On the Ganges

by George Black

  “People are coming also to the gaushala to buy the cow urine from us,” he said. “They take it home to drink it first thing in the morning because it is very good for acidity problem.” Some people liked to splash it on their faces.

  What about cow urine cola? That part of the operation wasn’t conducted here, he said, but at the Cow Protection Department of the RSS in Haridwar. Its director had announced the initiative several years earlier. All the necessary lab tests had been done. They’d figured out how to purify it, how to preserve it, and, most important, how to mask the taste. The cola had been test-marketed by a company in Kanpur in two flavors, orange and lemon, mixed with a variety of sacred herbs. But bringing the stuff to the masses had been a slow process. The idea had met with a certain skepticism. The president of one marketing firm had suggested it could be sold under the name of Fizzy Whizzy.

  Mr. Jain asked if I’d like to have some refreshment. A cold drink, perhaps?

  I looked at him warily. “Cow urine cola?”

  He was apologetic, but with the flicker of a smile. “Unfortunately not. We have only bottled water.”

  It came with a basketful of organic mangoes, which had thudded to the ground only minutes earlier. They were sublime, a quintessence of mango-ness, and I ate three.

  PART TWO

  PLAINS

  CAPSTAN BABA

  South of Haridwar and east of Delhi, heat, dust, and unending flatness. Horizon lines pierced by minarets as well as temple spires and English clock towers. Black burkas in the streets and beards dyed orange with henna. Portraits of the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Shi’a Muslim icons outside the opulent Asifi Masjid mosque in the city of Lucknow, erected during the Persian dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Oudh, or Awadh, until 1856, when the East India Company decided that it had ruled long enough. British bureaucratic efficiency could no longer abide the indolence of the last of the nawabs of Oudh, the obese Wajid Ali Shah, who was “sunk in the uttermost abysses of enfeebling debauchery,” dedicated not to statesmanship but to “the delights of dancing, and drumming, and drawing, and manufacturing small rhymes.”

  The Gomti River rises in the foothills of the Himalayas and winds for 560 miles southeast across the North Indian plain until it empties into the Ganges a short distance downstream from Varanasi. Close to the halfway point, it meanders through Lucknow, which nowadays is capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of two hundred million. The reason I’d made this small detour was to educate myself about the great rebellion against British rule in 1857, which came on the heels of the dissolution of the power of the nawabs.

  I went to see the ruins of Musa Bagh, which lie on the outskirts of the city, on one of the many lazy bends of the Gomti. A rutted dirt track branched off from the highway at a noisome garbage dump. Ditchdiggers were at work by the roadside, and speakers on a handcart were blasting out tinny filmi music. The track ended at a village called Bari, a straggle of houses and snack stalls with a small mosque that was painted green and white, with a gold crescent and star above the entrance. The usual yellow dog was sprawled out in the sun by a dripping water pump, to all appearances dead. The place was essentially a squatter colony, said a bony old man with a white goatee who was standing nearby. The villagers had no title to the land, which had been targeted by the city authorities and real-estate speculators for the next wave of urban sprawl. Government trucks arrived periodically and dug up the topsoil from their fields in a hapless effort to cap the mountain of garbage. “That dump makes us sick,” the old man said. “The flies and mosquitoes are killing us whenever the wind blows from that direction.”

  He turned out to be the caretaker of the mosque, which was dedicated to Hazrat Syed Imam Ali Shah Baba, a miracle-working thirteenth-century divine. In a neighboring field was the tomb of another revered imam, adorned with a picture of the Kaaba. The caretaker slept here all night to guard the shrine. Not that he seemed overly concerned. “If anyone comes in the night, the dead will rise from their graves and take care of them.”

  Behind the mosque were the remains of a mud-brick wall that had largely dissolved in three hundred years of rain. “It used to go all the way around the palace of Musa Bagh,” the caretaker said. “In those times, they had as much confidence in mud as we have in cement.”

