RAGE IN EDEN

Lines join in faint discord, and the Stormwatch brews
a concert of kings…
– Jethro Tull, Dun Ringill

The gods were angry. In the predawn darkness of Varanasi I was jolted awake, disoriented and cold, by an eruption of dense, booming sound. My fuddled mind processed the banshee wail of wind around the eaves outside my sixth-floor window and the clang of temple bells. An incandescent flash of silver-blue lightning lit the room as I struggled to extricate myself from the billowing folds of my mosquito net. A applause of rain spattered on the roof, increasing in volume to a tumult, then cutting off with the suddenness of a pulled plug. Another column of light, intense and jagged, erupted out on the river flats beyond the silver sheet of the Ganges; then the deep, reverberant, window-rattling crash of more thunder.

I had slept badly, haunted by a dream of having to escape the city in darkness. The previous evening, the power supply had been cut suddenly with an accompanying BANG that had echoed across to the far side of the river and back. I’d drifted off to sleep imagining terrorists attacking the city, hunting down and killing tourists. I’d lain there in the dark (power cuts are common in India) and plotted my solo escape from Varanasi, making my way through deserted alleys and back streets out into the safety of the countryside. The first peal of thunder had brought me back to wakefulness via these ethereal, half-remembered dreams.

Fully awake now, and upright, I pushed the rotted sliding window open. The temple bells echoed up from the ghats below. I could see the dim glow of funeral pyres and smell the acrid smoke of burning wood. A gust of wind pushed another squall of rain across the rooftops. It splattered into my face and dripped onto the floor. There were neon lights ablaze down by the river and the rain blurred them into pastel stains of blue and pink.

The lightning was coming in almost continual bursts now: retina-blinding shafts of white leaping from the white sandy river flats into the black belly of the sky. The detonations of thunder reverberated from the riverbanks and thudded from the tiers of buildings stepping upwards and back from the water’s edge. The rain hit the rooftops with a sound like flung ball bearings and the wind screamed around the flat concrete exterior of the Shanti Guest House.

The storm passed. The thunder died away to a distant rumble, like an angry man coming back into an argument as if to say “and another thing!” The sizzle and blast of lightning subsided into an occasional, insubstantial flicker. A great silence descended on the city, broken only by the continuing clang of the temple bells. I could hear the discordant chanting of the holy men down on the Manikarnika Ghat. A grey, watery light began to seep into the sky. The Ganges glowed like a curved strip cut from a sheet of burnished metal. The gods had been raging in their Eden. But for now, they rested.

The Great Flood (Part 3)

…a long, basso profundo chant which echoed hollowly inside the temple.

It was almost silent in the cavern. The air was cool, and fragrant with the aroma of polished teak. The only light filtered in through the narrow doorway, with its carved lintel and ornately-decorated flanking columns. I was barefoot. The floor of the cavern, polished smooth by the passage of countless other bare feet before mine, was cold and slightly damp. At the rear of the cavern, half hidden in darkness, a statue of the Buddha, composed and serene, sat in asana.

The Ajanta Caves are carved into the wall of a gorge cut over millennia into the basalt rock of the Deccan Traps, two hour’s drive north-east of Aurangabad. The soft, black rock was erupted by the Deccan Volcanoes 65 million years ago as India passed over the Reunion Hotspot (see The Great Flood Part 1). It had lain on India’s western flank as the continent moved north and, eventually, slammed into the underside of Asia. As the continent pushed further north it raised up the Himalayas, changing the climatic patterns of India as it did so. The barrier of the Himalayas created a barrier to the moist air flowing off the Arabian Sea towards the centre of Asia. The air was now forced to rise in order to flow over the mountains. As the air rose, the moisture within condensed and fell as rain. Lots of rain. The Monsoon was born.

