Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  IN INDIA THE MIRACULOUS IS COMMONPLACE, SO WHEN I WAS told at six by my favorite aunt, B, who lived in the apartment upstairs, that a saint was going to visit her that afternoon—a woman who had died and come back to life again—I was curious, not skeptical.

  I am not sure what I expected to see when I entered B’s bedroom, but it was not two old women lying on the bed laughing and eating chocolates. I had imagined saints would always be in trance; I had not imagined one would sprawl on a bed, enormous in her white cotton sari, looking very much like any other worn and plump old Indian woman.

  “Come onto the bed,” B said, “and lie down between us.”

  I climbed up onto the bed gingerly.

  The saint gave me a vast toothless smile and produced from the folds of her sari a chocolate, which she opened and held out to me.

  “Oh,” she sighed, “I am too fond of chocolates.” She smelled of biscuits and incense and played with my ears.

  “What big ears you have. This is good. The Buddha had big ears. I, too, have big ears.”

  She lifted a strand of dank white hair and showed me her ears. They were huge and ugly.

  “Shantih knows everything there is to know,” B said. “Her name means peace; she has seen God. She sees God all the time. Ma is a great saint and thousands worship her and she has done many miracles.”

  “Have you really done miracles?” I asked.

  “They come through me like water through a pipe. But the water is not mine.”

  “Where does the water come from?”

  She yawned slightly, pointing upward.

  “Have you really died and come back to life, and did you see God?”

  B laughed, got off the bed, and went into the bathroom to have a bath.

  “You want to know?” Shantih asked.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling frightened.

  She stroked my cheek dreamily with one of her fingers and said, “God is gentle, gentle as my finger.

  “About seventy years ago,” she went on, “I was another person, a woman, living in a North Indian village, married with several children. I got ill and died. When I died, a Light came to me, and in it I saw my Lord Krishna. This is what will happen to you, too, when you die. A Light will come and you will see whoever you believe in. If you believe in Krishna, you will see him; if you are a Christian, you will see Christ. From this light Krishna spoke to me. ‘You have loved me in your life,’ he said, ‘and I love you and will give you liberation. But you must go down to the earth and tell them what you have experienced so humans can lose their fear of death and love me more.’ I did not want to come down here again; I wanted to be there with him in the Light; but gods are strong, you know, and you have to do what they tell you. So I came back.”

  She said all this as if she were describing the train schedule to Agra or giving shopping instructions to the ayah.

  She said,“Go and close the curtains. I will show you something.”

  I did as I was told.

  Shantih leaned over, wheezing a little, and switched on the light by the bed. The swirling red and gold dragons on the lampshade that had been dull a moment before flared into life.

  She clapped her hands.

  “In everything and everyone the Light is shining. It is not like this light. It is softer. It is everywhere.”

  “Is it in me?”

  “It is in you and all around you and in everyone and around everyone and everything. Without it nothing could exist. It is God.”

  “Do you see this light?”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “I see this Light always. You, too, can see it. It is simple. God is simple; we are complicated.”

  She turned the lamp off. I opened the curtains, and sun flooded the room. I turned to Shantih. She was seated on the bed in meditation, immense and calm, a half-unwrapped chocolate on her lap.

  Andrew Harvey is the author of several books and works of translation, including A Walk With Four Spiritual Guides: Krishna, Buddah, Jesus, and Ramakrishna, A Journey to Ladakh, Burning Houses, The Web, and Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening, from which this story was excerpted.

  Gentle George Herbert had also spoken for me, near sixteen hundred years after Thomas Didymus:Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

  Guiltie of dust and sinne.

