India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

The raja’s chief minister didn’t like that. During all the years of the raja’s childlessness the chief minister had grown to believe that his own son would one day inherit the kingdom. So, from the very start, the chief minister hated Ayappa.

  ‘When Ayappa was ten years old, something unexpected happened. The queen gave birth to a son. But Raja Rajashekhar had grown so attached to Ayappa, the foundling, the gift of the gods, that he made it clear that Ayappa was still to succeeed him on the throne.

  The queen and chief minister now began to conspire. Their plan was this. The queen was to pretend to fall ill. She would say she had a headache. The palace doctor – who was also in the conspiracy – would make a show of doing everything he knew. The queen’s headache wouldn’t go away, and at last the doctor would say, “There is only one thing that can save the queen’s life. She must be given the milk of a tigress.”

  That was what the queen, the chief minister, and the doctor plotted to do, and that was what they did. Raja Rajashekhar was driven to despair. How could the milk of a tigress be obtained? How could anyone milk a tigress? The queen and the chief minister, however, knew very well what would happen. They knew that Ayappa was valorous, and they knew that, though he was only ten, as soon as Ayappa heard of the queen’s need, he would undertake to go out and bring back the milk of a tigress. And that was what Ayappa said he intended to do. Raja Rajashekhar knew it would be suicide for Ayappa to try to milk a tigress, and he forbade the boy to leave the palace. But Ayappa used a trick and got out, deceiving the raja in order to save the queen.’

  That was how the first part of the story ended. When Deviah began the second part, he said, ‘So far we’ve been dealing with history. Now we enter the realms of mythology. In order to understand why Ayappa was born, we have to go back 3000 years.’

  And, slipping easily down the aeons, we began to travel back to the time of the gods.

  Deviah said, ‘Ayappa was really the son of Shiva and Vishnu.’ They were both male deities, but for the purposes of the story Vishnu had to be considered to be in a female incarnation: Deviah had no trouble with these transformations. So the Ayappa who went out into the forest to get the milk of a tigress was not the mere boy the queen and the chief minister thought. He was the son of two of the gods of the Hindu trinity.

  Deviah said, ‘When he was wandering in the forest he came across a demon, and he killed the demon.’ There was a story attached to this demon. Deviah was quite ready to break off the main narrative and give the inset story. I asked him not to.

  He said, ‘All right. To cut a long story short, the monster or demon Ayappa killed in the forest was a female monster, and she had been terrorizing the devas.’ They were the gods – residing and having their councils in the place where gods reside. (Ayappa must have killed the monster by some means not available to the gods. There would have been another story here, and Deviah almost certainly knew it.) When the monster was killed, there was rejoicing among the gods. They, of course, knew what Ayappa’s predicament was. ‘So,’ Deviah said, ‘out of gratitude, the gods turned themselves into tigers and tigresses, and Ayappa came back to Raja Rajshekhar’s palace riding a tiger. The tiger was believed to be Brahma.’ The son of Shiva and Vishnu, riding Brahma: completing the Hindu trinity.

  Deviah said, ‘This forest expedition of Ayappa’s had lasted two years. The queen’s headache had long been cured. In fact, she had lost her headache as soon as Ayappa had left the palace to go and milk a tigress. And the day Ayappa returned to Raja Rajashkehar’s palace, he was twelve years old.’

  The identity of Ayappa – coming back riding a tiger – was now clear to everyone. It was what the rishi, who was Lord Shiva himself, had prophesied: that on the foundling’s twelfth birthday his parentage would be known. And now all enemies, all the conspiring of queen and chief minister, vanished like morning mist, and Ayappa in due course entered into his inheritance.

  The wicked chief minister, who had wanted his own son to rule, fell ill with an incurable disease – a real disease. One night Ayappa appeared to him in a dream and told him to go and wash away his sins in the River Pampa. So he did, and was cured; and then, calling Ayappa’s name, the chief minister ran all the way to the temple which Ayappa had been divinely guided to build at the top of a hill. He, the chief minister or former chief minister, thus became the first of Ayappa’s pilgrims.

