No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  By this stage we were having the greatest difficulty in keeping out of the water, so the sergeant suggested we beat a retreat to the police watch-tower to get a safer view of the bathing.

  The watch-tower was surrounded by pilgrims trying to hand in notices about their lost relatives, to be broadcast over the loudspeaker. We pushed through them only to find our way blocked by a police lady sitting firmly on the middle of the ladder leading to the first platform of the two-tiered tower. ‘It's dangerous,’ she said. ‘There are too many people up there already. You can't come up.’ My sergeant insisted, and she let us edge past her. The tower shook ominously as we scrambled on to the lower platform.

  Across the Ganges, the sun had just risen. It was shrouded by the morning mist rising from the rivers and the dust thrown up by millions of pilgrims who had spread like a black cloud covering all the banks of the rivers. It was impossible even to guess how many millions there were. An armada of small craft was ferrying the more privileged pilgrims to bathe from the boats anchored in the middle of the Sangam. Below, the police were still struggling to clear the area reserved for the akharas. The last of the Niranjanis were making their way back to reform their procession. The police horses were called in again, and the crowds were forced to give way.

  Sweepers cleaned the ghat in preparation for the Juna akhara, whose naked nagas were already approaching. When the nagas saw the cameramen on the watch-tower, they stopped, brandishing their weapons and roared, ‘No photographs!’ All the cameras were lowered with alacrity – none of the press fancied withstanding an attack by those ferocious holy men. Some nagas ran straight into the Ganges; others crouched to ease themselves before entering the sacred water. There must have been at least 500 of them. Their bodies were smeared with ash, their long hair was matted and their beards were unkempt. One elderly naga's beard came down to his ankles. They were followed by the initiates, with their skimpy loincloths and shaven heads. Then came the mahamandaleshwars, sitting under their gold-embroidered parasols. They descended from their raths, solemnly disrobed and went down to the river with their disciples. This time the police managed to keep the crowds behind the barriers. The nagas ran back from the Sangam whooping with joy and cartwheeling on the hard sand. The initiates came back shivering – they had not yet mastered the yogic skills to keep themselves warm. The mahamandaleshwars returned to their raths, and the procession moved off again. Some disciples struggled to pull their master's rath up the hill. The police allowed the crowd to break through to help them on their way.

  The Juna akhara should have been followed by the Vaishnavites, but I heard over the police radio that they would not be coming. Apparently the deputy inspector general of police had failed to resolve their electoral dispute and so they could not agree who was to be given pride of place in their procession.

  I made my way back to the press camp with the pilgrims who had bathed and were on their way home. I had never been in such a peaceful crowd. There was no frenzy, just the calm certainty of faith: the knowledge that what had to be done had been done.

  The vast majority of the pilgrims were villagers. Their faith gave them the courage to ignore the ugly rumours and the fortitude to travel in overcrowded trains and buses, to walk for many miles and to sleep in the open. Yet the villagers are being told that their faith, which means so much to them, is superstition, and that they must be secular. The élite for the most part ignored the Kumbh Mela, but those who did come travelled in cars and slept in tents.

  Two days later I went back to the commissioner's tent. He told me that 27 million people had bathed during the previous three days. I was not entirely convinced that the methods he had used to count the pilgrims were scientific, but even the querulous local press said that millions had eventually turned up. The commissioner admitted that he had been worried at one stage. Looking back on the Mela, he said, ‘The press and some politicians were on at me about overspending, and the Mela did seem to be rather empty when you arrived. I should have realized that there was an unusually long gap between the first two bathing-days and the big one, so the momentum was bound to die down.’

  ‘What about the BBC, then?’ I asked.

  The commissioner smiled. ‘Perhaps your coming stopped that. Actually, I now think it was just part of the campaign to discredit me.’

  There was only one serious accident within the Mela during the bathe and that was caused by the family of one of Rajiv Gandhi's ministers, Mrs Rajendra Kumari Bajpai, who, with her son Ashok, controlled the Congress Party in Allahabad. The police had arranged separate embarkation and disembarkation jetties for the pilgrims who were allowed to travel by boat to the Sangam. They knew that if boats returned full to the embarkation jetties they would be swamped by waiting pilgrims. The Bajpai family, however, insisted on returning to the jetty they had set out from, and the very accident the police had feared occurred. One of their boats was swamped by pilgrims and capsized. Two of their servants were drowned.

  No other country in the world could provide a spectacle like the Kumbh Mela. It was a triumph for the much maligned Indian administrators, but it was a greater triumph for the people of India. And how did the English-language press react to this triumph? Inevitably, with scorn. The Times of India, the country's most influential paper, published a long article replete with phrases like ‘Obscurantism ruled the roost in Kumbh’, ‘Religious dogma overwhelmed reason at the Kumbh’, and ‘The Kumbh after all remained a mere spectacle with its million hues but little substance.’ The Times of India criticized the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's politics, but made no attempt to analyse or even to describe the piety of the millions who bathed at the Sangam.

