Back of Beyond (40 page)
Of course, not all battles were successful. The ancient oracle’s prediction that Jaisalmer would be sacked “two and one-half times” proved to be true, and traveling historian-bards (
charans
) still sing of the great seven-year seige of 1295
A.D.
in the reign of Allud-din Khiljii. Recognizing imminent defeat, the Bhattis slaughtered their own women and children, smoked their ritual pipes of opium, and stormed out of the great Elephant Gate to be massacred, in the thousands, in an infamous
johar
by the invading armies. A similar johar was repeated a few decades later, followed in the sixteenth century by a “half-johar” when a “friendly” leader of a desert tribe managed a sneaky attack as far as the palace gates. The Rawal of Jaisalmer killed off most of his own royal family to prevent their capture before the invaders were finally beaten off and he was left heirless in his broken citadel.
Below the broody walls of the fort, built of huge blocks of unmortared golden sandstone, is the Manik Chowk, the hectic marketplace of the city, teeming with peddlers, fruit sellers, goatherds with their flocks, camel drovers (
raiskas
) offering expeditions way out into the Thar Desert to the great silky Dunes of Samm or, in late August, a long journey to the Ramderra Fair to see the famous “tera-tali” acrobats and the “horse-worshipers” at the Ramdevra shrine. I had hoped to arrange a journey to the great Tilwara Cattle Fair way out near the Pakistan border at Banner, but that is in January and I was too late.
The streets nearby are lined with exquisite eighteenth-century
havelis
or merchants’ houses, all honey colored and dripping with ornately carved stone facades, the work of Jaisalmer’s
silavats
. A few are now museums or showrooms for the city’s richly embroidered brocades and silks and carved marble statutory. Their cool interior courtyards are as richly decorated as the facades, soaring slabs of sandstone chiseled to lacelike tracery by the skilled silavats.
“Pleased to come in, sir.” A small, age-bent gentleman in long flowing robes caught me trying to photograph the courtyard of his haveli. “This is my private house, sir, so very neat and clean as you can see. You, I can perceive, have been made wary of the havelis by all those cheap salesmen people. It is understandable, but you are welcome here to photograph my own house.”
He was charming, leading me through all his finely painted rooms full of late Victorian furniture and bric-a-brac and lit by dusty chandeliers—a combination of a Vincent Price film set, Dickensian town house, and antique-lover’s paradise.
And then he pounced. In a small room on the upper level of the house overlooking the courtyard, he switched on the flickering lights and announced. “And this, sir, is my little shop. All things very good and very cheap. Not like other places…”
I should have known better. Everyone seems to be a merchant in India!
Later that evening I rested on the rocky hill of Barra Bagh, watching the setting sun bathe the walled city in a brilliant gold wash. Here among the templelike
chhatris
and tombs lie the cremated remains of all the famous Rawals of Jaisalmer. Flute players and tabla drummers strolled among the ancient stones; a herd of black goats wandered home between the smaller shrines at the base of the rock, leaving pink-gold streamers of dust behind, haloing the young goatherd boys.
Everything was fine during the night in my palace-hotel. Except for one thing. The dogs. Those damned, mangy, sly-eyed ribby wretches, slinking in the shadows of every Indian street. During the day they’re tolerable, usually dozing in the heat, making no more noise than the occasional snarl at unguarded ankles. But at night they become interminable, maddening surges of canine cacophony from dusk to dawn, piercing the thick sleepy silences with the sear of wasp stings.
One begins: a sudden rumbling bass rising rapidly to a quavering high C (or, in India, never quite hitting the note, like one of those unnerving quarter tones), which is then picked up by another one, determined to outdo the instigator, followed by another and yet another, until the whole world becomes a resounding disharmonic orchestration of yowls, yelps, growls, grunts, and howls rising to a climactic fever pitch and ending as abruptly as it began—in a short, spongy silence.
You lie still, trying not to make the slightest sound that might set off the whole maniacal chain reaction again. But it starts anyway. Maybe a minute or two of glorious respite, and then again and again, like the jarring surges of pain from an abscessed tooth. Except you can always pull a tooth or douse it with a few glasses of the hard stuff. But these damned dogs go on forever, every night, in every community, all across the vast subcontinent of India.
