INDIA REVISITED: IV. CHILDREN OF MOTHER GANGES

By F. YEATS-BROWN

[This is the fourth of a series of articles which Mr. Yeats-Brown has been specially commissioned by THE SPECTATOR to write on contemporary India. The fifth, which will appear next week under the title "An Indian Utopia," deals with the garden city of Dayalbagh.] Mfirst sight of the Ganges this year was on a radiant, rain-washed morning in January. The train ran slowly through acres of straw-huts and booths, and past miles of bullock-carts, piled high with bedding, rainbow- sari-ed women, round-eyed children, shining brass pots, moving slowly towards the sacred sangani* at Allahabad, where the blue waters of the Jumna mix with the green of the Ganges.

As a matter not of fact, but charming fancy, there is a third river, that of Eternal Wisdom, which flows by the Temple of the Undying Banyan Tree in the Fort at Allahabad, to join the other two near-by. Mortal eyes have never seen it, but for the Hindus it exists ; and it is said by the profane that the Mahant of the temple derives a revenue of forty lakhs a year (f30,000) from the mystical river and living tree. Certainly his shrine is very ancient, and greatly venerated. Fifty gods hold court there. When I asked him about his income, he said, rather cynically, I think : " Your Honour, we are dying of hunger ! " (" Iluzoor, bhuk se marte ! ") But I myself saw sackfuls of small coins being carried away for safe keeping during the festival. Pilgrims passed through by thousands and hundred thousands, marshalled by British soldiers, to bring their offerings not only to the stump of wood which so strangely flourishes in the dark, but to Ganesh, god of luck, or to Lakshmi, queen of beauty, or to Mahadeo, the great lord, whose emblem is the lingam. All of them gave a " pie " here and there, and a million one-twelfths of a penny make £350 . . .

The Ara Kuarbh Main is the biggest festival in India this year, but six years hence, owing to a special planetary conjunction, it will be double its present size. Today only two million people have come to bathe at the sacred place and at the auspicious moment-8 a.m.—when Jupiter enters the sign of Aquarius.

Only two million people ! From my vantage point in a _policeman's tower I can see them converging from all directions towards the central path to -the sangam. Looking north, through a forest of flags belonging to all the ascetic cults of India (strange to say, there are two Union Jacks amongst them, one flown upside-down) I can see the Fort outlined against the brassy sky ; and looking east, I can see the girder bridge that carries the railway to Benares : between these points there are several square miles of white-robed peasants, gaily-dressed women, saffron saddhus, ash-smeared bhairagis, yogis of every sort and both sexes, all looking southward to the

* Junction of rivers,

spit of sand where the Jumna joins the Ganges. It seems as if all Hindu India were here : yet what we see is less than one per cent, of that vast population.

In the cool of dawn I made a round of the freaks. There was a man who buried himself so that nothing was visible above-ground but his right hand, telling its beads. There was a living skeleton, his spine visible through his stomach, his body a bundle of parchment and sinew clinging to sharp bones. There was a handsome armless man, with seal-like flippers at his shoulders ; and a fat old fellow, worshipped by barren women ; and a man with a muscular tongue, who could open soda-water bottles with it ; and other people whom it would be improper to de- scribe. I felt as if I were walking in my dead past, for just such men I saw also twenty years ago. Then, as now, kind, staring, wondering crowds surrounded them, credulous, amused, incredibly generous out of their small means.

The crowd is dense here, near the ceremonial outer, and growing denser. Dust rises. How thirsty this land is ! Only yesterday it was raining : now the ground is dry. I must get down from my eyrie, for the procession is about to start.

The holy rivers of India have flowed through many of my memories during the last thirty years. I have sat by the Ganges at Rishikesh, where she comes gurgling out of the Himalayas, hunted pig in her various Kadir,. conversed with her devotees at Benares and Calcutta : and by the banks of the Jumna were passed the vividest hours of my youth. Today the two rivers seem to link up past and present not only in my little life, but in thc whole history of the Aryans. Here, bare to the buff. and beautiful in the simplicity that underlies innumerable fantasies—some noble, some of nameless shame—is the oldest of living faiths. It is .the faith of our remote ancestors,. who believed that _ the sun is giver of life.

