Twins in the Mirror: Mythmaking and the Past in India and MexicoOver the past century, many Latin American - especially Mexican - writers have written about India and their idea of India (which are often quite contradictory), who have drawn comfort, reason and solace from this ancient land. At the same time, few Indian writers have ventured in to Latin America, despite our many similarities. Of course, the latter may just be a result of India's historical aversion to venturing in to foreign lands. Nevertheless, a disparity exists. My fiction writing, which often locates itself in Mexico, is an attempt toward righting this disparity. More importantly, it is an attempt to understand ourselves through observations of the archetypal "other" that is more similar than dissimilar to us. For me, the similarities between Mexico and India created the initial empathetic bond, while the differences have merely served to highlight our "alike-ness." Mexico has always appeared to me as a twin in the mirror. Of course, the imagery refers back to Octavio Paz's observations about our two countries, while also extending it. So the first part of my parallel refers to the similarities of our two cultures while the second places that twin image within a specific framework - as that of a mirror - of my own experience of Mexico. I first arrived in Mexico as a twenty-one-year old, having recently finished college and ready to explore the brave new world. Of course, having read far too many romantic stories by Anglo-Saxon adventurers, and read even more Western novels, Mexico seemed the last frontier on earth, where a person could just vanish - literally and figuratively, into the jungle. I too wanted to escape and disappear south-of-the-border. Of course, the first disillusionment came when I realized that not all of Mexico was a jungle to start with. Perhaps, as an Indian, I must first explain why I wanted to escape. I was running away from an odd legacy. A legacy made up of dichotomies and contradictions, often too tiresome to bear. On a personal and family level, we had inherited a great deal of history, of our past, of our ancestors, of the role we had played over two thousand years in the ups and downs of India's experience. Yet, on a social, political and intellectual level, we had been increasingly marginalised. New political structures left no room for old style bastions of feudal power. And yet, another form of feudalism - this one disguised as socialist democracy and controlled by the British-trained class of brown sahibs - had taken over from the colonial powers. This left many - like my family - who had chosen to break with the past for ideological reasons, with a great deal of disillusionment and very little say in the post-independence squabble for power. Furthermore, in a society where the discourse was socialist and "secularist", and all the structures of the past were necessarily deemed evil, my people's story and role in the country's history were either distorted or eliminated. The process of this systematic exclusion from history is quite out of the ambit of this paper, however the results - within fifty years of independence - were clear: my people not only had lost our future within India, but were also losing our past. At twenty-one, these contradictions and the constant struggle to re-establish a historical identity frankly seemed too difficult for any one individual. Mexico - at least as represented in popular novels, (written oddly enough by foreigners) seemed to offer a refuge. I had heard of Mexico as a place where the past ceased to exist. Where people forged a new identity, more compatible with one's own personal ideals. I had also read that the Surrealist painters had termed Mexico as the perfectly surreal land. Of course, at an obvious level, Mexico had an added appeal. There were hardly any Indians in that country, so the contradictions arising at home (and in the diaspora) could not follow me. In fact, as an Indian, once you crossed the Rio Grande, you stepped in to a sort of twilight zone. The exotica, the strangeness, the very foreignness of Mexico exerted a powerful fascination. Of course, it did not take long for me to realise that Mexico may have served as a great escape for Europeans and north Americans who can escape into its exotic interiors. It merely serves to remind an Indian of home. The food is similar (not surprisingly, since Mexico exported the "chile" to India), the handicrafts are oddly reminiscent of things we encounter in markets at home. To my eye, even the people look the same, although a Mexican could generally mark me out as a foreigner. (This last is an odd phenomenon. Travelling through the hills in Queretaro, I was named the "mujer aceituna" - the olive woman. An old woman explained to me that Mexicans had "cafe con leche" skin tones while mine was colour of a dark olive fruit. This fine distinction has still escaped my comprehension.) When I travelled up north into the desert, I was reminded of Rajasthan and Gujarat. When I returned to India after a few years of living in Mexico and travelled through Tamil Nadu and Kerala, I was constantly reminded of Chiapas and parts of Oaxaca. As an Indian, being in Mexico is like entering Alice's world through the looking glass. Thing are familiar enough to lull you into a sense of comfort and security, and yet different enough to provoke an aching homesickness. As I learned the language and began to converse with the people - not just the elite in Mexico City and Cuernevaca, but the farmers, the artisans, the boxers and the mariachi singers, I began to sense our similarities. Of course, the glaring difference in this situation being that as an Indian woman in Mexico, I experienced a great deal of social freedom, more than I can imagine in India. This is not a comment on the Indian social structure or the position of women, but on the privileged position occupied by an outsider in any society other than one's own. As a foreigner, I also moved more freely in and between the social strata than most Mexicans. Perhaps, this is an inevitable consequence of our social structures and protocols that circumscribe our social interactions at home. Amongst the Mexican people, there was a similar loss of personal history. The social elite spoke of their "pure" European heritage even as distinctly Aztec characteristics marked their eyes and hair. Amongst the "mestizo" population, the loss was even more complete, leaving little information of their emotional past. (Let me point out here that historical studies or archeology rarely succeed in recording the past on an individual level. Interpreted with the benefit of