  And so, unwilling to surrender all that was required of me, my far too logical and sceptical mind became my shield and my defence. I could no more ignore religion and deny my instinct for the numinous than a child could abandon its comforter or the earth defy the natural law regulating its passage round the sun. But I had long since ceased to hope that one day, with Herbert, I might sit and eat with the true and certain believers in a kingdom of heaven. And India, above all the places I knew across the earth, had helped me to come to terms with this, had taught me no longer to strain and fret against my inadequacy; for India was, above anywhere else, the land where every distinction of faith, every equivocation, every contradiction, every doubt, every reticence was commonplace, often glorified and always accepted as if any variant at all was the natural condition of man. For that reason alone, I could have surrendered myself to the spirit of this country without any ifs or buts. There were, in fact, many reasons why such a submission was possible: for all its manifold and obvious darknesses, India had cast a spell over me, as much as any land could that was not my own. Kneeling there at the shrine [Basilica of San Thomé, Madras] I wondered when and even whether I would see the subcontinent again. Once, the prospect of my end would have alarmed and tormented me, but I had since come to accept it calmly and with curiosity, almost disinterestedly, as though it were an abstraction, something quite detached from me, stripped of its old power to hurt and terrify. I believed India had played a big part in teaching me how to accept that as well.

  —Geoffrey Moorhouse, OM: An Indian Pilgrimage

  Hobson-Jobson

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  The Raj is long dead, but its linguistic heritage endures.

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE, MANY PUNDITS NOW AGREE, DESCENDED like a juggernaut upon the barbicans of the East, in search of loot. The moguls of the Raj went in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sip toddy or sherbet on the verandahs of the gymkhana club, while the memsahibs fretted about the thugs in bandannas and dungarees who roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulish deeds.

  All the italicized words in the above paragraph can be found, with their Eastern family trees, in Hobson-Jobson, the legendary dictionary of British India, on whose reissue Routledge are to be congratulated. These thousand-odd pages bear eloquent testimony to the unparalleled intermingling that took place between English and the languages of India, and while some of the Indian loan-words will be familiar—pukka, curry, cummerbund--others should surprise many modern readers.

  Did you know, for example, that the word tank has Gujarati and Marathi origins? Or that cash was originally the Sanskrit karsha, “a weight of silver or gold equal to one-four hundredth of a Tula?” Or that a shampoo was a massage, nothing to do with the hair at all, deriving from the imperative form—champo!—of the Hindi verb champna, “to knead and press the muscles with the view of relieving fatigue, etc.?” Every column of this book contains revelations like these, written up in a pleasingly idiosyncratic, not to say cranky, style. The authors, Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, are not averse to ticking off an untrustworthy source, witness their entry under muddle, meaning a double, or secretary, or interpreter: “This word is only known to us from the clever—perhaps too clever—little book quoted below… probably a misapprehension of budlee.”

  The fifteen main Indian languages are:Hindi

  Assamese

  Bengali

  Gujarati

  Kannada

  Kashmiri

  Malayalam

  Marathi

  Oriya

  Punjabi

  Sanskrit

  Sindhi

  Tamil

  Telugu

  Urdu

  Most of the languages hav
e their own script, and these are used along with English. In some states, such as Gujarat, you’ll hardly see a word of English whereas in Himachal Pradesh virtually everything is in English. For a sample of different scripts, look at a Rs5 or larger banknote where thirteen languages are represented. From the top they are: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Hindi (Devanagari), Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu.

  —Hugh Finlay, et al., India - a travel survival kit

  The chief interest of Hobson-Jobson, though, lies not so much in its etymologies for words still in use, but in the richness of what one must call the Anglo-Indian language whose memorial it is, that language which was in regular use just forty years ago and which is now as dead as a dodo. In Anglo-Indian a jam was a Gujarati chief, a sneaker was “a large cup (or small basin) with a saucer and cover,” a guinea-pig was a midshipman on an Indian-bound boat, an owl was a disease, Macheen was not a spelling mistake but a name, abbreviated from “Maha-Cheen,” for “great China.” Even a commonplace word like cheese was transformed. The Hindi chiz, meaning a thing, gave the English word a new, slangy sense of “anything good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant, or advantageous,” as, we are told, in the phrase, “these cheroots are the real cheese.”

