by Mark Shand
We were extremely fortunate to have arrived in Patna at this time, for the Chaat Festival of Bihar was about to take place. People gather from afar on the banks of the Ganges and, at the exact moment of the setting sun, immerse themselves in the holy waters, spreading their offerings on its smooth surface. The same ritual is repeated the following morning at sunrise. The belief is that the sun is harmful and its effects immediate, causing skin cancer, leprosy and other diseases. By making this puja, the sun’s terrible wrath is appeased. For a state that has the worst reputation in India for violence and lawlessness, it is interesting to note that during the two days of the Chaat the crime rate drops so dramatically that the local newspapers have to work hard to fill their pages.
The terrace of Quila House, sitting high above the river, was the perfect vantage point from which to watch the ceremony. But Bala suggested that we should hire a boat for the evening and float slowly down the river past the ghats which line the banks of old Patna. As we drove to where we would board the boat, the streets were thronged with processions of people carrying offerings. The city was clean and the tarmac glistened from the water trucks that had preceded us. Above, a canopy of tinsel and fairy-lights formed a glittering tunnel. Brass bands of old men in red and khaki uniforms marched proudly, blowing curled highly polished silver horns. At moments, traffic would come to a grinding stop, enabling devotees to cross the road repeatedly prostrating themselves in their laborious pilgrimage to the river.
We boarded a large motor launch and slowly began to edge down river. A continuous stream of colour, like the flowing molten lava of an exploding volcano, ran thickly downwards as the masses descended the steps of the ghats carrying flowers, grain, little candlelit terracotta pots and garlands. On reaching the water’s edge lit by the last rays of the setting sun, they made their puja, immersing themselves and spreading their offerings on the dancing waves. Their faces serene, there was no rush, no pushing or shoving, just a completeness, a sense of contentment and peace.
Looking up at the crumbling oriental façades of former palaces and opium factories and the massive wall and buttresses of the old fort, entangled with overhanging trees, the stains of history were indelibly painted on the worn surface of this city, one of the most ancient capitals in the world. It was founded in 600 bc when King Ajatasatru built a fort which later became the capital of Magadha. It was there that the might of the Mundas compelled Alexander and his legions to retreat back home. In 304 bc in the reign of the great Emperor Chandra Gupta Maurya after his defeat of the Nunda Empire, it came into its full glory. By then he commanded a vast empire stretching from Kabul in the north to Mysore in the south, from Saurashtra in the west to parts of Bengal in the east. The Greek ambassador Megathesnes described the scene:
The public appearances of the Emperor Chandra Gupta were occasions of pageantry and grandeur. The Emperor was carried in a golden litter adorned with strings of pearls hanging on all sides. His linen robe was embroidered in gold and purple and before him marched attendants, carrying silver incense pans. The Emperor was followed by armed men and his immediate bodyguard was comprised of armed women. He rode in a chariot drawn by elephants. The King had a guard of twenty-four elephants and when he went forth to do justice, the first elephant was trained to make obeisance. In the King’s pay, there was a standing army of six hundred thousand foot soldiers, thirty thousand cavalry and nine thousand elephants.
Later, the great Emperor Akbar lived in what is now Quila House, from where he conducted his battle against the Afghan rule of North Bihar. Akbar was acknowledged as the greatest elephant rider of all time. In the Ain-I-Akbari, the record of Akbar’s reign, is written:
His Majesty, the royal rider of the plain of auspiciousness, mounts every kind of elephant from the first to the last class, making them notwithstanding their almost supernatural strength, obedient to his command. His Majesty will put his foot on the tusks and mount them, even when they are in the rutting season (musth) and astonishes experienced people.
Early the next morning, feeling a little like the Emperor Akbar, I rode Tara down from Quila House through a continuous procession of delighted devotees. We passed a line of sodium lamps which glowed eerily through the mists rolling off the Ganges, like a gas-lit street in Victorian England. As the sun rose over the horizon, we stood looking down upon a crowd of three hundred thousand people, spread out like some endless richly brocaded carpet which undulated softly as the saris and dhotis of the bathing devotees danced on the surface of the water. Leaving Tara with Gokul, Indrajit and I waded far out into the river through a sea of floating flowers. Indrajit performed a small puja for Sri Ram Naik, the resin collector who had been killed by the tiger in the Simplipals. Wrapping rose petals into his blood-stained lunghi we attached his sandals and watched the little bundle float gently away, taken by the eddies, to mix with the other offerings of the festival.