On my third day in Jaisalmer there was a sandstorm. A real roustabout out of the desert; screaming winds and the air so full of sand that the city vanished completely into the maelstrom. I decided to stay in my room and listen to the local radio station.
It was all music. Indian music. And I just couldn’t get the hang of it. I listened to the squeaks and grinding noises, the staccato improvisations on the sitar, and all the banging and hissing of drums and cymbals but, no matter how hard I tried, I heard only noise. And not a very pleasant noise at that. It was only when I read a mellifluous critic in an English-language newspaper I’d found in the lobby describing a recent concert in Bombay that I began to understand a little of the subtleties and complexities of this ancient art form:
Viplau Bhattacharya, a budding Saptak pupil, played a composition in Raga Durga, on sared which was followed by a scintillating tabla solo by Siddhartha Seth. Peshkar, kaydas, tukdas and chakradars were vigorously rendered in Benares style. Then Pt. Jasraj took the stage with his retinue of disciples. With a deep bass voice he chose to delve into the depths of Kharj octave with astonishing ease. The nishad of ati kharj was clearly audible. A lapi, ornamented by murki and meend, was steadily done in a rising movement and the primary goal of the octave shadja was impressively attained along with vertical swava patterns much to the amusement of one and all. Layakari and tans effected through gamak were clean and forceful: some storzando tans had the effect of a raging storm. Dhanesh Bhavsar provided melodic accompaniment on an out-of-tune harmonium…[poor Mr. Bhavsar]
The New York Times
couldn’t have said it better! However the
Times
editorial staff may have had problems with some of the unusual advertisements on the facing page:
Educated young handsome Vaishnar-Baniya boy of 30 having Bank assignment invites correspondence from parents of graduate, smart, fairly religious Vaishnar-Baniya girl with horoscope.
Horoscopes invited from parents of cultivated good-looking girls for chartered accountants.
Wanted: Beautiful girl 18–24 years. No dowry. Caste no bar.
Wanted: Alliance for Captain Merchant Navy. Foreign company, own flat, young, Goan Catholic marriage annulled, issueless, invites Goan graduates below 31, no dowry.
Those having no issue please contact for sex and vitality World Famous
Dr. SUBHASH SIGH
Thousands, Disappointed, Issueless persons have not been blessed with issues or only daughters for lack of vitality and skin diseases and male and female disorders, cured on the basis of 110 years of vast experience and special services.
Ah—but what services? I should have called the World Famous Doctor for more details.
I love Indian newspapers! A nation bares its soul. Behind the seemingly simple pastoral rhythms of predominantly rural life lie centuries of traditions and faith-bound mores—layer upon layer upon layer, heaped high as a hindu shrine, as complex and convoluted as temple carvings. It sometimes makes our freewheeling rainbow-hued dabblings in societal plurocracy seem like baby doodlings in loose sand: uncentered, unattached, meaningless.
But then, occasionally, you get a paragraph of real
National Enquirer
stuff like this glimpse into the antics of a high government official:
CABINET MINISTER OR MAFIA KING?
Did Dr. P. Patil, the Minister for Irrigation, brandish his revolver before Chief Minister S. Patil-Nilangekar? And did he, while in office lead a similarly vicious criminal assault on a manager of a district cooperative bank? When asked if he would seek legal action against the rumor-mongers the Minister said: “I don’t have time for such funny things. I have a lot of social work to attend to.”
And finally, this delightful tale:
SNAKE MAN COMETH
Professor T. Velayudham, a resident of Calicut, Kerala, began his ten day sojourn with poisonous snakes on Friday in his specially constructed glass chamber in the Sabha sports grounds. He was to keep company with over 80 poisonous snakes gathered from all over the country. Some members of the audience however complained that Professor Velayudham was not staying in the chamber, as has been advertised. He only goes inside the chamber, they said, when the crowd is sufficiently large enough. Poor show, Professor!
