PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIA IN SLOW MOTION
Mark Tully was born in Calcutta and educated in England. He was correspondent for the BBC in South Asia for twenty-five years. He now works as a journalist in New Delhi with his colleague and partner, Gillian Wright, who also translates Indian-language fiction in to English. Together they have worked on a number of books including Mark Tully’s highly acclaimed No Full Stops in India and The Heart of India.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Published in Penguin Books 2003
13
Copyright © Mark Tully and Gillian Wright, 2002
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-soid, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193587-4
To all those who are striving
for the good of India
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Reinvention of Rama
Misplaced Charity
Corruption from Top to Tail
Altered Altars
Creating Cyberabad
The Sufis and a Plain Faith
Farmer’s Reward
A Tale of Two Brothers
The Water Harvesters
Paradise Lost
Conclusion
We would like to thank all those who have helped us during our travels for this book, especially I. B. Singh, Madhukar Shah of Orchcha, Mario Miranda and his family, Percival Naronha, Frederick Naronha, Claud Alvares, G. S. Radhakrishna, Uday Mahurkar, Yusuf Jameel, Pushkar Johari, all those who gave us their time on our travels, and the team in our home in Delhi – Ravi Prasad Narayanan in the office, and Ram Chander and Bubbly in the kitchen.
Not a word passed between them as they strode towards the town of Orchcha with its temples to visit and its sacred river to bathe in. These were peaceful pilgrims, they carried peacock feathers as standards and sticks for dancing, not for doing battle. They were robed for rejoicing, with cowbells tinkling on their cross-belts, while round their waists gaudy green and red pom-poms bounced. Some wore vests embroidered with rosettes, and some pointed multicoloured clowns’ hats. There would have been loud praising of their gods too had this not been the end of a week of abstinence when not a word was to be spoken. The men of the villages of Bundelkhand, a region of central India, were on their way to celebrate one of their immemorial festivals when their silence was broken by the wail of a siren. An inspector of police in khaki uniform clutching the handle of his motorbike in one hand and imperiously waving everyone off the road with the other appeared round the corner. He was followed by a white car with a blue light revolving on the roof and one star above black number plates, the badge of office of a deputy inspector general of police. The convoy, completed by a pick-up full of armed policemen, hurtled past, scattering the pilgrims in a cloud of dust. They couldn’t see whether the superintendent of police, the representative of the Raj which succeeded the British, even bothered to glance at their discomfiture shielded as he was from those he ruled by firmly closed, heavily tinted windows. Waiting in our car to pass the pilgrims I was reminded of the senior Indian civil servant who had said to me, ‘Our police are only for the poor. They don’t touch the rich and the influential.’
We were on our way to see a cyber-café that a non-governmental organization had set up in a remote village. There we were told that the computers had been much more useful when they could pull down material from a satellite. But then some bureaucrat had discovered that the NGO needed an Internet Service Provider Licence II and had ordered them to dismantle the aerials. The government itself had proved quite unable to provide any connection with the outside world. There was a wireless mast for one public telephone but the villagers said no one had come to maintain the battery for years. The villagers themselves were of course not allowed to touch government property. As I have found so often in India the government was the problem not the solution.
The police officer with his convoy, and the bureaucrats who ordered the aerials to be dismantled, were the unchanging India, the India which is still shackled by a colonial bureaucracy, the India which has become a byword for red-tape and corruption, the India described by one of its most distinguished civil servants as a kleptocracy. This was the India that, according to a recent World Bank report, still has social indicators that are ‘poor by most measures of human development’. But there is a changing India too. In the same report the World Bank also said that India’s economy had, since the 1980s, been among the fastest growing in the world. Indian democracy has brought about a social revolution. The lower castes, because they are largest in number, have come to dominate the political scene. There is a sophisticated Indian elite and a sizeable well-educated middle class: thoroughly professional lawyers, bankers and accountants, academics, engineers, doctors, all admired by their peers in other parts of the world. India is renowned for its information technology skills. Civil society is vibrant, India has become the NGO capital of the world. Television has grown from a drab purveyor of government propaganda to a multi-channel independent media. The press, once obsessed with politics, now provides news and a bewildering variety of views on every aspect of Indian life, including the misdeeds of those who wield power.
Why then is India still in slow motion? Part of the answer lies in this story from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, or IIT, a symbol of modern India’s potential – a first-class university, teaching the cream of India’s science students. Rukmini Bhaya Nair is an effervescent enthusiast for the humanities, charged with persuading IIT students that there is more to knowledge than just science and technology. Apparently, if she travels on official business she is asked to fill in a form on which she can still claim for travelling by camel, or canal, depending on the version. The small print also sets out the rules for claiming second-class fare (without meals) on steamers, and mentions the furlongs travelled by trolley. What about more modern forms of travel? According to Rukmini Bhaya Nair: ‘Our clerks of the government of India have simply added air-travel to the list of possible conveyances – a final palimpsest layer.’ And what conclusion does she draw from this? ‘Despite our flirtation with the latest computer technology, our gleaming machines, and the constant talk of efficiency, we at the hi-tech IIT remain the hostages of history. The obfuscatory rites of colonial administration are with us still and everyone is caught equally helplessly in the toils of the paper chase.’ Those obfuscatory rites would have been done away with if politicians had concentrated on the most obvious issue facing India – bad governance. That would go against their own vested interests so they have distracted the voters’ attention by raising issues of caste and creed.
