Lewis - A goddess in the stones: travels in India

IT WAS NOT THE best of years in which to explore the attractions of what may appear to many of us as the most glamorous of the countries of the East. India, these days, is frequently referred to as the greatest democracy on earth, but immediately prior to my arrival greatness had been diminished by General Elections conducted in an atmosphere of extreme violence and fraud. Paramilitary forces had to be called upon to ensure the safety of electors in the regional elections that followed.

The density and darkness of this metaphorical jungle was deepened in 1990 by a worsening caste-war in the north. Religious fanaticism was on the upsurge, and ten thousand fundamentalist zealots, manipulated by a political conspiracy, set out to destroy a Muslim holy place, the ancient mosque of Ayodha. They were repelled by the police, but 200 died in the fighting, thus touching off nationwide reprisals, largely against small, isolated Muslim communities. Death by fire is an all-too-frequent feature of these ultimate acts of violence. Burnings have become part of the ritual of Indian dissent, as in the case of the protesters angered by governmental support for the untouchable cause who set themselves alight.

The worst of these atrocities took place in the State of Bihar, strategically chosen as the starting point for the journey that lay ahead. In Bihar feudalism in its most blatant form remains, nevertheless it is an area of supreme beauty and outstanding historic interest. Little is written about it apart from depressing newspaper reports. It is far away from the well-beaten itineraries of the North offering the justly famous attractions of Agra and the monumental towns of Rajasthan.

Through a shortage of information about the accessibility of regions, my journey was of necessity loosely planned. Moving on southwards from Bihar I proposed to travel in what were once known as the Central Provincesnow largely Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. Certainly, very little had appeared in print about this area in recent years, although it was of great interest to me since it contained the greater part of the Indian tribal population, numerically exceeding that of any other region of the world. Astonishingly, according to accounts furnished largely by anthropologists, many of these tribal groupings, despite all the pressures put upon them by the times, had been successful in retaining much of their aboriginal culture.

According to the latest census, 7 per cent of Indias total population of 773 millionsroughly 54 millionscomprises tribal peoples. These are spread in innumerable pockets all over central and northern India, largely in mountainous areas into which they withdrew following the Aryan invasions from the north immediately preceding the Christian era. Some are classified as Proto-Australoid, having a supposed racial affinity with the Aborigines of Australia. Others, the Dravidians, are regarded by the anthropologists as of Asian origin. In addition there are Mongoloid tribes who have reached India by way of Burma and China. Although a proportion of them still carry bow and arrows, it would be a very great mistake to label them primitive, for their culture, although strikingly diverse from that of the Hindu minority, has developed its own forms of sophistication, notably in the widespread practice and appreciation of the arts. Above all, the descendants of the original inhabitants of the sub-continent are free of the burden of caste.

When, shortly after the war, I travelled through Indo-China and Burma, I went there spurred on by the conviction that much of what I would see and hoped to record was shortly destined to vanish for ever. In A Dragon Apparent I discovered that, despite the fairly recent French occupation, a most refined and ancient culture had survived in Indo-China in which magnificence was tempered by good taste. Prestige went to the composer of acceptable poetry. People dressed not according to the dictates of fashion but to be in harmony with their environment, and there were mass excursions to admire the effects of moonlight on lakes, or to paint flowering trees, or simply to admire them. It was a country whose miracles of grace I felt impelledalmost from a sense of dutyto chronicle as best I could, so that not all memory of them should be lost. Burma, too, was heir to a great and little-known civilisation, doomed, as I saw it, to effacement through incurable civil war. In Golden Earth I attempted once again to put on paper what I could of scenes and ceremonies so soon to be obliterated.

In Indiareservoir of endless colour, pageantry, and interestthe pace of transformation, by comparison, has been slow, but it is happening, and at an increasing tempo. India, once dependent upon agriculture, has become a major industrial power, and the unhappy processes accompanying the drive for growth are only too familiar. Here, as elsewhere, the forests are vanishingin India almost as fast as in Brazil. Hundreds of miles of river valleys are being flooded to provide more water for industries, and tens of thousands of once self-sufficient tribesmen, thus displaced, now furnish low-paid labour for factories and mines. Thirty years ago there were elephants and tigers within a few miles of the centre of Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh. This is now the scene of the largest open-cast coalmine in the world, which is said to employ 100,000 miners. All round, the industrial wilderness stretches to the horizon.

The great palaces, the monuments and the tombs of the North will endure. Indias jungles and all that they contain are to be swept away. It was a thought that increased my feelings of urgency in writing this book.

Norman Lewis, 1991

MY RICKSHAW JOINED THE stream of traffic at the end of the airport road and turned in the direction of the city of Patna. The scene was one not to be forgotten. Three taxis from the airport bumped through the potholes and the fog into the distance and out of sight. After that we were part of a great fleet of rickshaws, of which there were possibly fifty in view, all keeping up with each other, while the pullersas they were still calledpedalled along as if under the orders of an invisible captain. No sound came from them but the dry grinding of bicycle chains, the rattle of mudguards and the horse-like snort with which they cleared dust and mucus from their nasal passages. Muffled against the cold and fog, the pullers looked like Henry Moores shrouded shelterers in the wartime Tube, or like Ethiopian refugees with only their stick-thin legs showing below their tattered body wrappings, or like Lazaruses called from the dead. The single change in this prospect wrought by modern times was the presence of towering advertisement hoardings, closing off both sides of the road to form continuous ramparts for mile after mile. Floodlit faces radiating joy through the twilight and thickening fog praised Japanese stereos, Scotch whisky, wise investments, luxury footwear and packaged food. Nearing the city the gap left between the bottom of the hoardings and the earth provided glimpses of the homeless, scattered like the victims of a massacre, singly and in groups, who had claimed these uncontested spaces to settle for the night. In the Indian context there would have been nothing exceptional in this apart from the advertisements, and it was these that added a brush stroke of the macabre.