India (35 page)

There had been no hint of that dereliction in the pundit’s account of his master. Nor had there been any hint of what was to be seen in the trophy room: the 25th maharaja had travelled in many countries, and shot wild animals. The towering neck and head of a startled-looking giraffe was among the trophies. It had been killed in Africa, and stuffed in Mysore; one of the world’s most accomplished taxidermists lived in Mysore at that time. Another trophy was the lower, curving half of an elephant’s trunk, made rigid and converted into an ash-tray or ash-bin, with an iron grille at the top for stubbing out cigarettes and cigars.

People spoke readily of the days of the maharajas. But no one I met seemed to possess the whole story of the end of the 25th and last maharaja of Mysore. Various people had various pieces, which sometimes didn’t match. He had borrowed far too much from local businessmen – that was one story. Another was that he had had unsuitable favourites. A third story was that he had been involved
in a lawsuit; and the prospect of having his ancient name – naked, without its titles – shouted three times by a court usher, in a place where his word had once been law, was so tormenting to him that he had taken an overdose of sedatives.

One version of the death was that he had swallowed a crushed diamond. Kala said that the swallowing of a diamond to commit suicide was a recurring piece of business in local Kannada-language films: people in extremity bit at the diamonds on their rings, and then began writhing in agony. So the story of the swallowing of the crushed diamond gave appropriate grandeur to the tragedy of the last maharaja, which remained mysterious.

I was told that he was fifty-five when he died. This made him three years younger than the pundit, though the pundit had said nothing of the maharaja’s age, had left all that side of the man vague. Even after his death, misfortune followed the maharaja, someone said. The people around him began to pull off the rings from his fingers, and they had to pull hard, because the maharaja was very fat – that was what was contained in the pundit’s respectful description of him as ‘hefty’, ‘like a king’, ‘like God’. And, in this story, that bad death was followed by an unhappy cremation. The pyre was of sandalwood. Sandalwood is expensive (it was a monopoly of the old Mysore State). People began to pillage the pyre of half-consumed sandalwood pieces; and the next day it was discovered that the body had been incompletely burnt.

Folk tales had been generated by the idea of the tragedy of the last maharaja, de-recognized, impoverished, and finally hopelessly in debt. But nothing of that had entered the pundit’s memories. He remained true to the man he had found: his memories were of the pure and devout man he had served indirectly and directly for 18 years.

In Bangalore three miles of wall enclosed the 500 acres of the summer palace grounds. The big and very valuable site was the subject of litigation; the public were not allowed in; special permission was required. The grounds were unkempt; films were sometimes shot in them. The palace was in red-grey Bangalore granite, and it was said (fancifully) to be modelled on Windsor Castle. The grass was burnt brown; the paths were of red laterite; sometimes in the grass were red anthills three or four feet high, like some melting-down spire top from the architectural imagination of Gaudí. The lamp standards were broken, one or two
leaning, many of the white globes broken or vanished. And all around was the traffic and the smoke and the cicada sound of the car horns of Bangalore, a city now of business, science and industry.

On the road between Bangalore and Mysore City was the river-island fort of Tippu Sultan, who had in the late 18th century ruled here. He had been defeated by the British, by Wellington. Old history, not known to everyone in England now, its place in the imagination having been taken over by later wars, later villains. The British had installed the Mysore maharajas in place of Tippu. They were not upstarts; in the 14th and 15th centuries the Wodeyars had been satraps of the mighty Hindu kings of Vijayanagar. By an unlikely twist they had been restored to power. Now they were receding fast into the difficult Indian past, beyond the reach of the imagination – like so many of the historical names on the road down from Goa.

