India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  He was a small man of seventy-two. Three broad bands of white ran horizontally across his forehead, and there was a red-and-sandalwood dot between his eyebrows. He had a gold-set ruby earring in each ear. His white tunic was buttoned over a small belly, and this belly was curiously narrow and long; so that, buttoned in the tunic, the pundit appeared to have the shape of a cucumber. The white holy marks on his forehead came from the ash of burnt cowdung. The cowdung was burnt for that purpose on a special day, Shiva-ratri, Shiva’s Night. Deviah told this story about Shiva-ratri: every day Shiva watches over the world, but there is one day when he falls asleep, and Hindus on that day (or night) have to stay awake, to watch.

  We met the pundit in the office room of the marriage hall. It was a small plain room, with cream-coloured walls, and with an iron chest in one corner and some bedding on the red concrete floor. A red telephone stood on a shelf in another corner, next to a board with four keys. One wall had inset shelves, painted green. Old fluorescent light tubes with attached electric wires (no doubt meant for use in the marriage hall, and stored here as a precaution against theft) were on one shelf; loose electric bulbs were on another shelf; a stack of thin booklets of some sort, together with a number of old-looking paper-wrapped parcels, were on a third shelf. From a nail or a hook at the side of the green inset shelves a woven bag hung flat against the wall. The wall was like a piece of furniture: it was a place for putting things or hanging things.

  The pundit was born in 1916. His father was not from Mysore, but from Tamil Nadu; he acted as agent for an absentee landlord, and he was also a dealer in grain. The pundit’s mother came from Mysore. Since women return to their parents’ house for the birth of their children, the pundit was born in Mysore. He was then taken to Tamil Nadu by his parents; but when he was ten his father died, and his mother’s father brought him back to Mysore and put him in the Sanskrit College in Mysore City.

  He had a Mysore government scholarship to the Sanskrit College. Anybody who wanted to study Sanskrit was given a scholarship. He started with a scholarship of two rupees a month, about 16 pence. Two rupees were quite enough for a boy of ten in 1926; the salary of a first-division clerk at that time was 30 rupees.

  The pundit was not a fluent talker. He waited for questions, and Deviah translated his replies.

  Deviah translated: ‘It was my grandfather who put me in the college. He was a cook in the palace, and I don’t know whether he knew about the scholarship when he put me in the college. We weren’t living in the palace; we were living in a rented house outside the palace. My grandfather used to cook for the palace pujas. He cooked the food that was consecrated. He earned 18 rupees a month. Though he was a cook at the palace, he never ate there. He ate at home – this was his custom as a brahmin. He lived for 92 years.’

  The pundit studied at the Sanskrit College for 20 years, from 1926, when he was ten, to 1946. Over those years the two-rupee scholarship he had started with was increased, bit by bit.

  One of the important things he studied was astrology. He studied that for five years. He had a teacher who was a very famous astrologer.

  ‘There is no end to learning as an astrologer. Just as science keeps on developing, with new discoveries, so I’ve not stopped learning about astrology.’

  On the desk at which the pundit sat was a little dark-blue or grey plastic bag – plastic, not leather, which was the skin of an animal and unclean. On the wall above his head was a framed colour picture of Shiva and his consort. Light had bleached the colours. Both figures had been given as much beauty as the artist could give: a feminine beauty, of an almost erotic nature.

  The pundit said, ‘We can tell a person’s blood group by the day he was born. We have three blood groups, and we can say whether people are compatible or not. They don’t have to take a blood test. There is no difference between astrology, medicine, and dharmashastra.’ Deviah translated this as ‘traditional learning’. To learn astrology, you first have to learn all the other sciences. Before you prescribe certain medicines, you have to look for certain planetary conditions, because certain medicines work only under certain circumstances. Certain medicines work only under the rays of the sun, or the moon, or Mars or Mercury.’

  He could predict the future. ‘If you give the correct time of birth – but it has to be down to the minute – I will tell you everything correctly. If there’s a minute’s error, it makes a world of difference. The place is also important.’

