Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

Through Alice’s Looking Glass

Through Alice’s Looking Glass A Hindu Challenge With my doctorate finally in hand, I taught for the summer at Penn, then bustled off to a tenure-track teaching post at the University of Texas in Austin. It was another world, balmy and relaxed, really relaxed. During my first week on the campus, I heard a passing student tell a companion,“Do you realize, I have actually been enrolled for three consecutive semesters!” Because I had one foot in South Asian Studies, one of my duties at Texas was joint coordination of a group-taught course on Asian civilization . My co-coordinator in this venture was Raja Rao, a Hindu novelist who was known, especially, for Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, and The Cat and Shakespeare. Raja, thirty years older than I, held a position in Texas’s powerful philosophy department. Ours was an amiable, productive partnership, despite Raja’s being troubled by my faith in “mere empirical knowledge,” and despite his more than once labeling my stance “materialist” and “that socialist, sociological nonsense.” Because I did not think of myself as being what anthropologists called a materialist, I wondered just what those teasing epithets meant to him. My attempts to draw him out led to long tales about the nature of “reality .” He and I evidently defined that term differently too. How were we to organize a course together when our terms and assumptions were so incompatible? We each yielded a good bit, but, at the beginning of our second year of working together, he urged me to return to India and 95 spend time learning to view the Hindu way of life from what was termed its Vedanta perspective. He hoped this would allow me to appreciate the shortcomings of my alien social science perspective. Being curious enough to go along with his suggestion, I applied for a research fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 1967–1968 and was awarded the support I sought. My project, ironically, was entitled “Indic Culture: An Anthropological Synthesis.” Although the end product of the year turned out to be far more Hindu than anthropological , wasn’t that precisely what Raja had hoped would happen? Arriving via the East The project was enhanced with university funds so that I could spend a month en route discussing Hindu India with Japanese scholars who had undertaken extended research there. My reason for this was straightforward : if I truly wished to divest myself of inappropriate Western perspectives on Hindu civilization, perhaps other viewpoints on the civilization, such as those of Japanese scholars, would stimulate me to begin my rethinking. They might direct me along avenues I had not previously considered and, in so doing, start to free me from what Raja had been calling my misconceptions. Up to this time, we had always crossed oceans by ship; now we were traveling by air. It felt weird to have breakfast at dawn in Texas, fly more than a third of the way round the globe in sunlight, and sit the children down for dinner in Tokyo before the sun finally set. Trudy and I knew that, because we had traveled with the sun through nine time zones, we were having dinner fully twenty-one hours after we had eaten breakfast. But imagine the effect of the stretched day on our five-year-old and our three-and-a-half-year-old! They had napped on and off in flight without getting a fraction of the rest they needed. Neither of them managed to eat much at dinner or even to keep their eyes open once they knew that beds were available. Needless to say they fell immediately into a deep sleep . . . and slumbered soundly until 3:00 a.m. They awoke at three with their energetic little bodies telling them it was noon, lunchtime! They were starving. “Mummy, Daddy, let’s go and get breakfast!” they sang. The International Guest House where we were staying happened to be in an affluent and westernized residential neighborhood, with a few embassies scattered through it. We walked in the brisk predawn air 96 Journeys to the Edge for miles in search of an all-night restaurant. All we saw were tall, inhospitable walls and, through the gates, massive dormant buildings. The children grew so frustrated, cold, and weary we had to turn back. Hours later, at our long overdue breakfast in the...