India (41 page)

There had been a revolution. The temples had been ‘looted’. The streets and walls were ragged and scrawled with election slogans and emblems. Mylapore was said to be only 40 per cent brahmin. But in the little space that was still Sugar’s the old world seemed to continue.

In Bangalore Kala had told me of her brahmin ancestor who had left his village and had come to the city of Madras, and had been so poor there that he and his mother had lived on the consecrated food of the great temple of Mylapore. That story – old gods, old temples, poor brahmins – had seemed to me to come from a far-off, fairy-tale time. But the story was of the new world, of a countryside becoming overpopulated, and of the dispersal of the brahmins. The story I had heard in Sugar’s apartment of the break-up of the brahmin agraharams or village settlements told of the same dispersal, the scattering of people from their ancestral homes.

But on this kind of journey knowledge can sometimes come slowly; the traveller can sometimes listen selectively; and certain things – because they appear to fit the country or the culture – can be taken too much for granted. When at the beginning of my stay in Madras I met Kakusthan, and heard that he was a brahmin who was trying to live as a full brahmin, I didn’t understand how unusual and even heroic this resolve of his was.

He lived in a brahmin colony or agraharam near one of the old temples of Madras. His father had been the one to move there; before that, for many generations, the men of Kakusthan’s family had been priests of a temple in a village, now two hours or so away from the city by bus. Kakusthan belonged now, by his profession, to the modern world. He worked for a big business company, and he wrote economic reports and project-assessments of various kinds for them. But the guardianship of the family temple had fallen to
him. His acceptance of the responsibility was part of his resolve to live as a full brahmin; and so, while sitting at his office desk and while travelling about on his office work, Kakusthan was dressed as a brahmin priest. He wore the caste-marks on his forehead; his head was shaved; he wasn’t bare-backed, but he wore the long cream-coloured brahmin’s tunic.

To me, India was a land of caste costume. (Though it was a good deal less so than a country like England, where a whole ritual of costume and colour, marking different jobs, groups, social ranks, sports, leisure activities, gradations of meals, different times of day and year, kept many people in a constant pacific frenzy: in India everyone just had his one costume.) And Kakusthan’s antique appearance, when I first met him, made less of an impression than it ought to have done. As for living as a full brahmin, I thought this meant that Kakusthan was the purest kind of vegetarian, not eating fish or eggs or garlic or onions; that he followed the basic laws of ritual cleanliness, not eating or drinking from vessels someone else used; that he used the right hand for clean activities, the left for unclean; and that generally he strove to avoid pollution.

But Kakusthan’s brahminism went far beyond that. The purity he aimed at forbade him to eat food he hadn’t first offered to his god at home, forbade him even to drink water he hadn’t consecrated in this way. In the great heat of Madras this meant that for him every working day was full of hardship. And, in fact, the brahminical restrictions he had imposed on himself were also a kind of private penance, an act of piety and expiation towards his father and his ancestors.

Kakusthan had been a poor brahmin. As a child in Madras he had been made to suffer because of the brahmin observances his father had forced on him. Periyar’s anti-brahmin ideas had gone right down to the children of Madras, and Kakusthan had been so tormented at school and in the streets that he had broken faith with his past. He had wanted to turn his back on his brahmin duties; and he had quarrelled with his father. He had succeeded in breaking away; he had made a life for himself elsewhere. But then in early middle age he had been eaten up by remorse; and he had come back to Madras, to live in the very agraharam or brahmin colony, and the very house, where he had grown up. He lived there now with the determination to be as pure a brahmin as was possible.

The colony Kakusthan lived in was in the Triplicane district of Madras. As a brahmin area, it was second only to Mylapore; and the Parthasarathy temple, which was about 1000 years old and was at the heart of the Triplicane district, was in the eyes of its devotees the equal of the Mylapore temple.

