Himalaya (2004)

by Michael Palin

  As night falls the handsome house behind us looks like an ocean liner, with its deep well-polished decks and white balustrade. It belongs to a local tea-planter called Manoj Jalan and his wife Vinita. His plantations employ 8000 people, and tomorrow he’s going to show me round. On an elephant.

  Day Ninety Five : Dibrugah

  The first thing I notice about my elephant is that it has no howdah. A howdah is a seat to make riding more comfortable, and I don’t have one. So I find myself being unceremoniously thrust up onto the elephant’s back and ordered to move forward until I’m tight up behind the mahout, the elephant driver. The elephant’s back is narrower here and there’s less chance of my doing the splits. Once I’m in position, the elephant is given an order and I feel myself rearing skywards as it straightens first the front and then the back legs. I’m now some ten feet off the ground and hanging on for dear life to a thin piece of rope that runs across its shoulder.

  Manoj, a carefully turned-out, trim figure with boyish features, is next to me. He’s riding his own elephant and doesn’t look altogether happy.

  My mahout shouts the order ‘Agit!‘ (‘Forward!’), one of 20 words of command the elephant has to learn, and this, accompanied, I notice, by a sharp blow to the back of the ear, sets the animal moving slowly ahead. There are three females and three young in our procession. The young elephants are not particularly interested in anything other than getting in the way and practising their trumpeting.

  Feeling more secure, I look around. The mahout uses his feet tight up behind the elephant’s ear to control direction and, far too often it seems to me, strikes the animal with the blunt end of a machete. Elephants’ ears, seen from behind, look surprisingly delicate and vulnerable. Pale, curled at the edges and marked with long purple veins, they’re like giant leaves in autumn. I’m surprised, too, how much hair there is on an elephant’s hide, short little shoots on the full-grown females, much longer and thicker on the young. The prehensile trunk is always working away; on the lookout for a quick snack, a leaf or two, some shoots to strip and, if possible, an entire bush to uproot.

  According to Manoj, the Assamese were the first to harness the natural skills of elephants to help with human activities, and their use became widespread in the logging industry when the railways were being pushed up into the plantations and oilfields. They showed the rest of India how to control and domesticate wild elephants but now, with logging drastically cut for environmental reasons, many of the mahouts and their elephants can no longer find work. A few, like these, are retained to clear bamboo cane or tidy up the tea plantations, but it’s a dying art.

  Having overcome my fear of falling, I’m enjoying this slow, powerful progress through the undergrowth. I’m hardly aware I’m on a living creature. It’s more like being on board ship on a gentle swell.

  All of a sudden there is the most enormous blast of sound, not unlike a foghorn at full volume. We’ve emerged onto a metalled road into the path of a group of men on bicycles. The cyclists are laughing and ringing their bells, the elephants are frightened and the mahouts and Manoj are shouting frantically.

  ‘Ghat! Pich-oo!‘ (‘Stop! Go Back!’) My driver rains blows down on the back of his animal. It seems only to get her more distressed and she bellows again and starts off up the track at a canter, which for one stomach-tightening moment I think might turn into a full-blooded charge.

  The mahout brings her under control, but I’ve had a glimpse of the power of the beast and I’m not unhappy when, after two hours straddling her back, my elephant kneels once more and I can clamber off.

  For a while I think I might never be able to close my legs again.

  Among the many pleasures of Mancotta Bungalow is its collection of old books. I pick up a copy of The Survey of Assam 1825-1828. This was the first time this part of the world had been mapped and the provenance of the areas covered has a nice personal touch to it. We learn that the details of one large area of Himalayan foothill is ‘based on information of a Persian sent by Mr Scott into Bhotan (sic)’, and the entire map between Assam and China is ‘from information collected by Lieutenant Wilcox’.

  A survey of Bengali exploration published in Calcutta in 1998 intrigues me in a different way. The index at the back of this book appears to record every word mentioned. A random glance at the ‘R’ column lists not only ‘Ranpur’ but ‘reached’, ‘reasonable’, ‘rather’, and indeed ‘random’, as well.

