian seers: "that the world exists is far more amazing than any how the world exists". On the same page Proust's jeunes filles crop up, and later on Proust is referred to as a "Vedantic master, though unaware of being such". Similarly Vinata, mother of the eagle Garuda, states "that impatience is the only sin", a phrase that "a pale and angular seer will say one day". The seer in question is Franz Kafka - evidently the Indian ancients were conscious of the future of their insights.
These overt references are perhaps less significant than those embedded in the text's philosophical fabric. When the seer Vasistha suggests that "the manifest could be considered as a residue, a leftover, a remnant .. . where the presence (memory?) of another territory might flash across our minds", we are reminded (or "pre-minded") of Jacques Der rida; when presence is analysed as "a special case in the category of absence", or when "Ka" is defined as "that evocation of an ever unknown subject", an entire western "philosophy of absence" looks on from the wings. This is less a question of detecting antecedents than of dismantling our preconceptions about the novelty - or indeed the "westernness" - of certain western systems.
Incidentally, the eponymous monosyllable isn't the convenient Egyptian spirit so beloved of Scrabble-players, but the secret name of the progenitor Prajapati, precursor of Brahma himself. "Prajapati was to the gods as the K. of Kafka's The Trial and The Castle is to the characters of Tolstoy or Balzac."
The poet Anandavardhana "maintained that the dominant rasa [flavour, tonality] of the Mahabharata was .. . the `peace rasa'." Calasso asks "Where was peace to be found in that appalling chain of events?" and answers himself: "in the tone of the narrative voice that never wavered, never buckled." This might serve as an epithet of Calasso's own elegant narration. For myself, the tale that lingers most insistently is that of Yudhisthira, who attempts to bring his dog into heaven. Indra objects: "You have lost everything, including your brothers . . . Why do you not renounce this dog?" Yudhisthira replies: "The others are all dead .. . But this dog is alive." There is a stalemate. "Then they realised that another being .. . was standing between them .. . `I am Dharma', he said. `I am your dog . . . You have survived many difficult trials, but none so difficult as this. You have refused to climb on the Celestials' chariot without your dog. Because of this, you are now one of the Celestials yourself'."