  In 1946, after 20 years, he came to the end of his studies at the Sanskrit College. He had lived for all this time on his scholarship from the state government. In his last year at the college this scholarship was 15 rupees a month. He was now thirty, and he was at last free to get married. He married the daughter of a man who worked as a clerk in the palace. He also found a job; he became librarian at the same Sanskrit College, at a salary of 45 rupees a month. He stayed in that job for 16 years.

  One of the projects he worked on as librarian of the Sanskrit College was the translation of all the Puranas, the sacred old texts of Hinduism, into Kannada, the local Mysore language. This project was sponsored by the maharaja, and the pundit’s work on it came to the maharaja’s notice. The maharajas in India had lost their titles in 1956, but they still had their privy purses; and in Mysore the maharaja still had considerable ceremonial standing as state governor, raja pramukh.

  One afternoon in 1962, on a day of the full moon, the pundit had finished his puja and was sitting at home, when a servant came from the palace. The servant had been sent by the maharaja’s secretary, and the message was that the pundit was wanted at the palace by the maharaja. The maharaja would have told his A.D.C., and the A.D.C. would have told the secretary, and the secretary would have told his servant.

  The pundit must already have had some idea of what the maharaja wanted, or he must have been given some idea by the servant. Because, when this call from the palace came, the pundit straight away sent word to the palace, to both his father-in-law and his grandfather, the one a palace clerk, the other a cook.

  The grandfather hurried home. He was happy for his grandson’s sake, but he was also nervous. He said to the pundit, ‘You have been trained as a scholar, a vaidhika. But the work you are going to do now is that of a loukika – worldly work. You may not fit in. Think of that.’ He also gave his grandson detailed instructions about how he was to behave when he came into the maharaja’s presence.

  At about three in the afternoon, when it would have been very hot, the pundit left his house to walk to the palace. He was dressed as a brahmin, in his dhoti, and with a shawl over his shoulders. Otherwise he was bare above the waist. He was barefooted. It was his way; he had never worn footwear of any kind; to this day he never wore anything on his feet – and, indeed, when I looked below the desk or table at which the pundit sat, I saw his bare feet flat on the red concrete floor, the skin dark and thickened at the soles, padded and cracked. It was no trouble either to walk barebacked in the afternoon sun; the pundit was used to that.

  It was about half a kilometre to the palace. He met the secretary in one of the inner rooms, and the secretary sent him in directly to the maharaja, who was in the palace library. The library consisted of three rooms, each about 40 feet long by 25 feet wide. They were all full of books, with hardly a place to sit down. The books were in all languages.

  In one of those rooms the maharaja was sitting. The pundit went up to him and did the obeisance his grandfather had trained him in, bringing the palms together and bowing low. The maharaja was wearing a djibba and a dhoti, and he was in a ‘social’ mood.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was a tall man, built like a king. Hefty.’ He wasn’t thinking only of the seated figure he had seen that day in the library; he was thinking of the man he had later got to know. ‘In the morning, after his puja, when he came out with his holy marks on his forehead, he looked like God.’

  The maharaja – but that wasn’t the word the pundit used: he used the Engl
ish word ‘Highness’, pronouncing it in a way that made it sound part of the local language – the maharaja, Highness, told the pundit that he had been chosen to work in the palace.

  ‘I hadn’t applied for the job or anything. So bravely I told Highness what my grandfather had told me, that I had lived all my life as a vaidhika, and couldn’t now live as a loukika. And Highness said, “I am using you here only for vaidhika work. I want you to be mukhthesar.”

  ‘I knew what the duties of a mukhthesar were. They were to organize all the pujas of the palace, to choose the purohits or priests, and to supervise what they did, to make sure that the pujas and rituals were correctly carried out.’

