IN LIGHT OF INDIA.<i> By Octavio Paz</i> .<i> Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger</i> . <i> Harcourt Brace: 210 pp., $22</i>

By his own admission, Octavio Paz’s “In Light of India” is “not a systematic study, but a more or less ordered gathering of the reflections, impressions, and objections that India provoked in [him].” The lacunae of this book “are numerous and they range from poetry, philosophy and history to architecture, sculpture and painting. The subject, due to its immensity and variety, rebels against synthesis. . . . These are merely glimpses of India: signs seen indistinctly, realities perceived between light and shadow.” With a light touch, Paz offers us India, knowing that modern India could be illuminated “with another light, crueler but more real.”

As a Third Worlder, Paz does not identify with what one might loosely call a monolithic First World attitude, as does E. M. Forster or even V. S. Naipaul, a writer of Indian extraction who identifies more with Great Britain than his native Trinidad, or for that matter, India. “To a certain extent,” he writes, “I can understand what it means to be Indian because I am Mexican.”

On his first trip to India, a brief stint in 1951 as an attache in the Mexican embassy, Paz arrived in Bombay by ship. He was 37 and his fascination was immediate: “I was a young barbarian poet. Youth, poetry and barbarism are not opposed to one another: In the gaze of a barbarian there is innocence; in that of a young man, an appetite for life; and in a poet’s gaze, astonishment.”

After a week, he took a train to Delhi. “It was impossible not to recall another long train ride [near the end of the Mexican Revolution], as desolate and with the same monotony that is one of the attributes of immensity, that as a child I took with my mother from Mexico City to San Antonio, Texas. . . . [We] were going to join my father, a political exile in the United States. . . . She was haunted by the hanged men she had seen on trips from Mexico City to Puebla, swaying from the telegraph poles along the way, their tongues dangling.” Paz was 6 years old then, and he particularly recalls “an elongated shadow hanging from a pole. Remembering that incident as I watched the interminable plains of India, I thought of the massacres of Hindus and Muslims in 1947. Massacres along the railroad tracks, the same in India as in Mexico. From the beginning, everything that I saw inadvertently evoked forgotten images of Mexico.”

Because he arrived in India four years after the partition--whereby the states of India and Pakistan were created--perhaps it is natural for Paz to see Indian history as one in which Hindus and Muslims at best coexisted. “The presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. . . . A history that unites them but also separates them. They have lived together, but their coexistence has been one of rivalry, full of suspicions, threats and silent resentments that frequently have turned into bloodshed.” This is not entirely true. For example, in AD 712, when the “first forays of Muslim soldiers into India” took place in the province of Sind, the Arabs declared the Hindus a “people of the book,” a status the Koran gives only to Jews and Christians. One could give countless examples of an active amity between Hindus and Muslims over the centuries.

Paz at times contradicts himself. He asserts that India’s ancient religious, ethnic and cultural divisions had “disappeared under British power,” but he also concludes that “participation in British culture, common to both [Hindus and Muslims], had separated rather than united” them. As a matter of fact, various divisions had not disappeared under British power; rather, the British had an active policy of creating divisions. If Hindus and Muslims see themselves as separate nations today, it is substantially the fault of the raj.

He also contradicts himself on the contributions of Islam to Indian culture. While he admits that “India owes to Islam admirable works of architecture, painting, music and landscaping, not to mention its great historical achievements, like the creation of the Mogul Empire”--in many of which immense and subtle fusions between Hinduism and Islam took place--he is wrong to claim that India owes “not a single new or original thought” to Islam. The new ideas Islam brought to India were equality and fraternity, something Paz implicitly recognizes in the fact that “all the millions who adopted the new faith came from the lower castes.” This was because, to quote Paz himself, Islam offered a chance “for one to free oneself from the chain of birth and rebirth (the terrible law of karma), a liberation that was not only religious but also social: The converted became a part of a fraternity of brothers.”