There have been many explanations for the failures of India. Some centre on India’s past, its history of invasions and foreign domination – Naipaul has described it as a wounded civilization. Some blame India’s culture, and its religions, seeing it as a land of fatalism, a society set in stone by the caste system. Some even blame the climate, saying it has sapped the will of the people. These explanations denigrate India, Indians, and an ancient culture that has been described by the poet Kathleen Raine as ‘having more fully than any other civilization on earth, past or present, explored and embodied the highest and the most embracing realization of our human scope’. It is these critiques that are fatalistic for they suggest that there is nothing that can be done, the flaws are fatal and India is fated to be a poor and backward country.
In this book we argue that one of the fundamental problems of India is a peculiarly Indian form of bad governance. The need to do something about governance was acknowledged by the Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee when he addressed the National Development Council in 1999. There he admitted, ‘People often perceive the bureaucracy as an agent of exploitation rather than a provider of service. Corruption has become a low risk and high reward activity. Frequent and arbitrary transfers of government officials combined with limited tenures are harming the work ethic and lowering the morale of honest officers. While expecting discipline and diligence from the administration the political executive should self-critically review its own performance.’ Three years later his party became the junior party in a coalition in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, headed by Mayawati, a formidable Dalit politician who when heading an earlier administration earned the nickname of ‘Transfer Chief Minister’. On assuming power this time she transferred two hundred and fifty officials within ten days.
The stories in this book tell not just of bad governance, but of the reason for it and also of those who are battling against it. We do not suggest that bad governance is the root of all India’s problems, but, unlike so many of the more exotic diagnoses, there can be no doubt that it’s a brake slowing down a country with enormous but unrealized potential.
On 6 December 1992 Gilly and I were standing on the roof of a building with a clear view of a somewhat dilapidated Mughal mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, a place of pilgrimage, hallowed by tradition as the home town of the god Rama. The right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organization the VHP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Council of Hindus, had been campaigning for six years to pull down this mosque, which they claimed had been built on the site of a Hindu temple marking Rama’s birthplace. This was the day the BJP and the other organizations supporting it were to begin work on building the temple, but they had given a commitment to the government and to the courts that it would only be a symbolic start, a religious ceremony, and the mosque would not be touched. Below us saffron-robed Hindu holy men jostled with each other for a place on the platform where the religious ceremony was to be conducted. Arrogant, officious young men strode around ejecting anyone they thought had no right to be there. Khaki-clad police held back the throng threatening to break through the bamboo barriers. A former head of the Uttar Pradesh police, now himself a political Hindu holy man, gave orders to officers he had once officially commanded. At what the police hoped would be a safe distance from the mosque, a vast crowd, perhaps 150,000 strong, some of whom had been camping near the mosque for ten days, roared encouragement to speakers who threatened they would pull down the building erected by the Mughal conquerors. Sitting on the VIPs’ platform, the former Maharani of Gwalior, wearing the white sari of a widow, clapped when the mosque was described as ‘a symbol of slavery, an insult to Hinduism’. Beside her, Lai Krishan Advani, the politician who had masterminded the Ayodhya campaign, was strangely silent and disapproving.
Trouble first broke out in the space below us when young men wearing canary-yellow headbands managed to break through the barriers. The police stood by and watched, but the unofficial guardians of the law appointed by the organizers, and wearing saffron headbands, did put up some resistance. They soon gave up, however, and joined the intruders in beating up television journalists, smashing their cameras, and trampling on their tape-recorders. Encouraged by this first victory, thousands charged towards the outer cordon of police protecting the mosque itself shouting, ‘Jai Shri Rama!’,’ Victory to Lord Rama!’,’ We will build the temple here!’, ‘We won’t tolerate this symbol of slavery!’ Slogans inciting hatred of Muslims were also shouted. Thick clouds of dust rose, making it impossible to see what was happening, but in what seemed like no time at all the outer cordons collapsed, and then we saw young men clambering along the branches of trees, dropping over the final barricade and rushing towards the mosque. Above the raucous slogans and the bellowing of conch shells, we heard a leader of the BJP shout through a microphone, ‘Police, don’t interfere!’ He needn’t have worried, the police had no intention of interfering. The last line of defence retreated from the mosque holding their wicker shields above their heads as protection from the stones raining down on them. We saw one police officer pushing through his men to ensure that he got out of danger first. As the police walked away, two young men scrambled on to the top of the mosque’s central dome, hoisted a saffron flag, and started hacking away the mortar.
