OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  There is one footnote I have not read before. In the nineteenth century, says the anthropologist, people believed there were ways of knowing who was a tiger in human form. It was useful for women to realise in advance, otherwise they found out only on their wedding night. People who turn into tigers sometimes carry a spotted knife, that’s one clue. But the main way to recognise a were-tiger is that his upper lip has no central groove.

  The Nun’s Tale

  WILLIAM DALRYMPLE (born Edinburgh, 1965) is the author of eight works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, White Mughals, and The Last Mughal. ‘The Nun’s tale’ is adapted from his most recent book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Brought up in Scotland, he has lived mainly in Delhi for the past twenty-five years and is a founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Guardian. www.williamdalrymple.uk.com

  The Nun’s Tale

  WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

  Two hills of blackly gleaming granite, smooth as glass, rise from a thickly wooded landscape of banana plantations and jagged palmyra palms. It is dawn. Below lies the ancient pilgrimage town of Sravanabelagola, where the crumbling walls of monasteries and temples cluster around a grid of dusty, red-earth roads. The roads converge on a great rectangular tank. The tank is dotted with the spreading leaves and still-closed buds of floating lotus flowers. Already, despite the early hour, the first pilgrims are gathering.

  For more than two thousand years, this Karnatakan town has been sacred to the Jains. It was here, in the third century BC, that the first Emperor of India, Chandragupta Maurya, embraced the Jain religion and died through a self-imposed fast to the death, the Emperor’s chosen atonement for the killings he had been responsible for in his life of conquest. Twelve hundred years later, in 981 AD, a Jain general commissioned the largest monolithic statue in India, sixty feet high, on the top of the larger of the two hills, Vindhyagiri.

  This was an image of another royal Jain hero, Prince Bahubali. The prince had fought a duel with his brother for control of their father’s kingdom. But in the very hour of his victory, Bahubali realised the transience of worldly glory. He renounced his kingdom, and embraced, instead, the path of the ascetic. Retreating to the jungle, he stood in meditation for a year, so that the vines of the forest curled around his legs and tied him to the spot. In this state he conquered what he believed to be the real enemies – his ambitions, pride and desires – and so became, according to the Jains, the first human being to achieve spiritual liberation.

  The sun has only just risen above the palm trees yet already the line of pilgrims – from a distance, tiny ant-like creatures against the dawn-glistening fused-mercury of the rockface – are climbing the long line of steps that lead up to the stone prince. For the last thousand years this statue, enclosed in its lattice of stone vines, has been the focus of pilgrimage for the Digambara, or Sky Clad Jains.

  Digambara monks are probably the most severe of all India’s ascetics. They show their total renunciation of the world by travelling through it completely naked, as light as the air, as they conceive it, and as clear as the Indian sky. Sure enough, among the many ordinary lay people slowly mounting the rock-cut steps, are several completely naked men – Digambara monks on their way to do homage. There are also a number of white-clad Digambara nuns, and it is in a temple just short of the summit that I first lay eyes on Prasannamati Mataji.

  I had seen the tiny, slender, bare-foot figure of the nun in her white sari bounding up the steps above me as I began my ascent. She climbed quickly, with a pot of water in one hand, and a peacock fan in the other. As she went, she gently wiped each step with the fan in order to make sure she didn’t hurt a single living creature on her ascent of the hill: one of the set rules of pilgrimage for a Jain ascetic.

  It was only when I got to the temple, just below the summit, that I caught up with her – and saw that Mataji was a surprisingly young and striking woman. She had large, wide-apart eyes, olive skin, and an air of self-contained confidence that expressed itself in an ease with the way she held her body. But there was also something sad and wistful about her expression as she went about her devotions; and this, combined with her unexpected youth and beauty, left one wanting to know more.

