Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  A few hundred yards from the ragpickers hillock lies the rutted entrance to an even more oppressive world: a colony of stone crushers. I first noticed them while landing at New Delhi’s international airport. In certain air traffic patterns, the planes sweep low over a vast scarred landscape of eroded red clay rock quarries just outside the airport grounds. If you peer down carefully into the pits, you can see small bands of shirtless men and scarved women and even children smashing rocks by hand with picks and axes. In summer, they do this work in temperatures of up to 120 degrees or more. There are about five thousand of them, mainly landless Untouchables from neighboring, drought-stricken Rajasthan who are collected by unscrupulous labor contractors, forced into debt, and then set to work in the quarries for decades, even generations, until their loans are repaid. The workers live in shanty colonies on the rim of the pits. Shortly after dawn each morning they carry their picks and sledgehammers on their shoulders down into the quarries and begin smashing against the walls. When piles of rock accumulate at their feet, they lift the stones and hurl them into flatbed trucks that arrive to haul the rocks away. A family earns about $1.50 per truck-load at present exchange rates, after commissions and expenses deducted by the quarry owners. On a good day, a fit husband and wife working hard together can fill two or three trucks. The pits are divided up among families until all the stones on a given wall are crushed. Typically, a single family will smash rocks on the same wall in the same pit for seven years or more, day after day. Sisyphus could not have known worse than this.

  It is easier,far easier,to accept a humble position if it is divinely ordained. To a Hindu, each person’s place in the world is not determined by chance. A Brahmin is a Brahmin as a reward for the virtues of a previous life, and a Shudra is a Shudra for past sins. It is all perfectly just. Over the course of several incarnations, even the lowest peasant can rise to the top of the heap.

  Until the present, this belief made social inequities tolerable. But when the order of the world is no longer changeless, it is no longer divine. Class is increasingly determined by money rather than by God. Indians have traditionally seen caste as a means of cooperation, a way of structuring society so that all members can work together in harmony. But if the system is stripped of its religious meaning, class becomes a struggle of each person against every other. If stratification has no basis in morality, it becomes a prison.

  —Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana through India

  Before climbing down into the pits one day to talk with the crushers, I visited the manager of the quarry “labor society,” which skimmed a percentage of the crushers’ wages and in theory invested the money in housing and water. We talked for a while about how the quarry system works. I asked casually why all the crushers were either Untouchables or tribals.“It’s the nature of the work,” the manager answered, laughing. “You wouldn’t expect a Brahmin to come and do this, would you?”

  God forbid. Wandering that afternoon from pit to pit, dodging stones as they fell from hammers, I asked the crushers whether any of the Brahmin-born, socialist-bred labor organizers or politicians who lived in the big flats and houses just a few hundred yards away had ever accomplished anything for them. Nobody shied from the opportunity to complain.

  “In the morning, you can’t work because of the heat and at night you can’t sleep because of the mosquitoes,” said Lal Chand, squatting on a pile of rocks in the shade. “We’ve got no electricity. The nearby slums have electricity, but we don’t. There are all sorts of people who come here and say you will get electricity. They want something from us—votes, money—then they go away. Nothing changes. They tempt us with a lot of things, but then they disappear.” He has been crushing rocks for six or seven years, he said. I asked Chand how he occupied his mind while swinging his sledgehammer. He said mainly he thought about riding the bus to buy liquor and get roaring drunk in Haryana, a journey he could afford to undertake about once every twenty days.

  In a neighboring pit I found a young, attractive, muscular married couple, Choti Devi and Bahwaral Lal, rhythmically hacking at a wall and loading a truck with stones. They were born and raised on the rim of the quarry—their parents work in the same pit—and were married fourteen years ago, when he was twelve and she was eleven. They have two sons, two daughters. They have been chopping at this same wall for ten years.

  “I keep thinking about food all day—that’s what makes me work,” he said, glistening with sweat.