  * * *

  The word bagh, which is of Persian origin, refers to a formal garden. The musa part is a matter of debate. Some say it alludes to a rat that was killed here by one of the nawabs; others believe, improbably, that it derives from Moses. The most convincing explanation was that it’s a corruption of the word monsieur, since the gardens are thought to have been laid out by Major General Claude Martin, the French-born soldier-architect who designed a number of impressive buildings in Lucknow, including the famous private school known as La Martinière. What the old caretaker called the “palace,” a three-story summer retreat in the Indo-European style, was built in 1803, three years after Martin’s death, for the fifth nawab of Oudh, Saadat Ali Khan.

  The ruins were on a low rise, notched into the hillside. The formal gardens, divided by walkways and water channels into four symmetrical squares like those of the Taj Mahal, had originally extended as far as the river’s edge, and the nawabs and their English guests would walk down there to watch the stag fights that were organized on the opposite bank for their entertainment. But the Gomti had changed its course since 1803, its old course was silted up, and the river was now almost a mile away, hidden away behind high levees. The gardens were long gone, repurposed as fields of mustard and wheat and animal fodder, while war, weather, and the pillaging of bricks hadn’t left much of the building itself. There was still just enough for your imagination to play with: two domed kiosks or lookout towers, a few freestanding pillars and archways with remnants of ornate stucco work, and a sunken colonnaded courtyard. Someone had scratched graffiti on one of the walls.

  NASEEM

  MANTHASA

  I LOVE YOU

  * * *

  Oudh was the heart of the 1857 revolt, and for readers of The Illustrated London News and The Boy’s Own Magazine, no event during that year quickened the patriotic pulse more than the six-month siege of the British Residency in Lucknow, whose battered ruins now occupy an immaculately groomed public park and are floodlit at night.

  The immediate trigger for the rebellion was the perverse decision by British officers to issue native troops, who made up more than 80 percent of the East India Company’s Bengal Army, with paper cartridges greased with beef tallow, the vilest of insults to Hindus, or pork fat, anathema to Muslims. But as Benjamin Disraeli observed, “The decline and fall of empires are not affairs of greased cartridges. Such results are occasioned by adequate causes.” New military rules had the Brahmins who dominated the army worrying about the loss of their caste privileges. No one had much affection for the Christian missionaries who scurried around seeking converts to their barbaric religion. The royal court and its loyalists fretted and plotted, as anciens régimes invariably will after they are ejected from power. Shi’a clerics issued fatwas and called for jihad.

  The rebels were finally driven out of Lucknow in January 1858, and their main force fled to Musa Bagh, where they made their last stand. There were as many as nine thousand men under arms, led by begum Hazrat Mahal, the junior wife of the slothful ex-nawab. The begum was considered a beauty; portraits show a fine-featured woman in her late thirties with a small, pinched mouth and a long nose. She was also scheming and ambitious, with plans to restore the royal family to the throne of Oudh in the person of her beardless twelve-year-old son, Birjis Qadr. Accompanying the begum to Musa Bagh was one of her lovers, Mammu Khan, perhaps the boy’s biological father.

  It wasn’t much of a battle. By some accounts, four or five hundred rebels were killed. Their commander was decapitated, his body burned, and his headless remains tossed into the river. The begum’s lover went to the gallows. She and the boy king ended up in exile in Kathmandu.

  *
* *

  In a field next to the ruins, I found a blue sign, pitted with rust, that said,

  NATIONALY PROTECTED MONUMENT

  CEMETRY MOOSABAUGH

  In fact, there was nothing that resembled a cemetery, only a single weather-beaten white tomb surrounded by a low stone wall and partly shaded by a scrawny tree. Yet for all its modesty, it was no ordinary grave. It was a mazar, a shrine, a term commonly reserved for a saint or a person deserving of special reverence.

