India (25 page)

Haters of idolatry, haters of all that was not the true faith, establishers in Goa of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics, levellers of Hindu temples, the Portuguese had created in Goa something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spaniards in Mexico. They had created in India something not of India, a simplicity, something where the Indian past had been abolished. And after 450 years all they had left behind in this emptiness and simplicity was their religion, their language (without a literature), their names, a Latin-like colonial population, and this cult, from their cathedral, of the Image of the Infant Jesus.

Nearly everything else of Portugal had been swallowed up in the colonial emptiness. There had been a statue of the poet Camoens in the main square of Old Goa – Camoens, the author of the
Lusiads
(1572), the epic of the expansion of Portugal, and the true faith, overseas. But the statue was taken down (and placed in the museum) after Goa had been absorbed into independent India; and a statue of Mahatma Gandhi was put up in that 16th-century Portuguese square.

Camoens knew Goa and East Africa and Malaya and China; he was like Cervantes in Spain, an old adventurer in imperial wars. He was the first great poet of modern Europe to write of India and Indians; and he wrote out of the hard-won knowledge of a decade and a half of 16th-century wandering. There is a wonderful living sense of south-western India in his poem, not only in its account of kings and castes and religion and temples (the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, destroyed by the Muslims seven years before Camoens published his poem, is felt to be in the background), but also in dozens of smaller things: the Indian ruler, for instance, who receives the just-arrived Vasco da Gama, chews pan to the 16th-century Portuguese rhythms of Camoens’s verse.

It might have been thought that Goa would have been as proud to claim Camoens as it was proud to claim Saint Francis Xavier. But the statue had been taken down; and though the hotel place-setting repetitively proclaimed the antiquity of Portuguese Goa,
there was no copy of his poem in the hotel bookshop, and no one there even knew his name. India had its own priorities and values. The tourists who came in coaches to the square of Old Goa came less for the architecture (and the statue of Mahatma Gandhi) than for the Image of the Infant Jesus in the cathedral. They bought bundles of wax tapers and lit them in a cloister.

Old Goa was very old. Almost as many years separated it from the present as separated the final Roman defeat of Carthage from the fall of Rome itself. And Portugal (though it lived on in 20th-century Europe) had become the museum here. A new middle-class India had become the tourists. That was an astonishing twist in history. Portugal had arrived in 1498 and triumphed in 1509–10. Just over half a century later the great Hindu empire in the South, the empire of Vijayanagar, was defeated and physically laid waste by a combination of Muslim rulers; almost at the same time, in the North, the Mogul power was entering its time of glory. It might have seemed then that Hindu India, without the new learning and the new tools of Europe, its rulers without the idea of country or nation, without the political ideas that might have helped them to preserve their people from foreign rule – it might have seemed then that Hindu India was on the verge of extinction, something to be divided between Christian Europe and the Muslim world, and all its religious symbols and difficult theology rendered as meaningless as the Aztec gods in Mexico, or the symbolism of Hindu Angkor.

But it hadn’t been like that. Through all the twists and turns of history, through all the imperial venturings in this part of the world, which that Portuguese arrival in India portended, and finally through the unlikely British presence in India, a Hindu India had grown again, more complete and unified than any India in the past.

History in Goa was simple. In the long colonial emptiness the pre-Portuguese past had ceased to matter; it was something to be picked up from books; and then the 450 years of Portuguese rule was like a single idea that anyone could carry about with him. To leave Goa, to go south and west along the narrow, winding mountain road into the state of Karnataka, was to enter India and its complicated history again.

Just as Portuguese rule had given a great simplicity to the history of Goa, so British rule gave a direction to later Indian history and made it easier to grasp. Events, at a certain stage, could be seen to
be leading up to British rule; and, thereafter, events could be seen leading to the end of that rule. To read of events in India before the coming of the British is like reading of many pieces of unfinished business; it is to read of a condition of flux, of things partly done and then partly undone, matters more properly the subject of annals rather than narrative history, which works best when it deals with great things being built up or pulled down.

