On the Ganges

by George Black

  It was apparent that by Arvind’s criteria, Muslims did not qualify as Indians in good standing.

  “We are having one, two kids only. And they are having six, seven, ten, like anything. After thirty years they will be in the majority, and we will be in the minority.” He pointed to his daughter. Exhibit A.

  Neither of us said much for a minute or two. We sipped our tea. He chucked the little girl under the chin and made little affectionate noises. Then he leaned forward, as if sensing that I might have been offended by what he’d said. There was something open and ingenuous in his manner that tempered his prejudices.

  “Not 100 percent Muslims are bad,” he said, before pausing again and fine-tuning the statement. “Definitely what I feel is that 1 percent of the Muslims are very good.”

  “What would be an example of a good Muslim?” I asked.

  He considered the question.

  “Aamir Khan,” he said eventually. “He was an actor. He has a program, Satyamev Jayate, on TV every Sunday. He is giving advice. ‘Don’t run on the rat race,’ he says. He made a film, you must see that film also. Being a Hindu, I am having the opinion he is the best person.”

  * * *

  Ravindra was back, and he joined us, beaming. He gestured at Arvind. “My brother is a gem of a person,” he said. “I am a very short-tempered person. I am not cooperative at all. Muslims? Should I be honest? I do not like Muslims at all, and Modi also is the same. I am not going to interrupt in your belief, but you are not the only ones on this earth only! I ask a Muslim a very simple question. ‘Do you believe in a God?’ ‘Yes.’ Second question. ‘Does your God have any form or shape or size?’ He says no. ‘So why do you go to the mosque to pray to the God? You call us kaffir because we worship idols?’ He says yes. So I ask him, ‘Why do you go the Kaaba and circumambulate? We do it by our left hand, you do it by your right hand. And you call us idol worshippers. There are fifty-eight Muslim countries where you cannot eat pork. But you have a slaughterhouse where cows are being killed for flesh, and for us cow is like a goddess.’”

  I wondered how he’d come up with the number fifty-eight. The longest list I ever found was fifty-one, and that included the French overseas department of Mayotte, which I hadn’t even heard of.

  Ravindra had all the symptoms of Wikipedia addiction, with a special gift for non sequiturs and free association. The war in Syria. Adolf Hitler and Germany’s misappropriation of the sacred swastika. The medicinal qualities of the neem tree, also stolen, this time by foreign pharmaceutical companies. The rise of China. The decline of America. The Kennedy assassination. The preposterous wealth of the Gulf oil states. Tamerlane and the Mongol hordes. Bill and Hillary Clinton. He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. “I am not saying that all Hindus are good. Although we are God-loving and God-fearing people, we also desire toward money, toward fame, toward sex. But it is our history that we never try to conquer anybody.”

  Surely, I must understand that such feelings were especially justified here along the Ganges? He conceded that one might argue that Islam had arrived peacefully in the south of India or the western coast, carried on the trade routes that crisscrossed the Arabian Sea. There were also Sufis here and there; there was nothing wrong with them and their strange whirling dances. But Islam had been brought to the great Gangetic Plain with the horse and the sword, borne on waves of Mughal invaders who swept down like a pestilence from the steppes of Central Asia, leaving the wreckage of Hindu temples in their wake.

  “There are three sacred places for Hindus,” Ravindra said. “Ayodhya for Lord Ram, Mathura for Lord Krishna, and Varanasi for Lord Shiva. All three of these cities are in UP. And these three gods are worshipped all over India.”

  It had been difficult for Arvind to break into his brother’s torrent of words, but he also wanted to have his say. “Have Hindus ever been involved in any crime, any explosion, any riot?” he demanded.

  The last thing I’d wanted was to get dragged into a political argument, but what about the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya? Or the reprisal killings of more than a thousand Muslims in Gujarat during Narendra Modi’s tenure as chief minister of the state?

  Both brothers regarded me as if I were a zoological curiosity, a foreigner of the particularly obtuse variety.

