India (34 page)

‘I knew what the duties of a mukhthesar were. They were to organize all the pujas of the palace, to choose the purohits or priests, and to supervise what they did, to make sure that the pujas and rituals were correctly carried out.’

The maharaja spoke to the pundit for half an hour. He told him what he would have to do. There were 10 permanent purohits in the palace; the pundit would have to supervise them, and all the additional purohits who might be called in on special occasions. The pundit would also have to look after the jewels of the palace temple. People who worked in the palace were given a special allowance of 20 rupees a month, and the maharaja told the pundit that he would be getting this allowance. The allowance was given because palace staff were on call all the time and had no leave. The salary itself would be 150 rupees; as librarian at the Sanskrit College the pundit was getting 45 rupees a month.

‘It was my duty to do it. Whatever Highness said, I had to do. I was already an employee of Highness, because the Sanskrit College belonged to Highness.’

After his audience in the library the pundit walked back to his family house. He told his father-in-law and grandfather the news, and his grandfather was pleased. He said, ‘We’ve all got good names in the palace. You should do your work well and keep our good name there.’

As someone working in the palace the pundit had to have a uniform. He immediately went to the palace tailor to be measured. He ordered two suits, and the charge was 200 rupees, more than a month’s salary. But for some reason the maharaja wanted the pundit to start working in the palace right away. So the pundit was in a quandary about what to wear – the uniforms he had ordered from the tailor weren’t going to be ready for some days.

The pundit said, ‘I did a mad thing. I borrowed my father-in-law’s uniform. We were the same build.’ And that was a mad thing to do, because a brahmin shouldn’t wear other people’s clothes: it was as unclean as drinking from a vessel used by someone else. ‘For three days I wore my father-in-law’s uniform. Then I had my own from the palace tailor, the two suits. I got them on credit. I
didn’t have 200 rupees. I paid with my salary, and paid it off in three or four instalments.’

He wore white trousers and a long coat. The coat was white for the mornings, black at night. He wore the Mysore turban, white with a gold band; and he got a white sash. No shoes: inside the palace no one wore shoes, not even the maharaja. The maharaja wore shoes only outside the palace.

On the cream-coloured wall of the marriage-hall office where we were talking there were finger-prints of grime, the eternal grime of India. The floor was dark red, and some inches up the wall were skirting areas in the same colour. Pale-green doors led to other rooms; over a padlocked door – leading perhaps to the marriage hall itself – was a gay
No Admission
sign in a wavy scroll. And, as in an Indian city street, where nothing was absolutely clean or finished, there was in this room, in the corner with the iron chest, a lot of half-swept-up dust and old fluffy dirt, together with the rags and the broom that might have done the sweeping and the wiping. The desk at which the pundit sat was of steel, and painted grey.

The pundit’s working hours, as palace mukhthesar, were long. They were from six in the morning to two in the afternoon. He would go home then for an hour, and go back to the palace and stay till seven. That was on ordinary days. On certain days, like the days of the Dussehra festival, the pundit could stay at the palace until midnight. This was because at Dussehra the temple jewels were on display, and the pundit would have to stay and see that the jewels were put back in the palace vault.

When the maharaja was away, ‘on camp’, the pundit was free and could rest. The maharaja went away on camp four or five times a year, for 15 days or so at a time. Sometimes he went abroad; then he was away for a month.

‘Highness used to go on pilgrimages. Highness had this habit, that if he read in an old text, a Purana, about a certain temple – in any part of the country – he would say, “Let’s go there.” The next day he would be ready, and about 25 people would go with him. He had one or two special railway coaches, which would be attached to the scheduled trains. He used to take cooks, bodyguards, a purohit, an astrologer. Sometimes he used to take his family. Highness had a “craze” for visiting temples. There is no temple that he didn’t see – he was such a devotee.’

In 1965 the pundit, as mukhthesar, was allowed quarters: a small house with two rooms and a ‘hall’. The rent was 10 per cent of his salary. Three years later, in 1968, he was given a special ceremonial uniform. He didn’t have to pay for this uniform; it was a gift of the maharaja. The long coat was red, with gold facings and gold buttons. The buttons had a phoenix symbol and the letters
JCRW
, which were the initials of the maharaja: Jaya Chama Rajendra Wodeyar. The trousers were of silk, and biscuit-coloured.