That was the last we saw of what was known as the Babri Masjid, the mosque of the emperor Babur. All communications with Ayodhya had been broken and so I drove to Faizabad, some ten miles away, to phone my story to London. On returning to Ayodhya, I was surrounded by an angry crowd shouting, ‘ Foreign journalists! CIA agents!’ They prodded me with tridents, Hindu emblems, as they debated my fate. Some were for beating me up, but they were restrained by a young sadhu. He persuaded them to lock me up in a temple dormitory, where I was soon joined by the Indianjournalists who had driven to Ayodhya with me. They refused to leave until I was released, although my captors insisted they had nothing against them. We were eventually rescued by a local official assisted by the head priest of one of Ayodhya’s best-known temples, and driven to Faizabad in a police lorry with other journalists who had been forced to hide from the mobs. By then the mosque was a pile of rubble.
The BJP is a member of ‘the family’ of a Hindu sect, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or National Volunteer Corps. For the RSS, India’s past is a story of humiliation by foreign rulers and the future lies with a united, militant Hinduism restoring the nation’s pride and standing up to fundamentalist Islam and missionary Christianity. The ideology of the Nehru-Gandhis’ Congress Party, which has ruled India for most of the years since Independence, is dismissed by the RSS as pseudo-secularism. They are particularly critical of Nehru’s decision to allow Muslims to keep their family law, and to give a special status to Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state. With its nationalist agenda and its quasi-military parades, the sect has been accused of fascism. The BJP has veered between the hard-line Hindu agenda of the RSS and policies which would have a broader appeal. The campaign to destroy the mosque was on the RSS agenda and marked the temporary dominance of the hardliners in the BJP.
For six years the BJP had kept Ayodhya centre stage. They had persuaded Indians all over the country to send sacred bricks for the Rama temple, which were transported to Ayodhya by the truckload. In the 1989 election the secular Rajiv Gandhi was so alarmed by the success of the Ayodhya campaign that he allowed the foundation stone of the temple to be laid in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the BJP running away with the Hindu vote. The next year, Advani set out on a 10,000 kilometre journey from the west coast of India to Ayodhya in a vehicle decorated like Rama’s chariot, making inflammatory speeches about the mosque wherever he stopped. He was arrested before reaching his destination, but thousands of BJP supporters did manage to reach Ayodhya’s bridge over the sacred River Saryu. A naked holy man drove a bus through the police cordon blocking entry to the town. The crowd surged through the narrow lanes to the mosque, broke through the gates, and hoisted a saffron flag on one of the domes before the police opened fire, killing, they say, six people. The BJP claims fifty. The next day there was a renewed attack on the mosque. This time the casualty figures were put at fifteen by the police and fifty-nine by the BJP.
Now in 1992, a year or so later, all too aware of the political potency of the issue, the Congress Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, was heading a minority government and hadn’t felt secure enough to ban this assembly at Ayodhya. He moved 195 companies of paramilitary police to the neighbouring town of Faizabad, but he didn’t order them to save the mosque for fear that they would open fire and create martyrs for the BJP.
Although the destruction of the mosque was the culmination of a campaign launched by the BJP, Lai Krishan Advani was a disappointed man. Indian journalists hung their heads in shame. One commentator said the Mahatma had been assassinated again, another spoke of’the nation’s shame’, and the Times of India editorial was headlined ‘The Republic Besmirched’. In the international press the bell tolled for Indian secularism. In the London Times, Conor Cruise O’Brien asked, ‘Will India fall to the zealots?’ Newsweek wrote of ‘the ancient conflict between Hindus and Muslims’. The Washington Post identified ‘centuries old religious hatred’ combined with ‘modern day economic depression’ as the cause of the desecration of the mosque.
Serious riots did indeed break out in different parts of India. In Mumbai, then still called Bombay, they turned into ugly attacks by the police on Muslims. But as has so often happened since independence India pitched and rolled alarmingly in seas which would have caused a smaller, less stable craft to capsize, but weathered the storm. The riots died down. The country didn’t fall to the zealots. Perhaps one reason for this is that there is in truth no ancient history of religious hatred. There are many who view the theory that there was such hatred as a colonial version of history, a version on which the case for Pakistan as a separate homeland for Muslims was constructed, a version which requires two cohesive communities united in opposing one another. But a religion as diverse as Hinduism has never produced a united pan-Indian community. In fact some scholars question the very existence of anything that could be called Hinduism. Muslims in India, too, were not one community, nor were they necessarily hostile to Hindus. In an essay entitled ‘The Myth of Unity’, the Indian Muslim historian Mushirul Hasan has written of an Islamic tradition with its roots firmly anchored in Indian soil, and quotes one British civil servant reporting from Uttar Pradesh ‘that there was a strong tendency among Muslims to assimilate in all externals with their Hindu neighbours’. Apparently he found Muslims wearing the Hindu dhoti and greeting each other in the name of Rama. To the east in Bengal, another civil servant described Hindu-Muslim mutual dependence and friendship as ‘an old and cherished tradition’. This was confirmed by Lord Lytton, the Governor of Bengal who commented on how the rank and file of the communities in his province got on well with each other in all the daily business of life. Although that tradition does not suit the RSS, and does not make good copy for journalists, events after the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya would suggest it is still alive.
