The Towers of Silence

Towers of Silence are funerary towers in Zorastrianism where the dead are exposed to the elements, to be eaten by carrion birds, and their bodies are kept from contaminating the earth.

A failed burial is a heart thread of Paul Scott's third novel of the same name in his Raj Quartet. Mabel Layton, according to her companion, Barbie Batchelor, wanted to be buried next to her second husband in Ranpur. These wishes, expressed to her, were not communicated to her step-daughter who buries her in Pankot. Barbie, who barging into the morgue, has seen the body being shifted into an appropriate pose after a post-mortem examination, imagines its extended features to reveal Mabel's present torment: a vision of hell and displacement.

This scene of heightened emotion and surreal viewing is beautifully controlled and evoked by Scott in the context of an apparently realist novel, unfolding with documentary like precision.

Indeed the closer you read Scott the more he diverges from a 'straightforward' narrative. The book breaks out of both history and personal psychology into deeper realities of vision and spirituality. Unfolding prosaic events take on the status of symbols.

Mabel Layton's 'failed' burial becomes a parable of displacement. This woman, an embodiment of English tradition in India, who has come to disbelieve in the colonial project, survives her disbelief by withdrawal into her garden, her tended flowers and her deafness. She does not mention her wished burial to anyone, except her eccentric companion, socially displaced by Mabel's family and their peers and wholly doubtful of her own career as a missionary and its failed impact on India. It becomes a sign of the whole project - apparently busy, hoping to come to rest as if to a native place, and, in fact, a retreat and a final disillusionment.

Barbie is (as we read on) to lapse into withdrawn, haunted silence in sight of the towers - where the illusion of embodiment and permanence (against which the British in India are fighting a losing battle) gives way to vultures and dismemberment.

It is such a satisfying read, and on so many levels, historical, psychological and spiritual.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog