by Mark Tully
We started out from Bhopal at six thirty in the morning on the Jabalpur road, passing unprepossessing square blocks of flats which house the vast army of bureaucrats and their hangers-on needed to man the headquarters of the government of Madhya Pradesh. Although it was still several hours before the bureaucrats would end their preparations for going to work, a few dark-green and red buses of the state transport corporation were already on the road, adding clouds of poisonous fumes to the morning mist. Gilly and I sat on the back seat. Jangarh, Iyer the artist and of course Swami's driver, Prakash, were in the front.
We were soon out in the country, passing through villages of small houses with sloping tiled roofs, many covered with yellow flowering gourds. The landscape was open, with blue hills in the distance and hardly a tree to be seen.
After an hour or so, I tentatively asked about breakfast. In Punjab and the more prosperous areas of northern India the roads are lined with excellent open-air cafés known as dhabas. That did not seem to be the case on the Bhopal–Jabalpur road. The driver, Prakash, grunted in a way remarkably reminiscent of his boss, Swami. That meant that he would decide when and where to stop. When we passed through a small town where the cafés around the bus station were doing a brisk business, I again feebly raised the question of breakfast. Prakash said brusquely, ‘Dhabas near bus stations are never any good.’ A few miles out of the town he pulled up at a small open-air café in the middle of nowhere. This was the place where he had decided we should eat.
At this stage I was getting a little worried about my relationship with Prakash. I find drivers among the most difficult Indians to get on with. Either you let them take charge, and then you really are taken for a ride, or you try to establish your authority, and that can mean a surly and uncooperative companion for the rest of the journey. Prakash looked as though he could be a difficult customer. He was a small, wiry man with spiky hair and a two-day growth of beard which never seemed to get any longer. His face was thin, with a hooked nose, and he wore a gold earring in one ear. He came from Morena, which is in the heart of the dacoit or bandit country in the north of Madhya Pradesh, and he could easily have passed for a dacoit himself. As we had four days to spend with him, I decided to leave myself a bit more time to assess the situation.
Breakfast showed that we had also still to establish our relationship with the other passengers in the front seat. Gilly and I sat on one charpai, many of its strings replaced with what looked like plastic washing-line, while Jangarh and Iyer the artist sat down three charpais away and Prakash made the first of what were to be many inspections of the car. A young boy who was still less than half awake plonked down our breakfasts of omelettes, parathas and cups of very sweet tea on a none-too-clean board placed across the charpai. There seems to be an age limit above which you can't work as a waiter in a dhaba anywhere in India, and that limit is about ten. This dhaba was set under an acacia tree whose yellow flowers fell on our omelettes.
Prakash banged down the bonnet of the car and then walked into the fields behind the dhaba. Toilets are not a service dhabas normally provide. He then came back for a quick cup of tea. Before we had finished our breakfast he returned to the driving-seat, making it quite clear that he wanted to be on the move again. We hurriedly washed our hands under a pump, paid our bill and took our seats in the car. It still didn't seem to be the time to disagree with Prakash.
Swami's vehicle was a Hindustan Ambassador – still the standard issue for everyone in the government of India who merits a car, from the prime minister downwards. It is a bull-nosed four-door saloon making no concessions to modern aerodynamics – the late-forties model of the British Morris Oxford. It came to India in the fifties and has dominated the roads ever since. Officially the Ambassador has been through several changes during its long life, but each new ‘mark’ has meant merely a face-lift for the front grille or a new dashboard. The engine behind the grille has remained the same, and the chassis and springs carrying it have not altered. The car has two outstanding qualities: there seems to be no limit to the number of people it can carry, or to the length of its life. Mind you, the Ambassador is a demanding car – it needs plenty of attention to keep it on the road, which is why every Ambassador driver has to be his own mechanic. But despite its stern principles of economic self-reliance, or pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, even India has not been able to withstand the Japanese invasion. The Maruti is now the fashionable car in the bigger cities. Named after the son of the Hindu wind-god, it is in fact a small Suzuki. Hindustan Motors, the manufacturers of the Ambassador, has replied by putting an Isuzu engine into the body of an outdated Vauxhall and calling it a ‘Contessa’. But Hindustan Motors has not stopped producing the Ambassador, as it is still in demand. Although the Contessa is more comfortable and has an engine which can power an air-conditioner as well as pull a car, I still feel safer setting out on a long journey in an Ambassador. Contessas - and indeed Marutis – require new skills and spare parts when they fall victims to India's treacherous roads, and those skills and parts have not yet spread into the countryside.
About half an hour after breakfast we got the first hint of trouble – a sinister knocking under the back seat. Prakash ignored it. We rattled on through villages where women were pumping water into brass pots, smoke was rising from mud ovens and bells in the small roadside temples were clanging as those for whom the day was to be of special importance sought the blessings of Hanu-man, Shiva or whoever the temple deity was. The luckier children were on their way to school; the unluckier ones were carrying vegetables and other produce on their heads to the local market. There were no clouds to shield us from the sun, but it was clearly not going to be an unbearably hot day. The knocking continued, and Prakash decided that something would have to be done. He stopped, went round to the back of the Ambassador and jumped up and down on the bumper. We set off again, the knocking apparently cured. Encouraged by this, Prakash put his foot down.