The colony was in a lane at the side of the temple. From the lane the temple wall was unexpectedly high. The stonework was beautiful and precise, and the lower section of the wall was painted in broad vertical bands of rust and white, sacred temple colours. Facing this temple wall, and almost in the middle of the lane, was the entrance to the colony: a gateway like a screen, not very high, with wooden doors, and with the symbol of Garuda, the bird ‘vehicle’ of Lord Vishnu, painted above the doors.

To the left of the gateway, as you entered, was the stone-walled temple garden, separated from the temple by the lane. The garden was old, possibly as old as the temple itself – and that enclosed formal space, with its own symbolical
gopuram
or temple-tower, seemed to take one back to old, superseded ways of feeling. The colony (though clearly on a sacred site) was not itself old. It had been established as a colony towards the end of the last century or at the beginning of this; and the land had been given by a charitable resident of Triplicane to provide for brahmins who had come from the villages, and were either serving in the temple or simply serving as pundits in the city.

The doors of the colony were closed at night, from 10 to five in the morning; only residents could enter then. The colony was closed at all times to people deemed unclean: smokers, drunkards, cobblers, scheduled-caste people generally, and Muslims. Such people were not allowed to pass through the doorway. Some people had to be let in to service the colony, but they were not allowed to enter the houses.

Past the doorway, a paved path led between low small houses to the central yard. There were wells in the yard, with winches and ropes. Women and girls were drawing water when I went; and the pastoral scene was surprising in the middle of a crowded town. Kakusthan, who was my host and guide, said that brahmins could use only well water for drinking, because well water had a direct connection with the earth. (I didn’t know about this brahmin rule. It cleared up an old mystery for me. In 1971 I had gone to India to follow the election in a drought-stricken desert constituency in
Rajasthan, in the north-west. One of the candidates, a God-fearing old Gandhian, much admired, had repeatedly spoken, on the grounds of morality, against the taking of piped water to the desert villages. ‘Good old water from the well’, he kept on saying, was good enough; piped water would ‘tell on the health and morals’ of women in the villages. He hadn’t explained why he had said that; but – going by what Kakusthan now said – his audience would have understood his caste shorthand.)

Over the years, with the increase in the population of the colony, the level of water in the well had gone down 30 feet, Kakusthan said. Years ago you could just dip your ‘vessel’ by hand and get your water. Now there was rationing, six pots per family in the morning, six pots in the evening. ‘Pots’, ‘vessels’ – these were the correct words, because brahmins didn’t use buckets. I didn’t know about that either, but the explanation was simple. Modern buckets were made of galvanized iron, and brahmins had to use pots made of brass or earthenware, since these materials had a direct connection with the earth. And there, at the colony well, were the women and girls with their awkward, handle-less pots – and one might have seen only the city pastoral, and missed the caste regulation.

Near the well was a hand-pump. The water got from this was strictly for use in the latrine – though, clearly, its source was the same as the drinking water in the well. The rule about the hand-pump and the latrine seemed fierce and brahminical; in fact, it showed how difficult it was nowadays absolutely to live as a brahmin. The very idea of the latrine was a non-brahmin idea: to enter such a polluted place was itself pollution. No old-time brahmin would have even contemplated the idea. Good brahmins, traditional brahmins, used open-air sites, a fresh one each time. So there was a compromise there, as well as in a number of small things the visitor mightn’t have noticed or thought about: the wearing of stitched garments like shirts, the wearing of leather sandals, and even the buying of bundles of food-leaves from the market.

