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In 1951, Octavio Paz was serving as Second Secretary in the Mexican Embassy in Paris, where he had been posted since late 1945. He had recently published two of the most important books of his career, <\/span>Libertad bajo palabra <\/span><\/i>(1949) and <\/span>El laberinto de la soledad<\/span><\/i> (1950), and had successfully cultivated friendships with both French and expatriate Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals. Paz was flourishing in Paris and was eager to remain there. Yet, all of a sudden, he was dispatched to India on a new diplomatic mission. As Indranil Chakravarty explains in his fascinating, thoroughly researched, and highly readable new book, Paz\u2019s political and cultural activities in Paris had displeased his superiors. Earlier that year, he had embarked on a vigorous campaign to promote Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s now-classic film <\/span>Los olvidados<\/span><\/i> (1950), which had earned the disapproval of the Mexican authorities for its at once brutal and poetic depiction of life in one of Mexico City\u2019s poorer neighborhoods. Paz loved Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s film; the official view, however, was that it cast Mexico in a bad light. In short, the assignment to Mexico\u2019s embassy in newly independent India was a form of punishment. Ironically, it opened the door to one of the future Nobel laureate\u2019s most significant and enriching cultural experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nPaz did not enjoy his first sojourn in India, and it did not last very long. He arrived in December 1951, and by May of the following year, he had already been transferred to Tokyo. In 1962, however, Paz embarked on a second Indian phase, now as his country\u2019s ambassador. He remained there until October 1968, when he left his position to protest his government\u2019s massacre of students in Mexico City\u2019s Tlatelolco Square, ten days before the opening of the Olympic Games, which Mexico was hosting that year. These six years in India were perhaps the most creative and joyful of Paz\u2019s life. Not only did he produce a torrent of books, but it was in New Delhi that he met and married his second wife, Marie-Jos\u00e9 Tramini, \u201cthe turning point of his emotional life\u201d (199) in Chakravarty\u2019s words. He spent months traveling all over India and visiting neighboring countries. He engaged in a remarkably intense dialogue with artists, writers, intellectuals, and politicians in India and immersed himself in his host nation\u2019s rich and complex culture and history. He was uniquely successful in building a bridge between India and Mexico (and Latin America more broadly). Paz himself described his experience as \u201ca second birth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The Tree Within <\/span><\/i>is a full-scale biography that covers the entirety of the poet\u2019s life. Still, the book\u2019s principal contribution lies in the chapters addressing Paz\u2019s two sojourns in India. Chakravarty offers engrossing new information about Paz\u2019s activities in India, the imprint left by the country on his thinking and writing, and his interpretations of Indian culture, religion, and history. Among the many intriguing stories related in this volume is that of the Indian painter Satish Gujral, who received a fellowship to study in Mexico, in large part thanks to Paz. Gujral remained forever grateful to Paz for his support. As a diplomat, Paz played a role in resolving the crisis over Goa, the Portuguese colony that finally returned to Indian control in the early 1960s. He promoted dialogue between Mexico and India through significant cultural exchanges. In addition to Gujral, Paz befriended numerous prominent figures, including the painter Jagdish Swaminathan, the novelists Santha Rama Rau and Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and the newspaper editor Sham Lal. Notably, Paz counted Indira Gandhi, India\u2019s prime minister, among his friends. He hosted Latin American visitors in New Delhi, such as Julio Cort\u00e1zar and Severo Sarduy, both of whom testified to the immense influence Paz had on their views of India. Chakravarty even discusses the friendships Paz established with some of the employees in the Mexican embassy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPaz pinpointed in the cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of India a way of thinking that provided an alternative to some of the impasses in which Western culture found itself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Paz displayed a deep interest in different cultures throughout his life, and he was a firm believer in the plural nature of the world\u2019s cultures. In short, he arrived in India eager to learn and with an open mind. He discussed the literatures of the subcontinent with eloquence and insight and wrote scintillating pages describing some of India\u2019s most important monuments and artworks. He was particularly drawn to Tantra, which he saw, as Chakravarty explains, \u201cnot just as a spiritual discipline but as a profound way of understanding the relationship between the material and the metaphysical, the individual and the universal\u201d (333). More broadly, Paz pinpointed in the cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of India a way of thinking that provided an alternative to some of the impasses in which Western culture found itself. He liked to draw attention to how in India there was a tendency to dissolve the binary oppositions on which Western thought relied. As he was fond of explaining, the West explored reality in terms of <\/span>this <\/span><\/i>or<\/span><\/i> that<\/span><\/i>, whereas in India it was always a matter of <\/span>this <\/span><\/i>and<\/span><\/i> that<\/span><\/i>. These ideas were captivating from a philosophical point of view; they also undergirded much of Paz\u2019s poetry of this period.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Chakravarty is passionate about his subject matter, and he speaks admiringly of Paz\u2019s love for India. This does not, however, make the author blind to the Mexican poet\u2019s occasional faults. Chakravarty notes that Paz\u2019s understanding of India was mostly filtered through his readings of European authors. He takes him to task, moreover, for some of his distorted readings of Indian religious practices. And he devotes several incisive pages to analyzing a 1984 conversation on Mexican television between Paz and the Catalan-Indian scholar of world religions Raimon Panikkar, in which the Mexican poet repeatedly talked over Panikkar and treated him dismissively even though what Panikkar had to say about the religious traditions of India was more nuanced, in Chakravarty\u2019s opinion, than what Paz contributed to the conversation. Chakravarty might have added that Panikkar had a far more up-to-date view of Indian society, drawing attention to the country\u2019s role, already in the 1980s, as a top producer of engineers\u2014that is, to a dimension of the country\u2019s development that was out of step with the Pazian emphasis on India as a repository of spiritual values. Chakravarty rightly concludes this section of his book with a warning to the reader to \u201cbe wary of Paz whenever he ma[kes] categorical statements\u201d (375).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Tree Within <\/span><\/i>is detailed and thorough in its approach to its subject. There is one noteworthy omission, though. <\/span>Vislumbres de la India <\/span><\/i>(1995), Paz\u2019s combination memoir and essay about India and, significantly, his final book, includes a lengthy discussion of the impact of the British conquest on India. Paz offers a surprisingly sanguine assessment of the British contribution to India\u2019s emergence as a modern nation. Even though he unhesitatingly sympathizes with India\u2019s battle for independence and regularly uses his understanding of India to criticize aspects of Western culture, in particular its excessive individualism, he also suggests that the British contributed things of great value to the country they colonized, including the principles of democracy and nationhood. Paz believes that the British imperialist enterprise contributed to its own undoing by instilling values in its Indian subjects that prepared them to overthrow British rule. Chakravarty does not comment on this aspect of Paz\u2019s thinking. This reader, for one, would love to know what he thinks of it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n