India

by Aline Dobbie

  I should, however, say more about Jabalpur, although, at first glance, it is not a prepossessing place. Nearby, the Narmada gouged out a gorge of marble rocks that is truly a sight, particularly in the moonlight; for us it was a full moon. This is quite a tourist attraction but my mother had told me about them and that, in the early days without tourist tat, they were really beautiful. For me, the charm increases the less people there are milling around.

  The former capital of this area was at Tripuri about 9 km west. That site was occupied around 2000 BC onwards and rose to prominence because of the lucrative trade route through the fertile Narmada Valley. The Kushanas who were contemporary to the start of the Christian era were followed by the Satavahanas, but these dynasties frittered away their power and wealth. The Kalchuri dynasty brought the area to prominence and their martial endeavours enabled successive rulers to extend their borders westwards. Finally, they too were swept aside by The Gonds who were descendants of Tripuri’s original inhabitants, tribal people. Gond rule gradually spread down the Narmada to Bhopal before it was met by the force of one of Akbar’s famous governors, Asaf Khan, in 1564. Rani Durgavati put up a fearsome resistance but was overwhelmed by the imperial army and Asaf Khan was installed as the region’s overlord. This was the area known as Gondwana. The area is also well known through the stories of Kipling’s Jungle Book and Mowgli stories. I grew up on these stories and so for me it was very special to have visited the forests, parkland, ravines and plateau that inspired Kipling to write his timeless classic that no doubt in due course I will read to my little grandsons, Piers and William. I do not, however, like the fact that Kipling made the tiger into a ‘baddy’. That might have served in his time but today the tigers are the victims of man’s inhumanity and greed and exploitation. Sher Khan was the name of the tiger ‘baddy’ against whom all of the jungle conspired to keep Mowgli safe. Well, now, many of us are happy to conspire and work tirelessly to help keep the tiger population safe from extinction in the great wild places of India. Once again, having seen these beautiful beasts in their remarkable bright colouring; having looked into their wonderful yellow/green eyes and seen and heard them pant and yawn and stretch and above all trust us, my friends, I am committed to helping preserve them in the best way I know how, by writing.

  Jabalpur has a few places of interest including the Rani Durgavati Museum. Three kilometres west of the centre there are some pleasant bathing ghats, banyan trees and a row of crumbling Hindu shrines. A little further away, there are a couple of immaculately whitewashed Jain temples, much as we had seen at Sonagiri earlier. At Tilwara Ghat there are a handful of shrines which mark the spot where Gandhiji’s ashes were scattered after his brutal assassination. His ashes were also scattered into the Ganga Yamuna confluence and, I do not know, but maybe even a portion of his ashes were strewn in the Godavari river. That special, little, courageous man and his writings and thoughts continue to inspire me, a child of Indian Independence; how he would have hated the suspicion, hatred and dreadful violence that are being demonstrated worldwide by evil men who have turned a great religion and doctrine on its head. He always looked for the good in all religions and he hated any form of communalism or sectarianism within India.

  Gandhiji’s words on Tolerance were:

  I do not want a kingdom, salvation or heaven;

  What I want is to remove the troubles of the oppressed and the poor.

  I do not want my house to be walled in all sides and my windows to be stuffed.

  I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house, as freely as possible.

  But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any, I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an Interloper, a beggar or a slave.

  The majestic Tiger

  The Indian Leopard

  Flamingos

  The beautiful but threatened Asiatic Lion

  Sambhar Deer

  Indian Rhino

  Elephants on the roadside, 1956

  A young Aline wins first prize as The Queen of Hearts. Fancy dress party, Christmas Day 1950, Bihar

  Aline as a young girl stroking a Sambhar Deer, 1954

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  The Long Bad Road to Bhopal

  In October 2003 in The Times of London, I read a tiny article in the ‘This Life’ column which I shall quote verbatim: ‘A civil servant has requested permission to kill himself in protest at the corruption and bureaucracy of an Indian state government. Vinod Shukla, under-secretary in the Madhya Pradesh finance department said: “I am fed up with the present system where honest officers are being sidelined for reasons best known to the higher-ups. I am prepared for the final act.” The government’s home, finance and administration departments have been asked to advise the governor on whether suicide is a workplace issue.’

  Pigeons are coming home to roost for the Chief Minister Digvijay Singh who represents the Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, heir to her late husband, mother in law, and grandfather in law Pandit Nehru. Madhya Pradesh is about to go to elections, as is Rajasthan and the likely winner is a woman candidate from the BJP, the Bharatia Janata Party which is the governing party, currently headed by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Apparently, the electorate are completely disillusioned with Digvijay Singh because he has enjoyed two terms of office and still the state suffers from severe power shortages, as we experienced, and appalling infrastructure, to which I have also referred. Both politicians are going through all sorts of politically expedient hoops, the BJP candidate enveloping herself in a religious ‘holier than thou’ mantle, but the truth is that the voters of Madhya Pradesh have woken up to the fact that they are as a state collectively needlessly backward in comparison to others because of inertia, corruption and inefficiency. I am heartened that all this has come to the fore in this forthcoming election, and again it reinforces my belief that, given an opportunity, democracy is the only way forward, even when faced with India’s huge challenges. Indians, I am proud to say, know this to be true.

