India's Unending Journey

by Mark Tully

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Praise

  Also by Mark Tully

  Title Page

  Chapter 1 Puri: exploring the opposites

  Chapter 2 Marlborough: an education in absolutes

  Chapter 3 Delhi: an Indian understanding

  Chapter 4 Raipur: a god too small

  Chapter 5 Cambridge: lessons in humility

  Chapter 6 Maynooth: losing faith

  Chapter 7 Khajuraho: the sensual and the sacred

  Chapter 8 The Global Village: in search of balance

  Chapter 9 Gurgaon: never-ending growth

  Chapter 10 Darjeeling: counting costs

  Chapter 11 Varanasi: the unity of opposites

  Further Reading

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Sir Mark Tully is one of the world’s leading writers and broadcasters on India, and the presenter of the much loved radio programme ‘Something Understood’. In this remarkable and timely work, he reveals the profound changes happening in India today, and brings the country alive in a way only he can do.

  Through interviews and anecdotes, he journeys from the skyscrapers of Gurgaon to the religious riots in Ayodhya, from the calm of a university campus to farmers deep in the countryside. And he brings us all the colour, flavour and balance of this fascinating nation that is having such an impact on our world.

  PRAISE FOR INDIA’S UNENDING JOURNEY

  ‘The quintessential foreign correspondent, informed, even-handed and practically a native.’

  The Times

  ‘A labour of love, written by a man who has witnessed the worst of India and yet can still find hope and optimism, someone who sees beyond the disunity in diversity and finds a unique balance.’

  India Today

  ‘A warm and engaging guide.’

  The London Paper

  ALSO BY MARK TULLY

  No Full Stops in India

  India in Slow Motion (with Gillian Wright)

  The Heart of India

  Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (with Satish Jacob)

  From Raj to Rajiv (with Zareer Masani)

  Lives of Jesus

  INDIA’S

  UNENDING

  JOURNEY

  FINDING BALANCE

  IN A TIME OF CHANGE

  Mark Tully

  PURI: EXPLORING THE OPPOSITES

  I WAS ASLEEP under my mosquito net in the BNR Hotel in Puri, a temple town on the east coast of India, when I was suddenly woken by loud explosions, sharp, ear-splitting cracks and the swoosh of rockets shooting up into the sky. It was still dark and my mind, befuddled by sleep, couldn’t fathom what was happening. Then, from the loudspeakers of a nearby temple, shrill pre-recorded bhajans, or hymns, began blasting out at all and sundry. That’s when I remembered that this was the festival of Kartik Purnima, which marks the full moon of the month of Kartik. It’s considered an auspicious day for worshipping ancestors or praying for success in a business venture. I had been told that Hindus eager to indulge their insatiable appetite for festivals would start the celebrations before dawn, and so realised that the booms and bangs must be the sound of fireworks.

  I had not intended to come to Puri at the time of a Hindu festival. Rather, I had come for a few days’ holiday, and to wallow in nostalgia for my British Raj childhood. As a child, I had spent winter seaside holidays at the BNR, or Bengal Nagpur Railway’s Hotel, in Puri with my parents and an ever-increasing number of brothers and sisters – I was second in line and by the time we left India there were six of us. My grandfather also used to join us for the holidays.

  Lying in bed now, and trying unsuccessfully to ignore the fireworks and the bhajans, all my worries bubbled up in my mind, as they usually do when I can’t sleep. One of them was whether I would ever be able to write this book, which I had promised to my publishers. It was to be a book describing how nearly forty years of living in India had changed me and my outlook. I was worried that this would seem very arrogant, and one of the lessons I have learnt from India is to value humility. Others are to avoid thinking in black and white, to be suspicious of certainty, to search for the middle road and, in particular, to acknowledge that there are many ways to God. But it’s so much easier to argue in black and white, to come down wholly on one side or another, and I worried that my book would be muddled and unconvincing.

