India

by Patrick French

  In the same state, the tourism minister, G. Janardhana Reddy, donated a diamond-studded gold crown to the famous Tirumala temple. This was to honour Lord Venkateswara, a form of the god Vishnu. The crown had cost Reddy nearly $10m, and the act was partly a display of wealth, partly a form of political assertion and above all a way of propitiating the god. It would be placed on the presiding deity after his weekly sacramental bath. Together with his brothers, Reddy was involved in huge, controversial and possibly illegal iron ore mining on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and was at that moment under grave threat from a central government inquiry into his conduct on forest land.15 It can be assumed his approach to the god was less about a search for forgiveness as a penitent sinner—since Hinduism lacks a creed—and more about a desire to continue to succeed. Hinduism does not have commandments and does not inspire guilt; with its lack of demands, a person’s relationship with fate is direct and does not anticipate forgiveness or immediate punishment.

  These tales of ministers in Karnataka were both about ambition. People who were successful in “scientific” fields would often, conversely, also have an inner devotion to religion. It did not seem unusual in India that K. Radhakrishnan, the new head of the Indian Space Research Organisation, learned of his appointment while stripped to the waist, performing rituals as a pilgrim at a temple in Kerala. Nor did it seem unusual that K. Radhakrishnan was a noted Kathakali dancer (he liked to play the deity Hanuman) and a singer of Carnatic music.16 Religion and science never went their separate ways in India in the way they did in Europe in the eighteenth century. There was no intellectual division, because Hinduism was too amorphous to be challenged or threatened by any new scientific discovery. If anything, advances in human understanding of the laws of nature might chime with the abstraction of Hindu philosophy, in which time has no beginning and no end.

  Then there were priests who used their position to gain favours they would not otherwise have received, a common enough practice in any of the world’s religions. One “godman” in Karnataka made the mistake of obliging his followers to sign a document absolving him of guilt if he was compelled to involve them in “close physical proximity and intimacy.” When he pushed the limits, a victim inevitably leaked the terms of the supposed contract.17 A priest in Kanchipuram, a major pilgrimage town, filmed sexual encounters between himself and women pilgrims in the sanctum sanctorum of his temple, a place only certain male priests are supposed to enter. When his mobile phone was being repaired, a technician noticed and copied clips of film, put them on DVD and made a good trade selling them around the temple town.18

  As India became more prosperous, devotion to religion did not seem to be declining. An engineer might go to a Hindu healer who would blow water over affected parts of the body to cure ailments, a trick—or a talent—that he had learned from Muslim healers. In Tamil Nadu, despite its reputation for efficiency, there was an instance of a young man being forced to marry a dog as a punishment by his community for killing two dogs, and a case of a Dalit girl having to marry a frog, for reasons no one could establish.19 Many of the more famous shrines and pilgrimage sites reported far larger attendances now than in the 1990s, when religion was perceived as a stronger political force. This may have been in part because pilgrims now had more time and money to travel.

  In India, people adjusted their religious practice according to the apparent rewards. Rakesh had a job procuring equipment for a large industrial firm. It was a temptation; he took illegal commissions, and was placed under investigation by an internal vigilance team. For two months they probed his invoices, and after one interrogation he was advised by a colleague to pray to Shirdi Sai Baba. After that, the investigation mysteriously disappeared. Now Rakesh was a Sai Baba devotee who, together with his wife, spent many of his waking hours promoting the guru and coercing his extended family to attend prayer and hymn events in praise of Sai Baba. Not long after the investigation, he lost his job over another matter, and this only increased his faith.

  Kumar, a cook in a house in Delhi, telephoned his cousin, a driver on the other side of town, to tell him Ravan has been discovered alive and well and living near Chennai. (Ravan is a mythological figure from the Ramayana.) They discussed in detail why it had happened, and why Ravan chose to reappear in Chennai rather than somewhere further north. A television channel reported that unidentified objects had been found on Mars. They turned out to be “encrypted messages in the universe”—representations or icons of Hindu deities. An otherwise conventional businessman who wore tight amulets on his upper arms stopped and went off into a trance for ten minutes at a time without warning. Religion was never separated from ordinary life. Outside a market in Kolkata, the pavement contained a busy shrine, incorporating a strangely gnarled and ancient tree, and a rock that had been worn smooth by veneration. At a nearby temple, workmen made statues that seemed greater than themselves, the ego sublimated into the tradition and the veneration of the divine that was contained in the statues.

