The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  ‘These demonstrations are simply expressions of people’s alarm at what is happening to Bangalore,’ he said. ‘Some people have certainly made a lot of money, but most have found that their life has got worse: think of the volume of traffic, the noise, the pollution. The people here have good reason to fear the future. In a few years everything that is familiar in this city has been destroyed. The opening of these restaurants and the fuss about Miss World, these are just flashpoints.’

  The growing discontent in the city was perhaps best articulated by the youthful General Secretary of the BJP, Anand Kumar, who has recently thrown his weight behind the protests. ‘What I am objecting to is not any individual restaurant or beauty contest, but the mindset they both represent,’ he told me as he sat in Gandhian homespun beneath a framed and garlanded picture of Shivaji. ‘The entry of multinationals in to Bangalore over the last few years has initiated a spiral of prices. The rich have flooded in, and the poor can no longer afford housing, education, transport, or even the most basic amenities. In this country half the population – 460 million people – has a daily income of not more than ten rupees [twenty pence]. A situation where millions are kept in poverty, without education, while a microscopic minority enjoys all the facilities available to the élite classes of Britain and America cannot continue indefinitely.’

  I asked why Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken should be the target, rather than the government or the houses of the rich.

  ‘These foreign restaurants are symbols of the disparity between rich and poor,’ replied Kumar. ‘Only the tiny Westernised élite want to eat there, or indeed can afford to eat there. There is a burning discontent which has begun to be directed against these outlets. A popular upsurge is growing that wants to hit out at those symbols.

  ‘Take my word for it,’ he said ominously. ‘It won’t be long before this becomes an explosive situation.’

  If some of the causes of the current unrest are peculiar to Bangalore, similar problems of hyper-development beset many Indian cities. Across much of metropolitan India, electricity and water are often unavailable for hours each day. Property prices are rising steeply, and roads everywhere are becoming impossibly jammed and polluted.

  Yet however bad things become, an unofficial wave of privatisation has enabled the rich to cushion themselves from the worst effects of this incipient urban breakdown. Many wealthy Indians now possess their own electricity generators, and most have found ways of guaranteeing themselves a constant water supply, using their own pumps to store water during the brief periods it is available. Meanwhile the poor get poorer, with over half the population now officially living under the poverty line. India’s rural masses are remarkable for their ability to endure hardship without complaint, but it is open to question whether this will remain so forever.

  Economic liberalisation and the sudden introduction of multinationals in to India has meant that the kind of social changes that transformed Britain in the half-century since the Second World War have been compressed in to less than a decade. The gap between rich and poor has visibly widened, and for the first time since Independence it has become possible – indeed acceptable – to flaunt wealth.

  Bombay, for example, now has the highest office rents in the world, and no fewer than 150 diet clinics, notwithstanding the fact that in the city’s slums death from starvation is still far from uncommon. In parts of the city Mercedes now outnumber Hindustan Ambassadors, yet the slums nearby become ever larger, ever uglier. Moreover, the spread of cable and satellite television, beaming programmes like Baywatch and The Bold and the Beautiful in to millions of ordinary mofussil towns and villages, has made vast numbers of Indians aware for the first time of how the other half lives, inevitably generating resentment that others are enjoying a lifestyle that to them is totally inaccessible. An Inspector General of Police told me that towards the end of the 1980s, as satellite dishes and cable began to reach the remoter parts of his state, the crime in his area rose exponentially. The poor had become aware for the first time of what they were missing.

  As the experience of Bangalore shows, symbols of Westernisation – be they pizza restaurants, beauty pageants or multinational businesses – may soon find themselves made scapegoats for the disorientation, social upheaval and dislocation the country is currently undergoing.

  On my last day in Bangalore, I woke up to find that every wall was pasted with flyers announcing ‘A MAMMOTH PROCESSION AND PROTEST MEETING: PROTEST INVASION OF WESTERN LIFESTYLE AND SAVE NATIONAL HONOUR.’ Changing my plans, I asked the autorickshaw-driver to take me straight to the venue.

  This, significantly enough, was Chikkalalbagh, an old Moghul garden built by Tipu Sultan, who in the late eighteenth century had led attempts to stop a rather more aggressive invasion of Western multinationals in the shape of the East India Company.

