India (33 page)

‘On the 16th of February 1983 I took the oath of secrecy and
office as a minister at Bangalore. On the same day there was a communal disturbance at Bellary – with a police firing, seven deaths, arson and looting. I immediately that night left for Bellary by car, 200 miles down. And I immediately assumed the authority there, and started directing the District Inspector of Police, the Deputy Commissioner of Bellary, and other officers. And I was able to control the disturbance in a day.

‘As a lawyer, I had appeared before the Deputy Commissioner of Bellary in several cases, where I used to address him as “Your Honour”. But, as a minister, there was a transformation. I started giving him commands. Within a day there was a change in me. And people wouldn’t have liked it, and the situation wouldn’t have been controlled, if I had just been a
mofussil
lawyer. It’s a very strange society we’ve created. Democracy has made it possible for people like us to have a different role.’

And his government had cut down on ministerial pomp. There had been a lot more in the Congress days: police escorts, red lights flashing to warn off cars, sirens. In those days people couldn’t just turn up at the ministers’ houses; they had to have an appointment.

Power came from the people. The people were poor; but the power they gave was intoxicating. As high as a man could be taken up, so low, when he lost power, he could be cast down. So the legislators were in a frenzy from the start, and in constant movement, like a group of penguins in an Antarctic blizzard, the ones at the outer rim seeking to work their way through the seething mass to the warm centre. The politics of the state, the comings and goings which filled the local newspapers, were the politics of alignment and realignment. When a majority became shaky, a politician’s vote in the chamber became an asset: it could be sold any number of times. Recently (I heard this from another politician), there had been 10 very difficult men who required a lakh of rupees, 100,000 rupees, £4000, for every vote they cast in the chamber. The government and opposition parties had to raise funds to meet these expenses; the ways they chose to raise those funds could be controversial.

The politics of the state, as reported in the newspapers, were opaque to the visitor. In the politics of alignment and realignment there were no principles or programmes. There were only enemies or allies: penguin politics. What was true of this state, Karnataka, was true of other states as well. There were very many columns of
the newspapers that one could ignore, or take as read. Political knowledge didn’t come from learning the names, just as computer skill didn’t come from trying to learn a computer programme by heart. The programmes could be changed or abandoned; the politicians could disappear, or move about very fast.

It seemed miraculous that there was government at all. But, with the growth of the Indian economy, active governments generated the greatest profit for all. And out of the political frenzy there had come a kind of balance: for the first time in the history of India, perhaps, most people felt that they or their representatives, someone of their group, had a chance of getting to the warm centre of power and money.

Prakash was that day in the midst of yet another crisis of some sort, which was taking up a lot of space in the newspapers. We walked down to the asphalted area around the Guest House, where four or five middle-aged men, chewing pan, in fresh cream-coloured homespun tunics and dhotis, with an air about them of sweet conspiracy, were waiting for him in the bright light – a little distance away from the cars and khaki-clad policemen of the Dalai Lama’s party. Legislators were being asked that day to sign a loyalty statement, and there was much of the eternal counting of Gandhi-capped heads. Homespun clothes, once the clothes of the poor, now no longer worn by the poor, worn only by the men to whom the poor had given power.

People of all conditions spoke with respect of the days of the old maharajas, and there was a reminder of old Mysore glory in the three-mile-long wall of the palace park in the centre of Bangalore. The palace there had been only the summer palace of the maharajas. It stood deep within the park and couldn’t be seen from the road. The park itself, immensely valuable as land alone, was now the subject of litigation, and was closed to the public.

The main palace was in Mysore City, 100 miles to the south. I heard from Deviah that there was still a barber in Mysore City who had been in the service of the 25th and last maharaja. There was also a brahmin who had acted as a pundit of some sort to the maharaja. The barber was said to be full of stories; but Deviah and I went to Mysore one day to see the brahmin.

The road was good, one of the roads of the old Mysore State. It
was shaded for long stretches by the big rain trees that had been planted in the time of the maharajas, and were now looked upon almost as part of the continuing bounty of the maharajas. And there were rich green fields that had come into being because of the irrigation works undertaken by the famous chief minister of the 24th maharaja.

