Not a Nice Man to Know

by Khushwant Singh

  Kali Reincarnated

  How and when she returned to civilization is shrouded in mystery. According to her sometime in the year 1946 she found herself in the Kali Temple in Calcutta. The ‘transport’ had been preceded by a mystic experience during Navratri when she had a clear vision of Kali enthroned in Kalighat. It was accompanied by ecstatic vibrations (‘spirit of pure joy’ is how she described it) and a subtle emanation of the fragrance of sandalwood. She felt that the goddess had sent for her to make her an instrument of some divine design. She describes the mystic journey, analogous to the holy Ganga’s descent from Gangotri to the Bay of Bengal. She spent the day amongst the throng of worshippers. Apparently her presence did not attract any attention. When the evening service was over she hid herself behind the goddess. The priests locked the sanctum without noticing her. She spent the night in prayer and meditation. Next morning when the head priest, Haripada Bandopadhyaya, opened the temple door he saw standing beside the statue of the Goddess a young woman who looked every inch a fair reincarnation of Kali; long tresses (jata) falling down her shoulder, torso covered with leopard skin, trident in one hand, kamandal in the other. He prostrated himself before her.

  The news spread like wild-fire through the metropolis. Pilgrims in their thousands came to pay her homage. Offerings of fruit, flowers, coconuts, silver and gold jewellery were heaped at her feet. Amongst her visitors was Justice Rama Prasad Mookerjee of the high court of Calcutta who was the elder brother of Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, minister in Nehru’s cabinet.

  Shraddha Mata was persuaded to give up her vow of silence to give her message to the people. For several weeks following she was housed in the palace of Rani Rasmoni in Dakshineshwar (where before her Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita had stayed). She was invited to expound on the Gita. She did so to large audiences, sometimes addressing four meetings in a day. But she never failed to spend some time of the day or night at the Kali temple. Her chief achievement was to persuade the priests and worshippers to give up sacrificing animals to the goddess and instead make offerings of corn, grain and vegetables.

  The Nehru Connection

  Shraddha Mata was not very anxious to discuss her relationship with Nehru; I did not press her on the subject. But in the course of our dialogue Mathai’s insinuations in his two books on Nehru and the conjectures made by the press surfaced. In several interviews given to a variety of journals, she has said that it was Shyama Prasad Mookerjee who brought her to Delhi and fixed the interview with the Prime Minister. She was given fifteen minutes to have her say; she was with him for an hour-and-a-half. What she said to Nehru in the first meeting can be briefly summed up as follows: Nehru’s secularism ignored the religious and cultural traditions of India and had therefore little support of the sadhus and sannyasis who were guardians of these traditions. Nehru did not give Sanskrit the place it deserved as the mother of all languages. He had toyed with the idea of introducing the Roman script to replace Devanagari and other vernacular scripts. He wanted the wording in the Constitution to be ‘India that is Bharat’ instead of what it finally emerged under her insistence as ‘Bharat that is India’. And so on.

  I told her that I had gathered from some members of Nehru’s household that she had met Nehru no more than three or four times. She smiled and replied: ‘That’s all they know about. I will tell you what I have not told anyone before. At the very first meeting that took place in the house on Aurangzeb Road we established a rapport which seemed to indicate that we had known each other in our previous lives. I could see Panditji was attracted to me (prabhavit huey). He was impressed with what I had to say. And I do not deny that he was attracted towards this,’ she said pointing to her face and features. ‘I met him many times and for many hours at a stretch. I sensed his growing attachment to me. He asked me many times about my marriage and my husband. I can say that had I been free and not taken the vows of a sannyasin, it would have been me and not any of the other women whose names have been linked with him (Lady Mountbatten, Padmaja Naidu, Mridula Sarabhai) that he would have wanted to marry. But it never came to it. I told him quite firmly that I was a sannyasin and that he, as a Brahmin, was expected to honour Hindu tradition. At one time he addressed me in his letter to me as Priya (Dear) rather than Mata as others did and I told him that was not proper. He did not repeat it.’ With some hesitation I asked her if the relationship, as stated by Mathai, had gone beyond the platonic. She replied in two words spoken with considerable feeling: ‘Asat hai—it is not true.’

