The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love

by Per J Andersson

  At the start of every summer the rivers were all but dry, awaiting the monsoon rains. The new Hirakud Dam, built a few days’ canoe journey further upstream, had stripped the Mahanadi River of its wilder rapids. By June, only the smallest trickle remained in the centre of the channel. This lack of water had become a scourge on the village. It would have been one thing if they had received electricity as compensation, but the power produced in the plant was directed elsewhere. When dusk fell they turned to the crackling fires and the flames of oil lamps. Kalabati and the other women of the village took to digging makeshift wells in the large sandbanks; holes stretching down for metres, from which the water that seeped in from the sides was collected and carried home in dented tin buckets. One bucket balanced on the head and one in each hand.

  According to the priests, untouchables made dirty everything that was pure and holy: they threw stones at PK whenever he approached the village temple. The year before he started school, PK decided to have his revenge. As the rituals began and the priests emerged carrying clay pots filled with water, he took his slingshot, scrabbled for stones around him, loaded and fired. Clonk, clonk, clonk! Water began to seep out of the cracks in the pots. The priests saw him and chased him through the village.

  ‘We’ll kill you!’ they shouted.

  He hid in a bank of cacti, the thorns digging into his flesh. Bleeding, he limped home to his mother. Even the plants want to hurt me, he thought.

  Ma stroked his back and whispered softly of everything that was good, even though she knew that for untouchables and tribespeople like them, the world was mostly vindictive and unfair. He did not know why the Brahmins disliked him so much, nor why they kept him out of the temple. He had no explanation for the stones that were hurled at him. All he knew was, they stung.

  His mother held back from telling him the truth and instead drew him the most beautiful pictures with her words.

  When the high-caste children touched PK by mistake, they ran away and washed themselves in the river.

  ‘Why do they do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they’re dirty,’ his mother replied. ‘They need a wash! Eugh, so stinky and dirty!’ she repeated until he no longer took their actions as a reflection of his own self-worth.

  Kalabati had never been to school and so could neither read nor write. But she knew a lot about the world, nevertheless. Like how to make pigments, paint intricate designs and mix leaves, seeds and roots into natural remedies.

  Her life was shaped by routine. Chores were always performed at the same time every day. She got up before the sun, her alarm the crowing roosters and the morning sun’s position in the sky her clock face. PK lay on his straw mat and listened as she scrubbed the floor, veranda and yard with a mixture of water and cow pat. He thought it strange that she used dung for cleaning, until she explained that it was far more effective than any white chemical powder you could buy in the village shop.

  After cleaning the house, Kalabati went to fertilize the family’s field of corn and then bathe in the river. She returned and stood in her dark blue sari on the newly swept veranda. Her wet, curly hair glistened in the morning sun as she slowly squeezed the water out with a cotton cloth.

  She sang softly as she watered the fragrant green-purple leaves of the holy basil bush. Then she went to the kitchen and dipped her index finger in a clay pot of red cinnabar powder and pressed it to the middle of her forehead. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror that hung on a hook by the stove. Leaning towards it, she painted thick black lines around her eyes with homemade kohl, a mixture of soot and ghee.

  Then it was PK’s turn to get up. He rolled up his straw mat and he received a dot of kohl in the middle of his forehead to protect him against evil. This was then followed by a dab of ghee, which soon melted in the sun and dribbled down his face. The butter was Kalabati’s way of telling the rest of the village they were not as poor as they seemed.

  ‘Not everyone can afford butter and milk,’ she told him, ‘but we can.’

  Look! The Mahanandia family lets the butter run down their children’s faces! At least, that was what Kalabati hoped they would think.

  His body clean, hair combed, kohl and butter smeared on his forehead, PK was ready for the new day.