  I had finally run out of excuses for not starting to write, but I had no idea where to begin. Then suddenly it occurred to me: maybe the coincidence of being in Puri during Kartik Purnima meant that I should start the book here. India has taught me that coincidences are often significant, and this coincidence certainly appeared to symbolise the forces in my life that were driving me to write the book. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the BNR Hotel stood for my very British upbringing, an upbringing that was designed to keep me apart from India, whereas the festival stood for my adult life, of which India has become an inseparable part.

  Holidaying in the BNR hotel of my childhood was a very British affair. I don’t remember any Indians drinking their early morning tea on the BNR Hotel’s long, wide verandas, with their red concrete floors polished as bright as the toe-cap of a sergeant major’s boot. My grandfather was fascinated by the colour of the white sahibs and memsahibs who arrived in the dining room for breakfast after a night on the Puri Express. He would embarrass my mother by loudly criticising some individual or another for being ‘pasty-faced’, adding that the poor unfortunate looked as though he ‘spends too much time in the office, and doesn’t ride and get out in the fresh air’. Of others, whose ruddy complexion may well have been the result of getting out and about, he would say, ‘Look at him – red as a beetroot. He must be spending too much time in the bar.’ We were all fascinated by a man who sat on the beach buried up to his neck in sand, in the belief that this would cure his rheumatism.

  For me, holidays at Puri were part of a childhood designed to ensure that my siblings and I in no way ‘went native’. The Indian servants considered essential by every European family were thought to pose a particular threat to their employers’ children. In her book Children of the Raj, Vyvyen Brendon describes one memsahib who recommended the employment of English nannies to guard children against ‘promiscuous intimacy with the native servants’. However, Rudyard Kipling’s parents did not take that line and Kipling had an Indian ayah rather than an English nanny. He spoke to her and the other servants in Hindustani; in fact, he had to be reminded to speak English to his parents when he went into the dining room. When Kipling returned to India after his education in Britain he was surprised to find his Hindustani coming back, which was a great help to him as a journalist.

  I was not so lucky. My childhood custodian was Nanny Oxborrow from England, and I remember being slapped by her when she found the driver teaching me to count in Hindustani. ‘That’s the servant’s language, not yours!’ she snapped. Years later, her zealous protection very nearly prevented my career in India from getting off the ground. When, in my twenties, I came up before a BBC Appointments Board to be interviewed for the post of Assistant Representative in the Delhi Office, one member said, ‘You must remember a lot of the language from your childhood.’ Perhaps because I was overawed by the occasion I blurted out, ‘Not really, but I can recite “Humpty Dumpty” and “Little Miss Muffet” in Hindustani.’ (Much to Nanny’s annoyance, Grandfather had taught us these nursery rhymes.) To this day I don’t know why that didn’t ruin my chances.

  The only Indians I remember on the hotel’s stretch of the beach during my childhood were the lifeguards. We all had our own bare-chested f
isherman, with a number painted on his white pointed hat. Without these men to watch over us, the breakers crashing onto the beach and the undercurrent as they retreated would have made bathing far too dangerous. Just down the road from the BNR beach was Puri itself, a Hindu temple town throbbing with pilgrims. But I knew nothing of that – I never went there.

  Now, as I lay listening to the fireworks explode, the celebration of Kartik Purnima seemed to represent the India I had been isolated from all those years ago. The press estimated that 500,000 people had gathered on the beach at Puri to bathe in the sea this year, yet, when I joined in the festivities later that day, there was no one in charge to tell the devotees who to worship or how to worship them, and there was no one to turn me away for being a foreigner and a Christian. Neither was there any line drawn between the sacred and the secular. Hawkers shouted their wares – candy floss, ice cream and Indian fast foods; plastic windmills and other toys; vermillion powder, coconuts and small clay lamps, as well as all the other accoutrements of Hindu worship – their cries competing with the bellowing of sacred conch shells and the mournful sound of women ululating as they remembered their ancestors.