  Like other relationships, the Nehru-Shraddha Mata association became the victim of misunderstandings—some of them deliberately planted in Nehru’s mind by people like Mathai, whom she describes as a member of the anti-Hindu lobby. There is little doubt that Shraddha Mata spoke the language of Hindu obscurantists like that of the leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). She admits that at one time Nehru told her that she saw everything from the Hindu point of view (Hinduon ki drishti sey). The meetings became less frequent and then ceased altogether.

  For a while Shraddha Mata lived in the Harijan basti in Delhi, then at the invitation of Raja Jugal Kishore Birla moved to Birla House, then to Birla Mandir and finally to a hut constructed for her on the ridge behind the temple. She was in Faridabad the day Gandhiji was assassinated. She spent the following fortnight chanting hymns from the Gita.

  Sometime in 1952 Shraddha went abroad. She toured Europe, the United States, East Africa—and everywhere she went she gave discourses on the Gita, which were heard by large crowds. When she returned to India she did not bother to contact Nehru. The Maharaja of Jaipur, Sawai Man Singh, and his wife, the luscious Gayatri Devi had become her disciples. He gifted the Hathroi castle to Shraddha Mata. She moved to Jaipur and set up her ‘world peace army’. Panditji misunderstood her intentions and regarded her venture as an attempt to revive feudal traditions among erstwhile Rajput princes. ‘Sukhadia created mischief,’ she says (M.L. Sukhadia was then chief minister of Rajasthan.) ‘When Nehru visited Jaipur, a mehfil was arranged by Hari Bhan Upadhyaya. I was cordial. But distant.’ When Nehru had his first stroke, Shraddha Mata wrote to him expressing her concern. He replied asking her to forget her past bitterness. That was the last communication between them. ‘When I was close to him I could transmit some of my shakti to him,’ she says. ‘Once distance had been created, I was no longer able to do so. I could not help him in his affliction.’

  Her reference to Panditji’s death gave me the opportunity to ask her what she made of death and dying. Her views are traditionally Hindu. According to her one lot of human beings evolve from human birth to human rebirth, getting closer and closer to the light eternal. The other lot who have evil within go through all eighty-four lakh yonis till they are purged of their evil. I protested. ‘Mataji, you are only making statements; there is no evidence to substantiate any of this eighty-four lakh yoni business.’ She replied in excellent English. ‘There can be no empirical evidence for this kind of thing. You can only realize the truth through insight brought about during samadhi. No one can provide physical proof of such phenomena because cosmic truth is reflected when man goes beyond sensory perceptions.’ I asked her to explain why if there was a god there was so much injustice in the world? Why good men suffered and evil men prospered? Once again she explained in the traditional—‘Pichley janmon key karm: paying for deeds done in past lives.’ All this was beyond me. So also her reasoning about why there ought to be nine Durga Pujas and not eight or ten. ‘Because,’ she maintained, ‘ultimately energy is in nine stages of radiation, one layer after the other—that is the tantric belief.’

  The next morning I was made more aware of the great gulf that divides the agnostic from the believer. We were seated on the parapet of the fort. It was very warm. A cord connecting the table fan to the switch came loose. Surendra Singh who had just come down from the temple after a session of prayer and meditation put the cord back in the switch hole. Then he pointed to a bare patch on the cord and said, �
�You see by mistake I touched the naked wire but it did not give me any shock! That is because the shakti generated by prayer and meditation is still in me.’ Shraddha Mata endorsed this by adding: ‘And also because I am here beside you.’ I was sorely tempted to ask Surendra Singh to touch the live wire again and let me see the power of spiritual shakti pitted against the electrical, but I did not want to be thrown out.

