The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  What Mir Moazam said was confirmed by the casualty figures: on the Indian side seven killed and nine wounded, of which one died later; on the Hyderabadi side, an estimated 632 were killed.

  ‘How did the Indian Army behave when it got to Hyderabad?’ I asked.

  ‘When an army invades any country – whether it’s Alexander the Great, Timur, Hitler or Mussolini – when it gets into a town, you know what the soldiery does. It’s very difficult for the officers to control them. I can’t tell you how many were raped or killed, but I saw the bodies of many. Old scores were paid off across the state.’

  I discovered later that it is in fact possible to make an informed estimate of the numbers killed in the aftermath of the ‘Police Action’. When reports of atrocities began to reach Delhi, Nehru, ‘in his private capacity’, commissioned an unofficial report from a group of veteran Congressmen made up of two Hyderabadi Muslims who had prominently opposed the Nizam’s rule and chaired by a Hindu, Pandit Sunderlal. The team made an extensive tour of the state and submitted their report to Nehru and Sardar Patel in January 1949. Its findings were never made public, presumably because of its damning criticism of the conduct of the Indian Army. It remained unpublished until recently, when a portion of it, smuggled out of India, appeared in America in an obscure volume of scholarly essays entitled Hyderabad: After the Fall.

  The report, entitled ‘On the Post-Operation Polo Massacres, Rape and Destruction or Seizure of Property in Hyderabad State’, makes grim reading. In village after village across the state, it meticulously and unemotionally catalogues incidents of murder and mass rape, sometimes committed by troops, in other cases by local Hindu hooligans after the troops had disarmed the Muslim population. A short extract, chosen at random, gives the general flavour:

  Ganjoti Paygah, District Osmanabad

  There are 500 homes belonging to Muslims here. Two hundred Muslims were murdered by the goondas. The army had seized weapons from the Muslims. As the Muslims became defenceless, the goondas began the massacre. Muslim women were raped by the troops. Statement of Pasha Bi, resident of Ganjoti: The trouble in Ganjoti began after the army’s arrival. All the young Muslim women here were raped. Five daughters of Osman Sahib were raped and six daughters of the Qazi were raped. Ismail Sahib Sawdagar’s daughter was raped in Saiba Chamar’s home for a week. Soldiers from Umarga came every week and after all-night rape, young Muslim women were sent back to their homes in the morning

  And so on, for page after page. In all, the report estimates that as many as two hundred thousand Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered, which, if true, would make the aftermath of the ‘Police Action’ a bloodbath comparable to parts of the Punjab during Partition.

  Even if one chooses to regard the figure of two hundred thousand dead as an impossible exaggeration, it is still clear that the scale of the killing was horrific. Although publicly Nehru played down the disorder in Hyderabad, telling the Indian representative at the United Nations that following the Nizam’s officials deserting their posts there had been ‘some disorder in which Hindus had retaliated for their sufferings under the Razakar militia’, privately he was much more alarmed. This is indicated by a note he sent to Sardar Patel’s Ministry of States on 26 November 1948, in which he wrote that he had received reports of killings of Muslims so large in number ‘as to stagger the imagination’, and looting of Muslim property ‘on a tremendous scale’ – which would seem to confirm the general tone of Pandit Sunderlal’s report.

  I asked Mir Moazam what happened to him while all this murderous anarchy was taking place around him.

  ‘Several of the officers who were under suspicion by the new regime went to Pakistan,’ he replied. ‘Arrangements were made for me, as it was clear I was going to be arrested. But my father said, “Face the firing squad. I will disinherit and disown you if you run away from your post.” So I stayed, and after a farcical trial full of paid witnesses, I was sentenced to death. I could see the noose from my cell.’

  Mir Moazam described his ordeal straightforwardly, with barely a flicker of emotion or bitterness: ‘Later that year the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment,’ he said quietly. ‘After three years in solitary cells, following an appeal in the High Court, I was honourably acquitted. Other officers were less lucky. Many were framed with trumped-up charges. Others were forced to flee to Pakistan, though they dearly wished to stay in Hyderabad. Very few retained jobs of any importance: they were weeded out. Some were removed, some were reduced in rank, others were put in jail. Seeing this, after I was released, I decided to go to London. There English friends of mine and old Civil Service colleagues eventually helped me get a job in UNESCO, and I spent much of the next thirty or forty years either in Paris or as Chief of Mission in Libya and Afghanistan.’