  Ahead of us lay at least a seven-hour road journey to Bhopal. This is not something I would suggest to other travellers but, as I want to write about the heart of India, I have to do the research and just flying in and out or rushing by in a train does not give one sufficient experience and knowledge of an area; however fleetingly I visited it, at least we experienced much of what there is to see and do. Part of the main road to Bhopal is good but most of it is awful. As ever, the Indian countryside is both interesting and beautiful but the little towns are pretty dreary because of their poverty and squalor. Typical of government initiatives, one sees signs all over the big ‘metro’ cities and some smaller ones saying ‘Say no to plastic’. Well, it will need some courageous action on the part of the Central Government to ban the use of plastic. We in the West have our own litter and refuse problems. Indians vets report that so many animals die from obstruction caused by eating plastic. It is worth reflecting that, in our own sanitised western culture, we are littering the earth with an annual use of more than 20 million disposable nappies in the USA alone. The UK will proportionately be just as bad, the first disposable nappy has not yet degraded. The bottom end of a baby is the least agreeable side of parenthood but we have made it all so easy at what cost to our global environment? In the past, Indians used cloth bags and then perhaps brown paper but in our modern triple-wrap society it is a nightmare.

  The roads of Madhya Pradesh hid a huge sinister secret for hundreds of years. The goddess Kali was the deity of the Thugs who practised the ancient sinister wicked order of thuggee. Shiva, the destroyer, the agent of death and destruction without which growth and rebirth could not take place is one of the Trimurthi of gods. He is represented with either one or four faces. His matted hair is said to carry Ganga, the goddess of the river Ganges in it. His consort is Parvati, the beautiful daughter of the Himalaya and considered to be the perfect wife. She is also a form of the mother goddess Devi, whose body is India, and also appears as Durga the terri
ble (with a great following in Eastern India, particularly in West Bengal), and she also appears as Kali, the fiercest and to my mind most repulsive of deities. Durga is a mighty goddess with the combined power and strength of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva – thought of as Shakti. Legend has it that the gods were impotent to quell a powerful demon in the guise of a black water buffalo. When their combined wrath condensed it became Durga. To her each of the gods gave his most powerful weapon. She decapitated the buffalo demon and slew the devil within. It is Durga who is supposed to have created Kali who sprang fully formed from Durga’s forehead. To incur the wrath of Kali is a terrible mistake within the Hindu belief.

  Having lived a lot of my young life in West Bengal where Durga Puja and worship of Kali is strong, I find it totally repelling. Kali was the deity of the thugs. Up until 1830 when Colonel William Sleeman, later knighted, set his mind to ridding India’s roads from the horror and nightmare of thuggee, travel in large parts of the sub-continent was very dangerous. Essentially, they were a secret sect of bandits and Kali worshippers who used to express their devotion to Kali, the jet-black four armed goddess of death, often depicted splattered with blood and with a necklace of skulls round her neck and a belt of dead men’s hands.

  These murderers would fall in with innocent travellers on the main roads, most especially in what we know as Madhya Pradesh. They would gain the confidence of the unwary, throttle them with the notorious silk scarf (rumal in Hindi) and any pieces of the corpse not required for rituals were dumped in wells or buried in large pits.

  Fear of retribution and a belief that this was the will of this all powerful goddess forced village head men and local rulers to turn a blind eye and allow the killings to continue for generations. Sleeman acted with great strength and guile and with effective ruthlessness. Working through informers, who were promised leniency for themselves, he was able to capture 4000 thugs during a twenty-year campaign. Some of these murderers had notched up over 300 victims each. Special courts sent 400 convicted thugs to the gallows and many more to jail in the penal colonies on the Andaman Islands. The informers mostly ended up in a reform school in Jabalpur, from where we were travelling. Interestingly, as late as the 1960s, when roads were being widened in this part of the country, the contractors would come across the remains of ancient pits of murdered travellers.