  There were two inscriptions on the slab, roughly incised by hand. One read,

  TO THE MEMORY OF

  CAPTAIN F. WALES [SIC]

  WHO RAISED AND COMMANDED

  THE FIRST SIKH IRREGULAR CAVALRY

  KILLED IN ACTION AT LUCKNOW

  ON THE 21ST MARCH 1858

  The other had eroded with time, and the last few words were the only part that was still legible:

  … LIVED AND DIED AS A CHRISTIAN SOLDIER

  The First Sikh Irregular Cavalry had been part of the assault force under Sir James Outram. It had been hastily assembled by an infantry captain named Frederick Wale, and for that reason it was also known as “Wale’s Horse.” Irregular was the right word, said one military historian. The Sikhs sported “every variety of bit and bridle, saddle and tulwar [a kind of curved saber]; every variety of horse, entire, mare, and gelding; of all heights from fifteen hands to animals little bigger than ponies.” But the British admired the Sikhs, like the Gurkhas, as one of the “martial races.” They could ride, they had a taste for heroic violence, and they hated the Moghuls.

  The fact that Wale’s was the only grave or monument in a place that had witnessed the deaths of hundreds of Muslims who were regarded as freedom fighters was strange enough in itself. Stranger still was the detritus around the mazar. The signboard was decorated with strips of yellow, blue, and green cloth. The tree was decked out in more green cloth, fringed with tinsel. Someone had pinned a handwritten note to the trunk that said, in Hindi, “I have three sick children and two adults. Please heal them. Give the kids a good education, give my family prosperity and good fortune.” On the ground, there were broken bottles of Old Monk whiskey and a number of clay incense burners. Each stick was tipped with a burned-down cigarette butt, with the brand name still visible just above the filter: Capstan. There were several empty packs nearby, all of the same brand and stamped in bold black capital letters with the warning, SMOKING KILLS.

  I stopped a graybeard farmer in a purple shirt who was carrying his hoe to the mustard fields. “Who was Captain Wales?” I asked him.

  “Captain Baba was an English saint who lived five hundred years ago,” he answered. “People bring him gifts. They also bring him bread and butter and hard-boiled eggs. When there is a festival, they bring a harmonium to play music. Once Captain Baba knows you are in trouble, he will bring you here.”

  “So he has special powers? How did he get them?”

  He shrugged. “People just know about them by word of mouth.”

  * * *

  I walked back to the mosque, where a small crowd had gathered after noon prayers. An old man came over and asked me what I was up to. He had two yellow teeth that were escaping from his mouth in opposite directions. He said he was the owner of the field where the mazar of the saint stood. “Captain Baba? Everyone comes to worship him, Hindu and Muslim alike, every caste and religion. If you are possessed by a devil and come close to the tomb, the devil will try to leave your body.”

  More men joined us.

  “This was where he died in battle. Part of his cavalry fled, and he was one of the handful who were left.”

  “We don’t know when this happened because there was no village here at that time. Some of the old babas guess maybe three hundred years ago. But even they don’t know.”

  The babas’ guess was closer to the mark than the old farmer’s, but the date on the tombstone didn’t seem to have caught their attention.

  “People also come at night if they’re sick, just like you’d go to a doctor.”

  They discussed the captain’s various powers and attributes. He could heal the sick, soothe the troubled, improve your love life, help young women to become pregnant. Apparently, this was an area in which he had some expertise.

  “Today is Sunday. You should have come on Thursday. It is more auspicious.”

  During the festival of Nauchandi, one of the biggest in Uttar Pradesh, as many as two thousand people come to pay homage.

  “You can see the video on the internet,” someone said.

  There was an inconclusive debate. Was it more correct to call him Captain Baba or Capstan Baba?

  “That was his favorite cigarette. He liked to smoke and he liked whiskey, so we bring him this also.”

  I saw another man frown at this, and I raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “I take him whiskey, and then I come home and I think he is blessing me. But then, when I go back to the mazar, the bottle is empty. So I ask myself, who is actually drinking that whiskey?”

  BUTCHERS

  Brigadier General James George Smith Neill, commanding officer of the Madras Fusiliers, a lugubrious Scotsman with a great shaggy mustache and muttonchop whiskers, died in battle six months before Capstan Baba. Neill is described as a religious zealot, a ferocious warrior, and a chivalrous protector of the honor of women. In the summer before his death, he had a chance to display all three of these qualities.