  His mother’s ancestors, the tribal people, had hunted among the trees and farmed in the glades for thousands of years. Nowadays, most of Kalabati’s relatives worked making bricks by the riverside. They collected mud from the bottom of the river, shaped and fired it. PK’s uncle, however, held fast to the old ways and made his living with a sling, hunting in the forest. PK received a peacock feather from him, which he tied to a string and fastened around his head while he played at creeping about the forest, pretending that he too was on the hunt.

  Kalabati secretly wished for a daughter, so had let PK’s hair grow and helped him tie it up in braids. PK was proud of them, and liked to tie stones to their ends. ‘Look how strong my hair is!’ he roared at the other children, swinging the rocks from his braids.

  The other boys, who wore their hair short, were impressed. They had never seen anything like it.

  He usually played naked save for some wristbands and a belt strung with white shells. All Khutia Kondh children ran around like this. The caste Hindus thought the tribal people strange; their children were covered up.

  Kalabati worshipped the sun and sky, monkeys and cows, peacocks, cobras and elephants. She worshipped the liquorish scent of the tulsi bush, as well as the peepal sacred fig and the neem tree, whose antibacterial sap was used for cleaning teeth. To her, the divine had no name, but it was present in everything around them. Several times a week she went to a grove where the trees grew so close that they formed walls on all sides. Inside this secret temple hewn from nature, she gathered stones and fresh grass, laid out a small amount of butter and sprinkled red cinnabar powder over it. There she prayed to all the living things in the forest, but especially to the trees, which, along with the sun, were the most holy of all.

  Just like the other tribes of India’s eastern forests, the Khutia Kondh had never divided themselves into castes, nor made any distinction between chiefs and subjects. Everyone had the same right to worship the gods and communicate with the divine. But then something happened. Kalabati told PK how the people from the north-western plains came, and how they began to cultivate the valleys and riversides. They regarded the forest people as primitive and uncivilized.

  ‘In the end, we were forced into their caste system,’ his mother said sadly.

  The forest people tried on occasion to revolt. The British had to send troops to restore order. But it was an uneven battle in which PK’s people were uniformly defeated. When PK was in his twenties, he read that Maoist guerrilla warriors called the Naxalites had once again taken on the fight for the rights of the tribal people. Gradually, the conflict escalated and the Indian army went in with force. Blood was shed, hatred took hold, and the newspapers called the conflict a civil war. PK did not like this violent turn. He realized that many of his mother’s kinsmen felt all hope had been lost when the mining companies started exploiting their sacred mountains, trees and shrubs for minerals. At first, he too thought the only solution was to fight back. But then PK’s hate subsided. No man was worth so little that he deserved to die, not even an oppressor or a murderer. PK agreed with Mahatma Gandhi when he said, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’

  Athmallik had been one of India’s 565 princely states during the years of the British Empire, a Lilliputian country of some forty thousand inhabitants. Not that it was ever a ‘real’ country: the King had been subordinate to the British and was forced, like all the others, to abdicate when the Empire retreated in 1947 to make way for a modern state apparatus and democratically elected politicians.

  The founding of the kingdom of Athmallik was shrouded in mystery. The royal family claimed to be heirs to a traditional ruling clan from Jaipur in Rajasthan. One of the King’s sons, named Protap Deo, left their
crumbling palace in Jaipur with his brothers and travelled eastward to conquer Puri, the grand temple city by the shores of Bengal Bay. But their plan failed, and they were forced to flee up the Mahanadi River, inland towards the forests. After a few days’ march upstream, Protap Deo founded his kingdom, taking over a collection of villages nestled in a clearing. He killed the local indigenous chief and installed himself on the throne.

  People said that before the kings arrived, when the tribal chiefs still ruled, the god Jagannath lived in a cave hidden in the forested mountains of Athmallik. The god was represented by a wide-eyed, limbless wooden statue worshipped by the indigenous Sabar people. But one day, Hindu priests arrived along the river by boat and kidnapped Jagannath, installing him in the main temple of Puri, where he has remained ever since. The god was thus brought into the Hindu pantheon to be worshipped by millions of pilgrims from all over India. In Athmallik, Jagannath is believed to have once been adorned by what was then the largest diamond in the world, before became known as the Koh-i-Noor and joined the British royal family’s collection of crown jewels via the Mughals, Persians and Sikhs.