The annual monsoonal floods began eroding the rocks of the Deccan Traps. It carved gorges and valleys. It shaped the ridges into narrow knife-edges. It sculpted the canyon walls into smooth billows and ledges. Waterfalls tumbled from vertiginous declivities. Rivers curled over beds of boulders that had tumbled from the heights. Forests grew in profusion, their roots and branches probing into every crevice and crack. Caves dotted the landscape: bubbles in the solid matrix of stone where gases had been trapped in the erupting lava. Eventually, men discovered the caves.

Beginning in the second century BCE (around 2,200 years ago), Buddhist monks began enlarging the caves at Ajanta. The carved elaborate decorations and effigies of the Buddha. The carved prayer halls and monasteries, temples and kitchens, cells for meditation and rooms for contemplation. When they ran out of natural caves to decorate, they began carving new ones. With endless patience, and the simplest of tools, they dug and scraped. The caves were works of art, affirmations in living stone to their deity, the Buddha.

I spent hours in the caves. Each one was similar but at the same time completely different: the sound of one hand clapping. In one cave, a Japanese tourist stood before a statue of the Buddha and sang a long, basso profundo chant which echoed hollowly inside the temple. In another, a statue of the Buddha reclining stretched for twenty metres along the wall. Many of the caves were decorated with paintings depicting emotions in pose, form and colour. Some were completely bare of decoration.

The monks of Ajanta kept up their cave carving for seven hundred years. And then, around AD600, they just stopped. In one cave, the floor was only half excavated. Its pillars and platforms still bear the marks of their tools. There were no decorations. It was as if they had finished work one day and never returned. No one knows why the work stopped. Perhaps some great environmental catastrophe occurred. Perhaps the region was over-run by invaders. Perhaps they just got sick of scratching holes in the ground.

But their work remains, carved into the black, crystalline basalt erupted so long ago, and so far away, during the great flood.

CHARON’S LANDING

Don’t pay the ferryman until he gets you to the other side…
– Chris de Burgh

It was chaos at the landing. Amid the clamour of two wedding parties, boat-loads of gawking tourists, touts, hawkers, hustlers, beggars and con-men, the ferry boats were moored side by side against the Ganges’ current. The water gurgled and hissed around the hulls. The wooden transoms and gunwales knocked together with hollow thuds. The river stretched out east and west, slate grey under a sullen sky. A lone dog, like a single-headed Cerberus, prowled the periphery of the crowd.

Forewarned is forearmed. I already knew the fare to be rowed across the Ganges. It was forty Rupees. I had asked at the café (the Varanasi Café and Bakery Restaurant, should you ever be in this part of the world!) where I’d had breakfast.

“Thirty to forty Rupees only,” the café’s owner Robertduej had told me. “No more.”

So when Charon, the ferryman told me the fare was 200 Rupees I laughed at him.

“You’re a funny guy,” I said. “The fare is forty Rupees.” He shrugged his shoulders and gave that Indian head shake that means “OK.” A few of the other passengers giggled. They knew the fare; and they knew that a ferryman couldn’t be trusted. I took a seat in the bows. It was twenty minutes before the boat was full. Charon’s assistant, Hermes, unmoored us from the pontoon dock and we pushed off out onto the Styx.

In Greek mythology, the souls of the dead are rowed across the River Styx by Charon (pronounced “Kai-ron”), the ferryman. On the far side of the river lie the Gates of Hell, the entrance to the Underworld, the kingdom of Hades, guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Charon demands a coin as payment for passage across the river and anyone who cannot pay is doomed to wander the riverbank for eternity.

Earlier, long before dawn, a massive thunderstorm had moved over Varanasi. Awoken by the gigantic peals of thunder, I had stood at the window of my dingy hotel room and watched the storm. Amid the clanging of temple bells and the thrum of drums, the thunder had erupted with ear-splitting, window-rattling intensity. Immense bolts of lightning had seared the darkness, strobe-lighting the flat water of the Ganges and the jumble of temples along the Manikarnika Ghat below.

