The Heat and Dust Project

by Saurav Jha

  Chaubey-ji says public, inflation and legend in English, also, corrupt to the core. The rest of his rant is in a Hindi strongly inflected with Braj. It is funny for me to see Braj employed in this context because to students of early Bengali poetics, Braj bhasha is the most poetic of all the Ardha-Magadhan prakrits. It is the language of poetry, not politics. Tagore wrote a number of songs in Braj bhasha – including a set called Bhanusingher Padavali (The Verses of Bhanusingha) – in the tradition of Vaishnava love poetry, and these highly melodious songs would be intelligible to speakers of Bengali, Hindi, Maithili, Oriya, Bhojpuri and Assamese too.

  I rein in my mind and pay attention to what he is saying. There are several demands for separate statehood from within UP now: Braj Pradesh, Rohilkhand Pradesh, Harit Pradesh and Bundelkhand Pradesh. And he, for one, hopes to see a Braj Pradesh, together with parts of Rajasthan, created before he dies.

  The courtyard is now in shade; the room is thrown into shadow. The sun must have gone behind a cloud. When we crossed the courtyard, on our way to lunch, sunlight had flickered in little pools on the mosaic – pink alternating with yellow – but now it is uniformly even. This room where we sit is pleasant too. Green arches, pale green mosaic, antique chairs with some sort of a furry throw on them. I tell the Chaubeys how beautiful I find the old town to be. ‘Funny you should say so,’ he remarks. ‘Young brides these days don’t want to live in these old houses any more. They want to live in those new flats coming up beyond Govardhan Chauraha. New kitchens, marble, AC vents on windows. To the youngsters, the old town is a litany of complaints: waterlogging in the rains, narrow lanes, crowds of pilgrims, old-fashioned people.’ He says this without malice, however, as though understanding of such fancies. The nephew looks a bit shifty and gazes at the ground. ‘But one thing is there about the old city: great warmth, great bonhomie. That these children will not get in the new townships.’

  The conversation goes on. I see dada walking about in the courtyard. I hear children playing outside. Chickens clucking. Songs on the radio. I half-hear S taking their leave: we have to go into town for a few errands. Lovely talking. Is there a courier shop nearby? The nephew answers in detail. The old gentleman says enigmatically, after we get up, ‘I’ll tell you two things before you leave. The first is a couplet we firmly believe in: Mathura ki beti/ Mathura ki gai/ Bhaag phute/ Toh baahar jai.’ (A daughter of Mathura/ Its milch cow too/ Only if her luck runs out/ Will she look for a city new.) He gets up and walks to the door with us. ‘The second is this: the gopis are never going to leave Braj.’

  Outside, though the sky is suffused with light, I cannot feel the sun on my face. The river is still. There are clouds gathering in the sky. But by evening they’ll have blown over.

  41

  It is one of those days. We feel overburdened and yet light as air. We want to meld into the strange town as though we belong. Not have to look for more than an instant or a half-glance at that face or this sign painted on a blue door or the little girl in pigtails: the twisted skein of clues – the lanes, the dharmashalas, the samosas, the kirana shops – is entirely familiar. Not take any photographs. Not wonder why it is so dirty (it is very dirty) or extend the conversation to a philosophical position on why India is so dirty (colonialism made people give up on the macro-world over which they had no control and in which they had no stake, to withdraw inside micro-worlds, homes, which are, to the contrary, scrupulously clean) or even exclaim at the perfect adorableness of the menagerie that peacefully inhabits the most distinguished pile of rubbish (it is a giant mound of trash by the walls of a white house where cows, pigs, ducks, dogs, cats and monkeys cloister). We do not look curiously at passers-by in the hope that they will reveal something meaningful. We don’t wear the friendly traveller smile.

  We sit in the rickshaw and talk about the possibilities of money, and our plans, not noticing the giant poster stuck on an unplastered wall: ‘Meet Tina, Super-successful animator. Like her, you can be, part of the booming animation industry.’ We speak intensely, about our own troubles, as though we care nothing for the Salmon Institute of Technology and Management, or sheep nodding rhythmically in a street clogged with thousands of motorbikes and bicycles, or even at the bank of black clouds that roll in.