  In 1827, a British colonel named Gilbert arrived and was made director of the South-west Frontier Agency in Athmallik. The King, he discovered, was in conflict with the neighbouring Boud on the other side of the river. The King of Boud regarded the King of Athmallik as his subordinate and demanded he pay tribute, but because the rulers of Athmallik did not consider theirs a vassal kingdom, they refused to pay. The British colonel noted that, every now and then, the King of Boud made incursions into Athmallik and stole livestock and other valuables. Gilbert must have rubbed his hands in glee. A local dispute! The area could not be better placed for a takeover, perfect for the British and their policy of divide and rule.

  When PK was a child, the people of Athmallik still talked about the days of princely rule. That time was doused in a shimmer of nostalgia. PK’s relatives did well during that time, and his paternal grandfather had the great honour of being assigned the task of capturing wild elephants for the King and taming them for service in court. According to custom, the elephant catcher’s children and grandchildren were held in high regard by the royal family.

  The kings of Athmallik did not fight the British. They acceded to the demands of the imperialists for political supremacy and control of trade, and accepted gratefully the offer of protection. The British rewarded their acquiescence in 1890 by upgrading their raja, Mahendra Deo Samant, a king, to the title of Maharaja, Great King.

  And yet despite their relative privilege during the time of the princes, it was under the British that PK’s family was really to prosper.

  When King Bibhudendra died in 1918, the heir to the throne was only fourteen years old and too young to accede, so Colonel Cobden-Ramsay took over temporarily. Ramsay was known to his subjects as the White Raja, and he governed the princely state of Athmallik for seven years. According to PK’s grandfather, those were the seven best years in living memory.

  ‘Cobden-Ramsay wasn’t a racist like the other Englishmen,’ his grandfather would say. ‘He didn’t pay attention to caste.’ The British, in contrast to many Indians, cared about the common good and not just how to enrich themselves.

  ‘Can you name one single Brahmin who treated anyone outside their own caste with even a shred of respect or dignity?’ his grandfather would ask. ‘Have any of them ever done anything to benefit the lower castes? No, exactly! But the British did, all the time. They acted on behalf of everyone and never discriminated against us untouchables.’

  PK’s family liked and respected the British. It was the first time they had known rich and powerful men who did not see them as ritually unclean. They knew India’s elite hated the British. But PK’s grandfather used to say that he had never met an untouchable who resented the British colonial masters.

  Mahatma Gandhi said the British were racists. That might have been true, but PK’s grandfather believed Gandhi never understood that the worst racism to plague Indian society was the treatment of untouchables by high-caste Hindus.

  PK’s grandfather, grandmother and father had all attended Victoria Vernacular School in Kaintragarh, the tiny kingdom’s capital, where they learned to read and write and even speak a little English.

  ‘Before the British came, there was of course no school for us,’ Grandpa said. ‘But then everyone got to go to school!’ he shouted, almost triumphantly. The British did not make distinctions between the local population – high caste and low were of equal worth. ‘It didn’t matter which caste we belonged to. Oh, it was such a joy to get to learn. For the first time, we saw that someone outside our group wished us well.’

  During Queen Victoria’s birthday celebrations every year, Grandpa was allowed to raise the British flag at school while the other children sang the British national anthem. Many years later, PK’s European friends found it hard to understand that his relatives could feel joy at performing such a ceremony when his country had been colonized, occupied and subordinated to a foreign power. But Athmallik had almost always been ruled by outsider kings, he explained. Hundreds of years ago, King Ashoka was conquered by Emperor Kharavela, who was succeeded by the Sultan of Bengal and then the Maratha Empire.