Once the storm subsided it became clear that the destruction of the mosque and widespread riots had even alarmed many supporters of the BJP, and pushed the party into a corner where it was impossible for most other political parties to have any relationship with it. The plight of the BJP became clear the next year when it lost elections in three states it had ruled.
Before Ayodhya became the fulcrum on which Indian politics hinged, it had never been one of the premier destinations on India’s pilgrimage circuit. Although Rama was one of the most popular members of the Hindu pantheon, Ayodhya was a town of crumbling mansion-like temples and rest houses, symbols of a past history when it had been capital of a Muslim kingdom. Cycle rickshaws, not cars, jammed the narrow lanes. It was bereft of hotels and the tourists to fill them. Its pilgrims could only afford to sleep in temple rest houses. They came from the surrounding villages and small towns. Ayodhya didn’t attract the faithful from far and wide like Shiva’s city of Varanasi, Haridwar, where the Ganges flows out of the Himalayas into the plains, Allahabad, the site of the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious festival, or Tirupati in the south, said to have the most ample cash-flow of all Indian temples. The cremation ghats on the banks of Ayodhya’s sacred river, the Saryu, couldn’t compete with the all-India death-industry on the steps leading down to the Ganges in Varanasi. But when the mosque was destroyed, the World Council of Hindus, the VHP, had called for Ayodhya to become the Vatican of Hindus.
It was hardly surprising that the VHP dreamed of a Hindu Vatican. The council had been set up to overcome what the RSS saw as Hinduism’s disadvantages, its lack of an organization like the church and its traditional reluctance to proselytize. Swami Chinmayananda, who had first proposed the establishment of a Hindu council, said, ‘I know that religious organization is against the very principle of Hinduism, but we have to move with the times. We seem to have entered today all over the world, in every walk of life, in every field of endeavour, an age of organization… Therefore, in the spiritual field, even though the individuals proceed forward and develop, if religion wants to serve the society, it also has to get organized.’
The missionaries the VHP sent out to proselytize tended to simplify Hinduism. In the same way that the Christian church taught a simple faith based on one God and one Bible, they emphasized Rama and the Ramayana.
Seven years after we had watched the destruction of the Babri Masjid, we decided to return to Ayodhya to see how far the VHP had succeeded in creating a Hindu headquarters, converting Hindus to their Rama, and putting the town on the national pilgrimage map. We went to one of the major festivals of the year, the Panch Kosi Parikrama, when pilgrims walk around the boundaries of what they believe was Rama’s city.
On reaching Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, we found that whatever else the BJP might have done for Ayodhya’s status it had not been able to improve access to the town. There was still no airport. There were, we knew, a few trains but when we asked about the afternoon service there wasn’t one. ‘Take a bus,’ the railway enquiries in Lucknow advised us. Although they were more plentiful than the trains, buses were even slower, and we wanted to get to Ayodhya before nightfall when, according to newspapers, the town would be ‘sealed off’ by the police to prevent traffic interfering with the pilgrims. So we fell back on a taxi.
Even in the taxi, we were still on the road after dark, and so were delayed by police enforcing the ban on traffic reaching Ayodhya. Officially only heavy vehicles were to be stopped, but they had blocked the road to all vehicles. When I asked a police officer why the lorries were parked in the middle of the road he replied, ‘They are not parked. They are stopped.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but even then wouldn’t it be better if they were stopped on the side of the road?’
‘I suppose it would,’ the police officer grunted, and walked off leaving the lorries exactly where they were.
We did eventually thread our way through the roadblocks, but fearing further unpleasantness with the police we decided to stop at Faizabad, a sizeable town and district headquarters, just a few kilometres short of Ayodhya. We booked into the Shan-e-Avadh Hotel – certainly not five-star, but very friendly. It had been the headquarters of the world press when the mosque was pulled down.
The next morning, after more trouble with the police, who insisted that we walked the last kilometre or so, we reached Ayodhya’s only bridge over the River Saryu. The town lay before us. The spindly minarets of a mosque could still be seen standing above the forest of temple towers, some slanting like steeples, some curving to a point, some tapered wedges. As part, perhaps the only part, of the government’s ‘Beautify Ayodhya’ campaign, the temples along the banks of the river had been painted to look like pink sandstone. The parikxama was already under way. A stream of pilgrims flowed down the road leading into the town, watched by police perched on tall watchtowers. The names of lost children blared from the public address system. Parents were advised: ‘Please put a note with your child’s name on it in one pocket. We have a girl here who can’t give us her name.’
