by George Black
The building itself gave no hint of the hereditary wealth and power of the Dom Rajas. The paint was flaking, the plaster was crumbling, and the flagstones in the courtyard were cracked and broken. Some of the inner walls appeared to have collapsed, and there were piles of rubble everywhere. Women were cooking over a fire of logs salvaged from the cremation grounds, but they scurried off indoors as we arrived. A Brahman bull was chained to the wall. It was a rare thing to see inside a city residence, but the bull Nandi was the mount of Shiva, and I took the presence of this one as a sign of piety and prestige. The animal had just deposited a huge pile of dung on the threshold, and we had to step over it to enter the house.
We passed through a darkened room full of devotional images and clutter and came out onto the balcony and into the sunlight. “One tiger is male, and the other is female,” Jagdish said. Their story involved a fight with the maharaja of Benares. Though the British had direct control of the city, they had granted the maharaja a good deal of autonomy and allowed him to retain his capital at Ramnagar, on the opposite side of the river. The title still existed, but these days, the maharaja’s authority was purely ceremonial. In the time of the Raj, however, his ancestors took their powers very seriously. Many years ago—Jagdish wasn’t sure when exactly, but sometime before Independence—the imperious Dom Raja of the time, Laxman Chowdhury, had proposed to erect statues of two tigers on his balcony, facing Ramnagar. “Impossible,” the maharaja declared. The Dom Raja retorted with the tale of Harishchandra and Kallu Dom. “And where were you at that time?” he asked the maharaja. “You may be the king of Kashi, but I am the king of the Doms. So we are equals, and if I want to put tigers on my balcony, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
* * *
Jagdish lumbered back into the room and settled onto a bed that was piled high with grubby blankets. The last time I’d seen him, he’d put me in mind of a smiling Buddha; now all I could think of was Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi.
He told me tales of his father, Kailash.
“He was always a generous man,” he said. “He would help people beyond his limits. If some poor man came with an invitation to his daughter’s wedding, my father would always give him rice or dal, or even money. Once or twice a week he would organize public feasts for the poor.”
I decided to say nothing of the stories I had heard from Jamuna.
The greatest of all the festivals in Varanasi is the annual Ramlila, a monthlong epic folk drama, staged under the auspices of the maharaja, that tells the life story of Lord Ram. “When Lord Ram’s wedding procession came to Manikarnika, my father would distribute kir, sweet rice pudding, to everyone,” Jagdish went on. “He would also organize all kinds of sport for his pleasure—horse races on the ghats, boat races, no one could match his standard for organizing such things. He would arrange fights here on Man Mandir Ghat for the strongest male sheep. It was always hard for him to accept defeat, so whenever his sheep lost, he would immediately sacrifice it.”
“Could you do such things today?” I asked.
Jagdish chuckled, and his whole body wobbled. “Inflation is the problem. A kilo of ghee used to be forty rupees. Now it’s four hundred! I try to keep up the tradition with one or two things, like giving out kir to everyone during the Ramlila wedding ceremony. But times have changed.”
One of Jagdish’s nephews had been sitting on the bed, too, saying nothing, but now he said, “Kailash lived for his reputation, not for making money. To make a name for himself, that was his idea.”
I decided to say nothing about the stuffed briefcase and the pet alligator.
“He behaved like a king,” Jagdish said. “He used to go into the city on a horse cart, like a chariot, in a very royal way, with an assistant sitting next to him. But at other times, he would go in a rickshaw or on foot. It all depended on his mood.
“One day, Indira Gandhi came to Varanasi. She was on her way to the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, with a large security detail as usual. No one was allowed near her. But my father went out into the street and lay down in front of her car and forced it to stop. He said, ‘First you have to speak to me, or you cannot go to the temple.’ Because he was the king, the Dom Raja. And Indira Gandhi got out of the car and said a few words to him before she drove on. You see, his pride and prestige mattered so much to him.”
“I am a king, so I will act like a king,” the nephew said.
* * *
I asked after Sanjit’s health. “Who told you he had cancer?” Jagdish asked. “He is fit and fine. He had some lung problems, but they were cured. His only problem is that he drinks too much.”