  Mataji was busy with her prayers when I first entered the temple. After the glimmering half-light outside, the interior was almost completely black. Within, at first almost invisible, were three smooth black marble images of the Jain Tirthankaras, or Liberators. Each was sculpted sitting Buddha-like with shaved head and elongated earlobes, locked in the deepest meditation. Tirthankara means literally ‘Fordmaker’, and the Jains believe these figures have shown the way to Nirvana, making a ford through the rivers of suffering, and across the wild oceans of existence and rebirth, so as to create a crossing place between the illusory physical world and final liberation.

  To each of these figures in turn, Mataji bowed. According to Jain belief, pilgrims may express their devotion to the Tirthankaras, but can expect no rewards for such prayers: the Fordmakers have liberated themselves from the world of men, and so are not present in the statutes, in the way that, say, Hindus believe their deities are incarnate in temple images. The pilgrim can simply learn from their example and use them as a focus for meditation. At its purest, Jainism is almost an atheistic religion, and the images of the Tirthankaras represent less a divine presence than a profound divine absence.

  From the temple, Mataji headed up the hill to wash the feet of Bahubali. There she silently mouthed her morning prayers at the feet of the statue, her rosary circling in her hand. Then as quickly as she had leapt up the steps, she headed down them again, peacock fan flicking and sweeping each step before her.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I applied for a formal audience with Mataji at the monastery guest house; and the day after that I began to learn what had brought about her air of melancholy.

  ‘We believe that all attachments bring suffering,’ she explained, after we had been talking some time. ‘This is why we are supposed to give them up. This was why I left my family, and why I gave away my wealth. For many years, I fasted or ate only once a day and like other nuns I often experienced hunger and thirst. I wandered the roads of India barefoot. Every day I suffered the pain of thorns and blisters. All this was part of my effort to shed my last attachments. But I still had one attachment – though of course I didn’t think of it in that way.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘My friend, Prayogamati,’ she replied. ‘For twenty years we were inseparable companions, sharing everything. For our safety, we Jain nuns are meant to travel together. It never occurred to me that I was breaking any of our rules. But because of my friendship with her, I formed not just an attachment, but a strong attachment – and that left an opening for suffering. But I only realised this after she died.’

  There was a pause, and I had to encourage Mataji to continue: ‘In this stage of life we need company,’ she said. ‘You know: a companion with whom we can share ideas and feelings. After Prayogamati left her body, I felt this terrible loneliness. I feel it to this day. But her time was fixed. When she fell ill with TB, her pain was so great she decided to take sallekhana. Even though she was only thirty-six.’

  ‘Sallekhana?’

  ‘It’s the ritual fast to the death. We Jains regard it as the culimination of our life as ascetics. It is what we all aim for, and work towards as the best route to Nirvana.’

  ‘You are saying she committed suicide?’

  ‘No, no: sallekhana is not suicide,’ she said emphatically. ‘It is quite different. Suicide is a great sin, the result of despair. But sallekhana is a triumph over death, an expression of hope.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If you starve yourself to death, then surely you are committing suicide?’

  ‘Not at all. We believe that death is not the end, and that life and death are complimentary. So when you embrace sallekhana you are emb
racing a whole new life – it’s no more than going through from one room to another.’

  ‘But you are still choosing to end your life.’

  ‘With suicide, death is full of pain and suffering. But sallekhana is a beautiful thing. You have God’s name on your lips, and if you do it slowly in the prescribed way, there is no pain. At all stages you are guided by an experienced guruji. Everything is planned long in advance – when, and how, you give up your food. First you fast one day a week, then you eat only on alternate days. One by one, you give up different types of foodstuffs. Finally you take only water, and then you have that only on alternate days. Eventually, when you are ready, you give up on that, too. Really – it can be so beautiful: the ultimate rejection of all desires, the sacrificing of everything.’

  She smiled: ‘You have to understand: we feel excited at a new life, full of possibilities.’