  Some of the distortions of Indian words—”perhaps vulgar lips”—have moved a long way from their sources. It takes an effort of the will to see, in the Anglo-Indian snow-rupee, meaning “authority,” the Telugu word tsanauvu. The dictionary’s own title, chosen, we are told, to help it sell, is of this type. It originates in the cries of Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain! uttered by Shia Muslims during the Muharram processions. I don’t quite see how the colonial British managed to hear this as Hobson! Jobson!, but this is clearly a failure of imagination on my part.

  It’s more than a century since this volume’s first publication, and in 1886 it was actually possible for Yule and Burnell (whom it’s tempting to rename Hobson and Jobson) to make puns which conflated Hindi with, of all things, Latin. The Anglo-Indian word poggle, a madman, comes from the Hindi pagal, and so we’re offered the following “macaronic adage which we fear the non-Indian will fail to appreciate: pagal et pecunia jaldé separantur.” (“A fool and his money are soon parted.”)

  I got into conversation with Mr. Bhajan Lal, the Pradhan (headman) of the village.… Thanks to our twice weekly lessons, Olivia and I had now become confident enough in Hindi for the practice of it to become enjoyable rather than tiresome—if only because people were so surprised to hear any non-Indian speak even the most stumbling version of it. Mr. Lal was no exception.

  LAL: Sahib! You are speaking Hindi!

  WD: A little.

  LAL: Oh, sahib! Truly this is day among days! What is your good name, sahib?

  WD: (confident now; a phrase I knew) My name is William.

  LAL: Oh thank you Mr. Will-Yums Sahib. Where are you learning this beautiful Hindi?

  WD: In Delhi. A munshi comes to our house...

  LAL: In Delhi! Heaven be praised....

  —William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

  British India had absorbed enough of Indian ways to call their Masonic lodges jadoogurs after the Hindi for a place of sorcery, to cry kubberdaur (khabardaar) when they meant “look out,” and to puckerow an Indian (“catch him”) before they started to samjao him—literally, to make him understand something, but, idiomatically, to beat him up.

  Strange, then, to find certain well-known words missing. No kaffir, no gully, not even a wog, although there is a wug, a Baloch or Sindhi word meaning either loot or a herd of camels. (Hobson-Jobson can be wonderfully imprecise at times.) I thought, too, that a modern appendix might usefully be commissioned, to include the many English words which have taken on, in independent India, new “Hinglish” meanings. In India today, the prisoner in the dock is the undertrial; a boss is often an incharge; and, in a sinister euphemism, those who perish at the hands of law enforcement officers are held to have died in a “police encounter.”

  To spend a few days with Hobson-Jobson is, almost, to regret the passing of the intimate connection that made this linguistic kedgeree possible. But then one remembers what sort of connection it was, and is moved to remark--as Rhett Butler once said to Scarlett O’Hara—”Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a small copper coin weighing one tolah, eight mashas, and seven surkhs, being the fortieth part of a rupee.” Or, to put it more concisely, a dam.

  Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947 and was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 for his novel, Midnight’s Children. His novel The Satanic Verses earned him a death sentence from the late Ayatollah Khomeini for allegedly profaning Islam. Since then he has written The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and a work of collected nonfiction, Step Across This Line. This story was taken from his book of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays & Criticisms, 1981-1991.

  In India, English is widely spoken but with its own unique vocabulary. “Number two” is not second place, but illegal. Indian politicians don’t fly—they “air-dash.” A woman is not sexually harassed—she is “eve-teased.” A “jackal’s wedding” is not a canine nuptial but an occasion when it rains while the sun shines.