I thought of the storm now as we moved out across the water. It reminded me of the lyrics in the Chris de Burgh song Don’t Pay the Ferryman: “And then the lightning crashed and the thunder roared, and people calling out his name. And dancing bones that jabbered and moaned on the water…”

The boat was a wide-beamed, flat-bottomed rowboat, hand built from hardwood. It was stable and very heavy. Charon sat on the coaming of the bow, his bare feet locked into an opening in the planks to give him leverage as he pulled on the oars. The river was sluggish and benign at this time of the year. During the Monsoon, when Mother Ganga comes down in spate, spreading out from bank to bank, the ferrymen must have a hard time crossing her.

The farther shore drew near. There was a cluster of ramshackle stalls, dozens of bathers, boats pulled up on the white sand. Beyond this narrow littoral of commerce and activity, the bare sand of the Ganges’ floodplain stretched away into the haze. A camel stood in silhouette on the skyline.

It was a neat inversion of the Greek myth. We had left Hades behind, like Orpheus walking into the light. The side of the river that we had departed from was the real Underworld with its burning ghats, crowds of wild-eyed worshippers, black ash-heaps, piles of funeral-pyre firewood, stoned Sadhus and befuddled tourists. This was the Middle World, Elysium, the land of Demeter and the living.

Charon’s assistant took out money. The ferryman had been paid his obol. I took off my shoes and stepped from the boat. The water of the Ganges was clear and cool. The sand was soft beneath my feet. I waded ashore. Cerberus greeted me: not a three-headed demon dog but a friendly tail-wagging mutt looking for a pat and a biscuit.

A warm wind blew down from the west. People bathed in the holy water. Children scampered in the shallows. From the far shore I could hear the temple bells, diminished by distance: the unholy cacophony of Hades dimmed to a whisper by distance. I sat on a stone seat drinking chai, then walked out onto the Elysian Plain, “where life is easiest for man.”

The Indigo Revolt

I wish I had invented blue jeans…
– Yves Saint Laurent

It was an uprising in blue. The Nil vidroha, or Indigo Revolt, was a peasant movement started by indigo farmers in Bengal in 1859. Tired of being exploited by landowners and money-lenders, the farmers went on a rampage, taking their cue from the recent Indian Mutiny. Atrocities were committed. Property was destroyed. The usual cycle. The Government sent in troops.

Indigo is a colour that has always signified wealth. Because of its relative scarcity, the dyes made from indigo were used only for high quality textiles such as the tagelmust headscarves worn by the Tuareg of the Sahara and the garments worn by Japanese nobility during the Edo Period (1600-1868). Isaac Newton described indigo as one of the primary colours in Lectiones Opticae, his 1765 description of the rainbow.

The indigo plant, Indigofera tinctoria, had been exported from India in small quantities along the Silk Route since antiquity. Pliny the Elder mentioned India as the source of indigo. Its name derives from the Greek word indikon, which moved to the Latin INDICUM and thence to Italian and English.

The planting of Indigofera tinctoria in the modern era began in the Indian state of Bengal in 1777 when a French farmer named Louis Bonnard began cultivating the plant at Taldanga and Goalpara, near present-day Kolkata. The demand for indigo in Europe, driven in part by its use in a new type of heavy-duty serge cloth being manufactured in the French town of Nimes, made it a highly profitable crop.

European planters (wealthy farmers who rented land from the land-owning Indian Zamindars) persuaded their small tenant farmers to plant indigo instead of food crops. They provided loans to the farmers for seed and equipment but charged such high interest rates that the farmers could never repay the loans. When the crops were harvested, the planters and their Indian dealers paid the farmers meagre prices: only 2.5% of the indigo’s true market value. When the farmers were unable to repay their loans the planters resorted to the destruction of the farmers’ houses and property.

Abandoned Indigo Kuthi (warehouse), Bengal.

An Act of Government, passed in 1833 by the corrupt and easily-bought East India Company (who governed India until 1858) strengthened the position of the planters and the Zamindars. The Bengali middle-class, however, supported the peasant farmers in their plight. The play Nil Darpan, by the Indian playwright Dinabandhu Mitra was instrumental in garnering support for the farmers. The play was banned by the East India Company but has subsequently been seen as being an essential part in the development of theatre in Bengal.