  The maharaja spoke to the pundit for half an hour. He told him what he would have to do. There were 10 permanent purohits in the palace; the pundit would have to supervise them, and all the additional purohits who might be called in on special occasions. The pundit would also have to look after the jewels of the palace temple. People who worked in the palace were given a special allowance of 20 rupees a month, and the maharaja told the pundit that he would be getting this allowance. The allowance was given because palace staff were on call all the time and had no leave. The salary itself would be 150 rupees; as librarian at the Sanskrit College the pundit was getting 45 rupees a month.

  ‘It was my duty to do it. Whatever Highness said, I had to do. I was already an employee of Highness, because the Sanskrit College belonged to Highness.’

  After his audience in the library the pundit walked back to his family house. He told his father-in-law and grandfather the news, and his grandfather was pleased. He said, ‘We’ve all got good names in the palace. You should do your work well and keep our good name there.’

  As someone working in the palace the pundit had to have a uniform. He immediately went to the palace tailor to be measured. He ordered two suits, and the charge was 200 rupees, more than a month’s salary. But for some reason the maharaja wanted the pundit to start working in the palace right away. So the pundit was in a quandary about what to wear – the uniforms he had ordered from the tailor weren’t going to be ready for some days.

  The pundit said, ‘I did a mad thing. I borrowed my father-in-law’s uniform. We were the same build.’ And that was a mad thing to do, because a brahmin shouldn’t wear other people’s clothes: it was as unclean as drinking from a vessel used by someone else. ‘For three days I wore my father-in-law’s uniform. Then I had my own from the palace tailor, the two suits. I got them on credit. I didn’t have 200 rupees. I paid with my salary, and paid it off in three or four instalments.’

  He wore white trousers and a long coat. The coat was white for the mornings, black at night. He wore the Mysore turban, white with a gold band; and he got a white sash. No shoes: inside the palace no one wore shoes, not even the maharaja. The maharaja wore shoes only outside the palace.

  On the cream-coloured wall of the marriage-hall office where we were talking there were finger-prints of grime, the eternal grime of India. The floor was dark red, and some inches up the wall were skirting areas in the same colour. Pale-green doors led to other rooms; over a padlocked door – leading perhaps to the marriage hall itself – was a gay No Admission sign in a wavy scroll. And, as in an Indian city street, where nothing was absolutely clean or finished, there was in this room, in the corner with the iron chest, a lot of half-swept-up dust and old fluffy dirt, together with the rags and the broom that might have done the sweeping and the wiping. The desk at which the pundit sat was of steel, and painted grey.

  The pundit’s working hours, as palace mukhthesar, were long. They were from six in the morning to two in the afternoon. He would go home then for an hour, and go back to the palace and stay till seven. That was on ordinary days. On certain days, like the days of the Dussehra festival, the pundit could stay at the palace until midnight. This was because at Dussehra the temple jewels were on display, and the pundit would have to stay and see that the jewels were put back in the palace vault.

  When the maharaja was away, ‘on camp’, the pundit was free and could rest. The maharaja went away on camp four or five times a year, for 15 days or so at a time. Sometimes he went abroad; then he was away for a month.

  ‘Highness used to go on pilgrimages. Highness had this habit, that if he read in an old text, a Purana, about a certain temple – in any part of the country – he would say, “Let’s go there.” The next day he would be ready, and about 25 people would go with him. He had one or two special railway coaches, which would be attached to the scheduled trains. He used to take cooks, bodyguards, a purohit, an astrologer. Sometimes he used to take his family. Highness had a “craze” for visiting temples. There is no temple that he didn’t see – he was such a devotee.’

  In 1965 the pundit, as mukhthesar, was allowed quarters: a small house with two rooms and a ‘hall’. The rent was 10 per cent of his salary. Three years later, in 1968, he was given a special ceremonial uniform. He didn’t have to pay for this uniform; it was a gift of the maharaja. The long coat was red, with gold facings and gold buttons. The buttons had a phoenix symbol and the letters JCRW, which were the initials of the maharaja: Jaya Chama Rajendra Wodeyar. The trousers were of silk, and biscuit-coloured.