hindsight as well as ideological glasses, historians look at the past in a collective, larger sense. This is of little use to the individual who needs something more immediate, more tangible to explain his or her presence and situation in history). The readings of history, tainted by cultural biases and ideological snobbery, made many Mexicans ashamed of parts of their collective heritage. In Guadalajara, men in cantinas spoke to me of the horror and barbarism of the Aztec human sacrifices even as they brandished the machismo that - at least in part - descends from it. The Aztec culture was cruel, even uncivilized, or so they had been told over and over again. I felt a kinship with these Mexicans, since our own traditions of war and violence have been subsumed by the more pleasing, glossed over, politically correct image of a land of Gandhi and Buddha. I too had grown up hearing stories of ourselves from a colonial view point - all too often internalised within my people - about the barbarism of some of my traditions. In a post-colonial, post-hippie vision of India, my memory of Arjun and Krishna had no place. Furthermore, similar to the Indians, the Mexican too found ways of circumventing and subverting the colonial messages they received. Let me just give you one example. In Oaxaca, I was led around an ancient Franciscan chapel, one of the first to be built in the "New World." Located in a remote site, far from cities, and despite its dilapidated condition, the little church still draws worshippers from the far depths of the jungles and the heights of the mountains, from isolated indigenous tribes that still speak no Spanish and have little or no contact with the outside world. Sometime in the 1980's, a team of experts began restoration of this 400-year-old church, its altar and crucifix (which have not only great historical but also significant artistic value). Imagine their surprise when in the belly of the human form on the cross, they found a small obsidian statue of the pre-Hispanic, popular god of corn. It had apparently been secreted there by the local artisans who had built the church. The indigenous people had continued to come and pray to their old god in the subsequent centuries. This is not an isolated incident in Mexico or even other parts of Latin America. Of course, although it would be tempting to interpret this incident in terms of religion and the politics of conversion, I choose to recount it as a measure of the resilience and innovation of the people of that land. The incident reminded me of the destruction of temples in India by Turkish, Persian and Arab "conquistadores", and the resilience shown by the local populace in preserving their traditions in face of that onslaught. In other ways too, I was reminded of India. Haven't we appropriated as our own what we received from the conquerors and found ways of subverting what has been imposed from the outside? The Mexicans have claimed the Spanish language for their own just as we have done with English. In both cases, the empire has struck back. And hard! Of course, there are also significant differences between our two lands. For example, India never went through the historically traumatic process of "mestizaje" or racial mixing to quite the same extent as Mexico. The waves of Islamic invaders brought new people who settled in India, severing nearly all (except of faith) ties to their homelands over the centuries. In case of the British, the colonial structure remained quite removed from the rest of Indian society, and functioned predominantly as a form of exercising control over the populace. The racial snobbery of the colonial English and the insularity of the Indian ensured that little mixing of the races took place between the two. However, for me, one of the most significant and obvious differences is that unlike India, Mexico has found a solution for coping with its historical burdens. Even when the past was lost or distorted or reinterpreted and distanced from the very people it belonged to, the Mexican found another tool - a weapon almost - in its stead. The loss of the past could be healed by active and popular myth-making. And let me emphasize here that if there is an element of Latin America that we must explore as Indians, it must be that of myth-making, at individual and collective levels. In Mexico, the cantinas, plazas, streets resound with stories of the past. Of great, brave heroes and beautiful, tragic women. Of course, the also sing of tragic loves and betrayals in the same cantinas, dolefully giving voice to the collective sense of loss within the culture. It is a kind of collective healing, a sort of admiring of historical wounds (like little kids do) and checking up (by picking and scratching) on the healing scabs of the nation's psyche. In creating mythical (although sometimes historical) personalities such as La Adelita dating back to the revolution or La Malinche back to the Conquista, the Mexicans have found a way of trying to reconcile their own mutually contradictory heritage. The myths can be based on history and tradition, but they need not have factual precision or even comply with the restrictive ideas of "objective truth." Instead, the myth and its hidden psychic explanation are the most important elements of this new creation. So while much of the Eurocentric world tries to precisely document and rationalise and interpret historical data, Mexico works at creating myths. In songs, paintings, sculptures and stories, they dreams up new histories, altered tales, curious explanations of their past and their origins. Such myth-making is a powerful act. Not only does it give rise to literary and artistic creation, but it also becomes the underpinning of the larger collective psyche. Myth-making contributes to the new sense of nation that the Mexicans have developed, not as a relative identity or geographically-bound idea, but as a cultural construct based on their shared experience, despite their internal differences and contradictions. It heals some of the wounds inflicted by a catastrophic past. Most importantly, such myth-making re-establishes some links and connections - perhaps historically tenuous but always emotionally vibrant - with the past that the individual has lost. In such myth-making, ancestors can be identified and remembered and admired across the mists of time, even though they may be ones we have created for ourselves. I have seen it happen in Mexico and I wish similar healing could occur in our own land. It is a lesson that the Mexicans hold for us and it would do us good to learn it. for more by Sunny Singh visit www.sunnysinghwrites.com and www.sawf.org/sunny |