  A circle of women from a fishing village made no objection as I watched them pat little mounds of sand into shapes like temple towers. Beside the mounds, they placed small boats made from the stalks of banana trees, bearing marigolds, betel leaves and sacred doob grass. After lighting the short sticks of incense that formed the boats’ masts, the women bent double, huddled together and charged down the beach like a rugger scrum, their ululating tongues wagging furiously, to launch their boats on the sea. The boat symbolised the legend of seven brothers who had crossed the seas to trade and bring prosperity to their homeland. There was no hint here of the old tradition that Hindus who cross the ‘black water’, as the sea used to be called, become polluted or ritually impure. Women dressed in traditional black-and-red checked cotton saris, together with others in saris of more modern designs – an array of yellows, greens and pinks, scarlet spangled with gold, and purple spangled with silver – squatted on the beach alongside girls in equally colourful shalwar kameez, all delicately splashing their hair with sea water and washing their arms and shoulders. Behind them, young boys leapt over the breakers and bobbed up and down in the sea. One less bashful middle-aged woman rolled in the waves, expertly managing to keep herself covered with her drenched cotton sari despite the pull of the breakers. A senior police officer paddled in the shallow water. Although he did not venture into the deep, he still required the company of two life guards and a security escort to prevent him from being swept out to sea. Amidst all this activity, a barber quietly shaved the head of a young boy with a cut-throat razor to prepare him for his naming ceremony.

  Observing this celebration of Kartik Purnima, where everyone was doing their own thing, I was again reminded that Hinduism is a pluralist religion. When I have spoken about this pluralism in the past, or recalled other lessons I have learnt from Hindu traditions, it has often been assumed that I have converted to Hinduism myself and that I am suggesting others should convert too. This is not so: I remain a Christian. I agree with Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to one of his closest disciples, Mirabehn, the daughter of an English Admiral, that she should not convert to Hinduism but try to be a better Christian. Anyhow, conversion to Hinduism is only allowed in certain sects because traditionally Hinduism is a way of life that people are born into.

  However, I do believe that we should all listen to each other and learn from each other – and that includes those who do not adhere to any religion. In my opinion, no single religion has a monopoly on the truth or is without blemish, nor can any religious tradition survive if it remains static. Those who reject all criticism and are not open to developing their doctrines do a disservice to their own traditions, often ending up defending indefensible practices or outdated prohibitions. In the particular case of Hinduism, it is quite clear that the practice of untouchability is indefensible. While Kartik Purnima brought to mind my experiences of Hinduism’s admirable tolerance of different doctrines and different philosophical schools, including atheism, I was also reminded in Puri that Hinduism can be exclusive.

  Puri is one of the major pilgrimage centres in India because it is the legendary home of the god Jagganath, or Krishna. He is an incarnation of Vishnu, who, with Brahma and Shiva, is one of the Hindu Trinity. But Jagganath’s great temple at Puri is not inclusive. Non-Hindus are not welcome to enter the temple precincts or to have a darshan, or sight, of the god. This meant that while I was in Puri, I had to stand on the roof of a dusty and apparently little-patronised library in order to peer into one of the forecourts of Jagannath’s temple. Before the high conical tower under which Jagannath sits, there were two halls separated by courtyards with high walls, so I really couldn’t see much from my roof-top perch. However, I knew from reading that inside the courtyards and the halls there were lots of smaller shrines where pilgrims worshipped before going on to the ultimate darshan. A priest of another temple once told me that the gods in the minor shrines in temples were a little like secretaries and personal assistants sitting in the outer offices of government ministers: you had to gratify them before you could get admission to the great man.

  The English word ‘juggernaut’ derives from the deity Jagannath’s massive wooden chariot. Once a year the god comes out of the temple on his chariot, which is pulled by devotees to another temple at the far end of the wide avenue that runs through the centre of Puri. There, Jagannath enjoys ‘a holiday for nine days’.