  I wondered whether it wasn’t too gaudy for him, as a brahmin.

  ‘I was proud of it. When I wore that dress, nobody could stop me anywhere, in the street or in the palace.’ He even had himself photographed in that uniform.

  He rose in the service. The maharaja called him Shastri Narayan, ‘Lord of the Shastras’, ‘Great Scholar’. But then there began to be signs of things going bad outside. In 1971 the maharajas of India were ‘de-recognized’ by Mrs Gandhi’s government, and the maharaja lost his tax-exempt privy purse of 2,600,000 rupees, worth at that time (after the devaluation of 1967) £130,000. Still, the maharaja continued to promote his mukhthesar. In 1972 the mukhthesar was appointed assistant secretary; there were two assistant secretaries in the palace. The pundit had entered the palace at a salary of 150 rupees; over the years this had doubled to 300; now, as assistant secretary, he was getting 500.

  ‘Highness received the catalogues of various booksellers. He ordered 300 to 400 books a month. The palace secretary bought them for him. Highness bought Penguins and books of the Oxford University Press. I had to read or look over or taste the new books, and give a summary to him of books I thought might interest him. He was interested in philosophy and history. He talked about philosophy with me and with others. Highness liked to have a scrapbook. I knew the sort of thing that interested him, and would point certain passages out to him. Certain passages he would want typed out, for his own speeches and writings.

  ‘Highness had two crazes, two madnesses. Temples. Second, books – buying them and reading them. He used to read throughout the night. I was associated with both his madnesses. In his reading room he allowed no one. He had his own system of arranging or storing books. He kept them on the floor. No one was to touch them while they were there. When he had finished with a book, he brought it to me and asked me to catalogue it and put it on the library shelves.’

  I wanted to know what English books the maharaja read and discussed with his mukhthesar, his Shastri Narayan. I was expecting to hear the names of Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Isherwood. But the pundit couldn’t help me; he couldn’t remember the name of any English writer.

  In 1973, two years after the maharajas had been de-recognized, there was a strike by the palace staff for better pay. At one time there had been 500 workers in the palace. At the time of the strike there were 300. The maharaja gave the strikers the increases they asked for. It was too much for him. The next year everybody on the palace staff was given a gratuity and sent away. The pundit himself was given 19,000 rupees, nearly £1000. But not long afterwards the maharaja sent for him, and five or six others, and took them back. He continued to be mukhthesar and assistant secretary, and the work was just as hard as it had been.

  ‘For some people
,’ the pundit said, ‘Highness never changed.’

  But there had been a price for the maharaja’s favour. Because of his irregular eating habits, the pundit said, he had developed an ulcer. As a brahmin it wasn’t possible for him to eat outside his own house. He couldn’t eat at the palace; even his grandfather, who had been a cook at the palace, had never eaten there. And because of the long hours the pundit had had to work in the palace, his digestion had become disorganized.

  One day in 1974, when he was fifty-eight, he began vomiting blood. He was taken to the hospital. He stayed there for eight days. He was about to be discharged when the news came that the maharaja had died. That was how it had happened – as suddenly as that. The doctors advised him not to think about the maharaja’s death; it would be bad for him. They postponed his discharge from the hospital; they kept him in for two more days. So, after all the years of personal attendance as mukhthesar, superintendent of pujas, he had not been present for the death of the maharaja, and the important rites afterwards.

  The pundit said, ‘To this day I try not to think about Highness’s death.’

  I didn’t think he was exaggerating. The story we had heard had come out with much trouble; it had taken many hours. For nearly 50 years, as student, librarian, mukhthesar, he had lived on the bounty of the maharajas; and for 12 years he had personally served the maharaja. But the story of his life and his service with the maharaja existed in his mind as a number of separate stories, separate little stories. He had never before, I think, made a connected narrative out of those little stories.

  After he left the hospital, he stayed home for a year. And then he saw this job as manager of the marriage hall advertised, and he took it.

  ‘It’s a job.’