The Saora were famous for their ikons, as they are generally termed, although known locally under the name anital. Charming and vigorous examples of folk art of the kind are to be found with local variation among most of the tribal peoples of India. There was a recognisable affinity with the vast painting with which the housewife of Hirapur covered her walls, although ikons were limited in size to a few square feet. In Hirapur inspiration of old had been diluted by custom, and by the sheer necessity of employing space-filling patterns to be finished in a matter of hours in between odd jobs about the house. At Potasing the artist sat alone in silence, families in a darkened place, waiting for a vision to form. Only a few families—the Brahmins of art—were allowed to paint ikons, thereafter made available to the general public in exchange for a small gift or service. An ikon was painted in commemoration of a recent death, in honour of an ancestor, or to celebrate a festival when, like a magnificent Christmas card, it was often offered by the artist to a friend. It was also employed in the treatment of illness by a shaman who might prescribe the dedication of an ikon to the village deity, together with, say, a course of massage and the sacrifice of a white cockerel.
For the PM the ikons had become meaningless, and therefore slightly boring. The Church of Christ did not require such paintings, nor, he added, did the new generation of the village. “They are looking,” he said, “another way.” And the carvings in and around the doors? I asked. Were they to come to an end, too? That was to be expected, he said. The few carvers left would find other things to do. Some were learning to carve toys for sale. People no longer wished for carvings on their new houses. They were a sign of backwardness. And were the new houses to be made with concrete and corrugated iron? When these materials could be had, he thought.
For all that—for all his distaste for those things in which Ranjan as well as I showed what must have been such inexplicable interest—he was an impressively tolerant man, and ready to help us in any way he could. It was at his suggestion that we set out to scour the village for any ikons that might have survived. A small hitch arose. Most of the villagers were out, he explained, working in their fields, and nowadays when they left their houses they locked up after them. Even the PM seemed surprised to encounter this sudden intrusion of untribal practice. In a land in which, by my experience so far, all doors were open, this indeed was a break with the past. The PM led us to several houses known to belong to notorious conservatives who might have had an ikon about the place, while a few villagers who had joined us, including a young man in a Toshiba t-shirt, scampered up and down side lanes in search of a household that might not have moved with the times. In the end one was found, and an elderly lady festooned with bangles and beads invited us in to inspect her ikon. It was painted in Saora style in white upon a red background, recalling aboriginal rock drawings, or palaeolithic hunters on the walls of caves, or even more the figures and scenes woven into the huipils of the Indians of Central America. Here Saora manikins pranced and capered in ceremonial hats and under ceremonial umbrellas, rode elephants and horses, pedalled bikes, and were carried by fan-waving attendants in procession. They played the musical instruments of the past but shouldered the guns of the present. Gourdfuls of wine awaited their pleasure, displayed like Christmas gifts on the branches of palms. The flaming sun illuminating this scene might have been copied from an Aztec codex, as might the Saora medicine men too, who had conjured it from darkness with their feathered wands.
The PM, watching us, smiled at our pleasure. He was happy for us. “We are lucky to find this,” he said, “it is belonging to one old lady. I am thinking it is the last.” I tried to match his face with the faces of the Saoras who had crowded into the dark room after us, but they seemed to belong to a different race. “Can he really be a Saora?” I had whispered to Ranjan. “Yes, he is a Saora,” was Ranjan’s reply, but centuries of evolution miraculously crammed into five years had produced an astonishing metamorphosis. The PM had leaped out of the stone-age of Saora art and belief, and the change seemed even to have paled his skin among the deep mountain complexions of the men at his back and to have smoothed his face. He had stripped away the credence that inspired paintings and carvings. Life, as he tried to explain, above all had become simple. “Too many gods,” he said. “Too many processes. Now one process only.” The concrete and corrugated iron shack was all part of the process of simplification.
The village of the Sudha Saora had swarmed with people. Potasing, with about three times its population, seemed strangely deserted; as many as four houses out of five were locked up. I asked why this should be.
“They are working in the fields,” the PM said. “They are very active in employment.”
“But this is an in-between season with not much to do,” I suggested.
“If there is a willingness to work it is always to be found. We shall be growing new crops which now they are planting. One government inspector was here. He is sending us pineapple to try. In the old times people were lazy. They were drinking much wine. Even the young children were drinking wine. That was bad. We have cut down those palm trees which were giving the wine.”
“But what do they do to amuse themselves? Do they drink at all, dance, go to harvest festivals, stage the Ramayana, put on cockfights? Surely it is not all work? I know they’ve stopped painting.”
“Well, we cannot say it is all work, but we are not wishing to do these other things. I am telling you that everything is different now. On Sunday we are attending church. Practising also to sing hymns. They are telling us that soon a bus will be coming on Fridays for the cinema in Gunupur. This is something for which we are all very glad.”
The PM had turned his back on art, and art had forsaken him.
After several days without access to newspapers we had picked up a collection at Rayagada, one of which, coincidentally, contained an article on the Saora. It was particularly concerned with the problem of bringing them, along with the other tribal minorities, into the mainstream of Hindu society.