Leaves, to eat your food off, were brahminically more correct than plates. Leaves were used once and thrown away; plates were used more than once and were technically always polluted, however much you washed them. There was a special quality of ritual, and romance, to eating off a leaf. It was something that had survived with us even in far-off Trinidad. After special religious occasions
in my grandmother’s house, when I was a child, people were fed on banana leaves (as they were in the Woodlands Hotel in Madras as late as 1962). A fresh banana leaf was a beautiful thing to eat off: dark green, with a hollow spine of a paler colour, the leaf itself smooth yet with grip, ribbed, with a slight sheen, impermeable, with no intrusive smell or taste. To eat off a leaf like that not only marked a special occasion; it became associated, in the most romantic way, with religion, making one think of one’s remote origins, and of the forests through which the Hindu epic heroes, divinities, wandered during the years of their exile. Even in small Trinidad, though, the forests were far away, and banana leaves were not things you just went out and picked. They had to be brought from miles away; they had to be brought fresh; and they weren’t always to be had. It was a wasteful and expensive way of serving food. In Madras, now, the Woodlands Hotel no longer used banana leaves. People like Kakusthan who needed to eat off leaves bought bundles of a smaller, rounder kind of dried leaf in the market. They were not fresh, not particularly clean, and they had no aesthetic quality. The idea of cleanliness had been overlaid by ritual; what was really being honoured was the idea of the leaf, the natural thing used once and thrown away.

In the colony there was a restriction about women I hadn’t known about. Menstruating women and girls were segregated during their periods. There was a special room for them in a corner of the colony. This room had two doors, and both were kept closed, so that people walking outside wouldn’t be polluted. Kakusthan told me that a menstruating woman was polluting at a distance of 10 to 15 feet: if for some reason you had to talk to a menstruating woman, that was the distance you should keep her at. The women in this separate room had their own latrine and bathroom. They did absolutely nothing for the three days of their period. For them, Kakusthan said, it was a time of ‘a full and complete rest’. They read books or listened to music. The room could accommodate 10 women, and in the old days the room was always full; but nowadays, modern life being what it was, with girls going out to work (and with other girls slipping out to the cinema and so on: there was a wicket gate at the back of the colony that menstruating women used), at any given time there would be only five or six women in the room. This segregation made women hate the idea of menstruation, Kakusthan said; yet at the same
time they welcomed the segregation, because it gave them the kind of regular little holiday they might never otherwise have.

Only five of the houses in the colony had an upper sleeping room; and these houses were in a row down one side, against a boundary wall. All the other houses were single-storeyed and low, built flat to the ground. So the central yard, all the life around the well, was overlooked by the higher buildings at the back. I wondered whether that didn’t raise problems of pollution for the brahmins of the agraharam, being gazed down at by people of other castes, or having the shadows of those taller houses fall on their colony. Kakusthan said the high buildings at the back were no problem. The people who lived in them were of the cowherd caste,
yadavas
, Lord Krishna’s caste; between yadavas and brahmins there was mutual regard.

The other immediate neighbours of the colony were Muslims. It might have seemed that the 53 families of the colony were vulnerable, and could easily be overrun in a riot; but for some reason there had never been any communal trouble at all between the Muslims and the brahmins. The Muslims might even – though Kakusthan didn’t say this – have acted as a buffer against unfriendly non-brahmins. So, between the temple and the yadavas and the Muslims, the colony enjoyed a kind of security: the houses, Kakusthan said, had no locks on their doors.

The colony – with its wooden doors closed every night, and standing next to the enclosed temple – made one think of some old foundation in Europe, alms-houses, say, in a cathedral close; and there was something of that in the way the colony was run. There was a trust; it collected the rents, did building repairs and general maintenance, and paid the man who watched the gateway. Tenancy of the houses passed down from one generation to the other; most of the families in the colony had been there for decades. Kakusthan’s father had got into the colony in the early 1940s.

Kakusthan said that penniless brahmins migrating – in the old days – from the villages to the towns were attracted to the areas around the temples not only because it was easier for them to make a little money by being pundits or mendicants, but also because the temple had tanks and wells, and offered water direct from the earth. The temples were also near the sea. This nearness to the sea was important, because during the lunar and solar eclipses, and on
some other occasions as well, traditional brahmins liked to have a dip in the sea.

It wasn’t easy, being a good brahmin! The more Kakusthan went into it, the more he came up with needs and observances; and the more awkward the whole business appeared. Perhaps an absolute brahmin way wasn’t possible. Perhaps it had always been like that; perhaps at all times brahmins would have had to compromise in one thing or another.