We were on a national highway, which should have meant one of the better roads of India, but this one would not have passed as a minor road in the more prosperous parts of the country. It was barely wide enough for one vehicle, as we found when we got stuck behind a lorry. The usual request ‘Horn please’ was painted on the back of the lorry, but Prakash's horn had no effect – the driver ploughed on as though he owned the road. Eventually a bus coming the other way made the truck-driver stop. The two heavily overladen vehicles moved gingerly on to the cart tracks on either side of the road and eased their way past each other. Prakash saw his chance, shot forward and overtook the truck before it could take command of the tarmac again.
The highway had almost as many potholes as the cart tracks, but we sped on – bumping up and down and bucking from side to side like a stagecoach in a Scarlet Pimpernel film – until suddenly there was a loud bang. We had hit a particularly vicious pothole. With the Ambassador still moving at a considerable speed, Prakash stuck his head out of the window and saw a tell-tale trail of oil. That struck him as something which could be serious, and so he stopped. A brief inspection of the underbelly showed that the oil-chamber had been holed. Prakash immediately decided that this needed a visit to the nearest village or town. Muttering something about getting oil, he jumped on a passing bus, leaving his passengers sitting under a tree by the side of the road.
It is of the nature of an Indian breakdown that you know it will be repaired but you don't know how many hours it will take. This delay – however long it was to be – forced us to break the barrier between the front and back seats of the car and establish a relationship with Jangarh and Iyer. The whole point of our journey was to get to know the artist better, and India is an inquisitive country, but even after so many years living here I still have an Englishman's reluctance to strike up a conversation with a comparative stranger – especially with a stranger like Jangarh, who seemed unusually reserved. I imagined that he might well resent our interest in him, but, as usual, my apprehensions were totally unfounded. Jangarh wa
s only waiting for me to open the business between us.
Swami had given me a version of how Jangarh had been discovered, but, remembering that philosopher's own words – ‘There is always a story behind a story in India’ – I thought I would start by asking Jangarh for his version.
Swami had said his team had come across the artist breaking stones by the roadside, but Jangarh denied that he had ever sunk to that level. ‘I did work on the roads. I carried baskets of mud on my head and dug mud to fill other people's baskets, but I never broke stones. We used to work in gangs and be away from the village for months on end.’
‘How did you live?’
‘I lived alone and used to sleep under trees in the hot weather. When it rained or got cold, we used to put up some sort of shelter. The jobs used to last a few months at a time, and then we went back home.’
‘What happened when you couldn't get work like that?’
‘Sometimes I collected wood from the jungle and sold it to the schoolmaster, and then of course at some times of the year there was work in the fields.’
‘Didn't you have any land of your own?’
‘Well, there were ten to twelve acres, but there are fifty to sixty people in my family.’
‘Fifty to sixty?’ I asked in surprise.
‘Yes, but I didn't have to look after them all,’ Jangarh replied with a smile. ‘When my father died, my immediate family split up. He had two wives and everyone went their own way. It was difficult, because I was only thirteen and I was left to look after my wife and one of my sisters. They were the ones I had to work for. Mind you, the women helped too. They used to work in the village whenever possible, but I didn't want them to come and work on the roads with me.’
Iyer, a former college weightlifting champion with prematurely grey hair neatly tied in a pony-tail, unlike his guru Swami's, turned to Jangarh and asked, ‘Well, what exactly did happen when the team of artists came? Where were you at the time?’
‘I was working in another village, in the fields, when I was sent for. I found these people from the city in my village. They had seen a painting I had done on the walls of someone's house and had been told I had done it. They seemed to like it. Eventually I met Swami and told him I would like to go to Bhopal, and he agreed. At first I just went for a bit, but then Swami gave me a permanent job and I stayed in the city.’
‘Did you think that you would learn more about art by going to Bhopal?’ I asked.
‘No,’ replied Jangarh firmly. ‘I don't take advice from any city artists. I also tell other tribals who come to Bhopal not to copy but to do their own work. The point of going to the city is not to change your art but to sell it.’
‘Surely your art has changed since you went to the city?’
Jangarh thought for a moment and then said, ‘Well, it's cleaner.’
‘What does that mean? That the lines are clearer, that it's easier to understand?’ I asked.
Iyer, the ‘modern’ artist, laughed. ‘No. He means that there are no longer any splodges on the paper.’
‘That's right,’ said Jangarh, apparently not in the least offended.
Swami had told me that Jangarh's art had ‘blossomed’ in Bhopal, that his genius had ‘burst forth’. Jangarh seemed unaware of that. Iyer then began to defend his guru. ‘Come on, Jangarh. You have learnt new techniques. You've learnt etching for instance.’
‘Yes, all right. I have learnt etching, and I do now paint with a thinner line, but my art hasn't changed.’