We joined the pilgrims, not, I am ashamed to say, barefoot as they were. It wasn’t long before we were asked the inevitable question, ‘What country are you from?’ Our first interrogator gave us the impression that perhaps Ayodhya’s festivals had progressed from local to international affairs. He was a young man who explained that he had travelled for thirteen and a half hours by bus and train from Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, the world’s only Hindu kingdom, ‘to see Rama’s kingdom’. He went on to say, ‘When I was a boy many old people told me to worship Rama every morning and evening and so I do.’ How many Western Christian parents and priests must wish that inspiring a lasting faith in the young was always so simple.
We mistook one young man, with his head shaved except for a tuft at the back and wearing yellow robes, for a sadhu, a potential recruit for the VHP, if not already a member. But he told us very firmly he was not. He was a Brahmin training to follow in his father’s footsteps as a priest who would perform all the rituals that mark an orthodox Hindu’s passage through life. He’d come to Ayodhya to study Sanskrit.
Two men, failing to mingle inconspicuously with the pilgrims, listened to our conversation. When Gilly told them she’d recognized them as intelligence officers from their uniform – tight-fitting safari suits – they moved off.
The young Brahmin was not interested in the Rama temple controversy. ‘That’s politics,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand political matters in depth and so I don’t think it’s right for me to comment. I just want to become a perfect Brahmin.’ He spoke excellent English and was well aware that his ambition might seem to be rather outdated. ‘These are new times,’ he said, ‘I know that. A scientific education is important, but we shouldn’t forget our traditions, and we should be proud of them.’
The stream flowed along what passes for Ayodhya’s high street and turned off down a lane flanked by temples. We sat outside a small shop to watch the never-ending procession pass by. Religion in India doesn’t just attract the elderly. Young mothers with babies in their arms, and fathers carrying children on their shoulders, villagers of all ages, their clothes dusty, their supplies and cooking utensils on their heads, smartly dressed middle-class families, all strode purposefully towards their destination. Two boys wearing jeans and listening intensely to Walkmans overtook a pot-bellied, self-important man, possibly a politician. A woman stopped, cupped her hand under a tap beside us and scooped water into her child’s mouth. Two old ladies hobbled along bent over their sticks. A young man lifted his paralysed leg with his hands for each step he took as he struggled to keep up with his colleagues. There were countless sadhus clad in loose-fitting robes, with ill-kempt hair and beards, carrying staffs and small pots full of water from the Saryu. A train of sadhus, two blind led by one with sight, coupled by walking sticks, passed at a remarkable speed. There were saffron-robed women too who had taken vows of chastity and poverty. Two local journalists stopped to talk to us. When I asked what role the members of the RSS family were playing in the pilgrimage, they pointed out that no one was wearing their uniform saffron headbands, or shouting their slogans.
We moved on, leaving the shopkeeper massaging his feet swollen by completing an even longer parikrama a few days earlier. He said, ‘We were so tired that we didn’t think we could take another step, then we saw the enthusiasm of others, we said chalo, let’s go. There’s something about Ayodhya that no matter how bad they are, people become good here.’
As we approached the shrine of the Five-Faced Hanuman, the monkey god who was Rama’s loyal, efficient, and effective lieutenant, we saw a banner across the road reading ‘Minister of State for Energy, Lallu Singhji heartily welcomes all Rama Bhakts’, our first sign of BJP activity. Outside the temple was a stall run by the youth wing of the BJP offering free tea to the pilgrims. A young man insisted, ‘You must avail of this facility’, and so we sat under a canvas awning draped in the party colours to drink tea and be introduced to the president of the party’s youth wing, Rishikesh Upadhyaya. He was proud to have been present when the mosque was pulled down but reluctant to explain the role he had played. Clean-shaven, neatly dressed in shirt and trousers, it was hard to imagine him as one of the hooligans swarming over the mosque and through the lanes of Ayodhya, shouting obscene slogans against Muslims on that day. When I asked whether he was also proud that the BJP had failed to live up to its commitment to ensure the mosque would not be harmed, that there would only be a ceremonial start to the work on the temple, he replied, ‘The BJP didn’t do it. It was the spirit of the devotees which carried them away.’ A surly man pouring cartons of milk into a vast pan of tea added, ‘The BJP would have been thrashed if they’d tried to stop it.’ It was now six years after that incident but not a brick of the temple had yet been laid. Nevertheless Rishikesh Upadhyaya assured me it would be built by the Panch Kosi Parikrama in 2001. His forecast was not fulfilled. Nothing happened in 2001, and in 2002 the VHP tried to make just a ceremonial start to the construction of the temple but the government forestalled it.