  Day Ninety Seven : Dibrugah to Majuli Island

  After a restorative break, it’s time to move on from the world of fresh bed linen every night, a whisky every evening and a copy of the Assam Tribune every afternoon. I think they used to call it the colonial life and I can feel myself slipping into it.

  The danger is that in faithfully and tastefully recreating the colonial lifestyle you recreate colonial attitudes as well. There is no shortage of labour in India, and this, along with residual effects of the caste system and poor education, results in there being a lot of people happy to wait around and be told what to do. I look forward to my Scotch at sunset but I know that if I pour it myself, jobs might be at stake.

  So servility is perpetuated.

  The gates are unlocked for us and we leave Mancotta’s past behind and drive west. For several miles a vast plain of small, trim bushes, all neatly clipped and standing at a uniform height of about 36 inches stretches away on either side. Tall trees rise from among the bushes to shield them from the full glare of the sun. In this quiet period before the new shoots start to appear women in brightly coloured shawls and scarves move through the glades, grooming and trimming. It must have been a listless time for plantation managers. A time for chota pegs and perhaps a visit to the lines.

  These great prairies of tea, still referred to as ‘gardens’, produce 340,000-390,000 tons (350-400 million kg) a year, half of India’s total tea production.

  The source of this bountiful fertility lies close to a snow-capped mountain in the arid desert of southwest Tibet. Mount Kailash is considered by Hindus, Buddhists and Jainists as one of the most sacred places on earth, the abode of their fiercest gods, the navel of the world from which life-giving rivers flow. The Indus and the Ganges both rise in its shadow, as does the Yarlung Tsangpo, which flows east through the length of Tibet, before entering the great bend of the Himalaya, plunging through a series of wild, barely accessible gorges and emerging in Assam, flowing due west and with a new name, Brahmaputra, ‘Son of Brahma, the Creator’.

  It is by now an immense river, with 1000 miles (1600 km) of water behind it, and it endows Assam with a rich alluvial flood plain, 445 miles (712 km) long and an average of 60 miles (96 km) wide.

  It sustains not only the tea industry but a rice bowl too, as well as wheat, sugar cane, banana, tobacco, mustard, jute, silk and just about anything you care to put in the ground.

  My first sight of the mighty Brahmaputra is from the ferry boat station at Neamati ghat, a few miles from the crowded town of Jorhat.

  There is an air of lassitude to the place. A bus is drawn up, waiting to collect disembarking passengers. Dogs chase each other sporadically before curling up on one of several coal heaps. Tarpaulin-covered shacks offer tea and samosas.

  The river seems very still and very silent. It’s around 500 yards wide, I would guess, but it’s difficult to tell, as it fills more than one channel. The land is endlessly flat. Out there all the lines are horizontals, subtle pastel shades fading into distant perspectives. The Brahmaputra is like an inland sea, as magnificent and implacable in its own way as the plateau where it was born.

  Somewhere downstream is Majuli, the world’s largest river island, and we’re here to try and get ourselves aboard one of the embattled ferry boats that are the only means of reaching it.

  The bank on which we’re waiting will probably be submerged after the monsoon rains swell the river, which might account for the lack of any jetty. When the boat arrives, embarking passengers have to slither down the bank as best they can a
nd cross two wooden beams that serve as a gangplank. The 100-foot-long flat-bottomed boats set no store by elegance. There is a basic cabin below, which is covered by a corrugated aluminium roof. Passengers pack in as best they can. From the anxious shouts and gesticulations you might think this was the first time a ferry had ever docked at Neamati but, as ever, remarkable order comes from the chaos, and by the time we cast off, every late-comer is aboard, as well as several bicycles, one or two motorbikes and a white Ambassador car. The women gather below and a mixture of men in Western and local dress sit, stand, squat and generally make themselves comfortable on the corrugated sheets above.

  With a steady chug of diesel, we pull out into the wide brown stream, which, judging from the tree trunks, leaves and clumps of jungle scudding by, is not as lazy as it looked. We pick our way carefully among low sandbanks, some of which are cultivated. Ruddy shelducks sunbathe on the beaches. Cormorants perch on the fishing poles. Colours are soft and vaporous: muted greens, strips of golden sand and a huge haze-blue sky above.