  What about the Arab in the story? He belonged to the historical Ayappa figure, Deviah said. He would have been a raider or a pirate. He had been defeated by Ayappa, and then he had been an ally. No attempt had been made to get him to give up his religion; when he died, a mosque had been built over his grave. This mosque stood at the start of the 25-mile walk up the hill to the temple of Ayappa, where the divine light flared every year on the 14th of January. All pilgrims had to pay their respects to the mosque. That was why there were many Muslims among Ayappa’s pilgrims. This was something else that attracted Deviah. He liked the mixture of the two religions.

  I had never, before this journey, heard of the Ayappa pilgrimage. And perhaps if I hadn’t got to know Deviah I might have taken the black-clad figures for granted, part of the crowded Indian scene, and might not have thought to ask about them. The appearance of the divine light at the shrine coincided with a harvest festival in the South, and with a great religious fair in the North; the pilgrimage, the walk up the sacred hill, had perhaps been grafted on to something quite ancient, something to do with the change of the seasons. As the pilgrimage to Ayappa and Vavar, it had been going on for centuries, Deviah said; but in recent years, for some reason, and in spite of the 40 days’ penance and the long walk up to the shrine, it had become very popular. A million and a quarter men were expected to be at the shrine at the time of the appearance of the divine light; and some newspapers said that during the year 25 million men might have made the pilgrimage – though, even for India, that figure seemed rather high.

  Perhaps the popularity of the Ayappa cult had to do with the fact that people now had a little more money; that roads were better, travel easier, and more buses were available; that more men, young and old, could now, for the best of reasons, get away from their families for a little and become tourists. The Ayappa buses could be like tourist buses; they sometimes took the pilgrims to some of the sights on the way – though this was wrong, Deviah said, since sightseeing was a pleasure; and an Ayappa pilgrim should do nothing that could be construed as a pleasure.

  People had a little more money now. It showed in the Karnataka countryside on the road south from Goa. Indian poverty was still visible, the middens, the broken-down aspect of houses and lanes. But the fields, of sugar-cane and cotton and other crops, looked rich and well-tended; the village houses were often neat, with plastered walls and red-tile roofs. There was nothing like the destitution I had seen 26 years before, when I had travelled through on a slow, stopping bus. There were none of the walking skeletons, with their deranged eyes. The agricultural revolution was a reality here; the increased supply of food showed. Hundreds of thousands of people all over India, perhaps millions of people, had worked for this for four decades, in the best way: very few of them with an idea of drama or sacrifice or mission, nearly all of them simply doing jobs.

  No corner of this land was without its connection with the gods: mocking when it was a land of scarcity and famine, but more fitting now. Tractors pulled trailers loaded with cotton in big, fat, hessian-wrapped bundles, the cotton forcing its way, like a kind of strained liquid, through the brown sacking. At the same time people in village yards were engaged in biblical-looking tasks, threshing, winnowing. The land was almost beautiful, almost without pain for the beholder.

  It was a kind of regeneration that could have come only slowly. There would have been false moves, failures, wasted labour. As there seemed to be even now: a forest department had been at work, planting eucalyptus trees in blocks beside the road. The planting had been successful; for mile upon mile there had been something like shade on both sides of the ro
ad, refreshing to look on. But all of that, the work of years, might have to be levelled now, the land stripped again, a fresh start made: the latest word about the eucalyptus was that it was a killer tree, greedy of moisture, desiccating rather than protecting the field it stood beside.

  The road was very busy, reflecting the agricultural activity. But the trucks, though decorated with love, were overloaded in the Indian way, and were driven fast and close to one another, as though metal was unbreakable and made a man a god, and anything could be asked of an engine and a steering wheel and brakes. Between Goa and Bangalore that day 10 or 12 trucks had been wrecked, and some people had almost certainly been killed, in seven bad truck accidents. Trucks had driven off the road into ponds; trucks had driven into one another. Driver’s cabs had crumpled, glass had shattered. Axles had broken, wheels had splayed at odd angles; and sometimes trucks, like vulnerable, soft-bellied animals, had turned upside down below their cruel loads, showing the wretchedness and rustiness of their metal underbellies and the smoothness of their recapped tires.