The following dawn we returned to the river. In a few hours we would enter the Sonepur Mela. We worked hard on Tara until she shone like obsidian. Bhim anointed her forehead vivid crimson with the sign of Shiva. After oiling her head and toenails, we loaded her up and bade farewell to Khusto, who was driving home to Orissa. The jeep was now due back.
Indrajit was staying on for the Mela as our driver, since Bala had kindly lent us a small minibus to ferry provisions back and forth, and for use if there was any emergency. Don would accompany Indrajit in the minibus. Aditya and I climbed on to Tara, flanked by Bhim and Gokul in their smartest dark-green khaki outfits. I lifted my hand upwards and forwards, like some American cavalry officer at the head of his troop, shouting ‘Challo’ and we trundled through the gates of Quila House towards Sonepur and the great elephant mela.
17
The Haathi Bazaar
WE SHOULD HAVE been imbued with a sense of excitement and fulfilment, and moved accordingly through the quiet streets of Patna in anticipation of the end of our pilgrimage. Instead we moved almost reluctantly, knowing that each of Tara’s steps was bringing us closer to the moment when we would finally have to part. No one spoke, each of us lost in our own thoughts, lulled by the quiet sound of Tara’s soft shuffle. The view from my lofty perch had become so familiar, so natural, that I found it hard to imagine any other way of life. I gazed vacantly at the top of her broad head, at the little white patch of criss-cross healed scars, where the point of the ankush had been used, and I ran my toes through the sparse, springy hair of which I knew there were two hundred and ninety-seven separate strands. I felt the heavy thump of her large ears against my legs, a sensation that had once annoyed me, but which I now enjoyed. My hands caressed the sweat-stained wood of the howdah, and I wiggled my backside deeper into the old faded red cushion, wanting never to dismount.
We circled on to the approach road leading to the Mahatma Gandhi bridge, one of the longest in the world, a masterpiece of engineering, simple and elegant, spanning the vast reaches of the Ganges. A long tailback of modern conveyances – buses, trucks, tractors, taxis, cars and scooters – were waiting to pay the toll, revving their engines impatiently and belching out blue exhaust fumes. We passed them slowly, waved on cheerfully by the toll-keeper, for such an ancient mode of travel was untaxed.
At Hajipur we joined up with a group of elephants. Two or three of the large females – we discovered from their mahouts – were owned by a local landlord hoping to purchase a big tusker. Veterans of the mela, they were capable, quiet old men, with faces that had seen it all. They rode proudly with straight backs, becoming wildly enthusiastic about the firinghee mahout, asking me if I would do them the honour of leading the cavalcade into Sonepur. As we cut through back streets I heard them talking eagerly with Bhim. Breaking into elephant language unintelligible to the outsider, they were enjoying the chance to advise a newcomer, and, no doubt, cleverly trying to extract the parameter of Tara’s price which would then spread like a bushfire across the elephant market.
Although Aditya and I had decided earlier that we would not sell
Tara to anyone unless we were convinced they would provide her with a good home, secretly I did not want to sell her at all. To cut down this risk I would make her the most expensive elephant of the mela. I had the feeling, though, that Tara would attract a lot of attention. Apart from her obvious cachet – fame – she was a beautiful elephant.
Sonepur is similar in shape to an isosceles triangle. It is flanked by two great rivers; the Ganges from the south and the Gandak from the north-east which begins its journey in the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, thundering down to its confluence with the Ganges. The fair takes place on the right bank of the Gandak. On the auspicious day of Kartik Purnima, hundreds and thousands of people line the ghats to take a ceremonial dip in its holy waters.
The Sonepur Mela has a special significance for Hindus, owing to the temple of Hari Nath Mandir where uniquely the gods Vishnu and Shiva are worshipped together. Near to the temple a mythological battle between a crocodile and an elephant took place.