  My travelling companion is a well-informed young man called Maan Barua, whose father owns a resort hotel in nearby Kaziranga National Park. He’s 20 years old and knows an awful lot more than I ever will. From him I learn the sex of the Brahmaputra, one of only two male rivers in India, and that ruddy shelducks mate for life. He’s also promised to show me a river dolphin, if one passes.

  After an hour and a half on the water the engine beat slows and the traditional man with a stick (in this case a bamboo pole) prods the shallow mud banks as we approach the island. As soon as the bank is within leaping distance, half the roof-class passengers fling themselves off and race up the hill to the bus. The bus driver, clearly enjoying his moment of power, sounds the horn again and again, prompting more and more people to death-defying leaps.

  Majuli Island covers nearly 250 square miles (650 sq km), which, Maan tells me, is half as big as it was 50 years ago. It’s been continuously settled for 3000 years, but since the arrival of a saint, Shankara Deva, at the start of the 16th century it has become best known for its religious institutions, a form of monastery called satras. These differ from mainstream Hinduism by preaching devotion to only one god, Vishnu, and rejecting the use of icons or images.

  The Uttar (meaning ‘North’) Kamalabari satra is in a peaceful rural setting among rice and mustard fields criss-crossed with well-trodden mud paths and dotted with small bonfires. We are required to remove our shoes and socks when we reach its arched gatehouse entrance, with the date of foundation, 1673, inscribed on it. Purity is a very important part of the tradition of the satras. The bhakat, the community of monks, has taken a vow of purity and if they prepare food or touch someone who is impure they must immediately wash.

  In the centre of the monastery complex is an east-facing prayer hall called the Kirtanghar, some 200 feet long and surrounded by vegetable gardens and tropical fruit trees. The living accommodation is set round the perimeter of this intimate site in four residential terraces called haatis, which are themselves broken down into two storeys of rooms called bohas, lending the satra the air of an Oxbridge college marooned in the jungle.

  The thing that strikes one most of all is the handsomeness of the monks. All look very healthy and lissom, with pale brown skin and hair worn either close-cropped or in long, lustrous black tresses, tied at the back.

  Accompanied by an older monk called Dulal, dressed in a white robe and dhoti, we’re shown preparations for a play called Rasa Lila, which involves many of the most beautiful boys transforming themselves into beautiful girls. In this particular celibate sect, all the women’s parts are danced by men.

  The whole play lasts five to six hours and they only perform it once a year, so they are doing an excerpt for us in which Krishna, a dashing romantic incarnation of the god Vishnu, appears to a group of milkmaids, who all fall in love with him.

  Inside and outside the bohas the young men are rapt in concentration, applying make-up to each other, rubbing white base over leg hair, or in the case of the monk who is to play Krishna, covering himself with a mixture of calamine and indigo, blue being the traditional colour in which Krishna appears.

  Dulal, who has spent 35 of his 41 years in the monastery, tells me that some of the young men are sent here by their parents because they can’t afford to keep them at home. Families who have experienced pain or disease might send one of their children to the satra in the hope of improving the family fortunes. A ten-year-old was being offered for sale in a market in Uttar Pradesh when one of the monks heard about it and brought him here.

  By now, some of the young monks are pulling on skirts and blouses and another is, with great concentration, strapping on a pair of small artificial breasts, which he then covers with a bra. Krishna is having trouble coping with two wigs and a crown.

  The dance is accompanied by a flute, harmonium, finger cymbals and three drummers, each with a kohl, a cylindrical drum only found in Assam, about 20 inches long, made from jackfruit tree stems with leather at either end and carried round the neck and across the chest.

  The dance, which involves Krishna, 14 milkmaids and a demon who Krishna fights off with a tree, takes place in the Kirtanghar. It’s exquisitely executed, requiring the most concentrated co-ordination, as every tiniest body movement, of arms and legs and hands and feet, is precisely choreographed, and every facial expression has to be exactly in accordance with tradition. Fingers must always be turned up at the ends to resemble the lotus, and when they make their delicate curlicue movements the eyes of the dancer must always follow them, creating the effect of the whole body as a stream in motion. A white butterfly flutters across the room as if to set them an example.