To my surprise, the conversation turned to the other, deeper problems of this complicated family. They involved the older brother, Ranjit, the one who had died, and not, it seemed, from the alcoholism that had ruined Sanjit’s prospects.
A man who had joined us, a family confidant, said that this brother and his young son, Jagdish’s nephew, had been murdered ten or twelve years earlier. Jagdish listened and said nothing, which seemed to be his way of giving tacit permission for the story to be told. Was it robbery? I asked. The man shook his head. “We suspect that it was a family war. The eldest brother was the only one who had a son, an heir to the pari at Manikarnika. The boy was kidnapped and killed. Now there were no male heirs. But then Jagdish prayed to the gods and promised to make many offerings to them if they would grant his wish, and finally he was blessed with a son of his own. Now he is nine years old.”
I said I’d seen the boy earlier. He was a sweet-faced child with long, dark ringlets. He had been swinging a heavy weight lifter’s club to amuse himself.
“Come,” Jagdish said. “I will show you the akhara.”
* * *
The akhara, the family wrestling and weight lifting arena, was down a short passage between two sections of the Tiger House. The walls of the akhara were painted blue, and blue-and-yellow clubs like the one the boy had been swinging, some of them studded all over with nails, were stacked in a corner. There was an orange bed of nails on a shelf and a bright vermilion shrine to Hanuman, strewn with petals of many colors. Whatever the surrounding squalor, the city always seemed to me like a child’s paint box.
“Wrestlers worship Hanuman, because he is the god of strength and power,” Jagdish said. “You will always find a shrine to Hanuman in any akhara.”
The Doms were celebrated wrestlers, and the sport had been a family tradition for at least four generations. “When I was eight years old, my father started bringing me to the akhara,” Jagdish said. “He made sure that I was well trained by my maternal uncle, who was an excellent wrestler. My uncle used to match me up against older kids, so I got much stronger. I could always beat my brothers. We used to get in a lot of fights.” His body jiggled with laughter.
When Jagdish was eighteen, he switched from wrestling to weight lifting and bodybuilding. In one corner of the room, next to the clubs, there were sets of barbells and huge stone doughnuts, which weight lifters call nals, two feet in diameter and weighing hundreds of pounds. There was an old photograph on the wall, hung with a garland of marigolds, that showed a man lifting a nal with one hand. Foreign visitors to Benares had always marveled at the feats of strength that they witnessed there. One day in an antique store in Delhi, I’d found a collection of stereographs, the kind that provided Victorian families with evening entertainment. On the back of one of them was a printed note from the photographer.
I present to you here this view of Mr. Dabee Chowdray Palwan, one of Nature’s athletes. Palwan is not a large man—about five feet and seven and a half inches—and weighs, if I remember correctly, a little less than one hundred and seventy pounds. He is a vegetarian; he never read a book on physical culture; he was never within the walls of a gymnasium or any place for physical training. He found he excelled in lifting weights and had a surprising strength surpassing that of most men. You see him here as he lies on his back, with muscles not large but hard as steel, bearing o
n his uplifted arms nine hundred and sixty pounds, and thus this great stone was sustained till the camera secured for you this negative.
As a young man, Jagdish said, he could lift almost three hundred pounds on the barbells. He could lie on his back with an eight hundred–pound nal on his chest and then have three or four men sit on top of it. He excelled at competitions with the clubs, the jori. The idea was to swing them behind your head and then back over your shoulder; the winner was the man who could complete the greatest number of swings. Jori contests were a special feature of the summer festival of Nag Panchami, the worship of snakes. At that time, Jagdish said, the akhara was whitewashed and decorated, and crowds of a hundred or more would assemble to watch men showing off their skills with the jori and lying on the bed of nails.
“I still try to swing the club at the Nag Panchami,” Jagdish said. “Just ten or fifteen swings. But not this year.”
He sat on a low wall and pulled up his dhoti to show me his grossly swollen calves. “I was very sick last year. I had medicines that made me very fat.”
Steroids? I asked. But the word was unfamiliar to him.
“To keep your body fit brings peace of mind,” he said. “Keep your mind on God and exercise and you will be blessed by him.” He began to massage his swollen legs. “If you do not exercise, your body gets into a very bad shape, as you see me today.”