  “What about your kids—will they do the same job?” I asked.

  “My son will do the same thing,” she answered, hoisting stones to her head and heaving them into a parked truck. “I’ll send him to school, but there’s never enough money, so he’ll do this as well. This work is nothing difficult. I have the strength.”

  “What’s so special about kids?” her husband asked, smashing stones for Devi to lift. “I was a kid and I did it. If there’s no alternative, why not? I studied math and science, but now there is no alternative.”

  “He gets mad in this heat,” said his wife. “Two years ago he got mad and ran away. We both blame it on the heat. We’ve got to live this life. If we fight, it’s because of the heat. We’ve got to take our anger out on somebody.”

  “It helps when she comes and works,” he said. “It helps a lot.”

  I asked about New Delhi’s various labor organizers and socialist activists. What did they think of them?

  “They come and tell us to become one,” he answered. “How can laborers become one? We’ve got pressures from the masters. If we get into the union, we’ll lose our jobs.”

  “What worries you the most?” I asked.

  “Tuberculosis.”

  Silence. Then the rhythm of hammers on rocks, rocks falling on rocks, rocks landing in trucks. A jet flew overhead, banking low on approach to Indira Gandhi International Airport. I asked Lal what he thinks about when he sees the planes.

  ”We want to go there,” he said, stopping now to lean on his pick. “I feel angry when I see them. They’re looking at us. Even I want to fly. I want to sit on an airplane and see the world.”

  “Perhaps it will happen,” I mused, foolishly.

  “The only time I’ll fly from here is when I quit the world,” he answered.

  Steve Coll is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the managing editor of The Washington Post, and the author of several books, including Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, and On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia, from which this story was excerpted.

  I was watching the activity at Kali’s shrine one day when a crowd of foreign tourists came through. Their guide had not even finished explaining the significance of the goddess and the form of worship practised by her devotees, when one of the party went to the priest in charge of the water tub, bought two pats of ghee and with caricatured movements hurled these in slow motion at the bronze, so that his wife could capture his bravado with her cine-camera. Many of the foreigners roared with laughter, while the nearest Indians managed to look disdainful and disapproving without moving a muscle or uttering so much as a sigh.

  I hurried away, ashamed by the man’s vulgarity and the colour of my skin, to sit on the steps near Meenakshi’s shrine. A small boy came past with a basket of flowers on his head, and when I smiled at him he tried to wink at me by closing both eyes at once. Shortly afterwards he returned with a girl of about the same age. She thrust a flower at me and I, mistaking her purpose, declined it as gently as I could.

  She held it out more urgently. “No money,” she said. “Take.”

  So I did, and prayed that she and her brother might have a long life.

  —Geoffrey Moorhouse, OM: An Indian Pilgrimage

  Beyond Turkman Gate

  WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

  The author enters the strange world of the hijras, India’s eunuchs.

  TURKMAN GATE LIES ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE
OF OLD DELHI. Most of the ancient city walls were pulled down twenty years ago and the gate now stands alone on a traffic island like a great beached whale washed up on the edge of the city.

  One morning in mid-January I jumped over the railings and climbed up to the parapet of the gate. It was a little before dawn; the Old City was just getting up. Sweepers raked the dirt and dung away from the front of stalls; a muezzin called from the minaret of a nearby mosque; chai- wallahs pulled their blankets closer around them and lit their burners to boil the first tea saucepan of the day. It was still very cold.

  I waited for a full hour before I caught a glimpse of the sight that I had come to see. Just as the sun was rising, a solitary bicycle rickshaw jolted out of the labyrinth of the Old City and trundled underneath the gate. Inside were three figures. They were clad in brightly coloured silks and muslins, flowing saris edged in glittering gold brocade. They were heavily made up, with painted cheeks and scarlet lipstick; each of their noses was pierced with a single diamond stud. They were dressed for the nautch [type of dance performance popular in the early nineteenth century], dressed as women, yet they were not women. Even at a distance of twenty yards I could see that their physiognomy was very different from the delicate features of Indian girls. Their faces were too strong, their arms were too thick, their shoulders were wrong. They smoked. Physically, they resembled painted men, yet they were not men. Like Dargah Quli Khan’s friend Taqi, the figures in the rickshaw were all eunuchs.