I wondered whether it wasn’t too gaudy for him, as a brahmin.

‘I was proud of it. When I wore that dress, nobody could stop me anywhere, in the street or in the palace.’ He even had himself photographed in that uniform.

He rose in the service. The maharaja called him
Shastri Narayan
, ‘Lord of the Shastras’, ‘Great Scholar’. But then there began to be signs of things going bad outside. In 1971 the maharajas of India were ‘de-recognized’ by Mrs Gandhi’s government, and the maharaja lost his tax-exempt privy purse of 2,600,000 rupees, worth at that time (after the devaluation of 1967) £130,000. Still, the maharaja continued to promote his mukhthesar. In 1972 the mukhthesar was appointed assistant secretary; there were two assistant secretaries in the palace. The pundit had entered the palace at a salary of 150 rupees; over the years this had doubled to 300; now, as assistant secretary, he was getting 500.

‘Highness received the catalogues of various booksellers. He ordered 300 to 400 books a month. The palace secretary bought them for him. Highness bought Penguins and books of the Oxford University Press. I had to read or look over or taste the new books, and give a summary to him of books I thought might interest him. He was interested in philosophy and history. He talked about philosophy with me and with others. Highness liked to have a scrapbook. I knew the sort of thing that interested him, and would point certain passages out to him. Certain passages he would want typed out, for his own speeches and writings.

‘Highness had two crazes, two madnesses. Temples. Second, books – buying them and reading them. He used to read throughout the night. I was associated with both his madnesses. In his reading room he allowed no one. He had his own system of arranging or storing books. He kept them on the floor. No one was to touch them while they were there. When he had finished with a
book, he brought it to me and asked me to catalogue it and put it on the library shelves.’

I wanted to know what English books the maharaja read and discussed with his mukhthesar, his Shastri Narayan. I was expecting to hear the names of Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Isherwood. But the pundit couldn’t help me; he couldn’t remember the name of any English writer.

In 1973, two years after the maharajas had been de-recognized, there was a strike by the palace staff for better pay. At one time there had been 500 workers in the palace. At the time of the strike there were 300. The maharaja gave the strikers the increases they asked for. It was too much for him. The next year everybody on the palace staff was given a gratuity and sent away. The pundit himself was given 19,000 rupees, nearly £1000. But not long afterwards the maharaja sent for him, and five or six others, and took them back. He continued to be mukhthesar and assistant secretary, and the work was just as hard as it had been.

‘For some people,’ the pundit said, ‘Highness never changed.’

But there had been a price for the maharaja’s favour. Because of his irregular eating habits, the pundit said, he had developed an ulcer. As a brahmin it wasn’t possible for him to eat outside his own house. He couldn’t eat at the palace; even his grandfather, who had been a cook at the palace, had never eaten there. And because of the long hours the pundit had had to work in the palace, his digestion had become disorganized.

One day in 1974, when he was fifty-eight, he began vomiting blood. He was taken to the hospital. He stayed there for eight days. He was about to be discharged when the news came that the maharaja had died. That was how it had happened – as suddenly as that. The doctors advised him not to think about the maharaja’s death; it would be bad for him. They postponed his discharge from the hospital; they kept him in for two more days. So, after all the years of personal attendance as mukhthesar, superintendent of pujas, he had not been present for the death of the maharaja, and the important rites afterwards.

The pundit said, ‘To this day I try not to think about Highness’s death.’

I didn’t think he was exaggerating. The story we had heard had come out with much trouble; it had taken many hours. For nearly 50 years, as student, librarian, mukhthesar, he had lived on the
bounty of the maharajas; and for 12 years he had personally served the maharaja. But the story of his life and his service with the maharaja existed in his mind as a number of separate stories, separate little stories. He had never before, I think, made a connected narrative out of those little stories.

After he left the hospital, he stayed home for a year. And then he saw this job as manager of the marriage hall advertised, and he took it.

‘It’s a job.’

Had he really succeeded in putting such an important part of his life out of his mind? Did no feelings now remain in him for the palace?

‘No feelings. The times are not suitable for that kind of living any more. Times have changed.’ He said the words simply, without any stress. There was still a royal family, but there was no maharaja now. The son of the former maharaja was a member of parliament on the Congress side.