We decided to get on with this parikrama, and rejoined the pilgrims who were marching on doggedly, entirely intent on completing the course, rarely even turning their heads to look at the temples they passed. We came to the headquarters of the VHP. The gates of the spacious garden were closed. Inside a few members of the VHP hierarchy sat talking under a tree. They evoked no interest in the pilgrims, and were not much interested themselves in this traditional pilgrimage, with the many different temples it encompassed and the diverse beliefs of the devotees. They were propagating one temple and one Rama. The pilgrims also walked straight past the compound where stonemasons were chiselling sandstone, carving pillars to be ready for when construction of the temple started. There had been an uproar about this in parliament, with opponents of the BJP government demanding that a stop be put to these preparations, but nobody in Ayodhya seemed particularly bothered either way. We came on two young boys dressed as Rama and his wife, Sita, wearing crowns taller than they were, sitting under a canopy by the roadside with their arms raised in blessing. They were of some interest to the pilgrims who dropped coins in their metal begging bowl. The humble paisa was still the currency of most Ayodhya pilgrims. They couldn’t afford to offer rupees.
Breaking away from the pilgrimage, we walked to the site where the mosque had stood and found ourselves the only visitors. The police didn’t allow us past the massive fortifications protecting the images of Rama and Sita now installed there because we didn’t have our passports. They were unamused when Gilly asked, ‘Do we need a passport to see God?’
Returning disappointed, we passed some villagers outside a temple, resting after completing the parikrama. An elderly woman was rubbing her leg, the men were lying down. They came to the festival in a party from a village in the neighbouring Gorakhpur district every year. The leader of the group was a staunch supporter of the BJP’s opponents, the Gandhi family’s Congress Party, but he was in favour of building the temple. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is important to build a temple. In their raj the Muslims destroyed our temple, so in our raj why can’t we have a place for our god?’
So, at the end of the day, we couldn’t say there was no interest in building the temple, but it wasn’t top priority in the pilgrims’ minds. What mattered was still the old tradition of beating the bounds of Rama’s city. At the same time there was little evidence of the pilgrimage drawing the faithful from afar.
We walked back into the heart of Ayodhya, to Kanak Bhavan, the temple where we were to sleep that night. The Maharaja of Orchha, Madhukar Shah, the chairman of the temple trust, had kindly arranged for us to stay there. As guests of the maharaja we had been give the VVIP accommodation. We had all to ourselves the two large bedrooms with thick cotton mattresses arranged on the floor and a pleasant verandah protected by wire mesh from mosquitoes and monkeys. A cook borrowed from the local bazaar had occupied the simple kitchen, where he sat on the floor cutting up vegetables, which he smuggled into the resthouse under his clothes for fear of monkeys.
The maharaja had told us that the temple was built by his great-great-grandmother who had collected silver rupees to ‘do religion’. The maharani didn’t trust the banking system of those days and so the silver rupees were transported to Ayodhya for the construction of the temple which took twelve years and was completed in 1901. The maharaja still has the deeds on Victorian stamp paper signed by the British sub-registrar of Ayodhya. The family bought some villages to provide for the maintenance of the temple. Land reforms after Independence took away most of the income from those villages but the trust still receives 2,300 rupees a year. To bridge the gap, and it’s a wide gap, between its much depleted endowment and the costs incurred in running the temple the trust now has to depend on donations.
As we were unpacking, there was a knock on the door and a man diffidently announced himself as Ajai Kumar Chhawchharia, a member of the temple’s management team, who had been deputed by the maharaja to look after us. He was thin almost to the point of emaciation, short, with a delicate, scholarly face, thick spectacles, closely cropped greying hair and wearing a brown shirt outside his baggy white cotton pajama trousers. As so often occurs in India he made me feel very large and clumsy.
Sitting on the verandah over the cup of sweet tea, which forms the start of most relationships, he told me that he kept the temple accounts. The next stage in getting to know each other was to discover that Ajai came from Bengal. His name wasn’t Bengali, and so I thought he might be a Marwari. They are a community, originally of moneylenders, from Rajasthan. Many of them migrated to Bengal during the Raj, where they flourished, eventually buying out the British businesses when Nehru’s socialism, and the bureaucracy that went with it, became too much for their owners to cope with.
Ajai confirmed that his father had been a wealthy Marwari who had supplied timber props to coal mines. Ajai himself had done well at school and university. After that he’d collected postgraduate diplomas in tax law, transport management, and hotel management too. He had been selected as a management trainee by the prestigious Taj group of hotels, but eventually went back to work in the family business. There he found that his father had to pay ten per cent of the money he was owed to the clerks of the nationalized collieries before they would clear his bills. He would charge for twelve lorryloads of timber when he’d only sent ten to pay all the bribes required to get business, and be paid for it. Disgusted by this corruption, Ajai had given it all up and come to live a celibate life in Ayodhya.
‘Why did you take such an extreme step?’ I asked. ‘After all, with your qualifications there were plenty of other avenues open to you.’
‘Well, you can say that from my childhood I was religious, so I suppose I always had this in the back of my mind. I adore Rama, he is my family, my father, my brother, and my friend.’
‘But by now you might have been a manager of a magnificent palace hotel, a latter-day maharaja. Don’t you regret that?’
‘No,’ he replied without hesitation. ‘Now I’m looking after Rama’s palace.’