Historical names were on that road down through Karnataka. Bijapur was one such name. It was the name of a Muslim kingdom, established almost at the same time as the Portuguese in Goa (Goa had, in fact, been taken away from Bijapur). The name was associated in my mind not with Goa or Old Goa, but with a fine, Persian-influenced 17th-century school of miniature painting: the very name brought the faces and the postures and the special colours and costumes to my mind. But how did Bijapur fit into the history of the region? What were its dates, its boundaries? Who were its rulers and enemies? It was hard to carry all of that in the mind: I would have to look it up in the books, and even then (though I would learn that it had lasted two centuries) I would get no more than the bare bones of dates and rulers. Its achievements, after all, hadn’t been that great; there was nothing in its history to catch the mind, as there was in the art (and the architecture, from my reading: a certain kind of dome). And so that name of Bijapur, and the other historical names on the road south, were like random memories in an old man’s mind.

There had been too many kingdoms, too many rulers, too many changes of boundaries. The state of Karnataka itself was a new creation, post-British, post-independence, a linguistic state, answering the new pride, the new sense of self, that the nationalist movement had fostered.

The land was sacred, but it wasn’t political history that made it so. Religious myths touched every part of the land outside colonial Goa. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.

All the way south through Karnataka there were buses full of young men strangely dressed, in black tunics and black lower
cloths. They looked like young men on a holiday excursion, but the black they wore was unsettling. When I got to Bangalore I learned that the men in black were on a pilgrimage. They were going to a shrine in the southernmost state of Kerala. The shrine honoured Ayappa, a Hindu ruler and saint of days gone by. The pilgrimage was essentially a Hindu affair; but the pilgrims to Ayappa were also required, in an unlikely way, to do honour to Vavar, an Arab and a Muslim, who had been a friend and ally of Ayappa’s.

Only men could go on that pilgrimage, and for 40 days they had to live penitentially. No meat, no liquor, no activity conducive purely to pleasure; and they had to stay away from women. The last stage of the pilgrimage was a 25-mile walk up a hill to the shrine of Ayappa. There, on a particular day in January, a divine light appeared. Not everyone who went on the pilgrimage went for the light; most people walked up to the shrine on days when there was no light.

I learned all this from a young man who befriended me in Bangalore. His name was Deviah; he wrote about science for a daily newspaper. He came from a farming family; produce from the family land was still sometimes sent to him in Bangalore by the night bus. Deviah had been on the pilgrimage for the first time eight years before. He had gone when he was feeling low, and was oppressed by thoughts that he had done very little in the five years since he had left college. He thought he had been changed by the pilgrimage – the discipline of the 40 penitential days, the long walk up to the shrine, the companionship on that walk, and seeing the way people had begun to help one another. He also felt he had had professional luck afterwards; and he had gone almost every year since then. Deviah didn’t believe in the divine light. He thought it might be only burning camphor, and the work of a human agency; but it didn’t lessen his faith. It didn’t lessen his wonder at the story of Ayappa.

This was the story Deviah told.

‘Ayappa was a real figure, about 800 years ago. He was born in interesting circumstances. Raja Rajashekhar didn’t have children. He and his queen did penance to Shiva and asked for the gift of a son. One day when Raja Rajashekhar was out hunting on the banks of the River Pampa – which in Kerala is as holy as the Ganges in the north: it can wash away your sins – he found a boy child with a
bell attached to its neck. The raja began to look for the parents of the child. A
rishi
, a sage, appeared – in fact, the rishi was Lord Shiva himself – and told the raja that the child was meant for him. The raja, the rishi said, was to take the child to the palace and bring him up as his son. “But whose child is he?” Raja Rajashekhar asked. The rishi said, “You will find out on the boy’s twelfth birthday.”

‘So Raja Rajshekhar took the foundling to the palace and looked after him. That palace is still there, by the way. It is not like the maharajas’ palaces you see today. It is quite a small house. The raja looked after the child as his own, and it began to be understood that the boy would succeeed Raja Rajashekhar when the time came.

