India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  What we have seen at this great congregation of sadhus and pilgrims has moved us to our depths. We were given, as it were, a glimpse into the heart of Reality, the Great Reality that is India— where dreams come true and the dynasty of the holy still abides! We may well be proud. But to begin…

  And my letter, never sent, begins, “Once, in your book, you resorted to a letter, as though that perfunctory but intimate form were the best you had at your disposal for conveying an impression of the mela.I have just spent some time at Jhusi, which is one vast stretch of saffron tents interrupted by straw huts, by sheds roofed with sheets of corrugated iron, by bamboo towers, and by bamboo poles flying the flags or signs of every imaginable sect of sadhus. And though I am not clear yet about what those dreams are that come true here, at times I did feel as though I were sleepwalking through some celestial bazaar. Or was it a medieval battlefield with hordes of Saracens in disarray? No, perhaps it was an ancient camp of Hannibal. Every man or beast was covered with dust. In front of the tents, which seemed to extend nearly to the horizon, camp fires burned. By the camp fires, beneath the open sky, were huddles of squatting sadhus and milling or motionless crowds of pilgrims. Now and again, I passed an elephant, festooned with flower garlands and embroidered rugs. All along the way, beggars held out their bowls, into which pilgrims dropped coins or grain. There were naked sadhus and sadhus opulently robed. There were sadhus wearing dhotis and marigolds, with horizontal stripes of ash on their foreheads. There were sadhus with ashsmeared naked bodies, offering ghi, jaggery, and sesamum to a sacrificial fire that crackled in a brazier, and chanting, ‘Hare Ram. Hare Krishna. Hare Om.’ Elsewhere, sadhus were shaking bells or clapping tongs or cymbals, or were singing or haranguing crowds over loudspeakers, or were leaping up and down, or were hanging by their feet from trees. Here was a sadhu reclining on a bed of thorns; there was a sadhu waist-deep in mud; near by, a sadhu stood on one foot, and opposite him another balanced himself on one arm; farther along were sadhus fixed in still other yogic contortions. Beyond, a man wearing a skimpy loincloth was in the middle of a ritualistic dance to the music of a harmonium. Then, there was a group of seated men, each with a finger pressed to his lips. Opposite them sat other men, each with his forefingers in his ears. The names of the sects of sadhus were as endless as the ways they conceived of God: for the Vedantists, it was as the One; for the Vaishnavas, as all things; for the Shankarites, as the self; for the Tantriks, as the doctrines in their sacred books; for the Shaktas, as Kali; for the Shaivas and Avadhutas, as Mother Ganga—all, of course, overlapping even as they asserted their contradictions.”

  Since at the mela anyone can go anywhere and talk to anyone, I visit a number of the sadhus' camps at Jhusi. On a gaddi (Hindi for “cushion”) of straw in one tent, pitched a little apart from the others, a man sits silent and withdrawn, like a guru. Near him sits a fast-talking man who is answering questions addressed to the silent man by an Indian filmmaker.

  “Looking at your face, I get the impression you have achieved great peace,” the filmmaker is saying, in Urdu. “In your eyes there is this wonderful glow of happiness. How do you achieve this peace?” He adds, “This question may seem very foolish to you, but I would like to know if you encounter any difficulty in keeping your vow of celibacy.”

  “How do I know you're not a spy?” the fast-talking man asks.

  “Spy for what?” the filmmaker cries.

  The man on the gaddi seems about to say something, but the fast-talking man speaks up again. “You could be a spy for another akhara, or a spy for the government,” he says.

  The filmmaker courteously identifies himself as Habib Tanvir and explains that he is shooting a documentary on the Kumbha mela, which he hopes to sell to the BBC.

  The fast-talking man listens warily, and then says, “The question you ask about peace would take months to answer, because the answer is very difficult, and I would have to go through many highways and byways. As for the other matter, if you have had that experience, it's much more difficult. It's not at all difficult for us, because we have never had that experience.”

  One large colony of tents is marked by a sign that reads, “Spiritual Regeneration Movement Foundation of India.” This is the headquarters of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I know of him, or know the few available facts about him (all uncorroborated): that he was born around 1910; that his father was a revenue inspector; that he attended Allahabad University; that he worked in a factory for a time; that for some years he studied in the Himalayas with the jagadguru Shankaracharya of Badi ka Ashram; and that, unlike most Indian sages, who use one religious title, he prefers to use two—Maharishi, which is Sanskrit for “great seer,” and Yogi, which is from the Sanskrit “yoga,” meaning “effort.” Inside the first tent, which is packed with such items as tomato sauce, cornflakes, soap, toothpaste, and chewing gum— all imports, to judge from the labels—a man in a brown lounge suit and with a vermilion mark on his forehead comes up to me. He tells me his name and continues, in English, “I am Americareturned. I am M.A. and Ph.D. in public administration from the States. Guruji has fifty-four chelas from distant foreign lands here at Kumbha. I myself am going to be initiated on this Amavasya, when Guruji will recite some mantras to me by the side of Mother Ganga, and I will recite them back. I met the Guruji only a month ago. After I set my eyes on Guruji, I left my five children to follow him.”