  “Okay, one mosque was demolished by Hindus,” Arvind said. “That was not correct. What I think, God is everywhere. You are a God. I am also a God. Everybody is a God. But demolition is not the issue. Demolition is bad, but the Mohammedans have demolished each and every temple in India. Our ancient temples here they have destroyed fifteen, sixteen times. They have that feeling in their blood. They think Hindus are their enemy, as well as of course you also.”

  “Europe and America have their own spectacles by which they want to see the world,” Ravindra said. “They are living in their make-believe world. Modi, in the eyes of America, he is a beggar, he cannot be a chooser. What happened in Gujarat? Fifty-nine Lord Ram pilgrims were returning to their native land, and they all died. Now it is known that two hundred liters of petrol were bought days before. It was cold-blooded murder, predetermined. Later, see, if a person can slap you once, and I reply him with four slaps, you are going to blame me for the fighting? It is not correct. I am sorry to say, my dear friend, these Muslims are not comfortable anywhere.”

  HERITAGE

  One day, Pinku took me out on his battered motorbike to the Mahmoorganj district in the western part of the city to meet his friend Navneet Raman, the chairman of the Banaras Cultural Foundation. With a small number of friends, including the owner of the excellent bookstore at Assi Ghat, they organized “heritage walks” around parts of the old city that the tourists rarely visit.

  We pulled over by a high wall. Behind the gates was an expanse of immaculate lawn, and behind that an immaculate white-painted building with parapets and colonnades and balconies and balustrades, all of them immaculate. This was the Raman Niwas Palace, home to eight separate subfamilies of the Raman clan, including Navneet and his German wife, Petra, who worked in marketing for Hewlett-Packard before moving to India.

  Navneet was in his office. His white kurta was as immaculate as the palace.

  He would sometimes call the city Varanasi if there was a technical need to do so—if he was talking, for example, about the Varanasi Municipal Authority or the local chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), where he had once served as convener. Otherwise, he preferred the old name, Benares.

  The Ramans are Benares aristocracy, zamindars who once owned more than fifteen hundred villages in Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar. The family can trace its lineage back to an ancestor who was the finance minister of the Afghan king Sher Shah Suri. Sometime around 1540, this personage was charged by the monarch with laying out the Sarak-e-Azam, the Grand Trunk Road that runs from the Khyber Pass to Calcutta. In 1545, when the king died, the minister built an elaborate mausoleum for him in the town of Sasaram, eighty miles east of Benares.

  The motto of the Raman dynasty was “Service to Humanity.” According to a family history, they “considered their estate populace to be like their own children and were dearly adored and loved by the masses.” For hereditary zamindars of the period, it must be said that this was not exactly typical. But whether the bond with their tenant farmers was based in fact or just family myth, the Ramans’ patronage of the arts was a matter of public record.

  What was remarkable about this was that in the firmament of stars around the Raman Niwas Palace, Hindu and Muslim musicians had equal standing. They included the sitarist Ravi Shankar and the master of the simple, oboe-like shehnai, Ustad Bismillah Khan.

  Though his family was Bengali, Shankar was born in Benares. At ten, he left for Paris, traveling with his brother Uday’s dance troupe. When he returned, he came to see Navneet’s grandfather, who by then was the mayor of the city, and declared that he would like to learn the sitar. A year later, having become proficient in the
instrument, Shankar came back and said he wanted to honor him with his first concert.

  “My grandfather told him it must be in our family temple,” Navneet said. “All the great musicians, whenever they came to Benares, they always performed there and in the house. Ravi Shankarji brought George Harrison here and told him, ‘This is the house where I learned sitar.’”

  Perhaps it was his Bengali origins that led the local musical elite to turn their backs on Shankar. Or perhaps they simply resented the fact that his genius so far outshone their own. Whatever the reason, Navneet went on, “They chased him out. They didn’t like him because he was not part of their gang. He felt so humiliated that he vowed never again to play sitar in Benares. But then he flew in from France to play on the first death anniversary of my grandfather, to say, ‘This is the man because of whom I learned to play sitar.’ And that was the last time he played here.”