“We must turn our back on this talk,” Ranjan said.“For forty years they are talking but nothing is done. Are they wishing these people to be Hindus? For this they must have caste. A man who is born a Saora cannot have caste.”
The tamarind tree is of greatest use to the poor tribes who inhabit the forests of India. In times of famine they husk the tamarind seeds, which are then boiled and powdered into flour to make bread. Both the leaves and the flowers of this tree are edible, and the tamarind tree is much revered by its dependents.
In the Tribal Myths of Orissa, retold by Verrier Elwin in 1954, it is said:
When God planted the tamarind tree and tended it, it grew long finger-like fruit. He tasted it and found it good. He decided to share it with men. When vegetables run short, He thought, they could eat it as chutney. But I shan’t tell the birds about it, He decided, otherwise there won’t be enough for men.
God called Man and said to him: Guard this tree well. Plant it on your hills. It will be greatly to your profit.
—Naveen Patnaik, The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India
One of the rickshaw men down in the street had found a customer. An immensely corpulent man, helped by a small friend, climbed in. The rickshaw man stood up on a pedal, bringing all his slight weight to bear, and they moved off.
“Is that a Saora?” I asked.
“That is a Hindu. When a Saora becomes a rickshaw-puller it is end of road. They speak their contempt for working for pay. ‘I am a farmer,’ they will say to you. ‘I am not a slave.’”
I read on.“It says here that the Saora are exceptionally primitive.”
“Primitive, yes. Backward. Most people are seeing it in that way.”
“But in their villages there is no real poverty.”
“That is my personal opinion. They have no possessions, but no one is hungry. No, they are not poor.”
“Would you say they are devoid of personal ambition, and that crime is un
known?”
“They have no ambition. It is safe to mingle with them. You will not be robbed.”
“Do they work in each other’s fields, as it says they do in this paper?”
“That is automatic. They are also helping to build each other’s houses. They are very democratic. Not even the Gomang may give them an order. He will say, ‘Let us sit down and talk.’ Then he will say, ‘This is my advice.’”
“And this is backward?”
“The government says it is. The government tells us it is backward. I am very much liking these people but they are backward in all the things they do. Our national society is requiring from them the opposite of all these things.”
Beneath us another customer—this time of average size—had turned up for a rickshaw, and Ranjan called my attention to the transaction taking place. The slender boyish rickshaw-puller at the head of the line waved the fare to a grey-haired man waiting behind him.
“This young man is passing an easy fare to the old man who is following,” Ranjan said. “He is a Saora. I think only a Saora will do this. They have a goddess who tells them they must help, so they are eager to behave in this way.”
“Are they going to survive?”
“If they learn to use money they will survive.”
“How does that affect the situation?”
“Because if they are not understanding money they will be cheated.”
“By who?”
“Everyone who comes who is making business with them. Always it has been their custom to barter the things they make or grow. They know how many bags of rice to a goat; they cannot handle rupees. If a tribal man cannot barter he must sell to a merchant. He cheats them with his weights and with his money. When the merchant has robbed him it is the turn of the moneylender. Maybe the Saora’s crop has failed and he must buy food, but he does not understand what is meant when the moneylender speaks to him about interest. So this man cannot pay and he must give up his land and go to be a labourer and break stones or dig coal for all his life.”
“How often does this happen?”
“All the time. Who can tell you? Now we have industries more labour is wanting. Also politicians and landowners are desirous of obtaining more land. This is happening thousands of times every day.”
Norman Lewis’s Voices from the Old Sea, A Dragon Apparent, and Golden Earth are considered travel classics, and Naples ’44 is widely considered to be one of the best books written about World War II. He died at the age of 95 in July 2003. This story was excerpted from his book, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India.
As we entered Konarak the first rays of a glorious sunrise were illuminating the Black Pagoda, a temple of such solitary grandeur yet of such sensuality that my first impression was one of shock. I had been fortunate once, many years ago, to have visited an empty Taj Mahal on a bright moonlit night and had thought that nothing I would ever see could surpass it for its beauty. But the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum, a tomb, silent in its splendour while Konarak is alive, a constant motion of stone—celestial nymphs with swelling breasts and rounded hips, the rhythms of the lovers and the ecstasy on the faces of the erotic statues. Its energy is manifest in scenes of royal hunts and military expeditions, with infantry, cavalry, and elephants marching in full regalia, speaking of the dream of an ambitious and mighty monarch.
Conceived as a celestial chariot of the Sun God, pulled by seven exquisitely carved horses and supported by twenty-four monolithic wheels, each of which represents the division of time, the temple was constructed by King Narasimha Deva the First of the Ganga dynasty of Orissa in the mid-thirteenth century A.D. Twelve thousand men toiled ceaselessly for twelve years to complete this masterpiece, and it was named the Black Pagoda by the captains of coastal ships who used it as a landmark. Konarak is the peak of Orissan architecture about which it was said that the artisans “built like Titans and finished like jewelers.”
—Mark Shand, Travels on My Elephant
Encounter with a Rajah
GEOFFREY MOORHOUSE
Appearances can be deceptive.