  We simply rush ahead in our need to get to the kotwali and courier the little present – a green flannel hippie cloak – for our nephew in Calcutta. Mathura has reminded me that winter is waning rapidly in the plains and the gift, bought in cold Paharganj, has been lying in my bag for days. If we are in time and it goes out tonight, maybe it’ll reach in two days and he can wear it to school before Calcutta gives over to summer. We might have to find an Internet cafe and check our mail (the hotel is in an unfortunate blank zone). We might have chai and samosas somewhere. That is all.

  It is one of those days when the book could not matter less.

  Ironically, I realize while writing, it is also one of those days when we have relinquished our lives to the reality of books: that real living is experienced only in the pages of books. Otherwise, it is the mere marking of time.

  42

  ‘Two tickets to Govardhan,’ the conductor repeats, handing us stubs. He takes off his sunglasses and slips them into his pocket, he flashes a bright smile, exhibiting a fine pair of teeth. His khaki shirt is unbuttoned at the collar. He wears a bright red vest underneath.

  ‘Can we get a bus to Barsana?’ S asks him.

  ‘You’re going to Barsana?’ the conductor repeats, as though he’s not quite sure why we might want to do that.

  We nod.

  ‘There is no bus route to Barsana,’ he says. ‘The road is very bad. You will have to take a vikram on share.’ Vikrams are three-wheelers, larger than regular autos, and sturdier. ‘They leave every half an hour from Govardhan for Barsana.’

  Outside the window, we can already see the eponymous Govardhan hill, brown with green patches, sharp against the azure sky. According to the Bhagavata Purana, at Govardhan, the villagers of Braj would gather for an autumnal festival in honour of Indra. This was a ceremony that was in practice from the days of yore. Krishna, however, told them that instead of worshipping far-off gods, they ought to give thanks for gifts that were closer home. Under his guidance, the villagers performed a giri yajna for the first time. Their cows were decorated, fed heartily, and sent off to do a circumambulation of the hill. After all, most of these villagers were cowherds, and the fertility of their charges is what would ensure their general well-being

  (go-vardhan literally means an increase in the number of cows). They prepared great mounds of food for the benevolent hill deity, and Krishna, appearing as Govardhan, accepted their ritual offerings. Naturally, Indra was most annoyed at this turn of events – at his devotees suddenly taking refuge in a mere mortal and neglecting the proper gods their ancestors had worshipped! As he unleashed his fury, dark rain clouds gathered above the hill, and day turned dark like night. Rain and hailstones began to pound the lands and forests of Braj and lightning zigzagged across the sky. Krishna retaliated with an impossibly elegant solution. He simply lifted the mountain with his little finger and held it aloft like a giant umbrella that would protect the villagers and their livestock. The storm continued for a week but since Krishna would not budge, it was Indra who had to finally give up and withdraw his arsenal.

  Govardhan is widely regarded as a central trope within the landscape of Krishna. The day after Diwali, the great Annakut festival is held in its honour, when fifty-six types of delicacies– chhappan bhog – are prepared by the women, and thousands of locals, pilgrims and cows make the ritual circumambulation, led, not by a priest but by a local Yadava. Since our time is limited, we have decided to defer the popular Krishna-lila tour for the next time. It is supposed to be a promising if slightly meandering journey through the Braj landscape, stopping at every site linked to Krishna lore (here he stole the gopis’ clothes; here he sported with the gopis in the moonlit grove;
here he showed Yashoda the cosmos revolving in his mouth) culminating in the ritual circumambulation of Govardhan. Instead, we shall visit Barsana, the birthplace of Radha.