  ‘You must have seen quite a few changes on your return,’ I said.

  ‘I hardly recognised the place,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘I arrived back with a friend who was head of a French bank. All the way I had been telling him about the wonders of Hyderabad, and particularly about the City Palace complex. I told him about the Blue Palace, the Green Palace and, most lovely of all, the Pearl Palace. So as soon as we arrived we went over there. I found the chowkidar and got him to open the gates. Inside it was completely flat: they had totally levelled it. Nothing was there except a few goats. I’ll never forget the humiliation as I turned to my friend to try and explain what had happened.

  ‘But of course I soon discovered that it wasn’t just the City Palace: almost all the great houses had gone. Even King Kothi [the Nizam’s palace] had been bulldozed, or at least most of it. There was one wing left, converted into some sort of hospital.’

  ‘Were the palaces confiscated by the government?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not as such,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘But the aristocracy lost all their status and their income after the Police Action, so they just sold everything: land, houses, even the doors and windows. They knew almost nothing about business. Selling their heritage was the only way they could make ends meet.’

  The old man shook his head in disbelief. ‘No one thought to protect anything,’ he said. ‘They sold their history just to survive. Now there’s virtually nothing left: just dusty high-rise buildings everywhere. Outside Salar Jung’s palace, for instance, was a garden easily comparable to the Tuileries. I’ll never forget its shady walks and ancient trees, its soft green lawns and parterres bursting with flowers. There was an octagonal fountain so large you could row about it in a skiff. Now it’s a filthy lorry park. So much was lost, unnecessarily, through sheer ignorance.’

  I asked Mir Moazam what had happened to his own family.

  ‘After the Police Action, the family simply disintegrated,’ he replied. ‘Some went to the Gulf, others to France, the UK and the USA. Now we are scattered to the winds, and Iram Manzil [Fakrool Mulk’s last palace] is a government office. It’s just around the corner from here, but it’s almost unrecognisable. For me it stands as a symbol of all that has happened to this town.’

  ‘Could you show me?’ I ventured.

  ‘Why not?’ said Mir Moazam.

  The old man got to his feet, and collected his stick. Two minutes later we were heading through the new housing estates that seemed to be springing up everywhere in Hyderabad.

  ‘When I was a boy all this was part of my grandfather’s estate,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘In those days Iram Manzil lay miles outside the town, five hundred acres of land, all beautifully maintained. Where those houses are, that was my grandfather’s nine-hole golf course. See those shacks? That was a polo field. And that mess over there? That was the palace orange groves. It’s impossible to visualise now.’

  We turned down a gradient, and drew up outside a large office complex. On the gate was posted the stencilled notice:

  GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

  OFFICE OF THE ENGINEER-IN-CHIEF

  ‘This was it,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘Unrecognisable.’

  I looked where he was pointing. From among a c
luster of shacks and lean-tos and concrete outhouses, clinging to the central building like barnacles on an oyster, I could see the outlines of what had once been a magnificent palace. But garages had been built in front of the central portico, obscuring the symmetry of the façade. The paint was peeling, and air-conditioning units hung out of every arched window. A feeling of neglect hung over the whole complex, almost completely masking the grandeur of the original plan.

  ‘You used to arrive through a gatehouse with two double-storeyed towers,’ said Mir Moazam. ‘A bugler would blow as you passed. The bugler’s name was Joseph, and he used to play the reveille first thing in the morning and sound the retreat each night at sunset. But they bulldozed the tower long ago. Over there, where that ugly garage is now, used to be the tennis courts, and beyond were the French Gardens, with their fountains playing. On the other side, at the bottom, there was a big lake. As you drew up in front of the palace, at a sign from the major domo our band would play ‘God Save the Nizam’ and ‘God Save the King Emperor’. Later, after a game of tennis, you used to have tea on that terrace, over where that temple is now.’