Four times a year now he went to the palace, to make offerings to the head of the royal family. He went as a brahmin, as he had always gone: bare-backed, with a dhoti and shawl, and barefooted. But now he didn’t go as an employee or palace servant. He went as a man in his own right. He went as a representative of a great and ancient religious foundation – though he just managed a marriage hall for them – and the gifts he took were not a retainer’s gifts, but priestly offerings: a garland, two coconuts, and kumkum for the red holy marks on the forehead.

Nothing in the former mukhthesar’s account had prepared me for the extravagance of the maharaja’s palace. A fire in the last century had destroyed the old palace; the one that now existed, the palace where the pundit had gone for his first interview with the maharaja, had taken 15 years to build, from 1897 to 1912; just after – to think of comparable extravagance – the Vanderbilt château at Biltmore in Tennessee. A European architect had designed the palace, and it answered every kind of late-19th-century British-Raj idea of what an Indian palace should be. Scalloped Mogul arches; Scottish stained glass made to an Indian peacock design; in the main hall, hollow cast-iron pillars (painted blue), made in England, to a
decorated pattern – the guide still knew the name of the manufacturers; marble and tile floors, Mogul-style pietra dura, white marble inset with coloured stones in floral patterns, and Edwardian tiles.

Many of the sightseers in the palace – everyone still required to be barefoot – were young men in black, pilgrims to Ayappa. Busloads of them had come, and there was a touch of vanity and even boisterousness about them, a touch of the visiting football crowd. Deviah didn’t like it. The days before the pilgrimage should be days of penance, he said, days of doing without pleasure; Ayappa pilgrims shouldn’t be breaking their journey to walk through a palace.

There was a very wide, shadowed, cool gallery where the maharaja in the old days would have shown himself to his subjects. The scalloped arches framed the very bright, brown gardens outside; the vistas here had the scale of the vistas through the arches and gateways of the Taj Mahal. And here especially – feeling the cool marble below my feet, in the deep recess of the pillared gallery, with the heat and the harsh light outside, like a complement of privilege – I thought of the pundit and his employer: privilege and devotion meeting in mutual need.

Among the palace treasures displayed was a gallery of Hindu deities. Some of those deities seemed to have been touched, like the palace itself, by a mixture of styles: the increasing naturalism of Indian art in the 20th century had turned ancient Hindu icons into things that looked like dolls.

Deviah thought so too. He didn’t like the ‘calendar’ ideas of Hindu gods which were now widespread. ‘The gods look like girls, women. I can’t accept the idea of gods being made to look like women. Rama was a brave man, when you get to know about him.’

The palace design, with its garishness and mixture of styles, its European interpretation of Indian princeliness, expressed – paradoxically – a kind of Indian self-abasement before the idea of Europe. The gallery with the deities, speaking of a Hindu faith that was like something issuing out of the earth itself, expressed the opposite. The doll-like quality of some of the deities – modern-looking and camera-influenced though they were – even added to the mysteriousness.

The royal family of Mysore had taken a special interest in the festival of Dussehra. For the 10 days of the festival the jewels of
the palace temple were on display until midnight, watched over by the mukhthesar; and on the last day of the festival the maharaja himself had taken part in the procession in the city. It was a great sadness for the people of Mysore, the guide said, when – after his de-recognition – the maharaja had to stop appearing in the Dussehra procession. His place had thereafter been taken by a large image of the family deity – and the image was there, in the deities’ gallery.

In a gallery around the main hall of the palace was the 24th maharaja’s celebration of the festival. There were panels all the way around with sections of a continuous, realistic oil painting, based on photographs, of almost the entire Dussehra procession of 1935. The faces of everyone, the guide said, could be identified. The uniforms of all the courtiers and the various grades of attendants were as they had been – the bare feet unexpected, but not immediately noticeable. The painters had taken delight, too, in rendering the details of the street, the buildings and shops and cars, the shop signs and advertisements. The painting hadn’t absolutely been finished. Nine painters had worked for three years, from 1937 until the death of the 24th maharaja. The 25th maharaja, whom the pundit served, hadn’t been interested in art; and the Dussehra picture sequence – like many old Indian monuments, and for the same reason: the death of a ruler – was left unfinished. There were a few blank panels at the very end of the gallery.