Mysore City was built around the palace. We had a glimpse of part of the grounds as we entered the city. Tempting; but that spaciousness and splendour were for later. Our business that morning lay in the city itself, in a small concrete marriage hall, which the former pundit of the maharaja was now supervising. The marriage hall was new and quite ordinary-looking, but it belonged to a foundation that had been set up by the ninth-century philosopher Shankaracharya. So the pundit, though he might appear to be doing commercial work, was still close to religion.

He was a small man of seventy-two. Three broad bands of white ran horizontally across his forehead, and there was a red-and-sandalwood dot between his eyebrows. He had a gold-set ruby earring in each ear. His white tunic was buttoned over a small belly, and this belly was curiously narrow and long; so that, buttoned in the tunic, the pundit appeared to have the shape of a cucumber. The white holy marks on his forehead came from the ash of burnt cowdung. The cowdung was burnt for that purpose on a special day, Shiva-ratri, Shiva’s Night. Deviah told this story about Shiva-ratri: every day Shiva watches over the world, but there is one day when he falls asleep, and Hindus on that day (or night) have to stay awake, to watch.

We met the pundit in the office room of the marriage hall. It was a small plain room, with cream-coloured walls, and with an iron chest in one corner and some bedding on the red concrete floor. A red telephone stood on a shelf in another corner, next to a board with four keys. One wall had inset shelves, painted green. Old fluorescent light tubes with attached electric wires (no doubt meant for use in the marriage hall, and stored here as a precaution against theft) were on one shelf; loose electric bulbs were on another shelf; a stack of thin booklets of some sort, together with a number of old-looking paper-wrapped parcels, were on a third shelf. From a nail or a hook at the side of the green inset shelves a woven bag hung flat against the wall. The wall was like a piece of furniture: it was a place for putting things or hanging things.

The pundit was born in 1916. His father was not from Mysore, but from Tamil Nadu; he acted as agent for an absentee landlord, and he was also a dealer in grain. The pundit’s mother came from Mysore. Since women return to their parents’ house for the birth of their children, the pundit was born in Mysore. He was then taken to Tamil Nadu by his parents; but when he was ten his father died, and his mother’s father brought him back to Mysore and put him in the Sanskrit College in Mysore City.

He had a Mysore government scholarship to the Sanskrit College. Anybody who wanted to study Sanskrit was given a scholarship. He started with a scholarship of two rupees a month, about 16 pence. Two rupees were quite enough for a boy of ten in 1926; the salary of a first-division clerk at that time was 30 rupees.

The pundit was not a fluent talker. He waited for questions, and Deviah translated his replies.

Deviah translated: ‘It was my grandfather who put me in the college. He was a cook in the palace, and I don’t know whether he knew about the scholarship when he put me in the college. We weren’t living in the palace; we were living in a rented house outside the palace. My grandfather used to cook for the palace pujas. He cooked the food that was consecrated. He earned 18 rupees a month. Though he was a cook at the palace, he never ate there. He ate at home – this was his custom as a brahmin. He lived for 92 years.’

The pundit studied at the Sanskrit College for 20 years, from 1926, when he was ten, to 1946. Over those years the two-rupee scholarship he had started with was increased, bit by bit.

One of the important things he studied was astrology. He studied that for five years. He had a teacher who was a very famous astrologer.

‘There is no end to learning as an astrologer. Just as science keeps on developing, with new discoveries, so I’ve not stopped learning about astrology.’

On the desk at which the pundit sat was a little dark-blue or grey plastic bag – plastic, not leather, which was the skin of an animal and unclean. On the wall above his head was a framed colour picture of Shiva and his consort. Light had bleached the colours. Both figures had been given as much beauty as the artist could give: a feminine beauty, of an almost erotic nature.