  He takes me to an open area among the tents, where many Westerners, some in Indian dress, are standing around a serving table finishing a meal of macaroni and custard. I accept a small dish of custard from a girl in Western dress. She has very long eyelashes and the slightly bored expression of a fashion model.

  “Where are you from?” I ask her.

  “From Canada,” the girl replies. “Guruji is a fact, and, like a fact, he manifested himself to me in Canada.”

  When I ask her to tell me something about the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, she says tersely, “You must address any questions you have to Guruji himself.”

  An Englishwoman joins us. “Guruji has been around the world six times, and now we have a half-dozen Spiritual Regeneration Movement centers in Britain,” she says. “They teach Guruji's simple technique of meditation.”

  The members of the group start moving into a tent. They arrange themselves as best they can on the floor in front of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a merry-looking little man with smooth skin, blunt features, and long, well-oiled hair. He is dressed in a flowing cream-colored silk robe. Three tape recorders stand near him on the floor, as sacred books might surround another guru.

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi urges the audience to ask questions, and I ask a general question about the nature of his movement.

  He asks me to identify myself, and when I do, he says, in English, in a soft, rich, bemused voice, “All I teach is a simple method of meditation. We are all conscious on a mundane level, but beneath that consciousness, in each one of us, there is an ocean vaster than any in the world. It's there that most new thoughts originate. The bridge between the mundane level of consciousness and the ocean is meditation—not reading, because if you read you can have only secondhand thoughts. Meditation expands the consciousness and leads to the greatest production of goods and services. The ultimate test of my method of meditation is therefore its utility—the measure of the usefulness of people to society. Through my method of meditation, the poor can become as rich as the rich, and the rich can become richer. I taught my simple method of meditation to a German cement manufacturer. He taught the method to all his employees and thereby quadrupled the production of cement. As I said when addressing a meeting in the Albert Hall, in London, my technique does not involve withdrawal from normal material life. It enhances the material values of life by the inner spiritual light. My method is, in my London example, ‘like the inner juice of the orange, which can be enjoyed without destroying the outer beauty of the fruit. This is done simply by pricking the orange with a pin again and again, and extracting the juice little b
y little, so that the inner juice is drawn out on the surface, and both are enjoyed simultaneously.’ ”

  During the rest of the session, which goes on for a few hours, with the tape recorders running, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi expounds on his simple method of meditation. He has a way of dismissing everything. Not only does he rule out at the start all questions concerning morality, theology, and philosophy— implying at one point that men are free to do anything in their personal lives, to themselves or to others, as long as, by the technique of meditation, they experience the bliss that is within themselves—but he seems to remove himself from the whole process of intellectual discourse by giggling at every question put to him and then at his own answer to the question, so one feels that no matter how long one talked to him one would come away with, at worst, chagrin at having been ridiculed and, at best, vague excitement at having been tantalized. He does not satisfactorily answer any question. (If by a few minutes of meditation a day the poor can become rich, why do they continue to be poor? Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's answer is that they are too indolent to master his simple method of meditation.)

  JAN MORRIS

  (1926–)

  Jan Morris was born in Wales, where she presently lives, and was known as James Morris until her sex-change operation in the 1970s. She has published a historical trilogy on the British empire, Heaven's Command, Rule Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets; a book on colonial architecture in India; and also biographies of Venice, Trieste, Sydney, and New York. As a travel writer, she is a connoisseur of people, places, individual and national eccentricities, and her essays seem driven by sheer enthusiasm. But there is a calm, discerning eye beneath the bubbly adjective-laden prose; she seems constantly working to make palpable that elusive special essence of a place. Her powers of evocation and sympathy are matched by her vivid historical imagination—qualities that are immediately striking in the following essay on Delhi, that most antique and intractable of Indian metropolises.

  MRS. GUPTA NEVER RANG

  Delhi, 1975

  Indira Gandhi was in power in Delhi in 1975, but though she had clamped the country under a State of Emergency, harshly limiting the press and imprisoning much of the opposition, to the stranger the Indian capital felt much the same as ever. There is not much in this essay to reveal which particular regime governed India at the time of its writing: Delhi is one of those cities whose age, manner and disposition easily absorb the styles of its successive rulers.

  “You see,” said the government spokesman, “you may liken Delhi to the River Ganges, it twists and turns, many other streams join it, it divides into many parts, and it flows into the sea in so many channels that nobody may know which is the true river. You follow my train of thought? It is a metaphysical matter, perhaps. You will do best to burrow under the surface of things and discover what is not revealed to us ordinary mortals! In the meantime, you will take a cup of tea, I hope?” I took a cup of tea, milkless, very sweet, brought by a shuffling messenger in a high-buttoned jacket with a scarf around his neck, and between pleasantries I pondered the spokesman's advice. Indians, of course, love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic. It is part of their Timeless Wisdom. For several centuries the tendency has variously baffled, infuriated, amused and entranced travelers from the West, and India is full of pilgrims still, come from afar to worship at the shrines of insight. But Delhi ? Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the Northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers' town, a politicians' town, a journalists', a diplomats' town. It is Asia's Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.

