The Mexican writer Octavio Paz was the most prominent Latin American to understand, analyze, interpret and promote India intellectually and culturally from a Latin American perspective in the twentieth century. He had first hand experience of India as a diplomat posted in New Delhi for seven years. He has written numerous poems and articles on India. His book "Vislumbres de la India" (In the light of India) is regarded as one of the best introductions to India among Latin American thinkers. Some cultural visitors from the Spanish-speaking world travel around the country with Paz’s book as an ‘intimate guide’. They see India through his eyes, trying to grasp the immense complexity of India.
Author Indranil Chakravarty has given a comprehensive account of Paz’s years in India and his writings on India. He has done extensive research including declassified diplomatic files and personal letters. He has interviewed many Indians and Latin Americans as well their offsprings and close associates who had interacted with Paz. With his knowledge of Latin America and Spanish literature as well as his fluency in Spanish language he has put Paz’s works on India in a larger perspective including in the context of Mexico’s cultural connections with India before Paz.
Paz’s first experience with India was negative. He was unhappy when he was posted as a junior diplomat in the newly opened Mexican embassy in Delhi in 1951. He was disappointed with the "atrocious and immense Indian reality” of the early fifties struggling with poverty and post-partition reconciliation. During this first stay for six months in India, he hardly made any friends, lived largely within the confines of his hotel, and did not like either Delhi or the people he met. Later, he reassessed his responses as partly a projection of his own unhappiness and partly the impact of deep-rooted Western prejudices he unconsciously carried within himself.
Delhi posting was a stark contrast to his colorful cultural life in Paris from where he was transferred to Delhi, against his will. At that time, Paz was enjoying his emergence as a budding celebrity poet in Paris where he was posted in the Mexican embassy. He did not want to leave his large circle of European and Latin American artists and writers in Paris. As a lowly diplomat in Delhi, Paz missed the Parisian charms and excitement of conversations in its cafes.
Later, Paz came to India as ambassador in 1962 and stayed in the post till 1968. As ambassador, Paz had a different and transforming experience. As ambassador he had privileged status and access as well as the facility to travel extensively. His relationships with figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi allowed him to engage actively in the country’s political and cultural history. When Paz left India in1968, Indira Gandhi organised a party at her residence. Paz had forged lasting friendships with many of India's leading artists and writers. His large house in Prithviraj road became a meeting point for Indian artists, writers, and thinkers. He had invited Latin American visitors to stay in his house and took them around India. He got married under the neem tree of the house with Maria Jose, his second wife.
Paz has repeatedly characterized his years in India as momentous: ‘It was a second birth’, a phrase that evokes the Hindu idea of dvija, the twice-born, suggesting an awakening of the self. Paz has said, “ India has been my sentimental, artistic and spiritual education. Its influence can be seen in my poems, prose texts and in my life itself.” His creative output during his second stay in India, between 1962 and 1968, was astounding. It was the most bountiful period of an unimaginably productive life. Paz has written poems on variety of Indian subjects such as Lodhi garden, Vrindavan, Madurai and painter Swaminathan.
Paz immersed himself in India’s contemplative traditions, history, philosophy, art and literature. He understood the complexity and contradictions of India based on his own analysis. This is evident from his statement: The centrifugal forces of India are old and powerful: they have not destroyed the country because, without intending to, they have neutralised one another. He referred to Varanasi as incarnating ‘the sacred in all its incredible banality’. He had discovered India through his Mexican eyes and perspectives. He found resonance in India as a spiritual home to his complex and labyrinthine Mexican identity. He said, “The strangeness of India brought to mind that other strangeness: my own country”.
Paz’s experiences in India are palpable in two collections of poetry often considered among his finest, a genre-defying philosophical reflection on his journey through Rajasthan, two volumes of essays and a memoir, his final book written three decades after leaving India. Drawing parallels with his own country, Paz once said that he understood what it meant to be an Indian precisely because he was Mexican. He insisted that the country entered his life not merely through his intellect but viscerally, through all his senses. In India, where the erotic and the sacred blend in ecstatic union—unlike in the West, where the two are scrupulously kept apart—he saw the possibility of a new synthesis through the dissolution of dualities. Paz was under the spell of Buddhism more than anything else. He immersed himself in the works of the philosopher-poets Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti and Bhartrihari, bringing them within a comparative framework of reference that included the West and Mesoamerican cultures.
Paz had planted ‘India’ in the minds of many Latin American artists and thinkers. His passion for India has left a certain impact on Spanish–American literature. His writings became a bridge between continents, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both. He hosted the visits of Latin American writers and artists such as Julio Cortázar and the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. Cuban writer Severo Sarduy (1937–1993), one of the most outrageous and baroque of the Latin American ‘Boom’ writers of the sixties and seventies wrote, ‘Octavio Paz gave me India, the most extraordinary gift that anyone can give'. In their struggle for identity, the Latin Americans often saw in the ‘Orient’ a reflection of their own selves waiting to be discovered and celebrated.
Paz touched the lives of leading Indian artists, journalists and writers who visited Paz’s house often, sometimes uninvited and enjoyed Paz’s hospitality and intellectual and cultural conversations. As a junior diplomat in 1951, he had identified Satish Gujral’s artistic promise and selected him for a scholarship to Mexico, going against the decision of the other members of the selection committee. Paz shaped Satish Gujral’s development as an artist by inserting Gujral among the maestros of the Mexican mural movement. The influence of the Mexican mural movement on modern Indian art through Gujral would not have been possible without Octavio Paz’s decision to send him to Mexico.
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