  Later, he talked about Bismillah Khan. “They have very superinflated egos, these Benares musicians, other than this great man.” It was the greatest of all the city’s many paradoxes: that in the spiritual center of Hinduism, the person who best incarnated its spirit was a Muslim—and one who was not even born here but in the neighboring state of Bihar.

  “He was like the jewel in the crown of Benares,” Navneet said. “He maintained the Qu’ran, but he transcended religious boundaries. He was so simple, yet so deep and so philosophical. Ravi Shankarji said, ‘Why not move to America?’ but he said, ‘If you can bring my Ganga Ma to America, I will move to America. Otherwise, leave me in my Benares.’ So let him be by his Ganga Ma. There is all this talk about building a big monument at the place of his burial, but let the soil be there without human intervention. No marble structure. Maybe if someone wants to do a tribute, he can bring some gangajal and pour it on the grave, so close to the Mother Ganga.”

  * * *

  We walked over to the small art gallery that Navneet and Petra had opened a decade earlier. Like everything else here, it was white and sparklingly clean, and there was a small, climate-controlled archive that housed a historical collection of paintings and photographs of Benares. Small framed images were spaced evenly along the walls of the gallery: architectural details, doorways, fragments of the city’s heritage. He said the novelist Geoff Dyer had visited when he was working on his book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and had remarked that the gallery could hold its own with anything in London or New York. But today the room was empty. Navneet shrugged. “Maybe I have ten feetfall in a one-month exhibition,” but it didn’t matter. He felt the same way about the heritage walks that he and Pinku conducted. “We maybe do one walk a month. Even if we take only ten people a year, I can safely say that the ten we take will go home appreciating that Benares is more than seeing the sunrise from a boat and going to the Ganga Aarti.”

  One hundred thousand foreign tourists come to Varanasi each year, he said. “And we have this strange community of so-called Indian guides who themselves know nothing about the city. They think the tourists are fools, so we can make a fool out of them, we’ll take a boat ride, ha-ha-ha, and we’ll take their money, and they will go back to their hotel and they will have some breakfast.”

  “One of the agencies is offering a seven-day Varanasi-Lucknow package for $1,200,” Petra said. “It’s for people from the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Beijing.”

  “These are packages of stupidity,” Navneet said.

  The word stupidity came up a lot whenever he talked about the various proposals that had been made over the years to protect the city’s heritage. He checked off the folly of one agency after another, accompanying each one with a roll of the eyes, a curl of the lip, or a bemused shake of the head.

  “A Japanese bank proposed a road along the ghats of Benares, with seven bridges crossing to the other side.

  “The World Bank proposed that all the ghats should be painted in one color! But the beauty of Benares is that in those seven kilometers you are walking through the encyclopedia of Indian architecture. Different times, different styles, different motives, different colors. If that’s the level the World Bank has stooped down to, better to keep the World Bank out of India!

  “In the name of heritage, the government wanted to build concrete jetties on the ghats so the boats can be organized and parked. I told them that every month the water level is different. The jetties will be too high, so you can’t get into the boat, or they will be underwater. They wanted to do sound-and-light shows on the ghats. Huge amounts of money in the name of heritage! Sound-and-light shows? I said, ‘This is stupidity!’”

  During his tenure as chairman of the Varanasi chapter of INTACH, he grew so frustrated with this nonsense that he began writing letters to the prime minister. For this he was removed from his post without a hearing. “As a citizen of this planet, I can write to the president of America also!” he exclaimed. “You cannot say to me, ‘Navneet Raman, you cannot speak a word, you are not a free man anymore!’”

  And that was the end of Navneet Raman’s career in the world of officialdom.

  THE FOREST OF REMEMBRANCE

  Navneet texted me one evening to ask if I’d meet him at six o’clock the next morning to take a boat across to Maghar, the east bank of the Ganges, and plant some trees. Maghar is a famously inauspicious place. Anyone unfortunate enough to die there will be reincarnated as a donkey.