  As we neared Chikkalalbagh, our pace sank to a crawl. Well over two thousand people had gathered with their placards: ‘Beware: Western Dogs Are Here!’ ‘Stop Kentucky!’ ‘Save Indian Culture!’ A cheerleader was standing by a rickshaw to which two huge loudspeakers had been attached. Fist raised, he led the crowd in a chant of ‘Down down Miss World! Up up Mother India!’

  Abandoning my rickshaw, I pushed through to the front of the crowd, where I found Professor M.D. Nanjundaswamy, President of the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association, standing around in a woolly tea-cosy hat and holding a huge picture of the Mahatma with his spinning wheel. It was Professor Nanjundaswamy who had organised the first wave of attacks, and he had spent several weeks in prison for his pains.

  ‘Actually, we farmers believe in true Gandhian non-violent protests,’ said the Professor, when I asked him about his protests.

  ‘But that didn’t stop you smashing up the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.’

  ‘Ah, you see, hurting living beings – such as killing cows and chickens: that is violence,’ replied the Professor. ‘But damaging inanimate objects: what violence is there? These actions are necessary if we are to save Indian culture.’

  ‘But what harm is there in a single chicken restaurant?’ I asked. ‘Three thousand tandoori restaurants in London don’t seem to have destroyed British culture.’

  ‘Actually, our case is very different,’ said the Professor. ‘We have evidence that the entire livestock of Karnataka could be wiped out in two years. When the government of India fails to protect the interests of its people and its cows, direct action is becoming inevitable. We are undergoing a cultural invasion worse than the Moghul invasion! Worse even than the invasion of our India by the Britishers!’

  Professor Nanjundaswamy’s ideas may be a little eccentric, but they are the very picture of calm moderation when compared to those of his ally, Ms Pramilla Nesargi, the BJP MP for Bangalore South. Ms Nesargi was standing beside the Professor, scowling at the police cordon in front of her.

  ‘The Miss World organisers are definitely in league with this Kentooky,’ she said. ‘It is a conspiracy hatched by all these people to destroy our ancient Hindu culture. Kentooky is the same as the East India Company. In that case one company was sufficient to occupy all India. But this government has let in many multinationals.’

  By now the protesters had formed a crocodile and begun to march. As they passed through the bazaars, handing out flyers in English and Kannada, their numbers swelled with curious passers-by: a pair of sadhus, a party of schoolgirls, a man with an ice-cream trolley. While we walked, Pramilla Nesargi painted a grim picture of Colonel Sanders and the Miss World organisation as sinister Riders of the Apocalypse, one of them descending on Bangalore bearing carcinogenic chicken nuggets to poison the unsuspecting Hindu youth, while the other perverted the morals of any left alive by the Kentucky plague.

  ‘What is the impact of the Miss World?’ she said. ‘I will tell you. When children see Miss World they will always be wanting to see all women in swimwear only. There will be 100 per cent increase in sexcrime. Since the government allowed MTV in to India sexcrime has
already increased by 100 per cent. Men are seeing these things and then committing rapes, committing murders. No woman is safe in our India any more. Eve-teasing [sexual harassment] is happening every day.’

  No less damaging, according to Pramilla Nesargi, will be the effects on the contestants, each of whom, according to her, has to undergo a makeover on the sort of scale received by Robocop.

  ‘These world beauties are coming,’ Nesargi said. ‘But I don’t call them beauties. Not at all. These are artificial … all silicon. Excess fats are removed from body: this lipo … Then all the body hair is removed by electrolysis. Silicon injection is given. The face will be lifted. The eyebrows are taken. Bleaching is there. Then artificial eyes are given: green or blue are put in. You call this beauty. Beauty lies in nature. Not in this artificially made … thing.’

  The arguments of the Bangalore protesters are shot through with a myriad of such myths and inconsistencies. Hinduism has celebrated the erotic for millennia, and it seems most unlikely that the religion which produced the Kama Sutra and the sculptures of Khajaraho will be fatally wounded by a selection of beauty queens strutting around in swimsuits. Indeed, modern Indian modesty seems to reflect imported Victorian notions of decorum more closely than anything home-grown: after all, the women of Bangalore, as elsewhere in southern India, went about bare-breasted until the British encouraged them to cover up in the nineteenth century.