  ‘But you could hardly have felt excited when your friend left you like this.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her face falling. ‘It is hard for those who are left.’ She stopped. ‘After Prayogamati died, I could not bear it. I wept, even though we are not supposed to. Any sort of emotion is a hindrance to the attainment of Enlightenment. We are meant to cultivate indifference – but still I remember her.’ Her voice faltered: ‘The attachment is there even now,’ she said. ‘I can’t help it. We lived together for twenty years. How can I forget?’

  JAINISM IS ONE of the most ancient living religions of the world, similar to Buddhism in many respects, and emerging from the same classical Indian world of the Ganges basin in the early centuries BC – but the faith of the Jains is slightly more ancient, and much more demanding than Buddhist practice.

  Buddhist ascetics shave their heads; Jains pluck their hair out by the roots. Buddhist monks beg for food; Jains have to have their food given to them without asking. All they can do is to go out on gowkari – the word used to describe the grazing of a cow – and signal their hunger by curving their right arms over their shoulder. If no food comes before the onset of the night, they go to bed hungry. They are forbidden to handle money. Unlike Buddhism, the Jain religion never spread beyond India, and while once a popular and powerful faith across the subcontinent, today there are only four million Jains left. Outside India, the religion barely exists, and in contrast to Buddhism, it is almost unknown in the West.

  The word Jain derives from Jina, meaning spiritual conqueror. The Jinas or Tirthankaras – Fordmakers – were a series of twenty-four human teachers who each discovered how to escape the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Through their heroic austerities they gained omniscient knowledge which revealed to them the reality of the universe, in every dimension. The most recent of those, according to the Jains, was the historical figure of Mahavira – the Great Hero – a prince of Magadha, in modern Bihar, who during the sixth century BC renounced the world at the age of thirty to become a wandering thinker and ascetic.

  Mahavira elaborated to his followers a complex cosmological system that the Jains still expound 2,400 years later. Like other Indian faiths, they believe in an immortal soul and that the sum of one’s actions determines the nature of one’s future rebirth. However the Jains reject the Hindu idea that the world was created by omnipotent gods, and they mock the pretensions of the Brahmin priests, who believe that ritual purity and temple sacrifices can bring salvation. As a Jain monk explains to a group of Brahmins in one of the Jain scriptures, the most important sacrifice for Jains is one’s own body: ‘Austerity is my sacrifical fire,’ says the monk, ‘and my life is the place where the fire is kindled. Mental and physical effort are my ladle for the oblation, and my body is the fuel for the fire, my actions my firewood. I offer up an oblation consisting of my restraint, effort and calm.’

  It is a strange and in some ways very harsh religion; but that, explained Prasannamati Mataji, is exactly the point.

  AT TEN O’CLOCK each day, Mataji eats her one daily meal. On my third day in Sravanabelagola, I went to her monastery to watch what was as much a ritual as a breakfast.

  Mataji, wrapped as ever in her unstitched white cotton sari, was sitting cross-legged on a low wooden stool in the middle of an empty ground-floor room. In front, five Jain laywomen with small buckets of rice and dal were eagerly attending her, with extreme deference. Mataji however sat with eyes lowered, not looking at them, accepting without comment whatever she was offered. There was complete silence: no one spoke; any communication took place by hand signals.

  For an hour, Mataji ate slowly, and in total silence. The women waited for her to nod, and then with a long spoon put a titbit of food into her cupped hands. Each morsel she then turned over carefully with the thumb of her right hand, looking for a stray hair, or winged insect, which might have fallen into the strictly vegetarian food, so rendering it impure. If she were to find any living thing, explained one of the laywomen, the rules were clear: she must drop the food on the floor, reject the entire meal, and fast until ten the following morning.

  After she had finished her vegetables, one of Mataji’s attendants poured a small teaspoon full of ghee onto her rice. When a woman offered a further spoonful of dal, the slightest shake of Mataji’s head indicated that she was done. Boiled water was then poured, still warm, from a metal cup into Mataji’s hands. She drank. After that, she was finished. Mataji rose, and blessed the women with her peacock fan.