The raja’s chief minister didn’t like that. During all the years of the raja’s childlessness the chief minister had grown to believe that his own son would one day inherit the kingdom. So, from the very start, the chief minister hated Ayappa.

‘When Ayappa was ten years old, something unexpected happened. The queen gave birth to a son. But Raja Rajashekhar had grown so attached to Ayappa, the foundling, the gift of the gods, that he made it clear that Ayappa was still to succeeed him on the throne.

The queen and chief minister now began to conspire. Their plan was this. The queen was to pretend to fall ill. She would say she had a headache. The palace doctor – who was also in the conspiracy – would make a show of doing everything he knew. The queen’s headache wouldn’t go away, and at last the doctor would say, “There is only one thing that can save the queen’s life. She must be given the milk of a tigress.”

That was what the queen, the chief minister, and the doctor plotted to do, and that was what they did. Raja Rajashekhar was driven to despair. How could the milk of a tigress be obtained? How could anyone milk a tigress? The queen and the chief minister, however, knew very well what would happen. They knew that Ayappa was valorous, and they knew that, though he was only ten, as soon as Ayappa heard of the queen’s need, he would undertake to go out and bring back the milk of a tigress. And that was what Ayappa said he intended to do. Raja Rajashekhar knew it would be suicide for Ayappa to try to milk a tigress, and he forbade the boy to leave the palace. But Ayappa used a trick and got out, deceiving the raja in order to save the queen.’

That was how the first part of the story ended. When Deviah began the second part, he said, ‘So far we’ve been dealing with history. Now we enter the realms of mythology. In order to understand why Ayappa was born, we have to go back 3000 years.’

And, slipping easily down the aeons, we began to travel back to the time of the gods.

Deviah said, ‘Ayappa was really the son of Shiva and Vishnu.’ They were both male deities, but for the purposes of the story Vishnu had to be considered to be in a female incarnation: Deviah had no trouble with these transformations. So the Ayappa who went out into the forest to get the milk of a tigress was not the mere boy the queen and the chief minister thought. He was the son of two of the gods of the Hindu trinity.

Deviah said, ‘When he was wandering in the forest he came across a demon, and he killed the demon.’ There was a story attached to this demon. Deviah was quite ready to break off the main narrative and give the inset story. I asked him not to.

He said, ‘All right. To cut a long story short, the monster or demon Ayappa killed in the forest was a female monster, and she had been terrorizing the
devas.
’ They were the gods – residing and having their councils in the place where gods reside. (Ayappa must have killed the monster by some means not available to the gods. There would have been another story here, and Deviah almost certainly knew it.) When the monster was killed, there was rejoicing among the gods. They, of course, knew what Ayappa’s predicament was. ‘So,’ Deviah said, ‘out of gratitude, the gods turned themselves into tigers and tigresses, and Ayappa came back to Raja Rajshekhar’s palace riding a tiger. The tiger was believed to be Brahma.’ The son of Shiva and Vishnu, riding Brahma: completing the Hindu trinity.

Deviah said, ‘This forest expedition of Ayappa’s had lasted two years. The queen’s headache had long been cured. In fact, she had lost her headache as soon as Ayappa had left the palace to go and milk a tigress. And the day Ayappa returned to Raja Rajashkehar’s palace, he was twelve years old.’

The identity of Ayappa – coming back riding a tiger – was now clear to everyone. It was what the rishi, who was Lord Shiva himself, had prophesied: that on the foundling’s twelfth birthday his parentage would be known. And now all enemies, all the
conspiring of queen and chief minister, vanished like morning mist, and Ayappa in due course entered into his inheritance.

The wicked chief minister, who had wanted his own son to rule, fell ill with an incurable disease – a real disease. One night Ayappa appeared to him in a dream and told him to go and wash away his sins in the River Pampa. So he did, and was cured; and then, calling Ayappa’s name, the chief minister ran all the way to the temple which Ayappa had been divinely guided to build at the top of a hill. He, the chief minister or former chief minister, thus became the first of Ayappa’s pilgrims.