  The performance attracts a small audience, and I notice that women spectators who wish to watch these men dressed as women are not allowed inside the prayer hall, but have to watch from behind bars outside.

  Day Ninety Eight : Majuli Island

  The air is warm and the light soft as I cycle along the high track between the fields. The bike I’ve been given is enormous, but then the sandy roads of Majuli are full of people riding bicycles much bigger than themselves. Maan is with me and we stop to see flying foxes hanging from the branches of a capacious banyan tree. A well-placed missile lobbed at the tree wakes a few and sends them soaring into the air on wings over three foot wide. The banyan is intertwined with an equally magnificent bo tree, with a geometrically elegant rattan palm somehow squeezed in there too. The rank luxuriance of the island is the result of regular flooding, which probably accounts for the impermanence and adaptability of human settlement. Bridges are light and mainly bamboo, houses are on stilts with grain and hay stores well off the ground. Nothing looks as though it expects to last long.

  One of the minority people on the island are the Mishing. There are an estimated 45,000 of them, believed to be the original lowland people, animists, believing in the sun god, Donyi, and the moon god, Polo. They took refuge on the island, where they could practise their unorthodox Hinduism without interference.

  It’s the custom throughout Indian villages that the men plough and carry, but the women are responsible for the more specialized tasks of cultivation and harvest. In one of the many small ponds left behind by the floodwaters I witness the extraordinary sight of Mishing women catching fish.

  About 20 of them, dressed in off-the-shoulder saris, walk through the shallow water, leaning on upturned conical baskets held out in front of them, rather like Zimmer frames. As they move forward, they stamp the baskets up and down to flush the fish out of the mud. Once they have a fish trapped in the bottom of the rattan frame, they pick them out, still wriggling, and drop them down their cleavages. Pausing only to tighten the waist band on their saris, they move on, the odd tail flapping defiantly between their breasts.

  The whole process is carried out with much singing, chanting, laughter and general exuberance, which only adds to the strangely erotic quality of this particular harvest.

  Day Nine
ty Nine : Majuli to Kaziranga

  At 6.30 in my monastic cell in the satra‘s guesthouse in Kamalabari town, I’m woken with a cup of ‘bed tea’. The tea, milk and sugar have been boiled up together in the Indian fashion. There are no windows in my room but I can tell the sun’s up by the pattern cast on my wall from a ventilation grille. A cow moos brusquely, crows screech in the trees nearby.

  A bucket of hot water is delivered next and I take it into my dark, stained cubicle of a bathroom, looking round rather hopefully for the giant spider with whom I shared it last night. He seemed a friendly sort. Unable to find him, I wash carefully, nose pursed against the reek of the drains.

  I’m at the satra by seven. From inside the Kirtanghar comes the sound of ragas being practised, and outside a class of a dozen young boys are being taught the 64 exercise positions needed to learn dancing. They’re pretty good at back rolls and walking on their hands but less deft at the ora position, which requires them to balance on one leg, with the other straight out, almost doing the splits.

  A young monk who has just finished milking the cow is washing himself clean under one of the old handle pumps. There’s no running water here.

  Dulal has agreed to give me a lesson on the kohl. First, he ties a dhoti around me. Dhotis, a variation on the sarong, must be worn when playing. I sit cross-legged facing him on the smooth, mud-floored passage outside his room. The first surprise is the weight of the cigar-shaped drum. When I draw attention to this, Dulal, a man of supreme calm, whose brother is a taxi driver, smiles. He teaches children of seven on that same drum.

  Dulal shows me three basic movements. Tao, a slap with open palm on the smaller end, dhei, the same on the wider side and khit, resonating then damping the sound with the fingers.

  He nods generously and compliments me on having grasped the basic moves. I wipe a few beads of sweat from the brow and allow myself a moment of smugness, which is swiftly despatched.