  ‘The British were only one in a long line of foreign rulers,’ PK said. ‘But as long as the foreign kings didn’t interfere in the lives of the ordinary people, the locals didn’t care too much who was in charge.’

  Yet British rule changed the power dynamics within the villages for the first time. They did not understand the caste system, at least not in the way the Brahmins wanted them to. The British hired untouchables to work in the post office, the civil service and on the railways. And anyone who wanted to could attend Victoria Vernacular School.

  ‘No, the British have nothing to be ashamed of,’ was Grandpa’s opinion.

  The kings of Athmallik had not been extravagantly rich. Not like the maharajas of Rajasthan in western India who lived in enormous palaces and kept hundreds of elephants, hung hunting trophies on their walls and filled their drawers with diamonds. And certainly not like the maharaja who owned twenty-seven Rolls-Royces or the maharaja who married his daughter off to a prince in a wedding The Guinness Book of Records described as the most lavish in the world. Or like the maharaja who arranged a wedding for two of his dogs, dressing 250 canine guests in gemstone-encrusted brocade outfits to receive the ‘bridegroom’ astride a train of decorated elephants. Such profligacy was unknown in the miniature kingdom in which PK grew up.

  By the time PK was born, most of the maharajan palaces and office buildings were already abandoned and dilapidated. Liana vines had begun to wrap their strong stems around the increasingly monsoon-mouldy walls and collapsed roofs. The son of the last ruling maharaja of Athmallik left the palace when India became independent, but as the owner of a successful business, he moved instead into a stately mansion. PK and his family were always welcome there for a chat, a cup of tea and to gaze at the framed sepia photographs of the British dressed in pith helmets and Indian princes in turbans. Indeed, PK is as welcome there today as he was as a child.

  Despite their status as untouchable, PK’s father, grandmother and grandfather still belonged to the Hindu faithful. His father performed Hindu rituals at home, but not all untouchables did so. PK suspected that his father’s beliefs were inspired by his high-caste colleagues at the post office. Shridhar put together a small altar with pictures of Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, Ganesh, the elephant protector, and a statuette of Vishnu, the Sustainer of the Universe, surrounded by incense and oil lamps. Every day, wrapped in sweet smells and smoke from the fire, his father prayed to the gods for a happy life for himself and his family.

  As long as there were no Brahmins nearby, untouchables were able to approach the Shiva temple. But no untouchable ever dared enter the innermost rooms where the statues of the gods were enthroned. Such impudence would have thrown the Brahmins into an ungodly rage.

  Local custom
claimed that hurting or killing snakes brought bad luck, so they had made the village temple their home. The priests fed the snakes every day because they believed it to be Shiva’s wish. PK liked that the villagers looked after the snakes. He had peered into the temple and spotted a metal cobra glinting in the darkness, its neck extended as it protected the gods just as the real cobra had done when he was a baby. The snakes were mankind’s friends, PK was sure of that.

  The temple was also the place you went if you were bitten by a snake. There, you would be laid on your stomach in front of the entrance and told to pray to Shiva. Sooner or later, the Auspicious One would answer and heal your wounds. PK saw it with his own eyes when his aunt had suffered a particularly fierce attack. As custom dictated, she went to the temple, lay down on the steps and prayed. Then she went home and slept. The next morning she got up and announced that she was fully recovered. It was a miracle by Shiva’s own hand, everyone could see that.

  Shiva’s powers were not limited to snake bites. One of PK’s aunts had been married for twelve years without bearing a child. She went to the temple, lay down on the steps to pray, and there she stayed for four days and four nights. She neither ate nor spoke; her devotion took all her energy. She returned home weak and tired, and had to be brought to the table to be fed rice. Nine months later, she gave birth to her first baby.

  The gods did not confine themselves to the temples. A nearby clump of cacti was home to Sat Devi, the Seven Goddesses who had their origins in the beliefs of the forest people but had since come to be feared by the Hindus. The goddesses possessed great powers, people said. Bad things happened if they were not respected.