  More importantly, economic liberalisation and the entry of foreign competition has enormously strengthened India’s outdated industrial base. The seed industry is a case in point. Fifty years of economic protectionism allowed Indian seed producers to get away with selling sub-standard seeds, which in turn led to Indian farmers growing sub-standard crops. When Cargill Seeds opened an operation in India they immediately seized half the market, leading to the bankruptcy of many Indian seed companies. But those who learned to compete are now producing excellent seed strains at highly competitive prices. Ten years later, India now looks likely to become a major seed exporter, able to undercut and outperform almost all its Western rivals.

  Yet to concentrate on such glaring holes in the protesters’ arguments is to miss the point of a case that is more emotional than logical. They are firing warning shots across the bows of those who seek to turn India in to a distant satrapie of Western capitalism. In their more xenophobic manifestations, the Bangalore protests can seem a ludicrous attempt at shutting out the twentieth century. Yet you cannot help feeling that there is something rather admirable in trying to preserve one corner of the globe free from McDonald’s yellow parabolas, a last piece of territory where masala dosas will forever rule supreme over Colonel Sanders’ finger-lickin’ good Kentucky Combo Meals.

  As the Moghul Emperor Babur noted in his diary soon after he had conquered the subcontinent in the early sixteenth century, ‘In India everything is done differently from the rest of the world. Nothing will ever change this.’ India will choose what it wants from the rest of the world; but its unique and deeply conservative culture is not going to go down without a struggle.

  At the Court of

  the Fish-Eyed Goddess

  MADURAI, 1998

  Look down over the Tamil temple town of Madurai in the pre-dawn glimmer of a summer’s festival morning, and you will see an extraordinary sight.

  The city sits in a broad, flat plain, as level and as green as a ripe paddy field at harvest time. Out of this flat tropical planisphere rises a series of four man-made mountain peaks, each echoed by a ripple of lesser man-made hillocks. These are the gopuras, or ceremonial gateways of Madurai’s great temple to Meenakshi, the Fish-Eyed Goddess, a town within a town and one of the most sacred sites in India.

  The gopuras dominate the city as completely as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages must once have dominated the landscape of Europe. They rise in great, tapering, wedge-shaped pyramids – each layer swarming with brightly coloured images of gods and demons, heroes and yakshis – until three quarters of the way to their apex, they terminate in a crown of cobra heads tipped with a pair of cat’s-eared demon finials. The astonishing complexity and elaboration of the gopuras’ decoration is something you can see from far away, long before you are able to distinguish even the beginnings of its detail.

  To the Tamils, this is a sacred landscape, and the origins of every feature are elaborately catalogued in the myths of Madurai. This rock was an evil elephant who attempted to trample the town’s Brahmins to death before being turned to stone by Lord Shiva; the river there, the Vaigai, was created by Lord Sundareshvara, the husband of Meenakshi, to quench the thirst of one of his wedding guests, a dwarf named Pot Belly who had developed an unbearable thirst after eating three hundred pounds of rice.

  At the very centre of the plain lies the temple itself, the most sacred place of all. For the temple, so the Brahmins will tell you, is a tirtha, a crossing-place linking the profane to the sacred. The pious pilgrim who steps within the temple enters a zone of transition, a ford between different states of perception, where the celestial can become suddenly imminent, manifest; it is a doorway to the divine, where you can cross from the world of men to the world of the gods as easily as you might cross a slow-flowing stream at the height of the dry season.

  Though the sun had yet to rise, from my vantage point on the edge of town I could see the beginnings of frenzied activity around the temple. The gopuras were spotlit, and all around in the streets which circled the temple, flames and lights were heading towards the sacred enclosure, like a cloud of moths circling a lamp in the darkness of a summer’s night.