  To help travelers unravel the mysteries of subcontinental English, Nigel B. Hankin, seventy-three, a retired British embassy attaché, shares the knowledge he has accumulated during more than four decades in India. The title of his glossary, Hanklyn-Janklin, is a tribute to Hobson-Jobson , a similar lexicon assembled in the nineteenth century. It is also an allusion to the local penchant for echo words: in India one may throw a party-warty, drink a cup of chai-wai (tea), read a kitab-witab (book)—or suffer from Delhi belly. Hankin includes definitions of commonly used Indian words, especially those that have entered the parlance of the country’s English-language newspapers, and in the process illuminates such hurly-burly aspects of Indian life as gherao, the act of surrounding that takes place during a common form of protest in which workers encircle an office to prevent a manager from leaving. Or a darshan—the term means glimpse and is applicable to sightings of both deities and politicians. Crammed with twelve hundred entries, this “Indophile Disneyland,” as the fortnightly India Today calls it, is refreshingly free of colonial condescension.

  —Emily Mitchell, “Traveler’s Unraveler,” Time

  Caretakers of the Dead

  JONAH BLANK

  India has trouble caring for the living, but it perhaps reveals more of itself in how it cares for the dead.

  LAWS CAN BE MADE AND UNMADE WITH A STROKE OF A FOUNTAIN pen, but attitudes must be crafted with time and unflagging will. In India the greatest barrier to class integration may well be the attitude of the Untouchables themselves. The poorest and least-educated members of society, Harijans are often the most conservative as well. At election time they may vote to shake the tree in hopes of dislodging choicer fruit, but most would never consider chopping the tree down. They may use government programs to get more out of the caste system, but they have little desire to abolish the system entirely. For most of them, caste is a fact of life not even worth thinking about. Something that always has been, something that always will be.

  The lowest, most contemptible wretch in all India is the charnel man. Thieves, whores, and garbage pickers look down their noses at him. The only person as detested is the tanner of leather, who cuts up dead cows and sells their hides for tainted money. But almost all Hindus are cremated when they die, and somebody has to do the burning.

  When I walked up to the Harishchandra Ghat in Varanasi, Suraj Chaudhri had long since set the morning’s corpses in a row. He and his fellow doams were now working on a middle-aged man, making sure the limbs were properly arranged for incineration. The other bodies had been brought here on a stretcher of green bamboo borne by close kin. Each had been lovingly wrapped in white cloth, then swathed in gaudy silk brocade laced with threads of spun gold, then lashed to the palanquin with rough twine and covered with orange garlands. Now each was alone. Each
band of mourners, with flutes and drums and women singing through their tears, had gone home. The only people left on the ghat were a few midday idlers, the charnel men, and the cadavers themselves.

  Suraj Chaudhri was sawing away at the bamboo poles, cutting them down to the same size as the body they carried. It makes the fire neater. As a doam--the Untouchable clan responsible for burning corpses--Suraj works from four a.m. until midnight every single day. There is no time for a holiday. What could he do, ask people to stop dying merely because he wanted a rest?

  It is his job, it is his life, it is him. There is no point in searching for any other way. When I ask what he thinks about caste, Suraj shakes his head. He does not think at all. He never asks why he is a Harijan, any more than he asks why his hair is black and his eyes brown.

  His place in the universe, Suraj knows, is to burn bodies. That is why he was put on the earth. It is an important task, a necessary task, a task vital to the survival of society. He fully supports the caste system, although technically he is not even a part of it. How (he asks) could he feel otherwise? The system was instituted by God Himself--who is Suraj Chaudhri to challenge fate?

  By working hard and living an honest life, Suraj hopes to scale the rungs of caste and one day reach Nirvana. It is not an impossible dream. The Ramayana provides him inspiration. He cannot read and has no television or radio, but he knows the stories well. When Rama was ferried across the Ganges, he embraced the low-born boatman as a friend. The episode gives Suraj comfort, for it shows that even a Harijan can be loved by God.

  A goat ambles over to the row of corpses and starts nibbling on one of the flowery garlands. Eventually an idler gently chases the animal away.