Reviewed: La India Eterna, by Juan Marín. Publisher: Editorial Zig-Zag, 1956.

Home // August.18.2018 // Jessica Sequeira

Imago mundi

"Architecture has been called the ‘womb of civilization'. Every people, every race, every age, every cultural period has contributed to the art of building the temple, palace, fortifications and bedroom its own distinctive ways of expressing life, its necessities, its aspirations and its dreams. Architecture is the mirror that permits us to reconstruct the past, not only in its material aspects of economy and social organization, but also in its most elevated spiritual currents. The Parthenon, the Coliseum, Notre-Dame, Nuremberg, Edfu, Luxor, Peking, Sanchi, Angkor-Vat, Machu-Picchu, Uxmal, etc show us not only how the peoples of a specific age and race lived, but also what their philosophical and religious ideas were, what the spiritual currents were that moved their psychological ‘dynamics'. They are islands that remain afloat in the cataclysmic submersions that have occurred in what one author has called ‘the ocean of history'. In this sense, nothing is more instructive than to visit the old ruins of monuments, driven not only by a narrow and unilateral archaeological curiosity, but by a profound wish to understand and grasp the soul of man in his development at the level of the earth and in his relationship with the imponderables of the spirit."

A diplomat and man of letters with a deep interest in history and spirituality, the Chilean poet Juan Marín wrote books that went beyond impressions of landscape to incorporate the rich analysis of his surroundings. No mere travel guide, La India Eterna crosses genre boundaries with remarkable fluidity, veering from an objective tone that comments on philosophies and religious sculptures into personal impressions, becoming almost domestic through the inclusion of multiple black-and-white photographs snapped by his wife and himself, before arcing back to the description of surroundings. There are ventures into psychological explanation, as well as constant quotes from Marín's own reading, which ranges over English and German romantics, French symbolist poets, commentators on Tibetan Buddhism, European cultural anthropologists, peripatetic writers like the Chinese Hiuen-Tsiang, and classical Arabic historians.

Given the extensive, wide-ranging nature of the book, the reader might well ask how Marín is reading the country, and what for him is eternal about India. For Marín, interest in India is linked to his interests in psychoanalysis and the literary currents of romanticism and symbolism. Early in his career, Marín wrote several works of fiction, poetry and essayistic reflection that included psychological themes, such as Margarita, el Aviador y el Médico, Naufragio and Ensayos Freudianos, and when he began his career as a diplomat, this interest developed naturally into a new form as he sought to psychoanalyse the landscape he was discovering. For Marín, reality could be read like a dream, through the analysis of physical and textual symbols. Architecture, in particular, was the primary mirror that he believed permitted a reconstruction of the past.

Looking constantly for similarities between cultures and transmissions from historical periods to the present, Marín's arguments are based in continuity, not rupture. This is what allows him to discuss such ideas as the Indian Middle Ages and the Indian Gothic, as well as see periods in terms of virility and decadence. The most powerful idea that runs through his work is that of the imago mundi. For Marín, communities possess “spiritual states” and “collective unconsciousnesses”, which he refers to as their “psyche”. Different peoples have different psyches, which are encapsulated in physical form as an imago. Working in reverse, one can use this imago to recuperate the past, by studying buildings, objects, myths, dances or texts like the Bhagavad Gita. Psychologies can be expressed either visually or in words; a towering temple, a rampant horse or posing figure expresses ideas that can be deciphered.

An idea of history begins to emerge from scattered comments throughout various chapters. Marín thinks of ideas as a germinating seed that flourishes in a receptive environment. Transmissions are possible when there is an overlap in sensibility between cultures. If an imago finds a receptive environment, as Buddhism did when it built upon the spiritual environment left by the Greeks in Asia, it will be successful. If there is no substratum from which to develop, there will be metastasis. For Marín, religious and commercial motivations are what create change, for as people shift about they transmit ideas. Cultural development thus first occurs through the movements of individuals, not through economic change.