  It is some sort of a personal pilgrimage for me. More than any other heroine ever, it is Radhika who was my lodestar for the longest time. In my growing years, peculiar hormonal configurations had induced a great hunger in me for the tragic. I did not rate any love story highly in which a couple were granted a happy ending. After all the lovemaking in forests and secret bowers, dancing to his flute and playing in the rain, Krishna left Vrindavan for Mathura, after which he became the ruler of Dwarka, never returning to his childhood home or sweetheart. What happened to Radha after he left is not recorded, though various poetic opinions are hazarded. Madness, self-imposed exile or death – some say she walked into the dark waters of the Yamuna one evening – are general theories. (Thus, if we were to follow Virginia Woolf’s theorization on the matter, Radhika was also a lost writer.)

  Radha, whose beauty and pride are unequalled in legend, has remained in literature as the youthful heroine whose lover has gone away, leaving her to walk their old haunts alone, shuddering at the memories each place evokes. The poster child of vipralambha shringara, as it were, matched perhaps only by Kalidasa’s yaksha as he grieves for his yakshini and employs the clouds to send a message to her. Every mundane thing is redolent of the Dark One: rain clouds, the neck of a peacock which is also the colour ‘shyam’, her own reflection in a clear pool, the reeds by the river where they lay together.

  The final statement on Radha’s viraha might be said to have come from Tagore in an astoundingly powerful song where Radha likens Death to her Shyam:

  Marana re tuhu mama Shyama saman

  Megha barana tujha megha jata juta

  Rakta kamala kara, rakta adhara puta,

  Taapa bimochana, karuna kora tava,

  Mrityu amrita kare daan

  Tuhu mama Shyama samaan

  (Death, you are to me, my Shyama;

  Your rain-cloud complexion, your dreadlocks rain-cloud too

  Blood-red your lotus limbs, your lips a blood-red hue;

  There is compassion in your lap; it soothes my heat,

  Grants to me the nectar of death,

  You equal Shyama to me.)

  Though Radha was known for a long time in Indic texts, the centrality accorded to her in Vaishnava myth and cult is a comparatively recent phenomenon. She became popular in Sanskrit poetry only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Though Krishna’s dalliance with the gopis is an important theme in Bhagavata Purana (composed around ad 900), Radha does not appear in it. Her acceptance by the Vaishnavas seems to have happened sometime between the composition of the Bhagavata Purana and Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, which was written in the twelfth century in Bengal or Odisha.

  I first encountered Gitagovinda in a historical romance by the Bengali writer Saradindu Banerjee, Tungabhadrar Teere (By the Tungabhadra), set in Vijayanagar. Though it was not a tragedy, it quickly became one of my favourite love stories. In it, the hero Arjunavarma uses the most profound line from Gitagovinda to woo the heroine Vidyutmala: ‘Dehi pada pallavamudaram’. (Place your foot on my head, says Krishna, seeking forgiveness from Radha.) Later on, when I studied the text in a course on Bhakti literature in my MA days, I learnt the context for these lines that I’d only half-understood then, though the suppressed erotics had made me all tingly. In Gitagovinda, when Radha sees Krishna dancing with hundreds of other gopis, she is furious and refuses to see him. Finally, he comes to her to beg forgiveness and says the ‘apocryphal’ lines – Dehi pada pallavamudaram.

  Jayadeva, the poet, wanted to ascribe these words to Krishna, as he begs forgiveness of his beloved, but Jayadeva, the devotee, demurred. When he presented this problem to his wife, dancer Padmavati, she suggested he take a bath, eat lunch and then they would think about it together. Jayadeva left absent-mindedly. When he finally returned home, still undecided, Padmavati was shocked. But hadn’t he just returned, eaten lunch and retired into his study to write? Of course she was sure of it – didn’t she talk to him as they ate? There was something strange in this affair. The couple rushed wordlessly to the study. It was as bare as Jayadeva had left it. But, as he came close to the manuscript, he found that the verse had been completed:

  Place your foot on my head –

  A sublime flower-destroying poison of love!

  Let your foot quell the harsh sun

  Burning its fiery form in me to torment Love.