I NOW FEEL I HAVE SEEN INDIA
My hotel misadventures continued. After the $140-a-night cockroaches and cigarette-burned furniture in Gorakhpur, and a couple of overpriced tourist traps on earlier visits to Varanasi, I wanted something better, preferably close to the cremation grounds. I ended up at Scindhia Ghat, immediately to the north of Manikarnika.
Scindhia is one of the better-known bathing ghats. It takes its name from its builders, a powerful Maratha clan, originally from Maharashtra, who ruled the princely state of Gwalior under the British. I read that the ghat was built around 1850, which would have been during the reign of His Highness Ali Jah, Pillar of the Nobility, Sword of the Kingdom, Agent of the Kingdom, Chief of the Highest Authority, High in Prestige, Exalted in Dignity, Great Prince over Princes of the Brave Scindhia, Lord of Fortune, Victorious of the Age.
According to legend, it was the wealth and ambition of the builders that accounted for the most striking feature of Scindhia Ghat. The weight of its construction had been too much for its Shiva temple, the Ratneshwar Mahadev, which slid into the river, leaving one of its bullet-shaped towers tilted at a crazy angle like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. During the monsoon, this shikhara, or “mountain peak,” was almost completely submerged.
Looking at the work of the British artists who converged on Benares in the nineteenth century, I was confused by this story. A painting by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ramus Forrest from his popular collection, A Picturesque Tour Along the Rivers Ganges and Jumna, in India, showed what seemed to be the same temple, leaning at pretty much the same angle, but in the opposite direction. The mystery was that Forrest had painted the scene in 1824, long before the Scindhias had supposedly built the ghat. Later, I found an 1860 painting by Robert Montgomery Martin. In this there was not one shikhara but two, and they were canted at an impossible forty-five-degree angle in the Ganges like ballistic missiles waiting for the launch codes.
As so often, I felt as if I were operating in a fact-free environment. “You have to understand,” a friend had told me once, only half-joking. “In India, there are no facts.” There were only stories and experiences, and that, in its way, was fine.
* * *
The guesthouse was at the head of a narrow, garbage-choked staircase high above the ghat. As we reached the entrance, a pair of monkeys bared their teeth and lunged at us from a low rooftop. Inside, we climbed more steep stone stairs to the top floor, where we’d booked “super deluxe” rooms with a balcony and a river view. We told the manager we were hungry. He spread his hands in apology. Alas, there was no restaurant. I showed him the page I’d printed from the hotel website. “The restaurant offers sumptuous refreshments cooked under strict supervision in very hygienic conditions.” He shuffled his feet. There was no restaurant.
No matter; the rooms were adequate, if not exactly super deluxe. There was a common balcony with a panoramic view of the river, and we could find a restaurant later. But when we got back after lunch, the monkeys attacked again, snatching at our hair this time, and the hotel lobby was full of uniformed soldiers with guns. We climbed the stairs to the sound of loud banging from above. We went outside onto the balcony. Men with sledgehammers were working their way along it. They had already pounded a hole large enough for a person to walk through in the wall of the room adjacent to Agnès’s. Hers would be next, then mine. I went downstairs to see the manager. “Sir, please don’t worry, it is not a problem,” he said. I told him I begged to disagree and canceled the rest of our stay.
After we’d found a more elegant and expensive alternative, close to the Tiger House, I told Pinku about the episode. He laughed. “There are lawsuits against fifty-two buildings,” he said. “Many of them are these hotels that have added illegal upper floors to give the tourists a nice view of the river.” Others were prosecuted because they had been built within five hundred yards of a designated historical monument, which was also illegal. He told me about a friend who had joined the plaintiffs in one of these cases. A man threatened him with a knife one day. “Drop the matter,” he said, “or you will see this knife again.”
Sometimes it took years for the courts to rule, Pinku said. “You can bribe the police, you can bribe the judge, you can bribe the prosecuting lawyer to present a weak case.” In the case of the hotel at Scindhia Ghat, for whatever reason, the judge seemed finally to have bestirred himself to act. The sledgehammers had put the illegal floor out of commission. A year later, passing on a boat, I noticed that they had done the same to the lower two floors. But the website was still up, with every indication that the place was still open for business and offering delicious home-cooked food in the restaurant.
