There were no cultural police thenI have recently re-read two books which have been old favourites; and now I realise that they have quite significant things in common. The first book is The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which is a travel diary written by the 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. The second book is called Ardhakathanika`' written by an Indian merchant, again in the 17th century. (This latter has been splendidly translated, annotated and introduced by Prof. Mukund Lath).The merchant in question, Banarsi Das, was a poet, like Basho, and, like him, intersperses the text with his own poems. His diary, again like Basho's, is largely an account of journeys. Finally, both men were deeply spiritual. Basho was a Zen Buddhist master, Banarsi Das was a Shrimal Jain.With all this in common, the two diaries provide a fine counterpointing of the two cultures they represent. Basho's journeys, for instance, were all in search of natural beauty. A change of season, or even in the way thewind blew, impelled him irresistably to take the road ``The autumn wind inspired my heart with a desire to see the rise of the full moon over Mount Obasute.''Basho travelled with almost nothing ``a paper raincoat, cotton-stuffed mantle, hat .'' The important events of his journeys were such things as watching a waterfall from a cave, or seeing new green leaves in the sun. These things were indeed events imbued for him with the same significance that political or financial events would have for us:Breaking the silence/Of an ancient pond/A frog jumped into water/A deep resonance.By contrast, Banarsi Das has no eyes for any of the natural beauties he must have passed. For him significance was located in highways, in bazaars and serais. Being a merchant, he could hardly travel light, and he gives us meticulous accounts of the rubies, pearls and artefacts he carried, along with equal meticulous accounts of how much was robbed. His purity of soul expresses itself by peeling away layers, not of the seenworld, but of the mind's falsehood.If Basho's haikus give us clear images of natural life, the chaupais of Banarasi give us clear images of the state of the soul.Like a parrot/He flew away/Leaving behind an empty cage/His lifeless frame.Finally, there is one feature that their writing has in common, which relates to the age they belonged to. They are both confident that the words they have spoken are the words which will be heard. Banarsi Das, for instance, can speak freely of his terror at the death of Emperor Akbar: ``When I heard the dreadful news. I reeled and. fell down the stairs in a faint. The whole town was in a tremor. Shopkeepers shut down their shops. Feverishly, the rich hid their jewels.''He can speak without being afraid that these words will be construed as being against the new emperor, or for the old one, or against the shopkeepers or for the shopkeepers. To put it differently, his words will remain his own. In our own age, listeners are concerned not so much with what thewords are, but with what they can be turned into. In the attentive silence which surrounded these earlier writers, there is something for our present world to envy.
