India (59 page)

When Saravankumar and his wife moved into the new house, certain rituals had been necessary. “We didn’t call a Brahmin priest. My uncle recited the Thevaram, a compilation of songs by three poets with no Sanskrit in the text.” He was making a point here about Tamil being distinct from Sanskrit, which he projected as being a discrete language of the north and of the Brahmins (academics dispute this point). He felt the Tamil language, with its tens of millions of speakers, deserved respect. In part, Saravankumar’s opinions were a product of Periyar E. V. Ramaswamy’s self-respect movement and the construction of a strong Tamil identity in revolt against the ancient power of the upper castes. In earlier eras, Telugu and Kannada cultural influences would have made their way among the people and kingdoms of the south.

“The elders felt obliged to come to the house and do a ritual. Part of the
kinship structure here is that the family have the right of veto over what you can do. My uncle is seventy-nine, older than my father, so for a time he became the ‘owner’ of our property, to do the rituals. That’s how it is. He lit lamps, he broke a fresh coconut: it’s a package. At the time of my marriage, I got married four times: Syrian Christian, Catholic, Hindu and non-Sanskritized Tamil. The idea of conciliation is an important part of our culture. People here are not xenophobic—if German or American business partners come to Chennai, we open out stakes to them without feeling threatened. The south has always been mobile, right across Asia. You create your home wherever you go. Your culture goes with you. The current president of Singapore is a Tamil.

“Even before independence we had guaranteed seats in the south for non-Brahmins in educational institutions. Groups like the Nadars—whose great-grandparents were toddy-tappers, climbing up palm trees to tap the sap—have done extremely well. The tech company HCL, which is very successful, is run by one. Our politics are more advanced than in the north. If I go to Delhi and take a taxi—this has happened to me, coming from the airport—the driver will say to me because I don’t speak Hindi: ‘Are you Indian?’ I want to remove that. Being an Indian works best if you start respecting inexactitude. Nehru recognized that India was plural. The south Indian imagination is like a banyan tree where the roots and the branches have constant interplay.

“At the time the British came, there were no major kings left here, so it was more of a dialogue about what sort of institutions and system we needed. Some of the great Tamil texts combine Hindu, Jain and Buddhist teachings, so Hinduism in Tamil Nadu comes from that interplay. We have had Christians coming to our coast since the second century, like St. Thomas the apostle, who died here. We never had Muslim rulers. The northerners—with their essential resentment about being ruled for so long—have grown into bigotry. We have had Muslims with us since the eighth century, but only for spice trading. They lived in pockets of their own and spoke Tamil. They even prayed in Tamil, though in the last twenty years they have become more Arabic.”
²¹
Yet the curious thing was that, as he spoke, I remembered a similar house-blessing ceremony about three years earlier, done a few hundred miles away in Kerala. The Muslim imam, his head wrapped in a white turban, had performed religious rituals involving coconuts, boiled milk and sugar which seemed much like those done by Hindus.

•   •   •

Chandraswami was born a couple of years after independence. He grew up in Hyderabad, and said he had travelled first to the jungles of central India to meditate, and then to the mountains of Nepal, where he had purportedly slept in a tree until he achieved self-realization. After an unsuccessful stint in the Youth Congress, he found that it was possible to exert greater power through offering religious guidance.

In his early days Chandraswami had been a herbal healer and masseur, promising to restore the sexual power of old men with the correct elixir, and by his late twenties he had moved on and attracted some followers. By the early 1980s he had been taken up by an assortment of world leaders. Using one leader as a prop to leap to the next, he travelled the world accompanied by an entourage and a photo album featuring himself with Ferdinand Marcos, the Sultan of Brunei, Indira Gandhi, Daniel Ortega, Elizabeth Taylor, Edward Seaga, Mobutu Sese Seko—and many more.