On a long bus journey south from Jaisalmer to Bhuj, across miles of deserty wastes, I did some homework about the Rann of Kutch. The owner of the hotel had very generously lent me a few books on Gujarat, and I scribbled away, delighted by one descriptive passage from a booklet by a Lt. Burns in 1828:
…Rann comes from the Sanskrit word “ririna” meaning “a waste”…a space without a counterpart on the globe, devoid of all vegetation and habitation…its surface shines with a deadly whiteness; the air, dim and quivering, mocks all distance by an almost ceaseless mirage. No sign of life breaks the weary loneliness. Stones and bones of dead animals mark infrequent tracks…passage at all times is dangerous, travelers being lost even in the dry season. Because of the heat and blinding salt layers, passage is made at night, guided by the stars from dawn to dusk…
Just my kind of place for a dry-season ramble!
Gujarat has also been a “land apart” on the Indian subcontinent. Ruled for centuries by powerful and fierce Maharaos, the “Kutchis” have long had an outward-looking attitude to the world. Their fame as seafarers, merchants, traders, and even pirates has made them a major presence in East Africa, Arabia, and the Persian Gulf. Recent development here by the Indian government of the new port of Kandla is beginning to increase Gujarat’s links with the rest of the country, but the Kutchis still value their own history, traditions, and independence.
The ruined castles of feudal chieftains, set high on the crags of Gujarat’s Black Hills, are still revered places. So too are the remote shrines of local saints, whose pious meditations and fierce penances (
tapsia
) were said to give them power over gods and the local warrior-kings.
You can see that power here in the bleakness and broken ridges of the hills. Fragments of ancient fiefdoms still dot the sun-bleached desert and, as Bhuj suddenly appears—a gray, solemn bastion of towers and high stone defence walls—I wondered how much had really changed in this remote region since the wild rampages of a ferocious duo known as Mod and Manai in the ninth century
A.D.
, and the cruel vengeances of the warrior Ful in the next century.
Tales of cunning, intrigue, murder and massacre are the very stuff of Gujarat legend. Our contemporary scandals and conspiracies of financial finaglings and political philanderings seem like schoolboy pranks when set beside the tangled complexity of regal power plays in and around Bhuj.
Take one of Ful’s little escapades. When he was a child, his grandfather, the powerful king Dharan Vaghela, decided to slaughter most of his power-hungry relatives. Ful only escaped the massacre when his maidservant dressed her own son in the royal infant’s robes and sacrificed his life to save the baby prince.
Revenge later became Ful’s main aim in life, and when he reached fighting age he challenged Dharan Vaghela to combat and neatly lopped off his head in the first blow. That may have been enough for most warriors, but Ful’s vengeance was not satiated. He had the skin stripped off the corpse, flayed, stretched across an enormous chair, and then invited one of Dharan’s pregnant daughters, an aunt, to join him for supper. When she realized she’d been tricked into sitting on the skin of her murdered father, she committed suicide. Her unborn infant was cut living from her body and became known as Ghao, “he that born of the wound.” And not surprisingly, the vendetta continued into the next generation and the next.
The “memorized history” of Gujarat is full of such legends, piled up like rock strata, hard and thick. “Ages shall wear away,” the Kutchi bards sing, “but our stories shall remain.”
And what wonderful stories: a princess turning herself into a mosquito to drive a king mad; the tumbling of mighty fortresses by magic catapults; the mysterious “cursed city” of Padhargadh whose ruins can still be seen today; the brilliant Troylike invasion of the poor city of Guntri by soldiers hidden in hay carts. All great stuff!
What surprised me was that in all the tumult and vengeance wreaking and city annihilation of Gujarat history, Bhuj still stands intact, surrounded by its high walls and impregnable gates. Until only a few decades ago, the city’s ruler, Maharao Khengarji III, had the keys to the five gates of Bhuj delivered to him personally every night, and every morning he would have them returned to the guards so that the citizens could conduct business beyond the walls, and the long lines of bullock carts and camels camped outside could enter with their produce from the desert villages.