Iyer came back again: ‘But Swami says that you are an original because you are the first person to paint pictures of your tribal gods.’
‘Yes, that is true. You see, what happened was that our people use geometric patterns to represent the gods. But then I used to see people when the gods took possession of them and that was how I got the idea of what the gods looked like.’
‘Didn't people in your village object to breaking the traditional way of representing the gods?’
‘No, they liked it.’
‘Did anyone in the village teach you to paint?’
‘No. Actually I started by copying my eldest brother, who made animals out of clay. I didn't do it in front of him in case he got angry. I was shy too. Then I took to painting pictures on the walls of people's houses. They seemed to like them, and so I went on.’
‘But how did you learn to paint the pictures?’
‘How does anyone learn? I just copied other artists in the village, and then I got some ideas of my own.'
‘Did you charge money for decorating people's houses?’
‘No, I didn't think of doing that in the village. Anyway, then people would not have been so keen on giving me their walls to paint on,’ said Jangarh, smiling.
After about two hours a bus pulled up by our tree and Prakash jumped down. ‘These dehati [rustic] places!’ he said. ‘I had to walk four kilometres back from the town before I got any transport.’
I wondered vaguely what good the can of oil he was carrying would do if it was just going to pour out through the hole in the chamber, but I need not have worried. Prakash stuffed a piece of rag into the hole, poured the oil into the engine, jumped into his seat and started revving the engine. Satisfied that there was not too much knocking, he told us to get in quickly and set off again.
The next town – it was really just an overgrown village – was Devri. It was off the main road, underneath a hill covered with patchy forest. The biggest building in the town was the police station, which had ‘Patriotism and Service of the People’ painted on one wall in big red letters. Prakash, however, would not have dreamt of trying out the police's patriotism and service in this or any other difficulty he found himself in – the only service you will get on the Indian roads is from the people themselves.
Devri didn't even boast an Ambassador mistri, or mechanic, but there was an expert in tractors and Prakash persuaded him that removing the oil-chamber of the car wasn't very different from performing the same operation on a tractor. All went well until they discovered one nut of a different size. The mistri tried all his spanners, but none would fit. He turned to Prakash in triumph and said, ‘I told you that we should not play around with this, but you wouldn't listen. Now you have lost another lot of oil.’
Prakash was not so easily defeated. He found a pipe, hammered it into something like the shape of the nut and managed to loosen it. After that it was all plain sailing. Devri did have a welder and so the hole in the chamber was plugged somewhat more substantially than before, and we started on the road to Jabalpur again.
Passing through one village, I noticed a small, squat building tilting precariously. It was advertised as ‘The Leaning Temple of Lolri’. Unlike its more famous counterpart in Pisa, the Lolri temple showed no sign of becoming a tourist attraction.
At about five thirty in the evening, we hit a stretch of road which was being rebuilt. Unfortunately the government seemed to have run out of money and the national highway deteriorated into a cart track for about twenty miles. The central government provides the funds for national highways but the state governments build and maintain them. That inevitably means that much of the money allocated for national highways gets siphoned off into projects dearer to the heart of the state government. An abandoned road-roller and occasional piles of stones were the only signs of the Madhya Pradesh government's intention to rebuild this national highway between the state capital and Jabalpur, the seat of the High Court.
When the government of independent India merged the British Central Provinces with a collection of princely states to form Madhya Pradesh, there were several rival claimants for the honour – and, of course, the commercial advantage – of being the state capital. In an attempt to satisfy everyone, Bhopal, somewhere near the centre of the state, was made the capital. Jabalpur in the east was given the High Court, Gwalior in the north was given the Revenue Board, and Indore in the south was given the Public Services Commission, which has the all-important responsibility of
supervising government recruitment – altogether not a very convenient arrangement considering the condition of Madhya Pradesh's roads.
Thirteen hours after leaving Bhopal we finally reached Jabalpur, a distance of 200 miles. An official of Bharat Bhavan had confidently assured us that it would only take six hours. There was no question of going on to our rest house at Mandla, the nearest district headquarters to Jangarh's village, so we made our way to Jackson's Hotel. The Jacksons have long-since gone and the hotel is now in the hands of the Chadhas, a family who before partition used to have a lucrative contract for providing the army with supplies, including wines and spirits, in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Fortunately they have not changed the hotel very much. The entrance that night seemed rather forbidding but the staff inside were more welcoming than the condescending young graduates who operate India's new five-star hotels. The rooms were far more spacious and the prices very much more reasonable too. There were notices on the walls of the rooms requesting ‘valued guests leaving early in the morning or in the odd hours of the night to get their bills cleared by 10 p.m. on the previous night to avoid inconvenience’. The notice ended, ‘Your cooperation is solicited.’ We had decided not to leave at an odd hour, though, so there was no need to cooperate in this matter at least.
The front seat of the car decided to sleep three in one room, but I need not have worried – the barriers were not going up again. When I suggested that we all meet in my room for a drink, Iyer said, ‘We have a little shopping to do and then we will join you.’