* * *
Even as the nineteenth-century British authorities were deploring the barbarism of sati, cremation, and female infanticide in Benares, artists like Forrest and Martin came here to Benares in search of the romantic, the picturesque, the sublime. They found the cramped alleys of the old city quaint and atmospheric, but their true inspiration came from being rowed along the river, preferably at dawn, much as the tourists are today.
“From passing through the streets … I could have formed no conception of its beauty,” wrote George, Viscount Valentia, in his Voyages and Travels to India, published in 1809 with paintings by the Egyptologist Henry Salt.
“The immense flights of steps, called the Ghauts of Benares, form a great ornament to the river face of the city; and, in the early part of the day especially, they present a very beautiful, though, at the same time, a very awful spectacle,” wrote Captain Charles Elliot in his 1833 volume, Views in the East. Awful, that is, in the archaic sense of the word: inspiring wonder.
For these artists, the city conjured India’s most dreamlike qualities. There was Benares Illustrated, a collection of exquisitely detailed drawings by James Prinsep, founding editor of The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta and fellow of the Royal Society, which found a wide audience through mass-produced lithographs. There were the paintings of Thomas Daniell and the aquatints of his nephew, William, in their six-volume Oriental Scenery. The Daniells’ images of Munshi Ghat, Shivala Ghat, Raj Ghat, and Dasaswamedh Ghat were radiant in the early morning light, with the chaos corralled into a pleasing harmony. The city, in these renderings, did indeed seem immune to the ravages of the age of Kali. Every detail of the architecture was sharply rendered. There was no crumbling stonework in the Daniells’ Benares. The pilgrims and priests were exotic but orderly, dotted around the ghats in modest numbers. The boatmen rowed with perfectly synchronized strokes like oarsmen in a Greek trireme, and there were no floating corpses.
* * *
I walked north along the ghats one day as far as the great seventeenth-century mosque that was built by the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb. Its soaring minarets, a favorite subject for artists like Captain Elliot, were long gone, one lost to an earthquake and the other removed for reasons of safety. A guard unlocked the gates for me, but the interior was banal, with cheap photographs of the Kaaba and the usual clocks showing the five daily prayer times. I walked south again for three miles to the southernmost of the eighty-four ghats that line the waterfront. Ram Ghat, Mehta Ghat, Ganesh Ghat, Bhonsale Ghat, Sankatha Ghat, Scindhia Ghat, to Manikarnika, where I stopped to look at the tank that Vishnu had dug with his discus and filled with his sweat and the marble plinth that bears his footprints, on the very spot where the universe was created.
Lalita Ghat, Mir Ghat, Man Mandir Ghat, and Dasaswamedh Ghat, the focal point of activity on the riverfront and the setting for the nightly worship of the river, the Ganga Aarti. The priests, sitting cross-legged as usual on platforms under their huge concrete umbrellas, were dispensing advice to pilgrims on the proper forms of worship.
Shitala Ghat, Mansarovar Ghat, Kedar Ghat, Harishchandra Ghat, Shivala Ghat, Prabhu Ghat, Tulsi Ghat, named for the sixteenth-century poet-saint who had made his home here. The resident herd of water buffalo was cooling off in the shallows at Jain Ghat, and nearby an old man was palming Frisbee-size dung cakes for his cooking fire. At Tulsi Ghat, a yellow dog was sprawled out on the steps, dying slowly in the heat, its entrails hanging out gray and bloody. And finally there was Assi Ghat, with its great peepul tree and its famous Shiva lingam, the excellent Harmony Bookshop, where I would browse for hours, and the last cluster of tourist hotels and guesthouses.
The river’s edge was little more than a clotted soup of garbage, shit, and ashes. By the time it reached Varanasi, India’s most sacred river was also its filthiest. At intervals there were pairs of squat towers, pumping stations that were built in the 1970s to keep raw sewage out of the most sensitive stretch of the bathing ghats. One pair was painted pink and decorated with Technicolor images of Shiva and Parvati in their Himalayan abode.