According to legend, there once lived two brothers, Jai and Vijay, devotees of the Lord Krishna who were asked one day by their king to perform a puja, and he was so pleased with their devotion that he showered them with gifts. The two brothers argued about the distribution. Jai thought they should be divided equally, but Vijay disagreed, saying that as he had performed a better puja, he should be entitled to more. Hurt by his brother’s greed, Jai cursed him, saying he would become a crocodile in his next life. Vijay retaliated and said Jai would turn into an elephant. After some time they made up their differences and asked Lord Krishna to break the evil spell they had cast on one another. He was helpless to do so and in due course the brothers became a crocodile and an elephant. One day, on Kartik Purnima, the day of the full moon, the elephant was bathing in the river when the crocodile grabbed him by the leg. A fierce battle raged, continuing for thousands of years. The elephant, finally tiring, was about to drown and he cried out to Lord Krishna for help. The god appeared on his Garuda (eagle) and killed the crocodile with the Sudershan Chakra (wheel). From that day on devotees have flocked to this place every year, paying their obeisance to Lord Krishna after bathing in the river.
Over the centuries the position of the fair changed. Sonepur, however, must have been the original site. According to old records, Raja Man Singh, one of Akbar’s Mogul generals, camped there while advancing on Patna. The Haathi Bazaar is to this day still called the ‘Garden of Raja Man Singh’, and further records show that during Aurangzeb’s reign, traders from far flung Tartar Desh and from Arabia used to come to the fair to sell horses.
Over the last forty years or so, Sonepur has been known as a cattle fair, but for thousands of years it was primarily a place for the sale of elephants, like three other smaller fairs in northern Bihar. For centuries these fairs were fed by elephant-catchers from the jungles of Assam, Bengal and Orissa, and must have been the main markets for the sale of war elephants to Pataliputra, the ancient capital of Chandra Gupta Maurya, whose vast army relied so heavily on these animals.
We approached the bridge spanning the Gandak. It was considered too narrow to accommodate the increasing volume of trains that stopped at Sonepur, an important junction on the north-eastern railway which, until 1950, boasted the longest platform in the world. Now a new parallel bridge takes the rail traffic across.
The cavalcade came to an abrupt halt. In front of us stretched a mile of mela traffic, waiting for the signal to proceed, as the oncoming vehicles inched across the narrow bridge. Bellowing cattle stamped impatiently against the wooden floors of their trucks. More were filled with horses neighing nervously, poking their heads out of the slatted sides. Some vehicles were unrecognisable under gigantic mounds of fodder, spilling over the back, the front and the sides. Business was brisk for the hawkers. They patrolled up and down the armies of bicyclists, selling fruit, ice-cream, newspapers and bags of sticky ludoos. We gained a few yards as the traffic was stopped on the far side and with a crunching of gears and hiss of air brakes, the procession would move forward. Tara was becoming impossible. One moment she would be swiping food from the hawkers, the next vibrating in panic at the horses, forcing me to use the ankush. Aditya swung down impatiently from Tara’s back.
‘We’ll be here all day. I’ll see what I can sort out.’
Half an hour later I caught sight of him signalling to me frantically to come forward. I bulldozed my way through, closely followed by the other elephants who were not going to miss this chance. At the entrance Aditya was standing with a smiling policeman who saluted smartly and waved us on to an empty bridge.
‘How on earth did you manage that?’ I asked Aditya incredulously, as we lumbered across.
‘I told him you were related to the Queen of England and that royalty did not expect to be kept waiting.’
‘Really?’ I said, impressed by his ingenuity.
‘No, of course I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I gave him a hundred rupees.’
To our right, a steam engine clanked across the new railway bridge. To our left, a vast shady grove of mango trees stretched out parallel with the river, under which I could see a few elephants standing. ‘Haathi Bazaar!’ shouted one of the old mahouts.
Urging Tara into a lumbering trot, with Bhim and Gokul running alongside, we reached the end of the bridge and, swinging left, thundered down into the ‘Garden of Raja Man Singh’. We jumped off Tara, and to the amazement of incredulous onlookers the four of us danced a jig around her. Opening a bottle of rum, I poured half the contents down her throat. Each of us then took a swig and yelled ‘Jai Mata Sonepur!’ We had made it.