  Through this old, new land we came to the town of Bangalore. It was 5000 feet above sea level, and was known in the old days for its rain and mild climate, its race course, its Simla-like civilities. Bangalore – though it had a British cantonment or garrison area – had been part of the princely state of Mysore, one of the largest princely states in British India. It had a palace. The royal family of Mysore had been known not only for their great wealth, second only to the fabulous but idle wealth of the Nizam of Hyderabad, but also for their responsibility as rulers, their pride in their state and their people. They had been known as builders of colleges and hospitals and irrigation systems, planters of roadside trees and big public gardens. Bangalore had been a place to which people retired or withdrew from the steamier India of business and work.

  Since independence Bangalore had changed. The climate that had attracted retired people began to attract industry, and Bangalore had grown. It was the centre of the Indian space research programme; it was one of the more important centres of the Indian aircraft industry. Every kind of scientific institution was in Bangalore. The tree-lined roads of the garden city of the maharajas was now full of the noise and smell and fumes of three-wheelers and cars. It was no longer a city for walking in.

  *

  The development of Indian science and technology interested me. What sort of people had made the move, and given India an industrial revolution in 50 years?

  In Bombay I had fleetingly talked to Dr Srinivasan, chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, at a social gathering at his apartment. He had told me then that his grandfather had been a purohit, a priest, a kind of pujari. His father, now eighty-six, and living in Bangalore, had been a schoolteacher.

  Late one afternoon, a day or so after I arrived, I went to call on Dr Srinivasan’s father. The old man was in a dhoti; he had a thin red caste-mark down the centre of his forehead. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, small, slender, fine in every way. He had the face of a man with a deep internal life. He showed an old passport-sized photograph of his father, Shadagopachar, the purohit. Shadagopachar was in his purohit garb, one shoulder bare. His eyes were bright, focussed on the camera, but his appearance was masked by his caste-marks: the thin red line down the middle of the forehead, and two much thicker marks going up from the eyebrows. Those thick white marks were of mud, a refined mud that was still sold in little cakes in the shops. The white mud on the forehead was the symbol of the feet of the Lord.

  The family had migrated to Bangalore in the 1890s from a town 40 miles or so away. In Bangalore Shadagopachar had been taught Sanskrit and instructed in all the Vedas by his uncle. But purohits earned very little – four annas, a quarter of a rupee, for a puja – and Shadagopachar also had a job in the maharaja’s government as a lower division clerk. He collected files, filed them, and bound them, and in this job he earned between 11 and 15 rupees a month. Graduates at that time earned from 25 to 30 rupees, around two pounds; but Shadagopachar was only a matriculate.

  Shadagopachar wanted his son to pass the university examination because graduates could get good jobs with the government, and make much more than they could make as purohits.

  ‘But we were all taught Sanskrit. We were all taught to do the morning and evening prayers. There was a midday prayer as well, but because we had to go to school we would do that prayer in the morning before we went to school. When I graduated, I applied for a job in the education department. This was in 1925.’

  That was how the schoolteaching career had begun. But the knowledge of Sanskrit and the general religious training he had received from his father had also stayed with him. Out of that confluence – the new education, the purohit or brahmin’s difficult, abstract learning, the concern with the right performance of complicated rituals, the stillness that went with the performance of some of those rituals – there had come a generation of scientists. The old Hindu Sanskrit learning – which a late 18th-century scholar-administrator like Sir William Jones had seen as archaic and profound as the Greek, and had sought, in a kind of romantic, living archaeology, to dig up from secretive, caste-bound brahmins in the North – that old learning had, 200 years later, in the most roundabout way, seeded the new.

  It might have been coincidence, but the two scientists I met later in Bangalore – men of different disciplines and from different parts of the country – also had purohit or priestly grandfathers.