  Eunuchs were once common over the width of Eurasia. They are fleetingly referred to in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian stelae and became popular as servants—and as passive sexual play-things—in the degenerate days of the later Roman Empire. In the Muslim world their impotence made them perfect harem guards and they rose to power as chamberlains, governors, and even generals. They were slaves in Anglo-Saxon England and survived in Italy well into the nineteenth century, singing castrato roles in opera as well as in the Vatican Sistine choir.

  Yet today eunuchs have apparently died out everywhere except in the subcontinent. Here they are still not uncommon figures in the poorer parts of the larger cities. In all there are thought to be some three-quarters of a million of them surviving. Modern Indian eunuchs dress as women and arrive uninvited at weddings and birth celebrations. They dance and sing and make bawdy jokes. From the poor they extract money in payment for the good luck and fecundity that their blessings are supposed to impart. From the rich they take larger sums by threatening to strip naked unless paid to leave; terrified middle-class party-givers will give them anything as long as they go quickly. They are volatile, vulgar and can sometimes be violent.

  Yet despite their frequent appearances in public, very little is actually known about the Indian eunuchs. They are fiercely secretive and of their own choice inhabit a dim world of ambiguity and half-truths. They trust no one, and hate being questioned about their lives; if they are pressed, at best they will slam their doors in your face. Only occasionally does a scandal—a stabbing during a territorial dispute or rumours of a forcible castration—throw them into the headlines and into the dear light of day.

  For ten days after that first sighting from the top of the Turkman Gate, I trawled the teeming alleys of Old Delhi, trying to identify the houses of the eunuchs and attempting to persuade one of them to talk to me. Sometimes I would receive a monosyllabic answer to a question, but generally my enquiries were met with either blank silences or, more often, with graphic expletives.

  One fruitless morning, after an unusually rude dismissal from a eunuch’s house, I retired dispirited to a nearby dhaba for a cup of chai. There I finally decided to throw in my efforts at making contact with the Delhi eunuchs; it was taking up a lot of time and there was still no hint of a breakthrough: after ten days I still knew as little about them as I had when I had begun. While I was sitting there, sipping my glass of hot, sweet Indian tea, I was approached by a shifty-looking man who asked me whether I could help him; he had seen me with my camera; could I help him mend his? I had nothing better to do, so I agreed to try. He led me to his house and in a few minutes I had diagnosed the trouble—a flat battery. Zakir thanked me and then quietly revealed that he had been watching me for several days. He knew what I was looking for; and he indicated that he might be able to help.

  He was, he said, a jeweller. His family had always been Delhi jewellers—his ancestors had served the Mughal emperors and before them the Delhi Sultans. At the court they had made the jewellery for the Imperial eunuchs. When the British evicted the Mughals from the Red Fort in 1857, some of the court eunuchs had come to live nearby, a few minutes’ walk from the Turkman Gate. There his family had continued to serve them. He said that he had known all the local eunuchs since his childhood, and that he still made all their jewellery. I had helped him, he said, now it was his obligation to help me. He instructed me to meet him the next day at the Turkman Gate, soon after dawn. He would see what he could do.

  I was there on time, and Zakir was true to his word. He led me through the narrow alleys of the Old City until we came to a lane barely two feet wide. At the end of the lane, round a chicken-leg turn lay a large haveli of the late Mughal period. He knocked three times, and the door swung open.

