by Mark Tully
Eventually we reached Gavvan, where Rani's wedding had been arranged. As we drove into the town, we were flagged down by an anxious Chandre who had been here since the morning. He had apparently forgotten that I'd told him we'd be lunching in Gajraula. Knowing Chandre's deficient sense of direction, I was relieved to be told that he'd brought one of his young relatives to ride ahead of the van on a scooter and lead us to the village.
We drove through the town, paid a two-rupee toll to cross a bridge and then turned right down an even narrower road. The area around the village was more productive than the scrubland we had just passed through. This was the season for sunflower as well as arabi, a root crop with leaves like elephant ears. One field was guarded by a scrawny scarecrow. The tarmac soon gave out and we bucked and reared along a mud track leading to Molanpur, the scooter-rider performing miraculous feats of balance to remain wheelborne. Eventually we came to the village, but we didn't stop. We passed the village pond, with the inevitable black buffaloes wallowing peacefully in it, and drove on until we came to a cluster of mud houses – Chandre's basti. Harijan bastis, or settlements, are always on the outskirts of villages.
There were six thatched houses with mud walls built around an open space of about eighty by seventy feet. More houses were built off the courtyard facing the track, which led in one direction to the main part of the village and in the other direction to the embankment protecting Molanpur and its lands from the Ganges. I had expected that we would be surrounded by curious villagers as soon as we stopped, but everyone was far too busy with preparations for the wedding to bother about us. Chandre got out and led us into the courtyard, where he showed us his house with a certain amount of diffidence. It had a low doorway without a door and one room in which I could just about stand up. Chandre said, ‘I have had the thatch done again for the wedding, but it's not really all right for you to sleep in so I've made another arrangement.’ I assured Chandre that we would be quite comfortable, but he was not convinced, as he was used to seeing me in much more luxurious circumstances.
The whole basti was decorated with strings of paper flags. Banana trees had been placed on each side of the doorway of the hut where the marriage ceremony was to take place. New mango leaves – symbols of prosperity – were strung above the doorway. The walls of all the huts and the ground of the courtyard had been covered with a fresh paste of mud and cow dung. On the walls, the paste had been worked into intricate patterns – peacocks and elephants had been moulded on to it and the women of the basti had painted animals and men fighting each other inside and outside the houses. The style was very similar to many of the tribal paintings I have seen in central India. Those are now much admired as ‘folk art’, but I have never heard or read of ‘the art’ of the Harijans of western Uttar Pradesh – I suppose because they lack the glamour of tribals.
The last-minute preparations for the arrival of the barat, the bridegroom's party, were being made. A tractor trailer carrying chairs and a generator was being unloaded outside the basti. A canvas awning was being erected on wooden poles – one of the elderly women said scornfully, ‘It's not very big.’ Mahipal, one of Chandre's relatives who works in our office, was washing himself under a pump. He and our dhobi had arrived by the overnight bus from Delhi.
Chandre took no part in the preparations. He seemed to assume that all would be all right in the end. His only concern was that we should live life as we were used to living it. He said, ‘It's five o'clock and you haven't had any tea.’ Then he insisted on sitting us down at a table complete with tablecloth and went off to brew up. An old lady with a face lined like a prune, no teeth and small, round Mahatma-Gandhi-style spectacles squatted in front of Gilly and started to massage her feet, whimpering, sighing and muttering to encourage herself. Chandre came back to ask where we had put the beer. It had been hidden in the back of the van, because I wasn't quite sure about the proprieties. Chandre doesn't drink himself, and I thought that it might be inappropriate for me to drink at the wedding. I asked tentatively, ‘Will it really be all right for us to drink beer. Won't someone object?’
Chandre said with some annoyance, ‘I have arranged everything. The whole village wants to welcome you, and I have told them that you will drink beer.’
I could have wished for a somewhat different image to precede me, but there was nothing I could do about it now. If I didn't drink beer, Chandre would, I supposed, lose face. Anyway, there was the ritual of tea to get through first.