  “Ah yes,” he said, “what you are thinking is quite true, but that is the surface of Delhi. You are an artist, I know, you should look beyond ! And if there is anything we can do to help your inquiries,” he added with an engaging waggle of his head, “you have only to let us know. You may telephone us at any time and we will ring you back with the requisite information in a moment or two. We are here to help! That is why we are here! No, no, that is our duty!”

  Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.

  One of the oldest and deadest places I know, for a start, is the crumbled fortress-capital of Tughluqabad in the city's southern outskirts. For a single decade it was a place of terrific consequence, for nearly seven centuries since it has been a grey wasteland of piled stones and ruined alleyways, a memento mori by any standard, inhabited only by the disagreeable monkeys which are the familiars of Delhi, and by a melancholy watchman who, recently transferred by the Archaeological Survey from some more frequented historical monument, now sees nobody but the apes from one day to the next.

  Or consider, in another kind of allegory, the Lodi Gardens. These are popular promenades, but they are also the cemetery of the Lodi kings who thrived in the early sixteenth century. Here death and life consort on familiar terms, and especially in the early morning, when Delhi people go out for some fresh air before the sun comes up, they offer some piquant juxtapositions. All among the memorials the citizens besport themselves, pursuing their Yogic meditations in the tomb of Sikander Lodi, jogtrotting among the funerary domes, exercising their pampered dachshunds beside the Bara Gumbad Mosque or pissing, in the inescapable Delhi manner, behind the mausoleum of Mohammed Shah.

  They used to say, to express the marvelous continuity of Delhi, that seven successive capitals existed here, each superimposed upon the last. Nowadays they are always finding new ones, and the latest tally seems to be fourteen. Few foreigners and still fewer Indians have ever heard of most of the dynasties represented, but here and there across the capital some of them have left not merely tombs or ruins but living remnants of themselves. Embedded, for instance, in one of Delhi's smarter quarters, almost within sight of the Oberoi Intercontinental, is the Moslem village shrine of Nizamuddin, built in the time of the fourteenth-century Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughluq and still as holy as ever.

  Through tortuous mucky lanes one approaches it from the busy highway, past the statutory Indian lines of beggars, crones and sadhus, through the spittle-stained portals where the old men stare, and into the intricate jumble of courts, tombs and arcades that surrounds the mosque of Nizamuddin and its sacred pool. Here mendicants lope around on knobbly staves, saintly scholars are at their books, sweet old ladies sit outside tombs (they are not allowed in, being female), and in the mosque there hustles and brushes the muezzin, an indefatigable goblin figure with white eyebrows and dainty tread. Nothing here is unpremeditated. All moves, though you might not guess it, to an immemorial schedule: the prayer call comes precisely to time, the rituals are meticulously ordered, even the whining beggars have their appointed place in the hierarchy, and when I left the precincts the imam gave me his visiting card—his name is Al Haj Hazrat Peer Qazi Syed Safdar Ali Nizami, and his cable address is HEADPRIEST DELHI.

  Even more a living relic, so to speak, is the Begum Timur Jehan Shahzadi of Darya Ganj, in the old walled city of Delhi. This lady is a Moghul princess of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and built the very city, Shahjehanabad, in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives now. Just go to the Old City, her son-in-law had assured me, and ask for the Begum Jehan's house: and though in the event this proved insufficient advice, and I spent half an afternoon stumbling through the high-walled maze of Shahjehanabad, vainly presenting the inquiry, still I relished the form of it, and thought it was rather like knocking on the door of the Great Pyramid, asking for Cheops.

  I found he
r in the end anyway, ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. There is no pretending that this princess lives much like a princess. Her old house, into which her family moved when they were ejected by later conquerors from their imperial palace, is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval—a wide decrepit courtyard, a dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.

  Like HEADPRIEST DELHI she lives very near the earth, close to the muck and the spittle, close to the mangy dogs and the deformed indigents in the street outside. Delhi is scarcely an innocent city, for on every layer it is riddled with graft and intrigue, but it is distinctly organic, to an atavistic degree. An apposite introduction to the city, I think, is provided by Map Eight of the Delhi City Atlas, which marks a substantial slab of the municipal area as being Dense Jungle: though this is now a city of a million inhabitants, it feels near the bush still. From many parts of it the open plain is in sight, and the country trees of India, the feathery tamarisks and ubiquitous acacias, invade every part of it—the animals too, for squirrels are everywhere and monkeys, buffalos, cows, goats and a million pye-dogs roam the city streets peremptorily.