  I told you about bandits at an earlier stage in the book when talking about the late Phulan Devi, the Bandit Queen, but thugs were part of India’s evil past and probably the supreme example of how simple illiterate people can be drawn into something so sinister and bad by indoctrination – but then it was Christianity that was referred to ‘as the opium of the masses’; any religion or cult it seems can be so powerfully enforced to subvert untrained minds of humble people who live so close to the land that their whole lives become an existence with timely interruptions of ritual and menace. In the full glare of the noon sun with women working on the roads, fetching and filling potholes – yes, that is what they are doing in Madhya Pradesh using hands not machinery, one needs to pinch oneself to imagine murder and menace at the start of the twenty-first century. However, we have seen several bizarre cults in the last twenty years in which mass suicide and other sorts of horrors have played a part, so really a cult of ritual mass murder to appease a blood-thirsty deity less than two hundred years ago in an ancient land where religion used to govern every aspect of living is not that extreme. The word ‘thug’ is well known in the English language sadly; British ‘thugs’ are mercifully not necessarily murderers, just persons intent on violence and intimidation, but that is how the word came into our language.

  As we neared Bhopal, the road did improve and the three of us cheered up at the prospect of an attractive destination. Gudu was able to find tea on the roadside but we did not trust the tea and could only find some bottled lemonade and a very primitive latrine at the top of the café owner’s house; meanwhile the café customers were all glued to the cricket on the television – forever India, the two extremes of sophistication and squalor!

  About 45 km southeast of Bhopal, one takes a secondary road to Bhimbetka. Discovered in 1957, this is one of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art. This is South Asia’s equivalent of the caves at Lascaux in southwest France and Altamira in Spain, or the aboriginal paintings found in Australia. The earlier paintings are thought to have been done about 12,000 years ago. The second more prolific phase is about 8,000 to 5,000 BC. Quite simply these drawing or paintings are wonderful in their similarity to present day creatures: elephants, bison, wild boar, antelope and even what appear to be tigers. This Mesolithic era, i.e., Stone Age, art is astounding and all the more so because of its location in these open caves of huge rocks and boulders that look down onto the plain below. Both the Upper Palaeolithic era drawings and the later Mesolithic art fills one with awe because one begins to appreciate how the whole area must have been teeming with wildlife which is now largely confined to designated areas. It was sunny and rather windy and the chowkidar was a decent chap who took a lot of trouble to explain and show us all that there is to see. The area is reasonably well preserved, but open to the elements and free of charge; one simply pays some baksheesh to the watchmen on departure. Not many people take the trouble to come but, curiously, again it is those on the Buddhist Trail that form the bulk of the tourists, and we encountered some Japanese or Koreans as we were leaving.

  Last year in October, the day before I departed for India, I came across an article in The Times reporting the discovery of wonderful rock art at Shankargarh, near Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. Apparently, the local villagers had known about the local cave art but events took over when they found labourers trying to hew huge rocks off the boulders to sell for silica. They ran for the nearest police superintendent and when Superintendent Vijay Kumar arrived and saw the art he was amazed and knew that this was a hugely important find. Local experts summoned to examine the paintings said they may be between 10,000 and 30,000 years old. If their assessment can be confirmed it would rival Bhimbetka or maybe indeed surpass those that we have seen. The discovery was even more significant because, within a deeper set of caves, archaeologists discovered further treasures, more red ochre paint sketches and drawings and some detailed diagrams of the internal organs of animals. The ground was littered with what appeared to be tools used by the pre-historic occupants of the caves. No doubt, in time, this will become a tourist destination but, apart from building a road to access it, I think it is unlikely to be spoiled and exploited because Bhimbetka is still very simple and untouched. Tourists bound for hedonistic pleasures do not go miles out of their way to see obscure prehistoric sites, thankfully; thus these wild ancient places will retain their beauty and mystery for the rest of us.

  Bhimbetka’s ancient rock art

  Pachmarhi is a hill station reasonably close to Bhimbetka. It was only discovered in 1857, i.e., a century before Bhimbetka, by the explorer and big game hunter, Captain Forsyth. Again, this plateau is littered with similar rock paintings but one would have to search them out. Pachmarhi, however, is an attractive little place to which city folk go to escape the heat of the plains in summer. The town is 1000 metres above sea level and thus very cool and the architectural legacy of the Raj is evident in the colonial bungalows, church with spire and parade grounds and garden atmosphere. The Satpura National Park to the north and west of the town encompasses a 600 sq. km swathe of sal, teak and bamboo forest. The park has bison (gaur), barking deer, sambhar, barasingha, jackals, wild dogs and a few tigers and leopards.

  LifeForce, the wildlife charity, about which I have already written, does a lot of constructive work at Satpura Tiger Reserve. Our friend who is dedicated to conservation reports that, whilst the 2002 monsoon was not the heaviest, the vegetation was lush and green, large herds of sambhar and other herbivores were present, providing a good prey base for many carnivores: wild dog, smaller wild cats, civets, leopard and tiger. Five tigers were seen socialising very unusually a
nd remaining together beyond a casual encounter. In November and December 2002, a tigress and cubs were seen in the forest only 3 km from the LifeForce base. Problems with poaching do, sadly, continue and, though the poachers were caught and await trial, whatever the legal outcome, the damage is done.