  We walked together around the complex, Mir Moazam pointing out where the zenana gate stood, before it was bulldozed, and where the African guards used to drill. Here was the pool they used to fill with coloured liquid to play holi, there the hall where Mohurram was celebrated and where the Christmas tree stood. Over there, where the arches were now blocked up, used to be the baradari hall. At the end of Ramadan, on the night of Eid, the room would be full to bursting, with everyone sitting on the floor, eating a great Mughlai dinner.

  ‘I remember the Nizam coming here, and the Viceroy, and a whole succession of British Residents. Outside there would be gorgeously caparisoned elephants and over a hundred polo ponies. There were palanquins and teams of palanquin bearers, four-in-hand coaches, and by 1934 nearly fifty cars, mainly Rolls-Royces and Daimlers. I remember the polo matches and the times we used to stand over there and try to shoot coins thrown in the air, or to pepper that old stuffed tiger on wheels. Then there were the tennis matches and the trips to the Malakpet races and the shikar trips into the jungle. It all seems very long ago now.’

  ‘So what of the future?’ I asked. ‘What do you think will survive of the old culture of Hyderabad?’

  Mir Moazam shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very little,’ he said. ‘You can’t keep out change. In fifty years an entire world has been levelled. Much has been utterly destroyed. The process is nearly finished now. I think that everything that is special about Hyderabad is going. Day by day the old ways are disappearing and being replaced by a monotonous standardisation.

  ‘What we had in Hyderabad was a distinct Deccani culture, the product of a very particular mixture of peoples and influences. It was based on religious tolerance, courtesy, hospitality, love of the arts and a first-rate civil service which made no distinction between creeds or caste or class. But much of the old élite went to Pakistan, and a flood of new people have come, bringing their own ways with them. What is left – the vestiges and fragments – is still vital and has a life and an extraordinary stamina. But who knows how long it can last?’

  The old man took my hand and led me sadly back towards the road. ‘My children tell me you mustn’t live in your memories. One must try to move with the times, and face the future rather than always dreaming about what has gone.’

  Mir Moazam turned to face me: ‘And they are right, of course,’ he said. ‘That is why I do not like to come back here. At every step there are fragments of my past. And frankly it breaks my old heart to see it like this.’

  Parashakti

  COCHIN, 1993

  Something was clearly wrong with the woman.

  As I walked past, she jumped up, rocked unsteadily one way and the other, then lunged towards my face with her long, dirt-stained fingernails. I sidestepped, and she lurched after me, one foot dragging slightly behind the other. Then, as abruptly as she got up, she sat down again on the floor, and curled herself up in to a little ball. Nearby, three other women rolled around beside her, cackling to themselves in deep, broken voices.

  Mr Venugopal put a calming hand on my shoulder: ‘You must not worry about these ladies,’ he said, smiling at my alarm. ‘Each of them has a devil in her. But soon all these evil spirits will be exorcised.’

  He patted me reassuringly on the back: ‘By tonight our goddess Parashakti will have all these devils tamed. By eleven o’clock, I promise you, sir, all these ladies will be ripe as rain.’

  Mr Venugopal was a kind and devout old man. We had met a little earlier that morning in a roadside tea-stall; as we shook hands, Mr Venugopal had handed me his card. It read:

  Venugopal

  Chief Engineer to All-Kerala Electricity Board (Retired)

  Mr Venugopal, it was true, looked a slightly unlikely Chief Engineer. As he sat at his breakfast, gobbling down great plates of idli sambhar, he was naked but for a thin white cotton loincloth, over the top of which spilled his sizeable paunch. He wore heavy black glasses, and his forehead was marked by a prominent sandalwood tilak mark. Over his chest, attached to a thin black thread, hung a Hindu charm.

  ‘I am a retired person interested in spiritual affairs only,’ he explained. ‘Now my career is over I visit temples and pray to God. But of all the temples I have visited, the goddess of this place is by far the most powerful. I tell you: if you surrender to her you will get total peace of mind.’