  Shrines and places of worship could arise unexpectedly. In Bangalore, a three-temple complex appeared on one of the main city thoroughfares, and an unauthorized shrine was built on a new ring road in response to several hit-and-run accidents. The city engineers knocked it down, but a week later another accident occurred and hundreds of residents from a nearby village arrived to rebuild it. The shrine came in the form of a lurid painted sculpture of a deity who had been adjusted for the purpose: “Highway Anjaneya,” raising his right hand fiercely. When an engineer arrived to demolish the creation, he quickly retreated, fearful that the site’s protectors would beat him.20 In New Delhi, the Irish ambassador bought a Ganesh sculpture and placed it near the entrance to his office at the Irish embassy. At first it attracted no attention, then he noticed each morning when he came to work that it was being venerated, garlanded, given offerings, and before long people from further up the road were visiting, sometimes in numbers. A quandary developed: he had built a shrine on diplomatic property without the Indian or Irish government’s permission.

  As I drove along a sandy road past angled coconut palms from Trivandrum to Kanyakumari, the feeling of religion was everywhere, and it was not exclusive to the Hindu traditions. Kanyakumari is the southernmost point in India, formerly known as Cape Comorin, a place hit hard by 2004’s great tsunami. At a Jain temple, pilgrims were preparing to make their devotions. Outside the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, families waited in a snaking queue in the fierce heat, the women with white jasmine in their hair, the men and boys topless in pressed mundus—a southern version of the dhoti. There was a monument to the communist leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the hammer and sickle garnished with fresh flowers. Further down the sandy road, as the peninsula of India narrowed to its tip, statues of “Child Jesus” were interspersed with billboards showing the Tamil deity Murugan, who in his younger manifestations looked like Child Jesus. References to Murugan can be found in literature before the birth of Christ, so two millennia were intermittently entwined. In Kanyakumari at a confluence of water, I could look left to the Bay of Bengal, straight ahead at the Indian Ocean or right to the Arabian Sea.

  Sitaram, a glowing young ascetic from Garhwal in the Himalayas, with a necklace of beads and a red smear with cream edges between his eyes, was raising support and funds for a strictly vegetarian ashram for visiting renouncers who had come to the far south. While we spoke, a naked man was lying on his back on the ground nearby with a structure rising from his face, like a version of the heavy spectacles used by optometrists for tests. His body was smeared with white ash. He came each day and lay in silence.

  Every society has its norms. When you are inside, they seem permanent—they seem normal. In Hinduism, there is no clear right and wrong. Christians, Muslims and Jews are brought up on the idea of pairs of opposites, the idea you are either for us or against us, and find it hard to put aside this trained instinct when looking at India. This is why European visitors from the early seventeenth century onwards
did their best to taxonomize the territory, to make sense of what was difficult to define in simple terms. Rules did not always apply, and when they did apply they might quickly be contradicted by new information. Knowledge might hold, for example about the respective positions of certain caste groups, but vary again in neighbouring territory. The culture of India was different and protean: nearly everyone adjusted, talked, depended on the protection of astrology, put a dab of kajal, or kohl, behind the ear of a child to ward off the evil eye. There were common threads, as well as a conceptual mutability, a different way of thinking, so that most certainties could be contradicted. Hinduism has no set book, which means books about Hinduism will often tell you little. The religion is only practice, only what it is, and can be understood only by seeing how it is lived.