  Mathai: He is a Liar

  I had planned to put off the questions about her association with Pandit Nehru to the last so that I could get the rest of her life-story before running the risk of an abrupt dismissal. But she had brought up the subject herself so many times that I was sure she would not be upset by my asking her for further elucidation. ‘Mathai in his first book has written that after returning from Bangalore you had settled in Jaipur as a mod young lady with short-cropped hair, using lipstick and wearing jeans . . . Is that so?’

  Shraddha Mata exploded in a string of expletives: ‘Ullu ka pattha! (son of an owl) moorakh! (stupid) agyani! (devoid of knowledge). His skull needs examining. See all these letters.’ She unwrapped a bundle of letters and handed me one from the late Sawai Man Singh, Maharaja of Jaipur, donating Hathroi Fort to her. It began with ‘Respected Mataji’ and ended with ‘your devoted S. Man Singh’. Shraddha Mata asked me: ‘You think the Maharaja would have addressed me in this way and given me property worth over two crores if I was wearing lipstick and slacks?’

  Articles, Essays and Non-Fiction Book Excerpts

  Doomsday in Yogiland

  On the evening of 3 February 1962—to be exact, at 5.35 p.m.—eight planets joined forces in the Capricorn and declared war on the world. Precisely at that time thousands of sacrificial fires were lit all over India. Yogis in loincloth and ashes, sadhus with matted hair, pandits with their foreheads smeared with sandalwood paste began to chant litanies from the sacred texts. The battle was on. Wicked planets versus the holy men of Hindustan.

  The astrologers had forecast the end of the world unless the gods were adequately propitiated. In Delhi, the chief priest, Swami Narsingh Giriji Maharaj, distributed printed copies of his prophecy that ‘terrible things’ would follow the conjunction of the planets. “The earth will be bathed in blood of a thousand kings,’ it stated. Rich businessmen gave large sums of money to the Swami; women prostrated themselves at his feet. He promised to intercede on their behalf and expressed the hope that the sacrificial prayers might save India. But, he added with a sardonic smile, he could not say what would befall other lands.

  A week before the fateful forty-eight hours, buses, trains and aeroplanes were packed with people going to join their families. The stock market declined; the bullion exchange announced it would close in time to let people get home; attendance in offices and schools fell; many shops were shut with notices bearing the legend: ‘May open on the 6th February.’ A new Sanskrit word came into the people’s vocabulary—ashtagrah—eight—a star conjunction. Cynics described it as an outbreak of ‘conjunctionitis’.

  Indian cities presented a strangely deserted appearance for two nights and days. There were innumerable encampments where large congregations listened to the chanting of hymns and saw the sacred flames fed with ghee, rice and sliced coconut. In Delhi alone, the priests intoned the name of the warrior goddess, as many as 4,810,000 times. Equally popular was the hymn, Gayatri, from the Rig Veda, which runs:

  O, most splendrous Sun, this prayer is offered to thee. Receive this craven worshipper as a loving man seeks a woman. May thou in the contemplation and wisdom be our Protector . . .

  All through the night the loudspeakers blared monotonously: ‘O, most splendorous Sun . . .’ Those who could not chant the Sanskrit hymn themselves, hired pandits to do it for them at a standard fee of fifty-one rupees—not too heavy a premium for insurance against injury during life and against fire in the hell hereafter.

  The issue between the priests and the planets was fiercely contested. On the evening of 5 February, the moon deserted the conjunction in the Capricorn and the enemy were in full retreat. The battle was won.

  In these forty-eight hours and twelve minutes India literally burnt hundreds of tons of precious clarified butter, rice, coconut and other edibles. At least a million dollars passed from the pockets of the credulous to obese Brahmins who maintain a tight monopoly on the right to perform sacred ritual. A senior member of the government’s Planning Commission stated that the loss to the nation owing to the stoppage of work during the ‘crisis’ totalled thirty-five crores of rupees (then about seventy million dollars).

  Sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas, compiled more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, accept astronomy and astrology (jyotish) as two branches of one science. Many treatises dealing with the forecasting of events were written by Hindu astrologers, of which the most famous is the Brihat Samhita by Varaha Mihira who lived some time about the middle of the sixth century AD. A commentary on Varaha Mihira written by one Bhattotpala in the ninth century AD is used extensively in present-day India. Long before these eminent scholars, the astral diviner had been given a place of honour in the councils of princes. The sage Garga, who preceded Varaha Mihira by over two centuries had proclaimed:

  The king who does not honour a scholar accomplished in horoscopy and astronomy, clever in all branches and accessories, comes to grief . . . As the night without a light, as the sky without the sun, so is a king without an astrologer: like a blind man he erreth on the road.

  Garga’s warning was heeded by the Hindu princes. As the courts of Europe had their clowns, the courts of Hindustan had their astrologers whose duty was to cast horoscopes of the royal progeny, select days which were auspicious for marriages or martial enterprises. If their prognostications went wrong, they paid the penalty at the block. Many astrologers perished; but astrology persisted. Even reverses at the hands of Muslim, and later, English invaders did not shake the Hindu’s faith in the stars. In AD 1761 on the famous battlefield of Panipat, the Marathas, who out numbered the Afghans by two to one, waited for several months till the chief astrologer assured them victory if the battle were commenced before dawn on 14 January. It was. Six hours later, the Maratha host had bitten the dust, having lost 30,000 men. Hindus lost their power in northern India—but not their belief in the prognostications of astrologers. Each time they fought the English, they did so only after their astrologers had predicted victory over the foreigners. By 1849 the British had annexed the whole of India. And now that British and Muslim domination is over, the astrologer (jyotishi) has come back into his own. No attempt has ever been made to enumerate them but 25,000 is likely to be a conservative estimate. In addition there are innumerable others in all walks of life who practise astrology as a hobby.

  There are many schools of astrology based on the different commentaries on Varaha Mihira; they can however be divided into two broad categories, the northern and the southern.

  Some educated Hindus are sceptical about the claims made by astrology but they bow to astrological predictions in some form or the other. The exact time of birth of every Hindu child is carefully noted down and communicated to the family priest to enable him to draw up a horoscope. The horoscope becomes a Hindu’s constant guide. It determines when his head is to be shaved, the day he will wear his sacred thread and the term when he will join school. Even amongst the most Anglicized who dismiss horoscopy as so much hocus-pocus, the document is consulted when a marriage is arranged: Hindus interpret the saying that marriages are made in heaven absolutely literally. Parents who advertise their marriageable sons and daughters in the newspapers invite interested parties to ‘please correspond with horoscope’. Asking for photographs is considered bad form and contrary to the oft-proven truth that beauty is skin deep. The date of marriage is chosen after a careful check of the horoscopes of the bridal pair and must be within the days prescribed by the astrologers as auspicious. In India there are ‘marriage seasons’; only atheists and the utterly impatient dare to have off-season nuptials. Between t
he 3rd and the 5th of February there was not a single Hindu marriage performed in India. What greater homage could 500 million people pay to the ‘science’ of astrology?

  Indian Muslims have their own methods of divination but astrology is not one of them. They have no horoscopes made nor believe in ‘auspicious’ days. But all other communities of India—Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Parsees—acknowledge the influence of the stars in some form or the other. The case of the Sikhs is particularly interesting. The founder Gurus (fifteenth-seventeenth centuries) strongly disapproved of soothsaying. Nevertheless, the first Sikh to be ruler of the Punjab, Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) became an ardent believer in astrology. He never launched on a campaign without first consulting astrologers. His faith in the stars increased as he won most of his battles. When he was stricken with paralysis, an English doctor attending on him tried his best to get him to move from his tent pitched alongside a rice-field, to the palace in the fort where the air was fresher. The royal astrologer was, however, of the opinion that changing location until a particular combination of stars had changed would be fatal. The Maharaja had more faith in the stars than in English medicine and continued to lie in the damp and unsalubrious atmosphere till the astrologer gave him the ‘all clear’ sign. In his palace he again consulted the leading astrologers of the country and asked them how long he could expect to live. They consulted the Maharaja’s horoscope, put their heads together and assured him he had at least another ten to fifteen years to go. Four days later, the Maharaja was dead.