I WAS LED OUT OF THE PALACE AND ACROSS THE COMPOUND AT THE back, where the dogs now lay prone and panting under the trees. We walked towards a low range of buildings that looked as if they might be stables, with a Land-rover and what could have been the original Willys Jeep parked outside. A number of men seemed to be waiting for something to happen, but stirred involuntarily as we approached, then saluted and grinned at one and the same time, with the mixture of affection and subservience that usually characterises the inferior greeting his master in India. Ram gestured to an open doorway, then turned and left me to fend for myself. I walked into a spacious area where a nondescript figure in slacks was bent over a piece of machinery under neon lights. I was about to ask him where I could find His Highness when he heard my step, straightened up, wiped his hands on an oily rag and came forward to greet me.
It was not quite the setting I had expected for an encounter with Sri Brihadamba Das Raja Rajagopala Thondaiman Bahadur; nor did the ninth and last Rajah of Pudukkottai look at all like an antique. This elderly Indian, with grey stubble where a beard might have been, was slender and supple, and he moved easily across the floor. He was surrounded by lathes, jigs, drills and all the tooling that would have fitted nicely into any small industrial workshop in the Black Country of the English Midlands. The maker’s name on the biggest pieces was, in fact, Willson of Birmingham. The place smelt of engine oil and warm iron fittings.
“It’s amazing,” I said. “This is your hobby?”
His head wobbled fractionally, almost apologetically. “I get a great deal of pleasure from it.” He spoke perfect English with the merest trace of accent, but very softly and diffidently. Every gesture he made was restrained, until he touched his machinery. Only then did he seem utterly sure of himself.
“Come, let me show you,” he said, leading me out into the yard with something approaching authority. He raised the bonnet of the Jeep and contemplated the engine with a gleam in his eye. “Yes, it is one of the first production models. I have restored her and converted the engine from petrol to diesel. That is more economical.” We went back inside. “And that is a four-kilowatt generator I have just finished for the estate up at Kodaikanal. It will run when my windmill is becalmed. I installed that last year.” He really was proud of having made these useful things. He was the very model of the shy and obsessive inventor, the one who is teased for blushing if a girl so much as speaks to him, but is pursued by the most attractive and kindest of them, who is desperate to mother him and gets him towards the end of the script. I couldn’t imagine him behaving regally anywhere, certainly not issuing edicts from the throne to a council of apprehensive courtiers. Gandhi used to call him Rajah Rishi, the Ascetic Prince.
He led me to a corner of the workshop, where a number of Hindu deities in gaudy bazaar colours were framed on a tin wall. An incense holder stood on a toolbox before them. His Highness bore Lord Shiva’s mark in grey ash on his forehad. He indicated that I should sit on a wooden chair after he had laid a clean cloth there, then drew up another one opposite.
I dared to say what had gradually been dawning on me. “You really would rather have been a mechanic than ruler of a princely state, wouldn’t you?”
A sweet smile crept over his face, and for a moment his eyes seemed less tired, less pouched with wear and tear. Then came the diffident inclination of the head again.“My mother was a very old-fashioned lady and it would have broken her heart.”
Geoffrey Moorhouse has written several books on a wide variety of subjects, including the highly acclaimed Calcutta, To the Frontier, Sydney: The Story of a City, and The Pilgrimage of Grace: The Rebellion That Shook Henry VIII’s Throne. This story was excerpted from OM: An Indian Pilgrimage. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in North Yorkshire, England.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if an Indian is nodding “yes” or shaking his head “no,” because typical In
dian body language includes a loose wobbling of the head that looks like a simultaneous nod and shake. The wobble means “ok,” “I hear you,” “sure,” but not necessarily “yes.” A clear nod is a “yes”; a clear shake is a “no.” The head wobble says many things, including, in conversation, “right, right, go on.”
—JO’R and LH
The Mirage of Life
DAVID YEADON
A long border to border journey reveals nothing and everything.
CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE THE UTTER EMPTINESS. A WHITE nothingness—a brilliant, frost-colored land—flat as an iced lake, burning the eyes with its whiteness. Not a bump, not a shrub, not a bird, not a breeze. Nothing but white in every direction, horizon after horizon, on and on for over two hundred miles east to west, and almost one hundred miles north to south.
This is the Rann of Kutch (or Kachchh), the largest area of nothingness on the planet; uninhabited, the ultimate physical barrier, separating India from Pakistan along its far western border. Only camels can cross these wastes, and at terrible cost. During the monsoon seasons it’s a shallow salt marsh, carrying the seasonal rivers of Rajasthan slowly out to the Arabian Sea, just south of the great Indus delta of Pakistan. Then for months it’s a treacherous quagmire of molasses mud under a brittle salt skin. Periods of safe crossing are minimal. Occasional piles of bleached bones attest to the terrors of this place. Tales of survivors, reluctantly told, are unrelieved litanies of human (and animal) distress. There is life out here—herds of wild asses the size of large dogs and vast flocks of flamingoes encamped in mud-nest “cities”—but very hard to find.
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