  Having put down a brief revolt in Varanasi, Neill proceeded upriver to deal with the rebellion in Allahabad. On June 5, 1857, the British residents of the city had taken refuge in the massive, squat fort that the Mughal emperor Akbar had constructed on the Yamuna, just above its confluence with the Ganges and the mythical underground Saraswati, named for the goddess of knowledge, wisdom, music, and the creative arts. Neill reached the city on the seventh day of the siege and dealt with the problem with his customary thoroughness.

  Twelve years later, in The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, an Indian writer named Bholanauth Chunder was still scouring his Victorian phrase book for the right words to convey the extent of Neill’s retribution.

  The Martial Law was an outlandish demon, the like of which had not been dreamt of in Oriental demonology. Rampant and ubiquitous it stalked over the land devouring hundreds of victims at a meal.… To ‘bag the nigger’ had become a favourite phrase of the military sportsmen of that day. Pea-fowls, partridges, and Pandies rose together, but the latter gave the best sport.… Scouring through the town and suburbs, they caught all on whom they could lay their hands—porter or pedlar, shopkeeper or artisan, and hurrying them on through a mock-trial, made them dangle on the nearest tree. Near six thousand beings had been thus summarily disposed of and launched into eternity. Their corpses hanging by twos and threes from branch and sign-post all over the town, speedily contributed to frighten down the country into submission and tranquility. For three months did eight dead-carts daily go their rounds from sunrise to sunset, to take down the corpses which hung at the cross-roads and market places, poisoning the air of the city, and to throw their loathsome burdens into the Ganges.

  It was capital sport, one British officer wrote. “One trip I enjoyed amazingly. We got on board a steamer with a gun, while the Sikhs and the fusiliers marched up to the city. We steamed up throwing shots right and left till we got up the bad places, when we went on the shore and peppered away with our guns, my old double-barrel bringing down several niggers.”

  “God grant I may have acted with justice,” Neill said. “I have done all for my country, to re-establish its prestige and power.”

  * * *

  The next place for prestige and power to be reestablished was Kanpur, or, as the British preferred it, Cawnpore, a hundred and twenty miles up the Ganges from Allahabad and sixty from Lucknow. Neill had to delay his own departure for Cawnpore by a few days to deal with an outbreak of cholera among his troops, but one of his subordinates, Major Sydenham
Renaud, made a more than adequate substitute, marching his men up the Grand Trunk Road and being “rather inclined to hang all black creation.” The height at which he hanged them allowed the local pigs to feast on their feet and ankles.

  In Kanpur, the leader of the uprising was one Nana Sahib, or Nana Rao, a hereditary maharaja who had been considered loyal to the crown. He enjoyed nothing more than a game of billiards with his English visitors, followed by a dinner of pork or beef with fine china and bone-handled silverware on damask tablecloths, washed down with claret in crystal champagne glasses. After all this amiable socializing, the local military commander, Sir Hugh Wheeler, assumed he had a natural ally against the rebels. Instead, Nana Sahib turned his coat and laid siege to the British garrison. After three weeks, Wheeler surrendered in exchange for a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. Boats would be waiting at the Satī Caurā Ghat on the Ganges, so named because this was where widows had once committed sati, immolating themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, a practice that the East India Company had first deplored and then, in 1829, banned.

  Down at the ghat, the fog of war was especially thick. No one ever established who fired the first shot. Perhaps it was a jittery soldier from the Bengal Army. Perhaps a sepoy taking matters into his own hands. Perhaps a horse startled and the rider dropped his rifle. Whatever the cause, the result was mayhem. The monsoon had barely started, and the river was only two feet deep. The boats were “crowded to suffocation,” so heavy that they bogged down in the mud. The boatmen jumped off and sprinted to safety, throwing away the oars and overturning stoves and oil lamps. The vessels began to burn. Rebels raked them with gunfire; others rode into the shallow water swinging their sabers.