The Indigo Revolt began in the towns of Gobindapur and Chowgacha (now in modern-day Bangladesh) and spread rapidly across Bengal. A number of planters were tried and executed by hastily-convened kangaroo courts. Indigo depots were burned down. The planters and their families fled. Many Zamindars were murdered.

After the initial surprise offensive by the farmers, the government collected itself and the revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Large forces of government (ie East India Company) police and soldiers were dispatched to Bengal. The revolt’s leader, Biswanath Sardar (described by later historians as a “heroic, Robin Hood-like figure) was tried and hanged by the British.

Despite atrocities committed by both sides, the revolt remained popular with the Bengali middle-class. Even some of the Zamindars supported the peasant farmers’ cause. When the violence died down, the Government set up The Indigo Commission in 1860. Its aim was to put an end to the planters’ oppression of the small farmers. Its report noted that, prior to the end of the revolt, “not a chest of indigo reached England without being stained with human blood.”

Nothing remains today of the Indian indigo industry. Indigo dye is produced synthetically and the old indigo warehouses of Bengal are all gone. But one thing remains. Those blue jeans you are wearing. They are made using a heavy cotton cloth woven from thread dyed with indigo. That cloth originated in the french town of Nimes. It’s called serge de Nimes. We call it denim.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment, don’t know what it is…
– Van Morrison

He was a vision in orange. His robes hung from his lean frame in flowing billows. Around his neck he wore a collection of sacred threads and clackering beads. His sandaled feet glided across the polished linoleum floor of the Nagpur Railway Station’s booking office. A crocheted bag of many colours hung from his tattooed shoulder. His wooden stick tapped on the tiles.

“I heff missed my train,” he said, pushing to the head of the queue, Indian fashion. “Vot vill I must do now?”

The woman behind the scratched and grimy perspex counter-guard eyed him with the long-practised scorn that Indian railway staff, used to dealing with an endless barrage of queue-jumpers, have perfected over the years.

“Counter three,” she said and returned to the business of organising my ticket to Allahabad. The German psuedo-Hindu groaned and moved away. The ticket clerk glanced up at me but I was silent. Karma is a bitch, I thought. No need to aggravate it by adding my opinion.

India is full of Westerners pretending to to be Indians. You see them on the ghats at Varanasi and in the Buddhist temple at Nagpur. They think they blend in, with their ethnic clothes, orange robes, matted hair and beads. But they are just as obvious as the elderly tourists in expensive clothes and improper footwear you see in the same places: shepherded around by touts and guides, shell-shocked and horrified, through the chamber of horrors that is Varanasi or the indecipherable chaos of the temples at Ellora.

You see them bathing in the Ganges, sitting cross-legged on the Raj Ghat, meditating in the temples, and wearing blue robes at the Buddhist shrines. They believe every word their handlers tell them. They wear their sacred threads. They stretch their limbs in the ashrams. They seek enlightenment. They collect their monthly remittances from trust funds back home.

India, to them, is a fully-immersive theme park. And they can go home any time they like.

Westerners visiting India seeking enlightenment are going to be disappointed. At the very least, they are only going to delude themselves into thinking that they have found enlightenment. India is, in fact, frightening. There is no enlightenment to be found here. India is crowded, chaotic, fascinating, brutal and relentlessly, overwhelmingly filthy. The erratic, stupid and plain dangerous behaviour of its drivers defies comprehension. The noise is constant and intense.

India is incomprehensible and unknowable. But perhaps that is it’s greatest attraction. India is impossible to understand; so it is best not to try and understand it. You just dive in, go with the flow and take from the experience anything you like. There is no enlightenment here. But you will find out things you didn’t know: mostly about yourself.

Besides, who needs enlightenment? Your orange robes won’t stop the train from leaving without you. Van Morrison said it best: “Enlightenment, don’t know what it is.”