  As I walked further in to the labyrinth of streets, the crowds thickened: groups of women with flowers in their hair were hurrying in the direction of the temple, all carrying offerings in their hands: packages of milk and ewers of coconut oil, pots of ghee and bags of prasad. In one place a huddle of old buses had parked in a sidestreet, and from them lines of shaven-headed pilgrims, all dressed in matching yellow lungis – devotees of Lord Venkateshwara, who had shaven their heads then offered their hair as gifts to the great temple at Tirupati – spilled out and set off in to the slipstream of the bicycles and rickshaws. A few stalls had already opened, selling marigold garlands, glass bangles, sandalwood and incense sticks, and around these the pilgrims collected, haggling with the vendors for charms and offerings, before setting off again in to the mêlée.

  By the time I got to the temple it was first light, and the enclosure was already humming with life. Ranks of beggars had begun assembling under the eves of the gopuras, hands outstretched, and between them the pilgrims were prostrating themselves before the entrance gate. Some were lighting small camphor fires on the stone slabs under the gateway and commencing their puja, utterly unconcerned by the passing throng of mendicants and festival-goers, some of whom only narrowly avoided stepping on the praying figures. From inside came the sound of drums, and with it the soft beating of the wings of startled pigeons.

  I passed under the Gate of Eight Goddesses and in to the long, arcaded passage beyond. Inside, it was dark and magnificent. A forest of carved pillars – on closer inspection lines of heavy-breasted Hindu caryatids: yakshis, courtesans, goddesses and dancing-girls – flanked me on either side. Everything about the architecture was deeply, and consciously, feminine: heading towards the innermost sanctuary of the presiding goddess, one sunk deeper and deeper in to the darkness, down a long, straight, womb-like passage.

  There is a reason for this all-pervading femininity. The temple at Madurai is one of the few in India containing both male and female deities where the goddess is always worshipped before the gods. As far as most of the pilgrims are concerned, this is the Temple of Meenakshi; to them, her husband Lord Sundareshvara, ‘the Beautiful Lord’, is a thoroughly secondary deity, only to be worshipped when joined to his wife, even though he is technically a form of the most powerful of all the gods, the great Shiva himself. For it is because of Meenakshi, not her consort, that the temple is famous throughout India. She has a r
eputation as a uniquely generous goddess who invariably gives boons to those who honour her, particularly in the matter of children. Pray before the shrine of Meenakshi – or Ammah, the mother, as the pilgrims call her – then tie a twine around the banyan tree in the courtyard, and in nine months’ time a child will be born; or so they say.

  The conscious fecundity of the temple is evident in every aspect of its decoration. Spiralling out over the cornices and the finials of the arcades are a great anarchic cavalcade of mask heads, demons, demi-gods and godlings, peeping out from the angles, coming to roost under the pendetives; a great spiralling pantheon of Hindu deities that is repeated with even greater vigour over the towering gopuras. It is as if Meenakshi’s fertility is such that every inch of the stonework is organically sprouting with supernatural forms, just as the bare desert sprouts with camel-thorn after the rains.

  Then, quite suddenly, a carved wooden temple rath appeared in the centre of the principal ceremonial avenue from a side passage, pushed by a swarm of half-naked figures. Their progress was lit by a succession of temple priests holding brightly burning yellow splints dipped in camphor oil. In a silken tabernacle at the top of the rath lay the golden image of the goddess herself, garlanded and draped in cloth-of-gold, her nose-jewel flashing in the flames of the priests’ burning splints. This was followed by another temple cart, containing an image of both Meenakshi and Lord Sundareshvara, with their son, the six-headed war god Murugan, standing between them. Then came a pair of brahminy cows led by two priests and hung with drapes and drums and anointed with dots of saffron and turmeric.

  As the cavalcade began lining up in the main axis, with a ringing of gongs and bells, a caparisoned temple elephant and a third rath carrying a huge golden horse joined the procession. From another passage emerged a temple band, banging cymbals and drums and blowing a succession of fanfares on the nagashwaram, the giant Tamil oboe whose rasping, raucous notes filled the air with a noise like the screech of peacocks. Then, with a last great fanfare from the nagashwaram, they were off, the whole procession moving slowly up the ramps, out of the temple and in to the streets, cheered on by the crowds of waiting pilgrims.