Somewhere in the Himalayas, one day in August 1962, when I was part of the great annual pilgrimage to the ice lingam, symbol of Shiva, in the cave of Amarnath, 13,000 feet up, I met ‘Sugar’. He was from the South, from Madras, a biggish, soft-featured man. We had become friends then, and two months or so later, when I was in Madras, I saw a lot more of him. He was a brahmin, and lived in the brahmin area called Mylapore, near the famous old temple. He was a melancholic, withdrawn man: so he had appeared to me in the Himalayas, and so he appeared to me in Madras, in his home surroundings. He didn’t have much conversation. What he offered, with a full heart and without any apparent kind of second judgement, was his friendship, which was of the most undemanding sort. He was always ready to see one; he was always pleased to be with one. He was in his late thirties, but he hadn’t married. He lived with his mother and father in their comfortable, middle-class, Mylapore house.

I was spending a whole year in India that time. Some weeks after I had arrived I had gone north to Kashmir. I had done some work there for some months, and then I had begun to move down south.
Sometimes, in country areas, I stayed with young government officers I had got to know. Sometimes I stayed in government bungalows and rest houses, bare shells of places offering the barest facilities – though those facilities, in the Indian countryside before the green revolution, were like luxury.

In the towns I stayed in such hotels as I could afford. Before I had gone to India I had had the idea that, with the many hands available, hotels in India would have been cheap and good, like the hotels in Spain in the early 1950s. It wasn’t like that. In India at that time there was hardly a tourist trade, and hotel-keeping wasn’t yet a profession. The people who ran modest hotels in small towns could only offer a version of the accommodation they themselves had; the staff they employed would have been like their own ragged house servants.

And then in Madras it was different. The restaurants and hotels that were vegetarian were clean (though the popular non-vegetarian or ‘military’ places, as they were quaintly called, were as bad as anything in the North). The cleanliness and the vegetarianism were connected; they were both contained in the southern idea of brahminism. At the Woodlands Hotel I stayed in a clean room in an annexe, and ate off banana leaves (for the sake of the purity, and the link with old ways) on marble tables in the air-conditioned dining-room. There were gardens and an open-air theatre or stage in the hotel grounds.

If I had known nothing of the brahmin Hindu culture of the South – if I had known nothing of the arts of music and dance, in both of which brahmins were pre-eminent – I would have begun to get some idea of it there: an idea of caste, like the Elizabethan idea of ‘degree’, acting as a check on the disorder – cultural, social, physical – which in India could easily come.

But with this idea of a protective culture there also came a feeling of strangeness. It was there, in the dining-room of the Woodlands, in the vegetarian food of the South. This wasn’t at all like the vegetarian food, the dal and the roti, I had grown up thinking of as essential Indian food. This vegetarian food of the South – which drew the crowds to the Woodlands – was too subtle, too light; it made no impression on my stomach; it never left me feeling fed.

And the religion was as strange as the food. Sugar wanted me to get to know the Mylapore temple; he worshipped there. But the idea of the temple had played almost no part in the Hinduism I
had grown up with in Trinidad. I knew about pujas; they were done at home; my Indian-born grandfather had built a puja room at the very top of the house he had built in Trinidad in the 1920s. What I was most familiar with were the occasional ceremonial readings from the epics and the scriptures. The devotee faced the pundit across a specially made and decorated earthen shrine, laid with a sweet-smelling sacred fire of resinous pitch pine. At intervals during the reading the fire was fed with clarified butter and sugar; and then a bell was rung, a brass gong was struck, and sometimes a conch was blown. Words, with a kind of tolling music – that was the Hinduism I had grown up with, and it had been hard enough for me to understand. The idea of the temple to which Sugar tried to introduce me – the idea of the sanctum, and the special temple deity at its centre – was very far away, even a little unsettling.

With all its welcome and restfulness, in Madras I always had the feeling that I was in a strange place. The sculptured pyramidal temple towers, the palm trees, the bare-backed brahmins among the old stone pillars, the big and beautiful water-tank at Mylapore, with internal stone steps all around – they were like things in old European prints. Because of those temple towers, especially, I again and again had a little visual shock and felt that I was seeing the place afresh; that the culture was still whole and inviolate; that I was seeing what the earliest travellers had seen.

