LA DANZA DE SHIVA

No todo es espiritualidad, misticismo, y disquisiciones filosóficas. La India, como sus vecinos, es un país lleno de desigualdades, injusticias, conflictos étnicos y religiosos, y una política candente. La India es, sí, un milagro de convivencia, pero también una olla de presión, una bomba de tiempo que cada vez en cuando hace pequeñas explosiones que dejan miles de muertos y una herencia de dolor para las generaciones venideras. La imagen que viene a mi mente con mas fuerza es la de la danza cosmica de Shiva, que destruye a un universo cansado y prepara la creacion de uno nuevo.
Dos autores autóctonos (aunque radicados en Londres), que estoy leyendo, son Gita Mehta (de quien ya leí el famoso "Karma Cola") y Pankaj Mishra, un periodista cuyos viajes por India, Pakistán, Afganistán, Nepal y Tibet, en años muy recientes, nos presentan una radiografía completa y profunda de la región, con un punto de vista que no pierde subjetividad, ni emotividad. Cada vez pienso con mayor convicción que el único relato honesto, es el que es abiertamente subjetivo.
Su libro, desafortunadamente intitulado "Temptations of the West", fue una buena sorpresa, y consolida en mi opinion a Pankaj Mishra (nacido en 1969), como una de las nuevas, inteligentes y sensibles voces en la India de hoy. Gita Mehta, en cambio, pertenece a otra generacion, que vio a Gandhi morir y que estudio en Cambridge en los sesentas. Sus pequenhos ensayos-denuncia, ironicos e incisivos, tienen ademas el punto de vista de una mujer. Hace ocho anhos, durante mi primer viaje a la India, lei "Karma Cola", su divertido antidoto contra el supermercado espiritual en que se ha convertido este pais. Lo que sigue a continuacion es el capitulo 27 de su libro "Snakes and Ladders":


GETTING THERE.

As the pace of India's exchanges with the outside world accelerates there is a growing demand both inside India and abroad for some comprehensible definition of what India actually is. Definitions are hard to come by, but there are some great descriptions.
When Mark Twain visited India at the end of the nineteenth century he wrote of the delirium he hoped would never leave him when he saw "the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations -the sole country under the sun that is endowed with imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bound and free, the one land all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."
More modestly, India has traditionally described herself as Karma Bhoomi, the land of Experience, where everything has happened so often before that even history is reduced to troublesome echoes in an empty cave. But no experience in the land of Experience, nothing in all her yesterdays, has equipped her for a world where her faith in the encompassing unity of life is in daily, even hourly collision with the explosion of fragmented information coming from outside.
Dismissing the possibility of ever defining India, in 1945 the writer Alex Aronson noted ascerbically that India was a civilization, and 'civilization is always a process: not a being but a becoming'.
Half a century later that observation still proves astute. Somehow India has managed to stay a civilization, still unpredictable, still surprising, still defying definition.
Maybe India's indolence preserves her. Or her traditional fascination with unifying what appears fragmented. In any case, in a world of perpetual motion India remains a perpetual becoming, a vast and protean sea of human improvisations on the great dance of time.

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