  Subramaniam’s family came from a small village which, with the post-independence reorganization of Indian states, was now in the neighbouring state of Andhra.

  ‘My ancestors lived for a long time in that area. There is a small spot not far from the village – this spot’s out in the middle of the jungle – and there is a small shrine in that spot. Our family say that the deity there is our deity.

  ‘The first ancestor I know about is my great-great-great-grandfather. There is a strange legend about him. The legend is that there was this tiger who was making a nuisance of himself in the area. This ancestor decided to tackle it. He wrapped himself in blankets, took a machete, went to the place where the tiger attacked people, and stood there, inviting the tiger, so to speak, to attack him. The tiger did, and my ancestor hacked it to death. I heard the story as a child. It was just this story of physical valour. Perhaps exaggerated. And that’s about as far back as I can go.

  ‘My family considered themselves to be part of Mysore State, the maharaja’s state. My grandmother – she survived until the 1960s – divided the world into three parts. The first part was the Raja’s Land, Raja Seemay. That was Mysore State, where things were nice and good and pleasant, and where people who were fortunate like ourselves lived. The second part of the world was what she called Kumpani Seemay, the Company’s Land. At the time I didn’t connect the words – the Company was the East India Company, and the word was still used by her in the 1950s. The Company’s Land was part of India, but it wasn’t as nice as the Raja’s Land. It was true that some of our relatives lived in the Company’s Land, but you had to have sympathy for people who lived there. Beyond these two areas was the rest of the world. This way of thinking was something that was just natural to my grandmother.

  ‘We are a family of brahmins. In a way we are priestly, but my grandfather was not a priest. He was a small landowner, and he was also a minor government official. As a village official he would have been paid 10 rupees, perhaps five rupees. The village would have considered him comfortable, but not rich. He was comfortable socially rather than economically. There were many in the village richer than him.

  ‘My grandfather realized that education in English was essential, and he made sure his son got that education. And so my father, who was born in the 1900s, was the first man in our family who went to schools where English was the medium. My father just applied to a school and got in. Nowadays it’s a rat-race to get your child into schools; the demand is great. But then my father just applied. He probably walked to school. Our vill
age didn’t have a high school. Many people walked long distances to school. I myself – and this was in the 1940s – walked several miles to school.

  ‘I don’t know what led my father to science. I personally feel that the scientific tradition is not alien to India. I think that science comes naturally to Indians. Many Indians like to think of themselves as having a tradition of pursuing knowledge, and science is knowledge as it was understood by Bhaskara, one of our old or ancient scientists. Today in India you can buy Bhaskara’s treatise on astronomy of 600 or 700 AD, and there is extant a famous medical treatise of about the same time. I must make it clear that I don’t for a moment believe all these other people who run around saying that everything – atom bombs, rockets, aeroplanes – was invented by ancient Indians.

  ‘But Indian knowledge became out of date. The measure of that is that what Newton wrote in 1660 was not understood or appreciated in India until the middle of the 19th century. On the other hand, in 1000 AD, and for a century or two after that, there was a knowledge that India had which would have surprised Europe. Especially in mathematics. In 1000 AD Indians were confident in their knowledge. We have evidence for that. But by 1800 that confidence had vanished. Raja Ram Mohun Roy was the first man who publicly acknowledged that the fact of the matter was that there were many things we knew nothing about.’

  Ram Mohun Roy came from Bengal. He campaigned against the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. He sought, more generally, to purify Hinduism, and to bring the new learning of Europe to India. He was India’s first modern reformer, and his dates are astonishing: he was born about 1772, and died, during a mission to England, in 1833.

  I told Subramaniam what I had read somewhere about the Mogul emperor Jehangir (who succeeded the great Akbar, ruled from 1605 to 1625, and loved the arts): Jehangir had scoffed at the notion of a New World on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Subramaniam said, ‘And Aurangzeb’ – ruling from 1650 to 1700, a period of rapid Mogul decay – ‘referred to England with contempt. He said it was a tiny island, its king like a minor raja in India. This was late in the 17th century.