  Like most things in Delhi, the curious position of the eunuchs in Indian society can be explained by the head-on collision of two very different traditions, one Muslim, one Hindu. Hijras (eunuchs) are referred to in the very earliest of Hindu texts, the Vedas, written in the second millennium B.C. Here castration was seen as a degrading punishment meted out only to the very lowest in society. An Untouchable who was caught urinating near a Brahmin could be castrated, as could any lower-caste Hindu who had sex with a Brahmin woman. The act of castration brought the criminal to a level even lower than the Untouchables. By the time of the Mahabharata, one thousand years later, the position of eunuchs had improved very little. To be a eunuch was a curse; even the sight of them was defiling to a Brahmin. No one was allowed to accept alms from them, no one was allowed to consume food prepared by them, they were excluded from all sacrifices. As a solitary concession, non-Brahmins were permitted to watch them dance.

  The position of eunuchs in Islam was always very different. Although the Prophet Muhammad forbade castration, eunuchs were always common in Muslim society and because of their sterility were considered free of the taint of sexuality. They were thus especially suitable to guard sacred relics and great sanctuaries. The shirt of Muhammad in Cairo was guarded by eunuchs, as was the Great Mosque in Mecca. Pilgrims—hajjis—would kiss the eunuchs’ hands on their way to see the Ka’ba, the most holy shrine in all Islam.

  Dedicated courtiers, undistracted by families, they soon rose to powerful positions, first in Mameluk Egypt, then in Ottoman Turkey, but most prominently of all in Mughal India. “The kings, princes, queens, and princesses place great confidence in these people,” wrote the Italian traveller Niccolao Manucchi. “All people of quality have eunuchs in their service and all the other officials, servants, and slaves are bound to account to the eunuchs for all they do.” As officials and as singers, dancers, and conjurors they were still prominent figures in Safdar Jung’s Delhi; according to Dargah Quli Khan, Taqi was a favourite of the Emperor and had access to His Majesty’s private apartments.

  When the Mughal court was disbanded, Muslim hijras were exposed for the first time to the other, Hindu, tradition of eunuchry. In typical Delhi fashion the two traditions merged, and the hijras became subject to a very Indian compromise.

  To give birth to a hermaphrodite is still considered by simple Indians to be one of the most terrible curses that can befall a woman. At the same time the blessing of a hijra is considered to be unusually potent. It can make a barren woman fertile. It can scare off malevolent djinns. It can nullify the evil eye. In the streets hijras are jeered at, sometimes even pelted with rubbish. Yet at a poor family’s most crucial and most public celebrations, at a marriage or at the birth of a male child, the absence of a hijra wo
uld almost invalidate the whole ceremony. The eunuchs themselves have aided the merging of the two traditions. They no longer guard harems; instead, as in the Mahabharata, they dance for a living. They no longer dress like men as they did in the Mughal court; instead they deck themselves in jewellery and cosmetics and wear saris. Nevertheless, they retain many of the characteristics of their courtly forebears.

  The extraordinary accomplishments of Muslims—builders of the Taj Mahal and scores of palaces, weavers, landscape designers, and painters of great skill—are often undervalued by Hindu India, whose temple architects, lacking the arch and dome, built dark, massive towers often distinguished only by their sculpture and friezes.

  —Barbara Crossette, India: Facing the Twenty-First Century

  Manucchi gives a rather patronizing description of characteristics and temperaments of the eunuchs of Mughal times. “Among the qualities of this sort of animal is their extreme covetousness in collecting gold, silver, diamonds, and pearls,” he writes. “They are afraid to spend money even when it is necessary, fond of receiving, niggardly in giving. Nevertheless they are anxious to appear well dressed. They are foul in speech and fond of silly stories.Yet among Mohammedans they are the strictest observers of the faith.”

  Manucchi obviously disliked the Delhi eunuchs: “They are baboons,” he wrote, “insolent, licentious baboons.” Anyone who comes across them casually today can easily see why he was so rude. Yet you do not have to spend very long with them to appreciate how India, then as now, has turned them into what they are, how it has brutalized them and forced them to anaesthetize their own sensibilities.