  (Translation by Barbara Stoler Miller 113)

  It is no exaggeration to say that Radha is the central character of Gitagovinda, even though Krishna is portrayed as both the lover and ‘lord of the universe’. It is also a text that feminists love to refer to. In a triumph of the female-centred Tantric traditions of yore, it is Radha who comes out on top in the love play; it is she who decides the post-coital rituals. The feminism is a crucial Shakta intervention in the Vaishnavite Charyapada tradition and reverses the purusha-prakriti relationship to privilege Shakti, the unchanging principle. Unlike in Bhakti poetics where the bhakta is the seeker and the divinity the centre, in Gitagovinda, it is Radha who is the still point at the heart of the text, and Krishna the seeker.

  Govardhan is hectic, noisy, and absolutely bustling with pilgrims. Little groups of men, women and children of different ages rush to do a parikrama of Govardhan hill, then rush to the small restaurants to eat ghee-laden food to their fill. I am not going to lie, the aroma of desi ghee being browned in massive cast-iron pans fills our hearts with hope. We decide to eat there on the way back from Barsana. For now, we cross the road and start walking in the direction of the vikram stand. It is a busy square; cackling rickshaws, honking cars and giant yellow tankers fill the narrow roads; hawkers gawk; a camel pulls a cart. Several highly committed pilgrims have decided that on the way to the Krishna temple, they will not only walk barefoot – everyone does that – but via a series of sashtanga pranams. Which translates into the following jumpy formula: they will lie flat on the ground, mark the spot where their head reaches, stand there, lie down again. It is a tortuous process, but not the most difficult of mannats. Elsewhere, we have seen Shiv kanwariyas carrying water and walking barefoot to Haridwar from Delhi and back, the old and toothless climbing 9,999 steps to Girnar, chatting and sipping juice, thin men travelling to Nizamuddin Dargah in weather-beaten buses over weeks and cooking humble meals on the road. This is stuff we Indians routinely do.

  The vikram is a curious vehicle. There are seats on both sides, which quickly get filled. Six people each. We occupy the minimum number of inches possible, and look outside. Our assistant driver stands beside the vehicle and calls out for passengers. Another four people are fitted in front. ‘Can we go now?’ I ask. But the guy waves my question away. He quickly rounds up a woman holding a baby, accompanied by her husband and two older kids. They are found seats at the back, in what would be the dicky in a regular auto, where a wooden plank serves as a bench. The woman sits coolly, facing the traffic behind us, and after ensuring her kids are alright (one is on the father’s lap, the other between them) she begins to breastfeed the baby. Her head is neatly covered, but her bosom is bare. All very nonchalantly executed. Another man sits next to the husband. The assistant and another guy then stand on the floor of the vehicle, their bodies almost entirely outside. They chat from the top and even play with their mobiles while the vikram negotiates, first, horrendous traffic, and then, after we leave the main streets of Govardhan and lush green fields open up on either side, horrendous potholed roads. Though Barsana is only about 25 miles north of Mathura, it takes us upwards of an hour to get there.

  What happens to me in Barsana is peculiar. Perhaps because of the personal significance of the journey, and how charged the moment is for me, my memory presents me with a bag of tricks. There are certain images I retain vividly. There are certain things that have gon
e blank – and for the life of me, I cannot summon up any details. To top that, there are no notes for Barsana. I was so sure that the details were indelible in my head I took no notes (a callous decision undoubtedly).

  So I shall tell you in the order I remember. There is a cloistered little town area; a busy mixed lot of Hindus and Muslims; shops

  on carts that sell fruits and jalebis; a green mosque in the corner; massive garbage dumps. From there, we go uphill to the prettier part of the town, where a beautiful haveli stands, though it is deserted and unkempt. The Radharani temple is at the top of the hill. The way up has steps hewn into the rock face, on either side of which are small traditionally designed houses that are intended to go uphill as well. These are painted in bright colours: pinks, greens, creams and blues. On the stairway, people coming down greet others with ‘Radhe-Radhe’.

  And then, truth be told, I have nothing. No recollection of the temple, the idol, the others who must have been present.