Which brings me to Paz’s fascinating discussion of caste. Finding absolutely no notion of social justice in the Hindu philosophical tradition, he locates its absence even in the “Bhagavad-Gita,” which he pronounces--quite rightly--”one of the most beautiful and profound texts of world literature.” What Krishna preaches to Arjuna (who is wavering before the great battle of the Mahabharata in which he must kill his cousins) is “a disinterest without philanthropy.” What Arjuna must do is acquire a detachment, a renunciation of himself and of his appetites, but that act of spiritual heroism, Paz underscores, “does not reveal a love of one’s neighbor.” For what about the enemy’s “widows, children, parents, siblings, friends? The superhuman disinterest that Krishna preaches has another face: the indifference to the suffering of others.” To attribute the deep polarization of castes in Indian society to this spiritual text is a fascinating interpretation, one that will anger many in India. But I do think Arjuna’s anguish carries within it the possibility of compassion.

Upon his return to India in 1962 as Mexico’s ambassador, Paz spent the next six years absorbing India through his senses and his intellect. He resigned in 1968 because of the bloody repression of the student rebellion in Mexico City. “I could no longer represent a government that was operating in a manner so clearly opposite to my way of thinking,” he writes. He also met his wife, Marie Jose, and married her there. In the final chapter, “Farewell,” as he leaves Bombay by the steamship Victoria, he relives what he had felt on his first visit years ago, “but now illumined by another, more serious light: We thought that we were seeing all this for the last time. It was as though we were leaving ourselves.” As “an invocation and as a way of saying goodbye,” Paz wrote a poem, with which the book ends. Its last lines are appropriate here:

Shiva and Parvati:

the woman who is my wife

and I

ask you for nothing, nothing

that comes from the other world:

only

the light on the sea,

the barefoot light on the sleeping land and sea.

It is no wonder, given the depth of this farewell, that Paz has returned to India several times and that he has written this book, in which he tries to explain India more to himself than to anyone else. That is why this book, Paz says, comprises “neither memoirs nor evocations. What I lived and felt during the six years I spent in India is in my book of poems, ‘Ladera Este’ and in a short prose book, ‘The Monkey Grammarian.’ ”

“In Light of India” is more an effort to answer the crucial and legitimate question: Is India, in its unparalleled diversity, indeed a nation? Perhaps, he answers, it is “a nation in the making.” What threatens this national project is the unapologetic rise of Hindu nationalism, which “like all nationalisms . . . is a political religion.”

Though the political corruption of religion has colored the three great monotheistic religions, particularly the Islamic tradition, “Hindu nationalism”--and this is one of Paz’s brilliant points in the book--”has fallen into a kind of caricature of monotheism by replacing its original pluralism and polytheism with the adoration of a single ideological god: the nation.” Despite such grim observations, Paz’s tone is never that of someone who has found final truths but, rather, of someone who is willing to have his truths qualified.

Simultaneously the insider and outsider in India, Paz inadvertently reveals the temperament he prizes. He does so, not surprisingly, in an eloquent discussion of Indian literature. In a classic anthology of Sanskrit poetry, compiled at the end of the 11th century by the Buddhist monk Vidyakara, appear “various poems attributed to a Dharmakirti.” Paz writes, “I rubbed my eyes: Was it possible that the author of these erotic poems was also the severe Buddhist logician?” Yes, indeed, “the passionate, sensuous, and ironic poet and the closely reasoning and sharp-minded philosopher are almost certainly one and the same.”

Paz is, simultaneously, just such a poet and such a thinker. Throughout “In Light of India,” one finds an India revealed by a passionate disinterestedness. Never harsh, never judgmental, when Paz is stark in his realism, it is ever so gently. “This book is not for the experts. It is the child not of knowledge but of love,” he writes. And I can’t help but be grateful. As should all readers of this book. Paz the poet intoxicates; Paz the thinker ensures that this is not at the cost of reason and fairness. He intoxicates with reason.