Ajai insisted that his Rama was not the Rama of the VHP. So where do the different Ramas come from, and how many are there? In Sanskrit, the sacred language of Brahmin priests, there are more than twenty-five different versions of the Ramayana. The epic has been told in countless other languages too. In different versions down the centuries the hero has been adapted to the times, and to the purposes of those who have retold the epic. There is a legend told about the monkey god Hanuman going down to the netherworld to find a ring Rama had lost. After narrowly avoiding being eaten by the King of Spirits he was shown a platter on which there were thousands of rings, and told to pick the one Rama had lost. But Hanuman didn’t know which ring it was. The King of Spirits said, ‘There have been as many Ramas as there have been rings on this platter. Whenever Rama is coming to the end of an incarnation his ring drops down to me here. When you return to earth you will not find your Rama, his incarnation is over.’
Most scholars agree that the Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki is the earliest written version we have. He tells of Rama, the heir to the throne of Ayodhya who is robbed of his inheritance by his father’s favourite wife. When the king abdicates she persuades him to choose her son as his successor, and send Rama into exile. Rama willingly accepts his father’s decision and retires to the forest to live with his wife, Sita, and his brother, Lakshman. There Sita is abducted and carried offby the demon king Ravana to Lanka. With the help of Hanuman and his army of monkeys Rama kills Ravana and rescues Sita. He returns to Ayodhya where his brother rejoices to see him again and hands over the throne. When Rama was exiled his brother had refused to sit on the throne, putting Rama’s sandals there instead, and telling his people that he was only their regent. Rama becomes the perfect king. Because the ancient Indian tradition of royalty is remarkably democratic – a king has no right to rule if he doesn’t satisfy his subjects – Rama used to move around his capital after dark, disguised, to find out what the people thought of his rule. One night he overheard a washerman saying that he shouldn’t have taken Sita back because she had stayed with another man, even though she had been through an ordeal by fire to prove her innocence. Rama accepted the verdict of his people and sent Sita back to the forest.
The Ramayana Ajai was brought up on doesn’t include the last section of Valmiki’s version – Sita’s banishment. Ajai’s mother used to read to him from a much later version of the epic written by the poet Tulsi Das in the seventeenth century. Revered as a saint by Hindus, Tulsi Das started writing his Ramayana in Ayodhya, but later moved to Varanasi. He called his retelling of the epic the Ramacharitmanas. Valmiki wrote in Sanskrit, the language of the priests, but the Ramayana of Tulsi Das was written in Avadhi, a form of Hindi, the language of the people, and so became the Vulgate, the people’s version of the epic. To this day it remains probably the most influential book in north India. The Brahmins were not amused when their monopoly of the Ramayana ended. Nor did they like Tulsi Das’s emphasis on personal devotion to Rama, which diminished the importance of the rituals they performed. According to tradition, they decided to test the Ramacharitmanas in Varanasi’s most sacred Shiva temple. It was placed under copies of the four Vedas, the original Hindu scriptures, and left overnight. The next morning it was discovered on top of the pile, and thereafter was regarded as the essence of the Vedas.
Tulsi Das followed the bhakti tradition of personal devotion to one of the manifestations of the supreme being. So the divinity of his Rama was established from the very beginning. Valmiki’s Rama didn’t realize he was a god until after he had slain the demon king. Only then was he informed that he was an incarnation of Vishnu. To Tulsi Das, Rama was ‘the benevolent Lord’ who is ‘compassionate beyond our deserts’, ‘an ocean of amiability and gentleness’, ‘the formless, invisible, and uncreated Immaterial’. But at the same time Rama became a man out oflove for his devotees ‘as water crystallizes into ice’. He was a companion ‘dwelling in the hearts of those who are all men’s friends and are friendly to all: to whom pleasure and pain, praise and abuse, are all alike, who are careful to say what is both true and kind’.
Rama certainly dwelt in Ajai’s heart. He told us he loved ‘his Rama’. There was ‘no formality in his relationship with his God’. ‘It is enough,’ he said, ‘if you thrill and the fine hairs of your body stand on end at the mention of Rama’s name.’ He hoped to die laying his head on Rama’s arm as his pillow.
Before we set off to see the image of Rama at Kanak Bhavan, the Rama we thought would be Ajai’s God, he armed himself with a stick. That seemed surprising for such a mild-mannered man, but he explained to us that it was for ‘the monkey menace’. ‘You have to be very careful of them,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t actually hit them or they will attack you, but they won’t come near you if you show them the stick. The worst thing you can do is to look them in the face, and don’t smile at them, or they get very angry’
There are enough rhesus macaques with protruding red bottoms in Ayodhya to provide the recruits for several armies of Rama’s lieutenant Hanuman. Mothers with infants slung under their bellies pouncing on unsuspecting pilgrims and snatching the fruit intended for the gods, youngsters shinning up electricity poles, or picking fleas out of each other’s hair, indicate that the population problem is getting worse. But no one dares to do anything about that in Ayodhya where Hanuman is second only to Rama and his wife Sita.
