No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  I asked the Yadav what his biradari thought of this friendship with a Harijan. He said, ‘In this village there are not those sort of problems. We mostly keep ourselves to ourselves, but if some work has to be done with another caste we do it. That's why I look after Ram Chander's farming.’

  It was the biradari that I really wanted to talk about. I thought that, as a younger man, Kamal might have had doubts about the system, but he said, ‘It's still very important. We help each other in the biradari from birth until death. When anyone dies, one or two hundred people will collect for the funeral and will take the ashes to the Ganges. Men and women come. Only biradari people help you in times of trouble.’

  Gilly asked, ‘Do you ever make someone hookah pani bandh these days?’ Everyone except Tau laughed, and Kamal said, ‘He's the only one we could make that, because he's the only one who smokes a hookah.’ ‘Hookah pani bandh’ means being barred from smoking the communal hookah or drinking water with members of the biradari – social ostracism. Chandre thought for some time and then said, ‘Actually there was a case, although it's very rare now. It was because of my cousin Ramu. Someone spoke badly about his daughter, saying she was living a dirty life. He reported it to the panchayat and they found the man had done wrong.’

  ‘How long did the bandh last?’ Gilly asked.

  ‘I think it was about a year,’ Chandre replied. ‘Then he asked for forgiveness and he was made to pay a fine.’

  ‘Can we meet the chaudhuri of the biradari?’ I asked.

  Kamal replied, ‘Yes. That's not difficult. We'll take you to Gavvan tomorrow to see him. But I want to ask your help, Sahib. You must do something about Tau. He has had his pay cut by the government from sixty rupees to thirty each month.’

  ‘Thirty rupees a month,’ I said with surprise. ‘I thought you could earn thirty rupees in two days working in the fields nowadays.’

  ‘Yes, thirty rupees,’ Kamal replied firmly. ‘It's a disgrace.’

  ‘What work do you do, Tau?’ I asked.

  The old man said, ‘I am a sweeper.’

  ‘Yes I know that,’ I replied – ‘but where?’

  ‘In the government school on the embankment.’

  Eventually I extracted the whole story from the taciturn Tau. He had been cleaning the school next to the temple for many years. He had been paid sixty rupees a month for his labours. Recently the headmaster had called him in and said that the government inspectors had instructed that he should be paid only thirty rupees. The headmaster couldn't explain this. I suggested that maybe the headmaster was pocketing the other thirty rupees himself. Tau grunted, ‘It's possible.’

  ‘How much do you sign for?’ I asked.

  ‘I don't know. I make a thumbmark.’

  I turned to Kamal and said, ‘Why don't you ask to see the register, so that you can see what Tau is signing for? My guess is that the headmaster is taking the money. I can't believe that, with all the money government employees get nowadays, Tau should only be paid thirty rupees a month.’

  ‘It's very difficult for us to interfere,’ Kamal said. ‘If we make too much trouble, Tau will lose his job altogether. I can't go to see the master sahib. He will just say it's not my business.’

  After finding out that the headmaster lived in the nearby town of Gavvan, I suggested that we might go and see him the next day. Kamal thought that was a good idea, but I wasn't entirely certain.

  ‘Supposing the master sahib is annoyed by my visit,’ I said. ‘He may not say so to my face, but he may take it out on Tau when I have left.’

  ‘That's possible,’ Tau grunted again. ‘Then you will have to come back.’ Everyone laughed except for Tau, who did not see what was funny about such a common-sense remark.

  ‘All right,’ I agreed – ‘I'll go to see the master sahib. But first of all you must show me the school you clean tomorrow.’

  ‘I won't be cleaning it,’ Tau replied – ‘it's Sunday.’

  ‘I know, but you can still show it to me.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  On that somewhat unpromising note we left the problem of Tau until the next day and started to clear up some of the questions I had about Chandre's wedding.