It was as well that we had arrived early. As newcomers, we needed to check the lie of the land and to learn the rules. The area between each mango tree, in front of which the elephants would be staked, belonged to a different landlord. We made our way slowly through the orchard, passing fodder stacked like giant teepees. Each landlord tried to interest us in his plot, offering discounts and special favours, knowing that Tara would almost certainly attract a large crowd. We settled on a site at the far end of the orchard which gave easy access to the Gandak some fifty yards behind and close to one of the main bathing ghats. Situated amongst the nearest row of trees to the river we would not be hemmed in. Elephants would stand in front and to the side of us, but not behind.
Our landlord, Lallan Singh, a delightful, wise old man, a veteran of fifty melas, took us under his wing, bustling and fussing over us like a kindly matron on our first day at school. I paid him 100 rupees, the traditional mela rent for the use of his land. (If the elephant was sold, the buyer reimbursed this amount.) Two large wooden stakes were driven deep into the ground and one of Tara’s front and back legs were chained to each. An ‘account’ was opened with the fodder and firewood suppliers, who delivered in the morning and the evening of each day. To ensure some kind of privacy, Lallan Singh organised a large colourful ‘kanat’ (a rectangular canvas wall) to surround our camp. Between the two mango trees we draped Tara’s caparison, the Union Jack, which hung grandly like a war standard. Tables and chairs were produced and by the time the tents were erected and a fire lit, we could have been guests in some Maharaja’s grand shikar camp, lacking only uniformed attendants, popping corks from champagne bottles and a floor covered in richly embroidered carpets.
To ensure good luck and a good sale, our landlord performed the ‘Aarti’, a special puja. He circled our camp holding a terracotta bowl in which a holy flare burned. Then, standing in front of Tara, he raised the flame to her like a toast-master, chanting a few solemn prayers.
Lallan Singh then sat down with us and explained mela etiquette. ‘When your elephant is sold, everything on the back legs belongs to the seller, the chain, ropes etc. It is customary to give the buyer the gudda [the saddle], the girth ropes, the bell, and any other decoration on the elephant, like silk cords and tassels. It is most important that your elephant is never unattended at any time, during the day or night. Accidents can and have happened frequently at the mela a
nd a loose elephant can cause terrible carnage amongst “five lakhs” of people. Be very careful,’ he warned us, ‘to keep your money hidden, as the mela will be full of thieves. When your deal takes place, it must be done quietly, out of the sight of prying eyes and, if possible, in the presence of a few members of your entourage. A showing of people,’ he explained, ‘means power and wealth,’ as we were to discover when approached by the local zamindars, who never went anywhere without a large armed bodyguard.
E. O. Shebbeare gives an ingenious description of how he dealt with this situation, in his book Soondar Mooni:
I have assumed a companion because to go elephant-buying alone is a miserable business. Two heads are better than one when deciding what to buy and how much to pay; they are very much better than one when it comes to justifying your purchases and their prices before a critical audience when you get them home. There is another, more practical reason for hunting in couples; a proverb even more apt than ‘two heads’, is the one about ‘safety in numbers’. As any policeman in the India of those days could have told you, a mela attracted more than just buyers and sellers, pilgrims and merrymakers; it was a magnet for every ‘bad hat’ in northern India. The reason was simple: since cheques were not accepted, a buyer before a sale or a seller after one was an object which no serious evil-doer could afford to overlook. My own security measures were simple. There was then, and may be still, a practice in India of cutting currency notes in half. If a large sum was to be sent by post, one half of each note was sent first and not until these had been acknowledged were the second halves dispatched. Before going to a mela all the money that would be required was drawn from the treasury in notes of high denominations – hundreds, five hundreds, and a thousand rupees each. Each was cut in two and each half put into a separate pack clipped together in their right order. The packs were then slipped into the corresponding pockets of a pair of linen belts which my companion and I wore round our waists next to the skin. This ensured that the prospective robbers would at least be put to the trouble of committing a double murder.