  Professor T. S. Saravankumar was born in the last years of Nehru’s premiership. He had a familiar Tamil look: oiled hair, a definite moustache, a pair of slacks, a bit of a belly, an olive-coloured corduroy shirt. We sat beneath a fan out on the terrace with the smell of clean plaster and paint; his house had just been built. In 1965, fifteen years after the Constitution came into being, Hindi was set to become the official language of the Indian union, but the protests by Tamils were so intense, with people immolating themselves against this perceived northern dominance, that the plan was abandoned and English continued as a parallel language. The powerful Dravidian political parties of the south came out of this movement. This opposition to a national language was felt not only in Tamil Nadu, but across different parts of the country, in places like Punjab and West Bengal, where a strong feeling remained against the “imposition” of Hindi.

  When Saravankumar and his wife moved into the new house, certain rituals had been necessary. “We didn’t call a Brahmin priest. My uncle recited the Thevaram, a compilation of songs by three poets with no Sanskrit in the text.” He was making a point here about Tamil being distinct from Sanskrit, which he projected as being a discrete language of the north and of the Brahmins (academics dispute this point). He felt the Tamil language, with its tens of millions of speakers, deserved respect. In part, Saravankumar’s opinions were a product of Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy’s self-respect movement and the construction of a strong Tamil identity in revolt against the ancient power of the upper castes. In earlier eras, Telugu and Kannada cultural influences would have made their way among the people and kingdoms of the south.

  “The elders felt obliged to come to the house and do a ritual. Part of the kinship structure here is that the family have the right of veto over what you can do. My uncle is seventy-nine, older than my father, so for a time he became the ‘owner’ of our property, to do the rituals. That’s how it is. He lit lamps, he broke a fresh coconut: it’s a package. At the time of my marriage, I got married four times: Syrian Christian, Catholic, Hindu and non-Sanskritized Tamil. The idea of conciliation is an important part of our culture. People here are not xenophobic—if German or American business partners come to Chennai, we open out stakes to them without feeling threatened. The south has always been mobile, right across Asia. You create your home wherever you go. Your culture goes with you. The current president of Singapore is a Tamil.

  “Even before independence we had guaranteed seats in the south for non-Brahmins in educational institutions. Groups like the Nadars—whose great-grandparents were toddy-tappers, climbing up palm trees to tap the sap—have done extremely well. The tech company HCL, which is very successful, is run by one. Our politics are more advanced than in the north. If I go to Delhi and take a taxi—this has happened to me, coming from the airport—the driver will say to me because I don’t speak Hindi: ‘Are you Indian?’ I want to remove that. Being an Indian works best if you start respecting inexactitude. Nehru recognized that India was plural. The south Indian imagination is like a banyan tree where the roots and the branches have constant interplay.

  “At the time the British came, there were no major kings left here, so it was more of a dialogue about what sort of institutions and system we needed. Some of the great Tamil texts combine Hindu, Jain and Buddhist teachings, so Hinduism in Tamil Nadu comes from that interplay. We have had Christians coming to our coast since the second century, like St. Thomas the apostle, who died here. We never had Muslim rulers. The northerners—with their essential resentment about being ruled for so long—have grown into bigotry. We have had Muslims with us since the eighth century, but only for spice trading. They lived in pockets of their own and spoke Tamil. They even prayed in Tamil, though in the last twenty years they have become more Arabic.”21 Yet the curious thing was that, as he spoke, I remembered a similar house-blessing ceremony about three years earlier, done a few hundred miles away in Kerala. The Muslim imam, his head wrapped in a white turban, had performed religious rituals involving coconuts, boiled milk and sugar which seemed much like those done by Hindus.

  • • •

  Chandraswami was born a couple of years after independence. He grew up in Hyderabad, and said he had travelled first to the jungles of central India to meditate, and then to the mountains of Nepal, where he had purportedly slept in a tree until he achieved self-realization. After an unsuccessful stint in the Youth Congress, he found that it was possible to exert greater power through offering religious guidance.

  In his early days Chandraswami had been a herbal healer and masseur, promising to restore the sexual power of old men with the correct elixir, and by his late twenties he had moved on and attracted some followers. By the early 1980s he had been taken up by an assortment of world leaders. Using one leader as a prop to leap to the next, he travelled the world accompanied by an entourage and a photo album featuring himself with Ferdinand Marcos, the Sultan of Brunei, Indira Gandhi, Daniel Ortega, Elizabeth Taylor, Edward Seaga, Mobutu Sese Seko—and many more.