  I spent my last evening in Allahabad discussing politics and religion with Sant Bax Singh. His seven years in England and his Oxford education have not turned him into a brown sahib. That night he was wearing his usual crumpled kurta and pajamas lacking any suggestion of shape or fashion. The small room in which we sat was sparsely furnished, undecorated and badly lit. We drank Indian whisky, although many would have expected the son of a feudal landlord, a raja, to drink Scotch. Sant Bax's English is perfect, but he frequently broke into Hindi, which was not too easy to understand through his pan-filled mouth. He tutted irritably when I suggested that the millions who had attended the Mela and the speeches they had heard might justify the élite's fear of a revival of Hindu fundamentalism.

  ‘Look, you know perfectly well that the vast majority of those who have bathed at the Sangam will go away and vote for secular parties like the Congress or my brother's Janata Dal, so where is the question of a threat to secularism? Actually, this debate about secularism is a Western debate, because in your part of the world religion blocked reason and science. Debates here have never been religion versus non-religion – that has been brought here by you. As far as we are concerned, as Mao said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.”’

  ‘Would you say’, I asked somewhat tentatively, ‘that bathing in the Ganges is like a sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.’

  Sant Bax chuckled. ‘That sounds like the Book of Common Prayer.’

  ‘The catechism,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, we don't have a catechism, Creed, prayer-book or Bible, but I would basically agree with your definition. The needs of an Indian, or any human being, are the material plus something else. For the pilgrims, the Ganges washes away all sins; Krishna lived on the banks of the Jamuna and made the greatest love ever made; beyond both sin and love is wisdom, and that is what the invisible River Saraswati represents. All this they have at the Mela. A bathe fulfils an inner need without the need of a psychoanalyst, so why shouldn't they bathe? There is no clash with modernists or scientists unless they themselves are fundamentalist and say, “If you don't subscribe to us totally you are a heretic.” After all, how did those millions of people bathing on one day hold up India's progress? If they weren't doing this, what should they have done towards industrialization or fulfilling World Bank
targets? The trouble is that these so-called enlightened people talk about a person's belief and then condemn the chappie but suggest nothing to replace those beliefs.’

  That is the danger of aggressive secularism. It is a barren creed which can cause great offence to religious people. If secularism leads Indians to think their rulers are, in the words of that speaker at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad meeting, ‘ashamed to call themselves Hindus’, the villagers will start to support communal parties. Khomeini was a backlash against the Westernized shah of Iran.

  4

  THE REWRITING OF THE RAMAYAN

  What is the recipe for a successful television series in India? Apparently you take a story which everybody knows, so that there is no suspense. You remove any hint of sex and reduce violence to electronic gimmicks acceptable in a video parlour for nursery children. You slow the story down to a crawl. You use archaic language which the actors even find difficult to speak, let alone the audience to understand. You deliberately choose unknown actors, although India is a country where the star system is very much alive and kicking. These were some of the principles which guided Ramanand Sagar and four of his five sons when they set out to write, produce and direct the great Hindu epic the Ramayan for television. Over seventy-eight weeks in 1987–8 they showed the trials and tribulations that the god-king Ram faced to rescue his wife Sita from Ravan, the ruler of Lanka.

  This television phenomenon, as it was to turn out to be, was produced in the Vrindavan Studios near the small town of Umargaon on the west coast. The studios – half-finished concrete buildings – face the sea, separated from the beach by a windbreak of conifers and a strip of green turf. Umargaon is about four hours' drive from Bombay, the film capital of India and home of the Sagars. They chose this remote site to be away from the pressures of Bombay, particularly the crowds and the VIP visitors. They did not install a telephone, so secretaries of VIPs were unable to ring up to inform them that ‘Shri so and so, MP for such and such, will be visiting your studio at a certain time. Please ensure suitable reception and that he meets all important actors and actresses.’ Another advantage of the location is that, once there, the cast has to stay: there is no way that they can put in a couple of hours on the Ramayan set and then go off to work on another film, as is the custom in Bombay, where a star can be contracted to appear in as many as thirty films at the same time.

  In two days at the Umargaon studios I had plenty of time to discuss the apparent commercial nonsense of the decisions Ramanand Sagar had taken. Walking around the studios, Subash, the son who was in charge of production, said, ‘We chose unknown actors because we wanted people to think of them as the gods. We didn't want people saying, “That's Amitabh Bacchan, that's Dharmendra, that's Mandakani.”’ Over a vegetarian lunch – only vegetarian food was served in the studio canteen during the shooting – I met Moti Sagar, Ramanand's youngest son and one of his co-directors. He explained to me the language of his father's Ramayan.

  ‘It is deliberately written in an epic style. If it had been colloquial, the impact would have been lost. These are gods you know, and not human beings.’