  Perhaps I had looked a little sceptical, for Mr Venugopal had immediately offered to take me around the great temple of Chottanikkara himself. Although all the major temples in Kerala are officially closed to non-Hindus, Mr Venugopal insisted that he was a personal friend of one of the temple officials, and that his friend would be happy, as he put it, ‘to expedite everything’. Sure enough, twenty minutes later I was through the great wooden gatehouse with its upturned Chinese flying eves, past the burly temple guards, and inside the temple’s first compound.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mr Venugopal. ‘Before I take you in to the presence of the goddess, let us sit down in the shade and take our rest. Then I can tell you about the Mother.’

  We found a stone wall-bench under an arcade of the cloister garth, and Mr Venugopal started to explain.

  ‘We Hindus believe that some of the symptoms of epilepsy – delirious convulsions and mad utterances – are due to the effect of yakshis, or evil spirits. These spirits have astral bodies only, and are invisible. Their identity can only be guessed at by the symptoms of the possessed person, and also by the astrological calculations of our Brahmins. Our feeling is that every evil spirit would like to unite with the Almighty. But thanks to his bad deeds he cannot. For this reason there are too many evil spirits roaming around in the atmosphere.

  ‘Now, the aim of these yakshis is to get inside the bodies of weak-minded peoples. Then they think they will be brought to a temple where some compensatory puja will be done for them, and in this way they will get salvation.’

  We walked past the first shrine and through a courtyard lined by a succession of small cells, each with a simple wooden door. Walking in the same direction as ourselves there flowed a continuous stream of pilgrims. Many were plump Brahmins over whose oiled and glistening torsos hung thin sacred threads. I remarked to Mr Venugopal on the number of visitors.

  ‘Each year this shrine is more and more popular,’ he replied. ‘Twenty years ago people did not have belief. They were materialistic and said that all temples were just humbug and nonsense. Now many have learned the error of their ways. They think materialistic things are not everything. They realise you cannot get happiness even with all the material benefits in the world. So, like all people who are in trouble, they call for their Mother, and she is answering them.’

  We had arrived at the bottom of a great stairway. Here a second gatehouse led past a tank in to a second compound.

  ‘Mr William. At this stage you must please take off your shirt. If you wish to go in to the inner t
emple, you must be wearing only a pant or a lungi. This is our custom.’

  ‘Why here?’ I asked. ‘Why not at the entrance?’

  ‘Our goddess Parashakti reveals herself in different forms in different parts of the temple,’ explained Mr Venugopal. ‘At the top she is in her most gentle and wise and motherly form: there she shows herself as the goddess Saraswati and the goddess Lakshmi. But here in this lower compound she appears in her most terrible form. Here she is Kali. We must be most respectful. To anger her …’

  He broke off, and ran his fingers melodramatically across his throat.

  ‘Finish,’ he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis.

  The inner compound was much smaller than those we had already passed. A wall pressed in around the small, dark shrine where the believers were bowing in front of the idol. To one side stood a tree. Its trunk was punctured by hundreds of long steel nails.

  ‘This is the Devil’s Tree,’ said Venugopal. ‘By hammering nails in to the bark with the heads of the patients we clamp the spirits to the goddess Kali so they will not disturb any other person.’

  ‘Did you say with their heads?’

  ‘Oh yes. But first the possessed person must be in a state of trance. She must be seized by the goddess, then she will feel nothing.’

  ‘And how do you persuade Kali to seize the person?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that is easy matter,’ said Mr Venugopal. ‘We feed her twelve basins full of blood.’

  Who is Parashakti?

  Her names are as many as her devotees, though sometimes she is called simply Mahadevi – the Great Goddess – for the world was created when she opened her eyes, and it is destroyed whenever she blinks.

  Some call her Jagatikanda, the Root of the World. Others know her as Supreme Ruler, She who Supports the Galaxy, She who is Ruler of All the Worlds, Mother of All. Her most sacred title is the Root of the Tree of the Universe.

  Yet if Parashakti is Life itself, she is also Death. She can destroy all she creates, and for this reason many of her devotees choose to worship her as Pancapretasanasina, She who is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses. She is also known by the names She who is Wrathful, She who has Flaming Tusks, She who Causes Madness, She whose Eyes Roll about from Drinking Wine, the Terrible One, Night of Death.