The Bridge Across Forever

“When Brahm ceases to dream, the Gods go…”
– Rudyard Kipling, The Bridge Builders

Findlayson of the Public Works Department would be proud. The bridge that he, Findlayson, C.S.I., built still stands after one hundred and forty years. It’s stone piers, capped with red Agra stone, and sunk eighty feet into the shifting ooze of the Ganges’ bed, have stood up to monsoonal floods and catastrophic collisions. Its carefully engineered lattice of girders and trusses, Findlayson trusses, have stood up to the ever-increasing live load stresses created by the flood of vehicles and people crossing it every day. Its two brick piers, facing each other across the river, “loop-holed for musketry and pierced for big guns”, are as clean and fresh as the day the bridge was opened by the Viceroy.

The Dufferin Bridge, also known as the Kashi Bridge and by its official (since 1948) name Malviya Bridge, spans the Ganges at Varanasi, just north of the Raj Ghat. This area of Varanasi is way beyond the tourists. This is workaday Benares. Buffaloes chew their cuds beside a rotting timber boat. The rusted remains of a river steamer, its hull pocked with corrosion, its boiler gaping open like a sightless skull, lies half-buried in Ganges mud. A group of men surreptitiously play cards on the ground beside a pile of funeral pyre wood. And dominating the scene, the bridge steps across the river into the hazy, half-seen forever of the northern bank.

In his short story The Bridge Builders, published in 1898 in his collection of stories titled The Day’s Work, Rudyard Kipling describes a catastrophic flood sent by the Gods to destroy the bridge before its completion. The bridge’s Chief Engineer, Findlayson, gets caught up in the flood along with his Indian serang (overseer) Peroo and, together, they are swept away and are washed up on an island. Peroo gives his half-drowned master some opium to revive him and Findlayson has a vision of the enraged Gods discussing the bridge.

“They have chained my flood, and my river is not free any more,” snarls a crocodile, the blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges. “Heavenly Ones, take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank.”

The Gods rage against the bridge and against the “fire-carriages”, trains, that were beginning to criss-cross the sacred landscapes of India. But amid the rage there is also reason.

“Let the dirt dig in the dirt,” the elephant-headed god Ganesh says to Mother Gunga. “My people grow rich [with the trade enabled by the roads and the railways] and praise me.

The gods argue to and fro. But the waters are dropping. Mother Gunga has done her best but the “fire-carriages” will still thread their way across the land, each one bearing “a thousand pilgrims” to worship at the altars of the Gods.

“Be content, Gunga,” the Tigress says. “Neither these men nor those that follow them mock thee at all.”

The flood subsides, the sun comes out. Findlayson and Peroo are rescued and the bridge is completed. But Peroo understands the ramifications of the fire-carriages and the roads. He understands what the new rulers of India, The British, and their single, all-powerful God means for the old gods.

“When Brahm ceases to dream, the gods go,” he says to himself as he and Findlayson are taken back upriver to the undamaged Kashi Bridge.

I thought of Kipling’s story as I explored the southern approach of the bridge. Up on the deck, the traffic on the Grand Trunk Road, which stretches from Dhaka, in Bangladesh, all the way to Lahore, in Pakistan, thundered and roared. In the dank, shady confines below, fires smouldered beside shanties of tin and tar-paper. Dogs prowled the rubbish-heaps and filthy children eyed me suspiciously. On the face of the red-brick bridge tower, beside the railway lines, was a plaque:

O. & R. R. Co.
THE DUFFERIN BRIDGE
MEMBERS OF THE COMPANY’S STAFF ASSOCIATED WITH
THE PROJECTION AND CONSTRUCTION OF THIS BRIDGE,
IN ENGLAND
SIR JOHN PENDER, CHAIRMAN.
MAJOR-GENERAL C. C. JOHNSTON, R.E., MANAGING DIRECTOR
W. F. BATHO, Esq, M. I. C. E., CONSULTING ENGINEER (UP TO HIS DEATH)
J. W. H. JAMES, Esq., M. I. C. E., DITTO DITTO (PRESENT)
IN INDIA
AT HEADQUARTERS.
COLONEL J. H. JENKINS, B. S. C. AGENT
H. B. HEDERSTEDT, M. I. C. E., CHIEF ENGINEER
BABU RAMGOPAL VIDYANT, ASSISTANT DO
ON THE BRIDGE WORKS
F. T. C. WALTON, Esq, M. I. C. E. RESIDENT ENGINEER IN CHARGE OF THE BRIDGE
S. CRAWSHAW, Esq, ASSISTANT ENGINEER
——————
The following Consulting Engineers to Government held Office
at Lucknow during the projection and construction of the Bridge.
MAJOR-GENERAL R. D. DeBOURBEL, R. E.
COLONEL E. DAVIDSON, R. E.
COLONEL C. H. LUARD, R. E.
COLONEL R. C. B. PEMBERTON, R. E.
COLONEL T F. DOWDEN, R. E.
—————-
The general features of the bridge were determined
by Messrs. Batho & Hederstedt.
The steel girders and the plant and appliances used in
erecting them, and in sinking the foundations of the piers,
were designed by Mr. Batho. All the other
portions of the bridge were designed by Mr. Hederstedt
—————-

These were the people that Kipling knew; the inspiration for the characters in The Bridge Builders. There were no tourists here. There was just me, the ghosts of Findlayson and Peroo, and the roar and rattle of traffic on the steel lattices of the bridge across forever.

A Perfect Pearl

Never mind those making promises of the afterlife;
Join us now, righteous friends, in this intoxication…
– Zeb-un-Nissa, Mughal poetess.

She was the love of his life. His favourite wife. Mother of his heir. To Aurangzeb, soon to become Emperor of the Moghul Empire, the greatest empire that India had seen, she was the world: a perfect pearl in a jewelled firmament. Her name had been Dilras Banu Begum. She had borne him four children. The eldest, Zeb-un-Nissa, would become a gifted poet. Their son, Muhammad Azam Shah, would one day succeed him, albeit briefly, as Emperor.

But in giving birth to their fifth child, Dilras Banu Begum died. Grief-stricken, Aurangzeb commissioned a monumental tomb for her. It would be the only great building that the Emperor would build during his reign. A pious, austere and parsimonious Muslem, Aurangzeb had little time for monuments. To him, the great works of his predecessors – Akbar’s Fatepur Sikri, Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal – were of little use. To him, creating illuminated copies of the Qur’an were of much more significance in the temporal world. His late and beloved wife, however, deserved a monument that was of suitable grandeur: a monument to Aurangzeb’s conjugal fidelity. And so, Aurangzeb designed and built the Bibi Ka Maqbara.

Stepping through the vaulted arch of the marble entrance gate I was immediately transported back to the day in 1992 when I first saw the Taj Mahal. Flanked by four slender minarets, the perfect dome of the Bibi Ka Maqbara, perched lightly on its dias of polished marble and red sandstone, is an almost exact of its larger and more famous contemporary.

Crowds of afternoon visitors thronged the flagstones and side gardens. A long marble water-garden, dry now but still perfectly proportioned, drew me forward. I climbed a set of stone steps, removed my boots and entered the cool, dim inner sanctum. A cool breeze flowed through the interior from delicate lattices, carved from single slabs of pure white marble, set into four alcoves. Below the level of the floor, and covered by an intricate silken blanken, lay the tomb of Dilras Banu Begum: a perfect pearl intombed forever within her marble shroud.

I sat on the edge of the west alcove, savouring the zepher of wind flowing through the lattice and watched the crowds walking reverentially around the tomb, clockwise, and tossing coins for luck down onto the Begum’s tomb. Gravestones and monuments are for the living. They are no use to the dead. The Bibi Ka Maqbara is a living, breathing tomb: an incarnation in marble of the words of Zeb-un-Nissa, Aurangzeb’s daughter. Never mind making promises of the afterlife; join us now in this intoxication.