  In the late nineteenth century, this Car Festival, as it is known, appears to have suffered from an acute form of a malaise that can all too easily afflict any religion: it was priest-ridden. In his book Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian, John Beames (the British official in charge of the district at that time) records that Brahmin priests, known as Pandas, used to fan out to all corners of north India in order to persuade pilgrims to come to Puri for the festival. Beames called them ‘touters’. The Pandas were, he says, ‘naturally’ more successful with women. He describes the plight of those who fell for their sales talk:

  It used to be a common sight to see a strong, stalwart Panda marching along the road, followed by a little troop of small, cowering Bengali women, each clad in her one scanty, clinging robe, her small wardrobe in a palm-leaf box on her head, with the lordly Panda’s luggage on her shoulders. At night they put up at one of the chatties or lodging-houses which are found all along the road. Here his lordship reposes while his female flock buy his food and cook it, spread his couch, serve his dinner, light his pipe, shampoo his limbs, and even if he so desires, minister to his lust.

  When the women reached Puri, the temple priests fleeced them of what little money they had left after the ravages of the Pandas. As for the Pandas, they deserted their pilgrims and left them to find their own way home. What a miserable journey that was, according to Beames:

  Far from their homes from which they have in many cases started surreptitiously, purloining their husbands’ hoard of money, these wretched women have to tramp wearily back through the rain, for it is mostly for the Rath Jatra (Car Festival), in the rainy season, that they come. What with exposure, fatigue and hunger they die in great numbers by the roadside. Those whose youth and strength enable them to survive the journey are often too much afraid of their husbands’ anger to return home, and end by swelling the number of prostitutes in Kolkata. ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum!’

  Beames was a scholar of Indian culture and languages, and so he is unlikely to have been as prejudiced as many British of his time. If his account is accurate, the Puri Car Festival of the nineteenth century was not an event that Hinduism could be proud of. But it can be proud of what is the world’s largest religious gathering today – the Maha Kumbh Mela. It is, like Kartik Purnima, a bathing festival, and it is held every twelve years at Allahabad, where the two sacred rivers, the Ganga, as the Ganges is known in India, and the Yamuna, meet.

&nbs
p; In 1989 when I attended my first Maha Kumbh Mela, I had been deeply impressed by the millions of pilgrims who thronged to Allahabad. Their strong faith reconfirmed my belief that Hinduism still had deep roots in India, for it clearly gave the pilgrims the courage and determination to make long journeys in buses and trains filled beyond bursting point, to queue for hours and walk for miles before getting to the riverside, and then to ignore rumours that there might be a stampede on the most sacred bathing day. Nevertheless, when I wrote about the festival, to offset any impression that Hinduism faced no challenge from modern materialism, I found myself quoting a warning by R.C. Zaehner, the former Professor of Eastern religion and Ethics at Oxford: ‘With the spread of Western education right down to the lowest strata of society and the progressive industrialization of the country the whole religious structure of Hinduism will be subjected to a severe strain; but such has been its genius for absorption and adaption that it would be foolhardy to prophesy how it will confront this new and unprecedented crisis.’

  Industrialisation has indeed spread rapidly in India since the 1980s, and now almost all Indians want their children to have a Western education and to be taught in English. Yet the Maha Kumbh Mela and – on a smaller scale – Kartik Purnima in Puri demonstrate that Hinduism is continuing to stand up well in the face of the crisis that Zaehner forecast, precisely because of its ‘genius for absorption and adaption’. In that, it is unlike Semitic religions for, as Zaehner has also written:

  Hindus do not think of religious truth in dogmatic terms: dogmas cannot be eternal but only the transitory, distorting images of a truth that transcends not only them, but all verbal definition. For the passion for dogmatic certainty that has racked the religions of Semitic origin, from Judaism itself, through Christianity and Islam to the Marxism of our day, they feel nothing but shocked incomprehension.