  That night, because it was quite cold, it was decided that we should sleep inside Chandre's one-room house. Two charpais and thick razais or quilts were provided for us. A small oil-lamp was set in a niche in the wall. Just as we were going to sleep, Kamal walked through the open doorway with a cricket bat. ‘What on earth is that for?’ I asked.

  He replied, ‘To hit dogs with. They come in during the night.’

  Fortunately they didn't. Nor was I woken this time by the sow.

  The next morning Tau had lost interest in the whole venture, so Chandre took us to the temple on the embankment with one of his nephews. The village had woken up by the time we set off. My friend the sow had been let out. The goats had been tethered and were nibbling greedily at branches of jamun trees. Brown and white puppies were sucking at the sagging breasts of their emaciated mother. The chickens had flown down from their roosts on the thatched roofs and were scratching furiously for their breakfast. Grey babblers – known in India as ‘sat-bhai’ or ‘seven brothers’, because they are said to go around in groups of seven – were rummaging noisily in the piles of dried cow dung. The residents of the basti were returning from their ablutions. A family party was disembarking from a bullock cart outside the next-door basti, which belonged to the dhobis. They were going to the Ganges for the naming ceremony of their son.

  The temple had been built in honour of a Hindu saint called Hare Baba, who had died as recently as 1971 with the words ‘Hare Bol’, or ‘Speak the name of God’, on his lips. Chandre told me with pride that the baba was credited with building the thirty-mile-long embankment to protect Molanpur and 6,999 other villages from the Ganges when it flooded. An old pilgrim told me that the baba had miraculously built the embankment in six months, because he was so moved by the plight of the villagers in a great flood in 1922. The pilgrim said, ‘I remember we all had to climb into trees. We even had to defecate from the branches.’ A retired official of the Uttar Pradesh Roadways who spent his time visiting the holy places of India gave us a guided tour.

  The main temple was built around a courtyard. Its centrepiece was a shrine with a life-size alabaster statue of the baba sitting upright, complete with beard and black spectacles. He was wrapped in a saffron robe, had a red tilak on his forehead and was sitting upright as that was the position in which he had been buried immediately beneath the spot where his statue now stood. Hindu saints are sometimes buried, sometimes thrown uncremated into rivers. Under the shade of the tall trees outside the main temple there were smaller shrines. Monkeys climbed over the roof covering the image of the monkey-god Hanuman. A small group of women were pouring Ganges water over a lingam – a phallus, the symbol of Shiva – which a dog was licking happily. The nonstop chanting of ‘Hare Bol, Hare Bol’ could be heard. Chandre said, ‘The chanting hasn't stopped since the baba died.’

  Tau's school was about fifty yards away. It was a large building with several classrooms. Pious platitudes were painted on its walls. One said, ‘It is our duty to work, the fruit is in the hands of God.’ If Tau could have read it, he might well have thought, ‘You can say that again.’ There was no way, as far as I could see, that anyone should be paid just thirty rupees a month for keeping that school clean.

  Back in the village, Chandre made breakfast for us and we discussed plans for the visit to Gavvan to see the headmaster and the chaudhuri. Tau agreed to come with us, but insisted that someone else would have to do the talking. We found Maulvi Ayub Khan, the headmaster, in a small brick-built house. The master explained to me that the rates of pay were set by the basic-education official. Apparently the sweepers didn't have a union, unlike the peons or messengers, and that was why they got paid so badly. I found it hard to believe that this pious elderly man would be stealing half of Tau's meagre pay-packet, and I retr
eated hurriedly before any other member of our party suggested that. It would have been highly embarrassing if the villagers had said that I had made such a suggestion.

  As we were walking away, Chandre proposed that we ask the chaudhuri for his help in the matter. He was sitting in the sun outside his house, surrounded by members of the biradari. When he saw me, he leapt up with remarkable agility for a man who claimed to be eighty-one and gave me a smart salute. ‘I was in the army as a sweeper,’ he explained. He was still wearing khaki, topped by a yellow turban whose tail almost touched the ground. He was a very small man, barely five feet tall. When Chandre introduced me, he said, ‘I know you. You came to Ram Chander's wedding. You did very well for him by paying for it.’