Though passive contemplation is of crucial importance in India, especially in its political application as non-violence, Marín argues that development in the East has been less sedentary than it has been made out to be. Sedentariness and travel, movement and repose operate in a constant dialectic, with Gandhi and Nehru representing the opposing poles that make up India. A spiritual revolution can precede a political and social revolution and economic reorganization, in what Marín calls a “positive rebellion”. There is an idea of history here that is progressive yet cyclical, in which the material moves toward the immaterial, even as this movement creates its own material effects. The different repeating phases in civilization, from growth to decadence, are building toward the union of soul with the divine, as Radha with Krishna. According to Marín, the “maximum aspiration of Indian thought is fusion with the heart of God”.

Who can decipher the images that express the spiritual states on the way to this aspiration, as yet unrealised? Alongside the notion of a landscape that is capable of being read as a set of hieroglyphics divulging popular belief, there is another possibly contradictory idea of India as home to a certain hermeticism. “Indian wisdom has a thousand ways of expressing itself and its designs are so deep and secret that it is not given to us to penetrate them”, “the whole atmosphere acquires a solemnity of miracle and typically oriental esotericism”, “there are in these feats an ‘exoteric' sense, taught to children in the schools, and another ‘esoteric' one, which but few know”: these phrases suggest that not everyone can understand what is written on a page or built into a stupa or molded into the side of a temple.

These contradictions do not seem to worry Marín too much. In fact, Marín himself embodies yet another contradiction very much present in India: the amalgam of interest in commerce and interest in religion. Marín is an élite diplomat, but he is also a genuine spiritual seeker. As noted, it is businessmen and missionaries who primarily spread ideas, and in Marín one finds a bit of both. This particular blend is not uncommon in the land where he is travelling, and he is conscious of this. Of British Ceylon, then part of India, Marín writes:

And this is the same channel of the sea, overcast today by the storm, that saw arrive the boats of the Arabs laden with goods on their way from the Red Sea to the coasts of China, coming and going, and saw arrive also in succeeding centuries the caravels of the Portuguese, the vessels of the Dutch and the freighters of the British, all of them resolute with an equal zeal for commerce and religion, colonisation and catechism, opium and the Bible, markets of spices and souls to save, elements that may now seem to us disparate, but have gone together with frequency through the world.

On the business side, Marín is a working diplomat, and his personal connections are in evidence. Tucked away amidst the pages are photos of him with the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, “on whose shoulders weigh infinite and complex problems”, the sheik and ex-prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir Mohammed Abdullah (at Marín's time of writing a prisoner-of-state) and many high-up government functionaries, including the director of archaeology of Kashmir. Marín's literary connections also enable him to recount in detail the fascinating life of Adelina del Carril, the wife of Argentine author Ricardo Güiraldes, who wrote the classic Don Segundo Sombra. Del Carril lived in Bangalore, adopted an Indian child, and became very interested in the mystic Maharishi. She speaks to Marín as a friend and introduces him to her guru. In Kashmir, Marín tells of his time with the Maharajah Hari Singh, “Su Alteza”, when the two engaged in long conversations and “upon not being able to arrive, of course, at definite conclusions to ‘set the world in order', we became deeply involved in a game of bridge or went out in a shikara boat on the Dal lake.”

Though Marín begins from a Catholic base, his religious approach constantly synthesizes. He is attracted by mystic currents of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, and he blithely notes overlaps in cosmovisions, such as in “the transparent brook, emblematic of the flow of life in Chinese Taoism or symbolic of the transmigration of souls in the advaita philosophy.” There are moments of skepticism, such as when a sadhu claims that the tomb of Jesus is located in Srinigar, or when another holy man claims that he will show him the “proof of the rope”, and make a street boy ascend to the clouds. Yet Marín keeps a very broad mind with respect to the spiritual.

Perhaps this faith exists in part because he has lived through great periods of spiritual effectiveness, when Gandhi and others produced change through belief. At one point Marín uses the phrase “a spiritual revolution of the most profound political and social significance”, and it is clear that this spiritual change interests him very much. Artistic individuals such as Rabindranath Tagore might lead the way for this, perhaps, in addition to the cultural transmitters mentioned. “Tagore is a typical example of the Eastern soul, a spirit penetrated to the marrow by the idea of the unity of Creation and the bonds that exist between all vital forms and with God,” he writes. Like others of his time such as Gabriela Mistral and the Los Diez group, these ideas deeply influence his work.