After tea, Avrille and Gilly were taken off to see the bride. Rani was being groomed for the coming wedding. Her hair had been oiled and her limbs smeared with turmeric paste, which is said to make skin smooth and fair. She was wearing an old sari borrowed from a relative, which made her look grown-up. In Delhi, like other young girls, she always wore a shalwar-qamiz – baggy trousers and a long shirt. The sari was an indication of her new status – of a married woman. She was an unconventionally pretty girl, with a dark complexion, prominent cheekbones and very large, bright, brown eyes. Ever since her engagement, she had glowed with confidence. Although she coyly refused to comment when asked what she thought of her fiancé, her smiles showed that she certainly had no objection to the match. Now that her wedding day had come she was still enjoying being the centre of attention, but she was tense because the great changes which lay ahead had at last dawned on her. ‘Today we had a puja [act of worship],’ she told Gilly and Avrille. ‘The kumhar [potter] came, and we made offerings to Boorhe Babu. If you do that, then he stops you getting seep – light-brown patches on your skin. I shan't see you today, unless you come here to see me. I have to stay in this house now, because the barat may come any time.’
While I was waiting for Gilly and Avrille to come back, the cows appeared over the top of the embankment in a haze of dust. They were being driven home for the night by young boys. Then two buses drew up on the embankment and the barat emerged. I had expected Chandre to go out to greet it, but he was nowhere to be seen. The young men came first – dressed in gaudy, tight-fitting trousers, with open-necked shirts which clung to their narrow chests. They gaped and giggled at me and then walked on, some of them holding hands. The older men followed, dressed for the most part in traditional cotton kurtas. They politely ignored the strange foreigner seated at a neatly draped table solemnly sipping tea. The women had been left behind – in Chandre's biradari they don't travel with the barat. The bridegroom's party regrouped on the open ground on the other side of the courtyard, where they were served with soft drinks. Twenty-four hours of feasting had started.
I was not sure what to do next. Should I join in the festivities or should I not? I am easily embarrassed and hate sticking out like a sore thumb. Fortunately Gilly and Avrille returned quite soon, and, with my customary cowardice, I sent them off to find Chandre so that he could tell us what to do.
Chandre decided that it would be premature for us to join the other guests. ‘You sit here,’ he said. ‘You will be more comfortable and I'll call some people to talk to you.’ Chandre went off and came back with about ten members of his biradari. It was getting dark, so hurricane lights were produced and Chandre brought the beer. I certainly felt like a drink, but I also wanted someone to drink with. Unfortunately Satish had left sometime earlier, since he had to get back to Delhi, and Gilly and Avrille both thought it would be most unladylike to join me. So there I was, left alone with my drink. However my embarrassment soon wore off under the influence of the lukewarm beer and the conversation.
One of the elders who came was Tau, a man of dismal countenance with a great moustache through which he filtered smoke from his hookah. ‘Tau’ means ‘elder uncle’, but he was in fact only Chandre's elder uncle's son – he'd gained the title of ‘Tau’ because he behaved and looked like an elder uncle. Tau offered the hookah stem to me, but I politely declined. I enjoy many Indian tastes, but the hookah has always defeated me. I nearly choked to death on one in Raja Bazaar in Rawalpindi.
Inevitably the conversation soon
got round to weddings. Tau said, ‘Ram Chander is lucky. In my younger days the barat stayed until there was no food left in the basti. Nowadays they usually go after one day.’
Gilly asked, ‘Do your boys and girls ever get married on their own, for love?’ The women laughed, and one said, “‘Love” – we don't understand the meaning of the word. These men just think we are there to do the work for them – from morning right through until we go to sleep at night they keep us at it.’
Another woman said, ‘That's true, but if you have a good man you become fond of him.’ It was harder to understand the women than the men, because they rarely went out of the village and so their dialect was not affected by the Hindustani spoken in towns.
Kamal, a very intelligent younger relative of Chandre's, said, ‘Only the educated people get married like that. They perhaps get to know each other in school. For us, an elopement is a great disgrace. I think that's right.’
