Tangerine: A journey of self and truth shaped by political change

Tangerine:  How to Read the Upanishads Without Giving Up Coffee

by Namita Devidayal

Published by Westland 

224 pages ₹599

 

  In a world divided between right and wrong, right and left, where centrism is seen as too neutral a ground, journalist and author Namita Devidayal’s new memoir stands apart in negotiating a fair ground for itself. It tells the story of an unexpected journey into Hindu philosophy during a period of personal turmoil. Spurred by a chance encounter with a practitioner of Hindu spirituality in Rishikesh when melancholy had begun to set in during her 40s, Ms Devidayal found herself at an inflection point. 

As her carefully curated life in Mumbai was coming apart, her marriage dissolving, everything she had worked to build — from Bombay to Princeton, back to the cozy comforts of Mumbai life — seemed to lose its sheen. Existential questions began to surface, and she found answers buried in Hindu scriptures. She started connecting the dots between experiences in her childhood, early adulthood, as a wife, mother, friend, journalist and musician. On her 50th birthday, quite in contrast to how her life had unfolded in the years before, she found herself on the banks of the Ganga, spending time in an ashram, “paying heed to this unusual stream of knowledge that flowed down through the centuries like the river.” She was, in her words, attempting to draw the map of her life. 

“Hinduism may be fifty shades and more of tangerine, but I gradually started discovering that there is an underlying metaphysical idea that underscores the unity of all beings,” she writes. Time and again, Ms Devidayal wondered why she found herself drawn to a path so different from her rational, modern, individual-focused, Ivy-League-educated belief system. As she probed, she found imprints of Hindu philosophy sprinkled through her life, without consciously consuming it as such. The opposing forces of the rational and philosophical parts of her life were, in fact, more connected than they first appeared. At first, the ideas she encounters seemed audacious, but Ms Devidayal is something of a free spirit. As she pored over the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in the manner of an “accidental pilgrim”, letting them seep in gradually, each lesson added layers to the way she viewed herself and the world. 

Ideas of universal truth, the search for the self, and the meaning of life can often sound lofty — or even clichéd. Yet Ms Devidayal is acutely aware that her explorations have raised eyebrows and sparked curious suspicion among puzzled friends and family. Which is what makes her book different from others on this subject: She grounds her book in that tension and the changing political climate during which her transformation unfolds. 

Even as she introduces her son to the epics, the Hanuman Chalisa, and tabla lessons, in order to stay in touch with cultural traditions, “…a ruthless version of Hindutva had started becoming the background score in our country... Many of us started feeling a sense of unease over anything Hindu. How had such a profoundly sophisticated religion unleashed so much hatred?... The world was being split into reductive binaries: Those who rejected religion were liberal and those who expressed their faith, right-wing.” The shadow of Ms Devidayal’s earlier nonfiction works — both remarkable for their quiet beauty and nuanced engagement with Hindustani classical music that I thoroughly enjoyed reading — falls on this book as well. Her curiosity and sensitivity once again bring a distinct interiority to her writing. In the memoir The Music Room, she wrote exquisitely about being shaped by her reclusive guru’s world of music as a young girl and finding solace in it as an adult. Her second book, The Sixth String Ustad Vilayat Khan,  was an immersive and affecting portrait of a musician marked by brilliance and darkness. 

In Tangerine, Ms Devidayal turns her gaze to an unfamiliar landscape, one she had never intended to enter. In that sense, it is a memoir that wanders, perhaps by its very nature, before reaching its destination. Ms Devidayal’s prose is fluid and reflective, moving between grounded experiences and spiritual learnings, with snippets of ancient texts interspersed throughout. Unfolding over seven chapters, modelled on the stages of life in Hindu philosophy, she moves between memory and meditation, charting the moments that led her from one realisation to another, from one side of the river to the other, as it were. 

What also emerges is a case for owning one’s culture. Ms Devidayal describes it as thehrav, a sense of stillness that comes from an ambient connection with art and culture. In naming the book Tangerine, a lush variation on the sacred saffron, she has infused it with a kind of warmth that recasts religious philosophy as something more personal, accessible, and universal. 

The reviewer is a freelance journalist and author who reports on public health, gender, policy, and culture