The pundit said, ‘We can tell a person’s blood group by the day
he was born. We have three blood groups, and we can say whether people are compatible or not. They don’t have to take a blood test. There is no difference between astrology, medicine, and
dharmashastra.
’ Deviah translated this as ‘traditional learning’. To learn astrology, you first have to learn all the other sciences. Before you prescribe certain medicines, you have to look for certain planetary conditions, because certain medicines work only under certain circumstances. Certain medicines work only under the rays of the sun, or the moon, or Mars or Mercury.’

He could predict the future. ‘If you give the correct time of birth – but it has to be down to the minute – I will tell you everything correctly. If there’s a minute’s error, it makes a world of difference. The place is also important.’

In 1946, after 20 years, he came to the end of his studies at the Sanskrit College. He had lived for all this time on his scholarship from the state government. In his last year at the college this scholarship was 15 rupees a month. He was now thirty, and he was at last free to get married. He married the daughter of a man who worked as a clerk in the palace. He also found a job; he became librarian at the same Sanskrit College, at a salary of 45 rupees a month. He stayed in that job for 16 years.

One of the projects he worked on as librarian of the Sanskrit College was the translation of all the Puranas, the sacred old texts of Hinduism, into Kannada, the local Mysore language. This project was sponsored by the maharaja, and the pundit’s work on it came to the maharaja’s notice. The maharajas in India had lost their titles in 1956, but they still had their privy purses; and in Mysore the maharaja still had considerable ceremonial standing as state governor,
raja pramukh
.

One afternoon in 1962, on a day of the full moon, the pundit had finished his puja and was sitting at home, when a servant came from the palace. The servant had been sent by the maharaja’s secretary, and the message was that the pundit was wanted at the palace by the maharaja. The maharaja would have told his A.D.C., and the A.D.C. would have told the secretary, and the secretary would have told his servant.

The pundit must already have had some idea of what the maharaja wanted, or he must have been given some idea by the servant. Because, when this call from the palace came, the pundit
straight away sent word to the palace, to both his father-in-law and his grandfather, the one a palace clerk, the other a cook.

The grandfather hurried home. He was happy for his grandson’s sake, but he was also nervous. He said to the pundit, ‘You have been trained as a scholar, a
vaidhika
. But the work you are going to do now is that of a
loukika –
worldly work. You may not fit in. Think of that.’ He also gave his grandson detailed instructions about how he was to behave when he came into the maharaja’s presence.

At about three in the afternoon, when it would have been very hot, the pundit left his house to walk to the palace. He was dressed as a brahmin, in his dhoti, and with a shawl over his shoulders. Otherwise he was bare above the waist. He was barefooted. It was his way; he had never worn footwear of any kind; to this day he never wore anything on his feet – and, indeed, when I looked below the desk or table at which the pundit sat, I saw his bare feet flat on the red concrete floor, the skin dark and thickened at the soles, padded and cracked. It was no trouble either to walk barebacked in the afternoon sun; the pundit was used to that.

It was about half a kilometre to the palace. He met the secretary in one of the inner rooms, and the secretary sent him in directly to the maharaja, who was in the palace library. The library consisted of three rooms, each about 40 feet long by 25 feet wide. They were all full of books, with hardly a place to sit down. The books were in all languages.

In one of those rooms the maharaja was sitting. The pundit went up to him and did the obeisance his grandfather had trained him in, bringing the palms together and bowing low. The maharaja was wearing a djibba and a dhoti, and he was in a ‘social’ mood.

‘What did he look like?’

‘He was a tall man, built like a king. Hefty.’ He wasn’t thinking only of the seated figure he had seen that day in the library; he was thinking of the man he had later got to know. ‘In the morning, after his puja, when he came out with his holy marks on his forehead, he looked like God.’

The maharaja – but that wasn’t the word the pundit used: he used the English word ‘Highness’, pronouncing it in a way that made it sound part of the local language – the maharaja, Highness, told the pundit that he had been chosen to work in the palace.

‘I hadn’t applied for the job or anything. So bravely I told
Highness what my grandfather had told me, that I had lived all my life as a vaidhika, and couldn’t now live as a loukika. And Highness said, “I am using you here only for vaidhika work. I want you to be
mukhthesar.
”