Gilly quoted an old saying: ‘Jab mian bibi razi, to kya karega kazi’ – ‘When a boy and a girl agree, not even a qazi [a judge, one of whose duties is the registration of marriages] can do anything about it.’
The villagers laughed, and Kamal said, ‘Han, you have said absolutely right. But then we don't encourage that sort of thing. We prefer to arrange it through our customs, because a young girl and a young boy – what do they know?’
I was reminded of the headman of a village just outside Delhi with whom I'd once discussed marriage. He'd said, ‘In England you marry the women you love. In India we love the women we marry. You fall out of love after marriage. We fall in love after marriage.’
When I related the headman's views, Tau grunted: ‘All this love talk! It has nothing to do with life in villages. Only those who don't know anything about how we live would talk of it.’ That ended that conversation.
After a lengthy silence, during which Tau bubbled gloomily on his hookah, I attempted to get things going again by asking about changes in the life of the village. An elderly man with thick glasses, and wearing a rather grubby Gandhi cap, said, ‘In my view the worst thing that has happened is that the police have started coming into the village. In the old days the police never came – we used to sort out our quarrels ourselves or with the panchayat [village council]. But nowadays people keep running to the court or the police station. They waste a lot of money, and achieve nothing. The police are not just. They always side with the richer person, so no matter how much you offer them you can't beat someone with more money.’
‘But surely,’ I asked, ‘under the panchayat system you also suffered, because you were the poorest community and you were the sweepers.’
‘Han, of course that was there,’ the elderly villager replied. ‘But, you see, many of our quarrels were among ourselves and we have our own panchayat in our biradari so they sort out the quarrels. Even when we had quarrels with the other castes, the leaders of the panchayat knew that the village could not do without us and that if too much injustice was done to us we would not do the necessary work. So it wasn't that injustice was always done to us. In a village in those days everyone knew their place, but so did everyone have a place.’
‘Why do people go to the police now?’
‘I'm not certain. I think maybe it's to do with the government. The government and the politicians are always saying they will do everything for us, and people believe this – even though they are always going to the government and getting nothing. Nowadays, you see, everyone thinks that only the government can do anything. Even if a person gets a good job, he doesn't think it's a suitable job unless he is an employee of the government. That's why everyone goes to the government for justice too, because they think only government justice is proper justice.’
Chandre walked into the courtyard, looking rather solemn. He came up to Tau and said, ‘Now we must do the accounts. It'll be too late if we don't start now.’ Tau, who was still sitting cross-legged on the ground, looked up at Chandre and said, ‘Call them all, and I'll come.’
Now the real business of the wedding was to be done. Members of Chandre's biradari are expected to contribute to each other's daughters' weddings. Each person notes down the contribution he has made and then hopes to be reimbursed when his daughter gets married. The proceedings this time were supervised by a diminutive old man drowned by a giant yellow turban. He was the chaudhuri of the biradari. The chota chaudhuri, or small chaudhuri, who was actually very much larger than his superior, was there too. The negotiations took nearly three hours, but Chandre told me they went off without any serious argument. This seemed to be largely because of Chandre's good nature. I asked him whether everyone had paid his dues. ‘No,’ he said – but then they never do. My closest friends did, and others paid something, but I don't like to fight about money. You know how much money I have given to Hari Ram – my real brother, who works near Delhi – and you know he has never given anything back to me.’
Tau apparently never contributed to weddings but always took part in the negotiations. He had told me he earned only a pittance, and so I suggested to Chandre that he lacked the wherewithal to contribute to weddings.
Chandre replied, ‘He's got money, but if he doesn't want to give back what I have given for his weddings I am not going to cause any trouble.’
When the business session was over, Chandre came back to us and said, ‘You'd better come out now, because the barat procession will be arriving soon.’ Gilly asked Chandre, ‘But aren't you going to change to receive the barat?’ He was wearing a distinctly dirty white shirt and a pair of trousers which had formed part of his uniform several years ago. Chandre ignored that question and went off to see what the caterers preparing the wedding dinner were up to.