  I protested that I had made only a very small contribution, but he wouldn't hear anything of it. ‘No, no. I know what you did. I said the mantras at the wedding, so I know.’

  I asked him how he had learnt the mantras. He replied, ‘I was taught them. You don't have to know how to read and write to learn them. Now I'm teaching my son. You see, people in our biradari like to be married by an important man, otherwise there will be no evidence that they are married.’

  I didn't quite understand this, so I asked Kamal to explain. He said, ‘There is no book or register it's written in, so if there's a fight later about the wedding then you have to have an important witness to say they were married.’

  ‘Yes,’ the chaudhuri said. ‘There are often fights within the biradari, and it's one of my main jobs to sort them out.’

  I asked the chaudhuri about the case of hookah pani bandh, and he replied, ‘I can't remember a case like that for many, many years. There can't have been, because I would have given the sentence.’

  I turned to Chandre, who said, ‘No, there was one years ago – when I was ploughing the fields.’

  ‘You haven't done that for years, but last night you said it happened recently,’ I replied.

  ‘Maybe I did,’ said Chandre. ‘But now I know it was when I was still ploughing.’

  The chaudhuri generously admitted that he might have forgotten the incident. With that misunderstanding cleared up, we got down to talking about Tau's problem. All agreed that his wage was shameful, and most felt that there must be some brashtachar or corruption somewhere. A smart young man who spoke a little English said that he earned a thousand rupees a month as a sweeper in the municipal offices. The chaudhuri said, ‘This boy is like my prime minister, because he is a reading and writing man. I am like the president, and I also have a vice-president. We are all elected, so that gives us a status. But I don't know what we can do in this case.’

  ‘But surely you have this status so you can do sifarish [make a recommendation] to some big officer.’

  ‘We do sometimes do sifarish to the government officers,’ the chaudhuri agreed, ‘but that's to get people jobs. It doesn't work always – in fact not very often. Anyhow, this seems to me like the work of a sweepers' union, and you know there are no unions in the villages.’

  So we left, no further forward with Tau's case. I assured him I would take it up with the Uttar Pradesh government myself, but I was not very optimistic.

  When I got back to Delhi I did write to the commissioner for Uttar Pradesh, and to my surprise I got a reply: the government of Uttar Pradesh did not think the work Tau did merited more than thirty rupees a month. So much for my influence! I should never have interfered. I had done no good to Tau, and perhaps had harmed Chandre's standing in the village. He had given me such a build-up, and here I had failed on my one and only sifarish. But then probably it's only my pride which has been hurt. Chandre has, as usual, taken it all in his stride. When I next meet Tau he will, I suspect, be secretly rather pleased that his own dismal expectations were fulfilled.

  2

  THE NEW COLONIALISM

  The celebrated Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who now lives in Oxford, dedicated his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to the memory of the British Empire, saying, ‘all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule.’ I admire Nirad Chaudhuri's scholarship, I envy him his felicity of style, I enjoy his humour, but I profoundly disagree with his views. Emperors don't quicken their subjects’ cultures: they kill them. So, if Nirad Chaudhuri is right, there was nothing worthwhile in India before the raj, which would have been truly remarkable for a culture that had survived so long. That wasn't even the view of the British who ruled India. They studied Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures, they wrote grammars of modern Indian languages and they preserved India's ancient monuments. But the raj could not have survived if we British had not been convinced of our own superiority, and so few Britons could not have ruled so vast a country if they had not also created an Indian élite who shared their conviction that British culture was inherently superior to their own. We were clever, not crude, rulers, and we realized the dangers of going too fast and too far – of the sort of resentment which caused the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence, whichever way you look at it. That was why we concentrated our efforts on creating that small élite and left the rest of India to itself. That élite – the India which applauds Nirad Chaudhuri – took over the reins from us and we continue to exercise our cultural hegemony over them – a hegemony preserved by the conviction that we are superior.