He was not a sophisticated man, but he had an uncanny talent for entering the heads of others. The swami looked chubby, grubby and unkempt, wearing a dhoti kurta, sandals and a chunky gold rosary, a large red tilak on his forehead, leaning on a silver-topped black cane. His talent was for reading weakness, particularly in someone in a position of authority who had the loneliness and anticipation of betrayal that comes with an excess of power and money. In Mobutu’s case, Chandraswami would hide himself behind a curtain while the Zairean president met a general or a minister, and tell him afterwards (despite the linguistic gap—Mobutu was speaking in French) whether they could be trusted. With the massively wealthy Sultan of Brunei, his focus was on gaining the trust of his wife Mariam, who he realized was in a vulnerable position at court; she needed a son, and he assured her he could make it happen. In India, Chandraswami’s position was nebulous, but he strengthened it by acts of generosity, like feeding 10,000 hungry pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela. On his travels, he might give someone a ruby or a Rolex, and often the gift would lead to the receipt of more gifts in return (Mobutu reportedly paid the swami in diamonds).

Chandraswami’s entourage went a long way to boosting his reputation. Like latter-day rappers, he knew that anyone who was surrounded by staff and security looked important. His principal sidekick, known as Mamaji, or uncle, would tell people he was a very important religious leader, list his more famous disciples and whisper that he was one of India’s five spiritual
kings. In the atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s (when these things could not be checked with the help of the Internet) his approach often drew an excited response.

During Narasimha Rao’s premiership, he was known as the prime minister’s Rasputin. There were various reasons for this alliance—the swami had paid for Rao’s heart surgery while he was out of office, which must have exerted a considerable emotional pressure on Rao, who was a few days short of seventy when he became prime minister. When Rao left office, the swami fell to earth and his career was finished. He was charged with conspiracy in a bribery case and accused of involvement with the Tamil Tigers over Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, although he had become close to Rajiv after a rapprochement during his last years in power.
²²

When I went to see him at his ashram in 2010, Chandraswami was looking old and fat. He sat with his legs propped up on a padded stool, leaning back on something like a reclining airline chair, cushioned on what appeared to be an animal skin. His forehead was marked with wide smears of red and orange paste, still wet from his morning puja. With cases still running against him in the courts, he would not speak about his earlier career. “I am only the medium. All else comes from the almighty. I can predict the past, present and future.”
²³
An aide handed me a printed brochure as I was ushered away from his presence. It was filled with photographs: Nixon, Carter, Arafat, Adnan Khashoggi—and always the swami, looking triumphantly serene beside them. I examined the brochure as I drove home:

He told me he had predicted Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory, and that she had thanked him for it.

Shankar had travelled with Chandraswami during the 1980s: “Swami was meeting a lot of different people at that time—the Sultan of Brunei, Tiny Rowland, Mohammed al Fayed, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus in the U.S. About seven or ten of us would travel with him, usually. We went to Mobutu’s apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, which was
filled with unopened shopping bags and boxes. All sorts of people were around: film stars, politicians, princesses, hookers, some very rich people from Germany. The journeys were often done on Adnan Khashoggi’s flying palace, a DC-8. That was in the days before everyone had planes. One time we were on board the DC-8 and a little priest from Madras who was in the entourage was fiddling around with all the switches. He points to one red button and asks Khashoggi what happens if he presses it. Khashoggi says, deadpan: ‘We all blow up.’ He goes back to his seat. You’ve never seen the look on that priest’s face.

“We went to visit Mobutu in Kinshasa and stayed in a house that had beautiful cutlery and dishes, and fridges full of champagne, but there was nothing at all to eat. He sent us to his ancestral village, and the plane had to land on a runway with goats and cows wandering around. Naked children were walking by the side of the road. We found there was not much in Mobutu’s village except a farmhouse with a disco or nightclub attached to it. Swami laid some bricks to do a havan, a fire ritual, he put some wood and ghee, took some incense, broke lots of coconuts, chanted some hocus pocus.”

Although Shankar was dismissive of Chandraswami, he was not a sceptic, and respected those with what he saw as spiritual power. “Some years ago a ‘vastu’ guy, someone who advises on these things, came to our house on the recommendation of a friend. I said, come and have a drink, and told him I was a bit stuck on some things in my life. He asked to see the kitchen. The positioning of the fire and water in your kitchen is important—the cooker and the sink. He said immediately, you have to change where the fire is, so we had the kitchen broken and made it another way. Things became easier after that. He never charged any money, and I never saw him again. He just drew the thing out on a sheet of paper—that was it. I had a couple of large projects I was working on, and after that the money just started pouring in.