We went out to the open space in front of the basti to join the villagers waiting for the barat. For some two hours we were continuously reassured, ‘It's coming soon’; ‘It's on the point of coming’; ‘Now it's coming’; ‘It'll be here any moment.’ But the barat procession didn't appear. Chandre sent off a series of spies to find out what was happening, and each one returned with an assurance that the barat was on its way. The procession was obviously delayed because the bridegroom's party were still tanking up. It's the privilege of the bridegroom's relatives to arrive drunk, but they take it amiss if the bride's relatives have been drinking. By ten o'clock in the evening, even the laconic Chandre was becoming a little worried. He said to Kamal, ‘I hope they won't arrive too much in drink, because then there could be trouble with some of the young men.’ Kamal replied, ‘There's nothing you can do about it. It's their occasion to make merry.’
Eventually we saw a bright light in the distance moving towards us. It seemed to move very slowly and to stop frequently. As the light got nearer, we picked up the sound of a deep baritone voice amplified by vast loudspeakers singing a hit from an old Bombay film – ‘Mere sapnon ki rani, chale ao’ – ‘Come, queen of my dreams.’ Actually it was the raja who was coming to Chandre's Rani. The procession halted again just before rounding the last corner. Some children ran towards it, but they were called back – tradition demands that the bride's party must wait for the arrival of the procession. The music faltered, and I wondered whether everyone, including the bandsmen, was having a last pull on the bottle before entering the no-drinking area. If so, it must have been a quickie, because the music soon picked up again and the head of the procession, brightly lit by Petromax lights, rounded the corner. Chandre's generator chose this moment to give up and so we – the receiving party – were plunged into darkness.
The first thing I saw was a zoo jigging up and down vigorously. There were white storks, gaudily striped tigers, black bears, and monkeys – all made of papier mâché and cotton wool, and all held aloft by young men dancing the bhangra. The bhangra is a Punjabi dance which has now become standard at all north-Indian weddings and has deteriorated into a hybrid pop form heavily influenced by Western jiving and Indian film choreography. The Hindu gods mingled with the menagerie. There were pictures of
Krishna, famed as a lover; the ever-popular monkey-god Hanuman; and Ram with his wife Sita, the hero and heroine of the epic the Ramayan, which was top of the television charts at the time. Even the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was numbered among the Hindu pantheon for this wedding.
Next came the singer. Miraculously, no one tripped over the wires which connected his microphone to the generator bringing up the rear of the procession. He was accompanied by bandsmen in red uniforms with flat hats and white plimsolls. There were trumpeters, clarinettists and even a sousaphone-player blowing their hearts out. Behind them came the hero of the night, Manoj, sitting on a peacock throne wearing a golden turban and garlands of currency notes round his neck. The throne was set on a converted jeep covered with bright-coloured bulbs flashing in circles, diamonds and arcs like rainbows. It looked like a gigantic jukebox. Behind the jeep came the generator, spewing out black smoke. I said to Gilly, ‘Manoj looks like a Hindu god seated on a throne.’
Gilly replied, ‘He's either a very bad-tempered or a petrified god.’
Manoj certainly didn't look as though he was enjoying the barat. Everyone else was. Perhaps that was the problem – maybe he was like the bridegroom who would have preferred to have stayed back for the party rather than gone off on his honeymoon. It was certainly going to be a very dull night for Manoj. When the procession came to a halt in the space in front of the basti, Manoj meekly descended from his chariot and went into the house where he was to be married. There he was tended to by his sisters. He could hear the beat of the drums and the cries of the dancers – by then we had all got swept up in the bhangra. He had to sit and think about his future with a young bride whom he didn't know at all.
Such thoughts didn't trouble Chandre – by now the proud proprietor of a show which was clearly going very well. He came up to me and said with satisfaction, ‘It's a big barat, isn't it?’ I replied, ‘It certainly is.’