  Cultural exchanges are one of the more subtle ways of imposing cultural imperialism. They create the impression that we respect Indian culture, while at the same time giving us the opportunity to exhibit our own superiority, or what we believe is our superiority. Over the last ten years or so, India has been persuaded to hold a number of impressive festivals in foreign countries – significantly, Britain led the field. These were matched by festivals of Britain and the other countries in India. The festivals of India undoubtedly increased interest in things Indian but they had no radical effect on life in our countries. The exhibitions in India were a hard and effective sell to the Indian élite who dominate Indian life.

  In the small seaside town of Mahabalipuram, about thirty miles south of Madras, I came across a remarkable example of cultural imperialism through cultural exchange. It was the catalogue of the sculpture by the English artist Stephen Cox exhibited at the Delhi Triennial in 1986. Cox had spent some months in Mahabalipuram working with Indian temple sculptors. An official of the British Council told me that Cox had been given a scholarship ‘to learn and to teach’. The catalogue of his works started, ‘Art is unimaginable without a matrix of culture, even a parochial culture; it is inconceivable without a history; it cannot be separated from the properties of the materials of which it is made and these are themselves provided by that culture, history and by the physical world its peoples inhabit. All of these are elements of the web of language in which an art is expressed.’ Further on, the author of the catalogue wrote, ‘So Cox's art of sculpture is continually developing. He does not bring with him to India an inflexibly alien instrument, but one capable of growing by response to the rocks and to the human achievement that he finds.’

  If I understand that aright, it means that Cox had gone to Mahabalipuram to learn about the culture of its sculptors and had then allowed that culture to influence his work. In Mahabalipuram, however, that was not the accepted view of what had actually happened. Ganapathi Stapati was the principal of the College of Architecture and Sculpture, and it was to him that Cox had turned for guidance. Stapati comes from a long line of shilpis, who are both architects and sculptors. His father was the first principal of the college in Mahabalipuram, and Stapati succeeded him. He had recently retired and was living in a small house on the main street of Mahabalipuram.

  Stapati has written a detailed account of what he calls the ‘grammar’ of the ancient Vaastu tradition of art and architecture, the tradition he is keeping alive. I asked him how much Stephen Cox had learnt of this ancient culture, and was somewhat taken aback when the mild-mannered sculptor replied, ‘He never learnt anything from me. I used to talk to
him about spiritual things and sculpture, but he would say to me, “When I am with you I experience what you mean; as soon as I leave the room I lose it. What can I do? That is my culture.” It is my opinion that he did zero here.’

  ‘What do you think of the work he did while he was in Mahabalipuram?’

  ‘He still has people working for him here. He is very commercial. He hasn't understood my craftsmen, my people. We are real creative artists. He is doing mechanical work; he is not moved; he is not aroused. In fact I said as much. On the last day that he was here, there was a reception for him where I spoke and I told the audience, “Stephen Cox has been here for months. He is carrying nothing from Mahabalipuram except a few pieces of stone.”’

  I thought that perhaps the two sculptors had got across each other – that there had been a personality clash – but Stapati said, ‘I liked Stephen. He was honest and kind. I deliberately did not interfere in his work. I never went to the place he was working until the last day. Then I took the minister of education, and Stephen showed him the work.’

  Contrary to the claim of the catalogue, there had not, in Stapati's view, been any meeting of cultures. He believed that Cox had learnt nothing from Mahabalipuram, and Stapati had certainly not been inspired by the Western sculptor's art. When I asked him for his views on modern art, he looked across at Sasikala, the wiry and energetic architect who had introduced us, as if to ask whether she felt he was going too far. She smiled and Stapati, encouraged, let rip.

  ‘In the name of modern art you have dispensed with the spiritual element of art. The whole world is carried away by these trends. We don't vibrate to modern art. The old masters like Michelangelo, they do affect us – they had imagination. Those who look at modern works and say “How beautiful!” are hypocrites.’