“Last year I was told I needed to wear a Burmese ruby for good fortune. I wore it and felt like I was having a heart attack. I consulted another guy, and was told my sun sign was being ramped up much too far by the ruby.” He lifted his hand. “Now I wear an emerald on my little finger, and a diamond on another finger.” For Shankar, the swami was insufficiently qualified. “He was not a learned man and didn’t know about Hindu traditions. Swami was able to make people beholden to him, and he had extraordinary charm. He would say some nonsensical mantra, or normal dialogue in Hindi as if it was meant to be a prayer. To those people, who didn’t know the language,
it sounded like a mantra. He might say, ‘Danger coming, I do prayer for you.’ At the time, people wanted to hear all this, and to believe him. He would say that he could feel a vibration in the earth and could see your village, or some such thing.”
²⁴

•   •   •

Dileep Kumar was born in Mylapore in 1967 to a teenage mother and an older father. The father had raised himself from the slums by writing music for Malayalam and Tamil movies, and taught his son how to sing and to play the harmonium at the age of five. When Dileep was nine, his father died—the boy believed from some form of black magic, because melted wax and bird feathers were found in the house before his death. He had no choice but to support the family and turned up to recording sessions to play a keyboard twice his own size. At first he was employed as a favour to his late father, but by the time he reached his mid-teens he was gaining a reputation.

Dileep had an additional skill: he knew the inside as well as the outside of a keyboard, and could mend any electronic instrument. (His father’s father was an electrician who in his spare time composed bhajans, or devotional songs, to sing at the temple.) His method of working was different from other people’s, and he refused to follow the hierarchical conventions of the Tamil music scene, turning up to formal events wearing denim. At school in Chennai, where learning was highly regarded, Dileep was a failure and was often rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by his teachers. He took to composing ad jingles for radio and played in a band called L. Shankar and the Epidemics.

His break came in his early twenties when Mani Ratnam asked him to be the musical director of a new film,
Roja
, about a woman whose husband is kidnapped by Kashmiri separatists. A bizarre pattern of behaviour started to show itself around this time. Dileep Kumar had always spoken little, but now he said almost nothing at all, and did not mention the
Roja
commission to anyone. He set to work, doing things his way. A singer might receive a call in the middle of the night and be asked if she would sing a song immediately over an Internet link. A musician might finish tuning up a sitar and find himself dismissed from the studio, since the recording was already in the bag—Dileep wanted the sound of tuning. He might use a practice version of a song because it contained more passion than the more accurate version. A sound engineer might be summoned to record Dileep
singing (although he had stopped calling himself Dileep by now) because he had awoken from a dream with divine inspiration. All of these snatches of sound were woven together using novel technology and turned into extraordinary soundtracks, together with freshly composed music influenced by anyone from Bach to Andrew Lloyd Webber, from swing to pop, from Qawwali to Carnatic music. He was scrupulous about giving credit to his collaborators.

Roja
was a hit, and so was the young composer. His family had always been heavily superstitious and concerned with numerology, and now a Hindu astrologer named Ulaganathan told him he would become world famous if his name was prefixed by the letters “A” and “R.” Together with his sisters and mother, he had recently converted to Sufi Islam, believing the rules of the faith would give him a mental discipline Hinduism could not. He was also concerned that the Hindu deities his father had worshipped had been turned against him by those who wished to do him evil. So Dileep took a new name and a new faith: he would be called Allah Rakka (or A. R.) Rahman.
²⁵
From then on, everything he did would be oriented around his profound devotion to god. Although he was an observant Muslim, always following the call to prayer and washing in the prescribed way, A. R. Rahman’s new religion contained elements of his old, complex, superstitious Hindu devotion. He said that music could not be forbidden by Islam because it brought forth “good thoughts” and was a route to the divine.