We crossed the compound safely, walked up a flight of steps, through an ornate arch into a courtyard paved with black and white marble. It was surrounded by a two-storeyed white building, surmounted by small domed pavilions. The temple could well have been one of those Rajput palace hotels, so popular with tourists, which Ajai might have managed. The congregation for the evening aarti, or worship, was assembling in the high-ceilinged hall on the far side of the courtyard. We sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the curtain hiding the sanctum sanctorum and the gods inside it. As the hands of the distinctly un-ornate electric clock on the wall moved towards the time for the aarti, the congregation fell silent. The curtains were drawn back, revealing the images and the pujari, or priest, standing in front of them with a bell in one hand and a lamp lit by seven wicks of cotton wool dipped in ghee in the other. Many in the congregation prostrated themselves, but Ajai didn’t. ‘I don’t bow down,’ he whispered, ‘because I regard Rama more as my brother than as a god.’
Unlike the deliberately dishevelled sadhus who throng the narrow lanes of Ayodhya, the pujari was a smart young man, his sleek, oiled, black hair neatly trimmed, his kurta and dhoti clean and pressed. The flames flickered as he circled the lamp in front of the images chanting Sanskrit prayers. There were three images of the couple sitting under the ornate gold canopy. The largest couple were joined by a huge marigold garland, the smallest were so small I would probably have missed them if Ajai hadn’t pointed them out to me. The tinkling of the bell in the pujari’s hand was almost drowned by the clang of a temple bell and the cacophony produced by a Heath-Robinson contraption driven by an electric motor which managed to ring yet more bells, clash cymbals and beat a drum all at the same time. Ajai whispered in my ear, ‘I dislike that thing. The way things are going they will soon be automating the aarti itself.’
The congregation sat enthralled by the darshan, or sight of Rama and Sita, whose blank, black almond-shaped eyes stared back. Emotion rarely plays any part in Hindu iconography. Just in front of us a young man in a khaki shirt was talking to his prayer beads fervently. After the ceremony he introduced himself as ‘Rama’s security guard’. He was a constable from one of the fourteen companies of police protecting the site of the mosque and the images of Rama and Sita installed there. ‘I stand just by Rama,’ he said proudly.
Ajai’s attitude to Rama was not entirely consistent, as we discovered after the aarti when he took us into a small room where the royal couple’s robes were stored. They changed clothes each day, and Ajai was responsible for looking after their wardrobe. Although he hadn’t prostrated himself before the images because he regarded Rama as his brother, he handled the royal robes with the greatest reverence saying, ‘I love this because I am touching the clothes my Lord has worn.’ I had been surprised to notice during the aarti that Rama had been wearing a cap not a crown. Ajai explained that he wore a crown during the day, when he was about his official duties, but in the evening he was relaxing. ‘You will notice too,’ he added, ‘that Rama and Sita are seated when they are usually seen standing. This is because Kanak Bhavan is their home. That’s why Rama’s brother Lakshman who you usually see with him isn’t here too. You see in our custom a younger brother-in-law is not allowed to enter his sister-in-law’s house.’
According to tradition, Kanak Bhavan is the palace in which Rama and Sita lived after they were first married. It’s a temple of rasik Hindus. For them Rama is the young husband ecstatic in his love for his new bride, and they respond by adoring Rama as Sita did. Their love is feminine, the passion of a young bride for her noble, handsome husband. When the pujari performs the aarti he covers his head to symbolize that he is worshipping Rama as a woman would. Although Ajai has devoted his entire life to serving the Rama of Kanak Bhavan, without incidentally being paid a paisa, he is not a rasik. ‘I have nothing to do with sects,’ he insisted, ‘I stick by my Rama that’s all. I wouldn’t even necessarily call myself a Hindu, because if Rama had been a Muslim I would have been a Muslim. I love my Rama, no one else’s.’ From the robing room we climbed a flight of stairs to the private chamber where the royal couple live.
On the first floor, right above the sanctum sanctorum, there was a low-ceilinged room with a silver bed, open on all sides and surrounded by smaller rooms – a music room with a sitar in the corner, a dining room, a room for recreation complete with chessboard, a bathroom, a wardrobe with a cupboard for the crowns, and even a room for those who prepare paan, or betel nut, for Rama and his wife to chew after their meals. Ajai told us the images were not brought up to the private chambers but Rama does receive petitions and letters every day, some delivered by hand and some by post. These are brought up to the private chambers at night and then taken to be immersed in the river. ‘Rama does sometimes reply to letters,’ said Ajai, drawing our attention to a letter which had been framed and hung on the wall of the bedroom. It was Rama’s reply to a Srimati Hemlata Devi in a dialect of Hindi neither Gilly nor I understood. Ajai carefully pieced together its meaning.
I come to your garden, Beloved
Every day in the early morning.
I am pleased and please you.
Come to my palace
To my chamber, Beloved,
Come in the month of Magh
In the evening I will call you
Come, Sakhi,
To my palace
Come, do come,
In the darkness
Don’t forget.