  We hailed a boatman at Assi Ghat, and as we pulled away from the steps, the sun rose and flooded the curving waterfront of ghats, temples, and palaces with the saffron glow of dawn. It was mid-May, and you could tell already that another hundred-degree day was on the way. The monsoon was still two months off, and the river was low and murky. Indeterminate objects floated by in the surface film.

  I mentioned the mayor’s idea of recovering the flowers that were dumped in the river and use them to manufacture incense. Navneet snorted. Turn them into incense after they’d been sitting around in a slop of shit and ashes? More stupidity.

  Some years earlier, he said, he’d had the notion of asking the priests at the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, the Golden Temple, if he and his friends, the heritage walkers, could recycle the flowers that were brought there as offerings. They could be composted. They could be used to reenergize the patches of dusty ground and stunted trees that passed for parks in Varanasi. But as the city’s most important shrine, the temple was managed by the government. Written applications had to be made, meetings requested with the relevant officials. Flowers? The bureaucrats were mystified. If they’d offered to pave the parks over with cement, it might have been a different matter. That would have meant bringing in contractors, opportunities for kickbacks. So Navneet approached the smaller, privately owned temples. The priests there also shook their heads. The gods would take a dim view of such a project; tossing the flowers into Ma Ganga was the proper thing to do.

  Our mission this morning, Navneet explained, was a good example of how the few people who cared about the health of the river had to work here. A small end-run around vested interests and the stupidity of bureaucrats. There had only ever been one person in Benares who could have been described as a professional defender of the Ganges. He was a man who was uniquely able to reconcile the physical and metaphysical concepts of purity, an engineer priest named Veer Bhadra Mishra, a professor at Banaras Hindu University and the hereditary mahant of the Sankat Mochan Temple, which is dedicated to Hanuman. Mishra was as much at home giving TEDx talks to audiences in New Delhi as he was taking his holy dip in Ma Ganga each morning. The foundation he created—although foundation is something of a misnomer; in truth it was closer to a one-man enterprise—collected data on fecal coliform bacteria in the river. During the lean period, when the river was at its lowest, as it was now, this could be several thousand times above safe levels. All around us, pilgrims were bobbing and ducking in the water.

  “He was a great man with a great vision,” Raman said. “Anyone who went to meet him at his house at Tulsi Das Ghat always brought some la
ddoo and some channa and some glass of water, and I have sat and had lighter moments with him. He was truly human in that sense. But isn’t there a saying, fault, thy name is human? He feared that people would lose their relationship to the river if he said it was polluted. I told him, if you say that the river is your mother, and your mother is sick, you have this authority. If you could only say, at some function on the ghats with a hundred thousand people listening to your words, that until every Hindu stops throwing garbage into the river at Benares, you will fast unto death.”

  But Mishra was a stubborn man, and now he was gone, cremated on the plinth reserved for notables at Harishchandra Ghat in the presence of just such a crowd, his ashes consigned to the river to mingle with the rest of the black slurry. His son, Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, had inherited the priesthood, and I’d spent an hour or two with him one evening at the temple. I’d found him warm, earnest, and eloquent, with flashes of understated humor. He’d recounted the river’s woes, the familiar litany. He said Modi had requested a fifteen-minute audience with him during the election campaign but had ended up staying much longer. But the younger Mishra would probably have been the first to admit that his father had left him with shoes that were too large to fill.

  * * *

  When we reached the far side of the river, we stepped out of the boat onto a broad expanse of dried mud. Raman reached into the bag he’d been carrying and scooped out a handful of shiny, dark purple seeds the size of pistachios. They were coastal almond, Terminalia catappa, known locally as the sewage tree because it has the ability to filter pollutants. Later there would also be aromatic red sandalwood and harshingar, night-blooming jasmine, a tree sacred to Shiva.

  We walked back and forth along the narrow strip of scrubland above the flood line, scattering the seeds to the left and right. Raman had originally suggested the idea to the government forest department. No interest. More stupidity.