Travellers, the sea: my Madras memories were mixed up with memories of dawn walks to the city beach, which was very long and very wide. At sunrise people washed their cattle in the sea. The sun came up from the sea; the flat wet sand shone red and gold; the ribby, bony-rumped, horned cattle stood on their blurred reflections; and then the heat of the day began.

Less than five years later I was in Madras again for a few days. There had been a state election (but it wasn’t for that that I had gone); and the atmosphere in the Woodlands Hotel on the day of my arrival was like the atmosphere in a colonial territory after the election of the party that was going to rule after independence. Motor-cars, music, new clothes, the political heroes of the day recognizable by the extra excitement their arrival caused. And the open-air stage or theatre area of the Woodlands was festooned and decorated, as for a carnival.

Twenty years after the independence of India, this colonial-style celebration. After my introduction to the brahmin culture of the
South, this was my introduction to the revolt of the South: the revolt of South against North, non-brahmin against brahmin, the racial revolt of dark against fair, Dravidian against Aryan. The revolt had begun long before; the brahmin world I had come upon in 1962 was one that had already been undermined.

The party that had won the state election in 1967 was the DMK, the Dravidian Progressive Movement. It had deep roots; it had its own prophet and its own politician-leader, men who were its equivalents of Gandhi and Nehru, men whose careers had run strangely parallel with the careers of the mainstream Indian independence leaders. Until that moment I had hardly heard about them, and had hardly known about the passion of their cause. And what that victory in 1967 meant was that the culture to which I had been introduced by Sugar less than five years before, the culture which had appeared whole and mysterious and ancient to me, had been overthrown.

Sugar appeared, in his brahmin way, not to pay attention to what had happened. He was still living in the house of his parents in Mylapore, still going to the ancient temple, still doing with apparent contentment the modest business job he had always done.

His friendship after five years was as warm as ever. He was still as melancholy as I had remembered him, still with that deep, internal nagging. Perhaps now he was a little more withdrawn. I don’t think we talked politics. Instead, in an upstairs room of his parents’ house, we talked of certain Tamil books of prophecy he had become interested in. He told me they were ancient books; they had now been published, in many volumes, by the state government.

He couldn’t say why he had become interested in the prophetic books, whether he was interested in finding out about his own future, or whether his interest in the books was that of a student. There was an ambiguity: he was clearly fascinated by the books, yet he appeared to be warning me off them, telling me that the priests who read and interpreted those holy books could take a lot of money off people.

He read other books as well. They were in his room. He brought them out: romantic feminine fiction from England, books to pass the time, he said, as though for him the matter of a book was not important, as though in his solitude what mattered was simply the act of reading, keeping the mind going.

Now, more than 20 years later, I was in Madras again; and, again without intending it, I had come at a political time. Another state election was about to take place. The posters of the various parties, and the party emblems, and the pictures of the leaders were everywhere. Some of the posters were enormous, like the cinema posters of Madras; and that was fitting, because the leaders the Dravidian movement had thrown up, after the original Dravidian party had split, had been Tamil film stars. In the posters all the politicians had the round plump faces of Southern film stars, and even people known to be dark were given pink cheeks: it was part of the iconography of leadership.

The film star who had been chief minister for much of the past decade, and whose death had led to the present state election, was shown with dark glasses and a white fur cap. The glasses and the cap had been his trade mark both as a star and a politician. He had been a famous stunt man, a kind of local Errol Flynn figure, and to his admirers he had been almost divine. He had been more interested in being a ruler and a star rather than in the business of governing. It was said that at his death some 18,000 files were waiting for his attention. One of the things he had done was to abolish the Madras Corporation. So Madras was in a mess, with mounds of rubbish everywhere. It was as though this, too, was part of the revolt of the South, this violation of the old ideas of purity.