  He was not a sophisticated man, but he had an uncanny talent for entering the heads of others. The swami looked chubby, grubby and unkempt, wearing a dhoti kurta, sandals and a chunky gold rosary, a large red tilak on his forehead, leaning on a silver-topped black cane. His talent was for reading weakness, particularly in someone in a position of authority who had the loneliness and anticipation of betrayal that comes with an excess of power and money. In Mobutu’s case, Chandraswami would hide himself behind a curtain while the Zairean president met a general or a minister, and tell him afterwards (despite the linguistic gap—Mobutu was speaking in French) whether they could be trusted. With the massively wealthy Sultan of Brunei, his focus was on gaining the trust of his wife Mariam, who he realized was in a vulnerable position at court; she needed a son, and he assured her he could make it happen. In India, Chandraswami’s position was nebulous, but he strengthened it by acts of generosity, like feeding 10,000 hungry pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela. On his travels, he might give someone a ruby or a Rolex, and often the gift would lead to the receipt of more gifts in return (Mobutu reportedly paid the swami in diamonds).

  Chandraswami’s entourage went a long way to boosting his reputation. Like latter-day rappers, he knew that anyone who was surrounded by staff and security looked important. His principal sidekick, known as Mamaji, or uncle, would tell people he was a very important religious leader, list his more famous disciples and whisper that he was one of India’s five spiritual kings. In the atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s (when these things could not be checked with the help of the Internet) his approach often drew an excited response.

  During Narasimha Rao’s premiership, he was known as the prime minister’s Rasputin. There were various reasons for this alliance—the swami had paid for Rao’s heart surgery while he was out of office, which must have exerted a considerable emotional pressure on Rao, who was a few days short of seventy when he became prime minister. When Rao left office, the swami fell to earth and his career was finished. He was charged with conspiracy in a bribery case and accused of involvement with the Tamil Tigers over Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, although he had become close to Rajiv after a rapprochement during his last years in power.
22

  When I went to see him at his ashram in 2010, Chandraswami was looking old and fat. He sat with his legs propped up on a padded stool, leaning back on something like a reclining airline chair, cushioned on what appeared to be an animal skin. His forehead was marked with wide smears of red and orange paste, still wet from his morning puja. With cases still running against him in the courts, he would not speak about his earlier career. “I am only the medium. All else comes from the almighty. I can predict the past, present and future.”23 An aide handed me a printed brochure as I was ushered away from his presence. It was filled with photographs: Nixon, Carter, Arafat, Adnan Khashoggi—and always the swami, looking triumphantly serene beside them. I examined the brochure as I drove home:

  Jagdacharya Shri Chandraswami Ji Maharaj is an advanced sadhaka of Shakti, a seeker of high attainments, full of fiery aspirations, a seer sage possessing intense renunciation and deep dispassion … The nectar of his teachings are manifested in spreading the message of Dharma and righteousness. He feels that the solid foundation of high moral life can be laid only by knowing the importance and significance of Man, Nature and God.

  He told me he had predicted Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, and that she had thanked him for it.

  Shankar had travelled with Chandraswami during the 1980s: “Swami was meeting a lot of different people at that time—the Sultan of Brunei, Tiny Rowland, Mohammed al Fayed, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus in the U.S. About seven or ten of us would travel with him, usually. We went to Mobutu’s apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, which was filled with unopened shopping bags and boxes. All sorts of people were around: film stars, politicians, princesses, hookers, some very rich people from Germany. The journeys were often done on Adnan Khashoggi’s flying palace, a DC-8. That was in the days before everyone had planes. One time we were on board the DC-8 and a little priest from Madras who was in the entourage was fiddling around with all the switches. He points to one red button and asks Khashoggi what happens if he presses it. Khashoggi says, deadpan: ‘We all blow up.’ He goes back to his seat. You’ve never seen the look on that priest’s face.