  When it came to violence, the Sagars relied on crude electronic tricks, especially in the great battle between the armies of Ram and Ravan, which turned into nothing more than a video comic. The protagonists never came near each other – they shot electronic arrows sparking like fireworks and sending out highly coloured rays. After protracted flights, the arrows would collide in mid air, spit at each other and then return to their quivers. When the time eventually came for someone to die, his enemy's arrows would slowly dismember him. An arm might be sliced off first – the viewer would see the whole limb flying away. Then perhaps another arm would soar into the sky, then the head, then the torso. Moti Sagar was not apologetic about this.

  There again, don't you see, we couldn't have the gods behaving like ordinary Hindi film actors. All that disham disham, that crude violence with people kicking each other in the crotch, punching them and throwing them over their shoulders. This had to be something quite different.’

  ‘But were you confident that the audience would want to see something as essentially unreal as your violence?’

  ‘We were, but we knew that we would be attacked by the élite. After all, the Ramayan is about everything that the élite doesn't like, considers awful – religion, superstition, women obeying their husbands, dynastic rule.’

  The Sagars' judgement proved right. The popularity of the Ramayan itself became legendary. At first I thought it was just an attempt to imitate Hindi movie versions of the epic on television. Ram struck me as sickly and Sita as simpering. But after a few episodes the taxi-drivers from the rank opposite my house would knock on the door every Sunday morning to ask if they could watch the Ramayan. They had never asked to see any other television programme, and their enthusiasm made me take it more seriously. I became a fan – to the disgust of almost all my friends, because of course it's fashionable to rubbish the Sagars' Ramayan.

  Then reports started appearing in the press about the impact of the series. An electricity substation was burnt down by viewers enraged that a power cut had robbed them of one episode. New cabinet ministers asked for their swearing-in ceremony to be delayed so that they could watch the Ramayan. As one cynic said, ‘The last thing a politician would normally do is to delay his swearing-in, for fear that the PM might change his mind.’ A bride was missing at the auspicious time for her wedding, because it clashed with the Ramayan. (History does not relate whether the pandit who had set the time relented and conducted the wedding ceremony after that week's episode was over.) A councillor in Maharashtra suggested that the municipality should hold a special condolence meeting to mourn the death of Ravan, the king of Lanka. The wife of a senior Indian bureaucrat told me that one of India's great transcontinental expresses she was travelling on was delayed while the passengers and crew sat on the platform at Gwalior watching the Ramayan on the station's television monitors. A cooperative society of women who make poppadam's took out half-page advertisements in the national press when the Ramayan ended, saying,

  For seventy-seven weeks, Sunday mornings of great many families were adorned with the atmosphere of Ramayana, brought alive by the galaxy of mythological characters, reliving the times millenniums back. Here is a day to say goodbye, to that blissful nearness. Yes, that immortal world will no more be before our eyes. But down the memory lane this world will accompany us with all its splendour and shine.

  Like so many other great epics, the origins of the Ramayan, or Ramayana, are obscure. It is generally accepted that it was composed some time between 1500 and 200 BC, giving a wide margin for error. Its author is believed to have been the sage Valmiki, who was inspired by the god Brahma. Valmiki's was the first of many Ramayans. The author R. K. Narayan, in the introduction to his own English version, The Ramayana Retold, says the epic has been ‘the largest source of inspiration to the poets of India throughout the centuries. India is a land of many languages, each predominant in a particular area, and in each one of them a version of the Ramayana is available, original and brilliant, and appealing to millions of readers who know the language. R. K. Narayan also says, ‘I am prepared to state that almost every individual… living in India is aware of the story of the Ramayana in some measure or other. Everyone of whatever age, outlook, or station in life, knows the essential part of the epic and adores the main figures in it – Rama and Sita.’

  The Ramayan is the story of the eldest son of the king of Ayodhya. He goes into exile voluntarily with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshman because the king has promised the throne to Bharat, the son of his second wife. Ram accepts this without any ill will. During their exile in the forest, Ravan, the king of Lanka, disguises himself as a hermit and kidnaps Sita. Ram and Lakshman, with the help of the monkey-god Hanuman and an army of monkeys who build a bridge across the sea to Lanka, defeat Ravan and his army of demons. Sita is rescued, but her troubles are not over: she has to pass an ordeal of
fire to prove that she has remained faithful to Ram. Eventually Ram returns in triumph to Ayodhya, where his younger brother, who has never ascended the throne, welcomes him.

  The story of what happens after Ram ascends the throne is not normally included in traditional performances of the epic, and some scholars have questioned its authenticity. In this final section, Ram is disturbed by reports that his subjects have not accepted the return of Sita. They say that she was defiled during her captivity in Lanka. Ram sends her into exile, where she bears him twin sons, Lav and Kush. Years later, Ram and Sita meet in the forest and he tries to persuade her to return, as she has now proved her chastity beyond doubt. Sita refuses and calls on her mother, the earth, to swallow her up. This last story was not originally scheduled to be included in the television Ramayan, but India was so upset when the epic came to an end that the government asked Ramanand Sagar to start work on Sita's second exile. This was in production when I visited the Vrindavan Studios in October 1988.