Marín embraces the idea, present in both Freudian psychoanalysis and the dialectic of creation represented by Siva and Parvati in Hinduism, that life is opposition of forces. “To understand life, one must accept the fundamental principle that it is essentially ‘action-reaction”, opposition between two forces, one creative and the other destructive, positive and negative, Freudian Eros and Ananke.” Elsewhere he writes that:

The West has an ecstatic and egocentric vision of the world: the East conceives of it in revolving cycles, eternally renewed, of which the best symbol is the ‘swastika' or turning sun or atom in a whirlwind or male-female couple in creative intercourse.

There are enough lateral theories and open-minded forays at the borders of history, psychology and science in this book to keep it both inspiring and entertaining, even as it informs. Marín's lyrical style helps, and his erudition is always playful, such as when he notes the similarity between the Romantic poets' Lord Jagannath (Juggernaut) and the Sanskrit Jagannatha. What most comes through, however, is his respect for the beauty of the landscapes through which he moves, which he calls “living poems”, and the agility of his mind as it casts about for ways to decipher the images that materialize. A fold-out map at the beginning of the book, showing the position of Indian States in the New Constitution, provides an elegant reference as we move with Marín about the country, in our imagination.

History inevitably continues to occur as Marín writes, and impinges into his text. He notes that his first experience with Goa was fraught with emotion, as he arrived on a Japanese repatriation ship that brought his wife and himself from their post in Shanghai to the neutral zone of Mormugao in Goa during WWII. In a footnote elsewhere, he remarks that as the book was going to press, his Maharajah friend died, and was replaced by his son. He remarks on his own presence during the days of Independence, a constant memory during later mass events he experiences. “We who, despite having been present for the overflowings of popular mass enthusiasm on 15 August 1947, when the Independence of India was proclaimed in New Delhi, and thought with it to have beaten all the records of foules asiatiques in the complete brimming over of emotional fervor, must confess that Hardwar will figure in our diary of memories as the largest mass assembly we have ever seen.”

Romantic as he may be about the esotericism, popular energy, and possibility for spiritual growth and miracle in the East, Marín is also very much aware that much of this lies in the history of the country, and that at the present time the East is no longer primarily a place of mystery but of progress. “Political hurricanes blow today through the Himalayas, in the same way that centuries ago the great religious and cosmogonic systems were blowing. In the Asia of the 20 th century there no longer remains space for any ‘Shangri La', let alone for a ‘Sleeping Beauty of the Forest'.”

The form of Marín's text, a personal travel narrative undergirded by cultural commentary, reflects the content of his arguments. Marín himself is a transmitter of culture. From Latin America he has read many texts on India, primarily in English, a double distillation. But he is also an attentive observer with a keen eye. To transmit culture need not be something solemn. Technical details regarding the journey by car, as it slouches along the dirt paths and highways of the country à la Cortázar, provide an absurd and sympathetic element to the narrative. There is also a great deal of humour in the descriptions of the many people Marín meets, who are never abstractions but always idiosyncratic. A philosophy does not define a person, and as everywhere else, the people of India can be earnest folk or charlatans, academics or dandies. Reading Marín, India assumes interest not only for the history condensed in the amber of its monuments, but also because the living intelligence of the writer is there to solidify his perceptions into text, as yet another piece of amber offered for eternity to the universe.

A Marín bibliography:

Buda o la Negación del Mundo. Literatura Espasa, 1954.
El Alma de China. Claridad, 1945.
El Egipto de los Faraones. Zig-Zag, 1954.
El Tibet Misterioso y sus Lamas. Nascimento, 1944.
Ensayos Freudianos. Zig-Zag, 1938.
La India Eterna. Zig-Zag, 1956.
Lao-Tsé o el Universismo Mágico. Espasa, 1952.
Margarita, el Aviador y el Médico. Letras, 1932.
Mesa de Mah-Jong. Emecé, 1948.
Naufragio: novela de intenso dramatismo arrancada a la vida chilena, con episodios impresionantes de la tierra y el mar del sur. Zig-Zag, 1939.

Banner graphic source: a photo of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), "lit up on Republic Day 2015," by Wikimedia Commons user Ronakshah1990. Used here under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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