  When the silent meal was finished, Mataji led me to the reception room of the monastery guest house. There she sat herself down cross-legged on a wicker mat in front of a low writing desk. At a similar desk at the far end of the room, sat a completely naked man – the maharaj of the monastery, silently absorbed in his writing. We nodded to each other, and he returned to his work. He was there to chaperone Mataji during our conversation: it would have been forbidden for her to stay alone in a room with a male who was not her guru.

  When she had settled herself, Mataji began to tell me the story of how she had renounced the world.

  ‘I WAS BORN IN RAIPUR in 1972,’ she recalled. ‘In those days my name was Rekha. My family were wealthy merchants. My father had six brothers and we lived as a joint family, together in the same house. For three generations there had been no girls. I was the first one, and they all loved me. I was considered a pretty little girl, and had unusually fair skin and thick black hair, which I grew very long.

  ‘I was pampered by all of them: in fact my uncles would compete to spoil me. Every desire of mine was fulfilled. Nobody ever beat or disciplined me, even in jest. In fact I do not remember even once my parents raising their voice. It was a very happy childhood.

  ‘When I was about thirteen, I was taken to meet a monk called Dayasagar Maharaj – his name means the Lord of the Ocean of Compassion. He was a former cow herd who had taken diksha when he was only ten years old, and now had a deep knowledge of the scriptures. He had come to Raipur to do his chaturmasa – the Monsoon break when we Jains are forbidden to walk in case we accidently kill the unseen life that inhabits the puddles. So for three months, the Maharaj was in our town, and every day he used to preach for the children. He told us how to live a peaceful life and how to avoid hurting other living creatures: what we should eat, and how we should strain water to avoid drinking creatures too small to be seen. I was very impressed and started thinking.

  ‘Within a few weeks I decided to give up eating after dark, and gave up eating any plant that grows beneath the earth: onions, potatoes, garlic and all root vegetables. Jain monks are forbidden these as you kill the plant when you uproot it – we eat only plants such as rice which can survive the harvest of their grain. When I also gave up milk and jaggery – two things I loved – as a way of controlling my desires, everyone tried to dissuade me, especially my father. They thought I was too young to embark on this path, and everyone wanted me to be their little doll at home. This was not what I wanted.

  ‘When I was fourteen, I announced I wanted to join the Sangha – the Jain community of which my Maharaj was part. Again
my family opposed me, saying I was just a young girl. But when I insisted, they agreed to let me go for a couple of weeks in the school holidays, hoping that I would be put off by the harshness of the Sangha life. They also insisted that some of the family servants should accompany me. But the life of the Sangha, and the teachings I heard there, were a revelation. Once I was settled in, I simply refused to come back. The servants did their best to persuade me, but I was completely adamant, and the servants had to go back on their own. There was a lot of pressure and everyone in my family was very angry. But eventually they gave in.

  ‘When you eat a mango, you have to throw away the stone. The same is true of our life as ascetics. No matter how attached you are to your family, whatever efforts you make, ultimately you have to leave them behind. Wordly pleasures and the happiness of family life are equally temporary. If you close the door, you cannot see; open it a little and all becomes clear. For me, the Sangha was itself like a rebirth, a second life. The gurus taught me how to live in a new way: how to sit as a Jain nun, how to stand, how to talk, how to sleep. Everything was taught anew, as if from the beginning.

  ‘At the end of two years with the Sangha, I finally made up my mind that I would take diksha. That November they plucked my hair for the first time: it’s the first step, a test of your commitment, because if you can’t take the pain of having your hair plucked out you are not going to be ready to take the next step. I had very beautiful long thick hair, and as I was still very young my guru-ji wanted to cut it with scissors then shave my head with a razor, so as not to inflict such pain. But I insisted, and said there was no going back now. I was a very obstinate girl: whatever I wanted to do, I did. So they agreed to do what I wished.