Here is a priest on a screaming stallion. Behind him comes a tall boy lolling on a tall elephant : his honey- coloured torso is painted like the forehead of his mount, with the white, horizontal stripes of Siva. He is evidently an ascetic of repute, for the crowd greets him with " Ram ! Ram ! " and women press forward to touch the tassels of gold lace hanging from the -gorgeous pad of his elephant. Here comes a fife-and-drum band ; and now a group of naked ascetics, the notorious bhairagis, whose presence near a village causes a flutter in virtuous homes. Normally, in British India, they wear codpieces about their loins, but today, according to the custom of thirty cen- turies, they go to the sangam naked as they were born. Ropy hair hangs down to their shoulders. Their eyes stare blankly, as if out of a hemp dream. Some young ones shiver, perhaps because they are self-conscious, in spite of their bold front. A few are sturdy, handsome fellows, but most of them look weak and undeveloped, mentally and. physically. More and more bhairagis pass, live hundred naked men in all, holding bouquets of viogkra-blossoms for Mother Ganges, and little bags of wood-ash, with which to powder their persons. After them come the women yogis, wearing the usual saffron sheets of the Seekers of the Path. Many of them are of a masculine type, whereas many of the boys have the rounded thighs and full hips of effeminacy. A group of pandits comes strolling by : solid, bespectacled citizens, to my mind (but evidently not to theirs) a little out of place in this company. Then a band of wild youths from the Panjab, who look like bhang-fed Sikhs, but cannot be. for the brethren of the Khalsa do not attend Hindu pilgrimages. Now more elephants, carrying dignitaries who bless the crowd. Now a squadron of saddhus lopes by on camels. Another fife-and-drum band. A black- robed group, carrying staves surmounted by swastikas jerks my mind from here to those other Aryans, in Berlin . . . Dancers are pirouetting round a tabernacle. A band of good-looking priests is clustered round something or somebody shaded by peacock fans. A nice white sheep is led past by a child. (Is it a pet or a victim ?) A mounted band rides by, with an escort of bare-legged saddhus. (I never knew so many of them had horses.) More and more saffron-sheeted men and women pass.

Some are so pretty or intelligent-looking that my mind goes out to them in helpless, hopeless wonder ; but the majority are sub-normal. Yes, the average yogi is a poor specimen.

Still the procession passes, but meanwhile its vanguard has reached the sangam, where each worshipper will make an oblation, drink the sacred water, wash in it, repeat the ancient invocation to the sun, asking not for daily bread, but for light for the inner man. I would like to follow the bathers and mingle with them, but do not do so, remembering how holy are these lustral rites. I would not enter a church to stare at the con- gregation during the elevation of the Host.

What are the spectators thinking ? I have seen a pageant of religious history : it is as if the frieze of the Parthenon had come to life, as if I had watched the priests of Ammon-ra, and Baal, and had seen the sons of Levi moving the Ark of the Covenant. But in India things happen because they happened before, and for no other reason. Not ten men in all this gathering could tell me the why and the wherefore of what I have seen. For the masses it is dastur : custom.

* * * * Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya might tell me, no doubt, but we have other things to talk about. (I imagine, also, that he does not approve of all these goings-on.) When I find him, after some difficulty, for the Fair is an enormous warren of huts and shelters, lie is sitting, bare-headed, in a dhoti* and shawl, in an almost empty tent. Two chairs are set in the sand. Outside, millions rejoice in the sun, but no sound of jubilee comes to this twilight.

Pandit Malaviya is a Brahmin, a leader of the high- caste Hindus, and the founder and moving spirit in the huge Benares Hindu University. Having previously talked with Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Sir C. P. llamaswamy Iyer, and other distinguished Hindus, I had imagined that while complaints against the Government certainly exist, on the whole the situation is incomparably better than it was when I was 'last in India, fifteen years ago.

* A single piece of cloth, draped about the legs and tucked in at the waist, worn by Hindus. On the contrary. the Pandit assures me, it is incomparably worse. The British encourage communal faction. They are not serious about Indianising the Army. They lack sympathy, imagination, honour. (Here the Pundit, who is the soul of courtesy, apologises for hurting my feelings : I had asked him to be frank.) At one time he believed in us and trusted us, but now he can no longer rely on the word of an Englishman. The plight of the villages is terrible. Unemployment is growing. There is an ugly spirit amongst the youth of the count ry. In ten years India will have cut herself free front the Empire.

I leave this gentle-mannered old gentleman with a profound sense of depression. What has my race done to make him so bitter ? It is no personal slight : he is too big a man for that, too wise and experienced. For many years he liked us : now we have wounded him to his soul. Or is it not " we," but the Time-Spirit that has so wounded him ?

* * * * At this fair very little has changed in the last hundred, perhaps thousand years. I meet a man who has undergone an ecstatic trance for 45 days, without moving or swal- lowing. I am introduced to a lady who claims to be 109: her teeth are good and she is without a grey hair : she tells me that she rarely sleeps more than one hour in the 24. And I come across the handsome Krishnanand with his full-grown lioness. Ile tames wild creatures by loving them. In his ashram in South Kanara he lives with the beasts of the jungle. This lioness of his roams about: freely amongst the crowd. I pat her, and pose her tin• a photograph, with her playmate, a fox-terrier. The three friends live entirely on bread and milk and fruit. But there is something more in Krishnan/m(1 than cleverness with animals. He radiates power and peace. At present he is still on the road to self-realisation (he always alludes to himself in the third person) but one day he will lead souls to him as he now does the lioness.

People come to Krishnanand, take the dust from under his feet, sit before him silently, getting a darshan,* as it is called. India has preserved a truth which we have forgotten. Knowledge may pass from man to imam without speech. Our de:•ire to have everything explained and analysed leaves us with a lot of labels, but we arc no wiser than before. True knowledge lies in the intuition, and Krishnanand is a catalyst of the intuition.

* * * * An Indian critic who has read the foregoing says : " You have slipped into the typical patronising attitude of the European visitor. You describe us as dreamy and backward children. You mix up Malaviya and a lion-tamer, and you don't even mention that the Pandit has installed some of the best technical and scientific laboratories in India in Benares Hindu University. If you were writing of England, and met a Bishop on Hampstead Heath on August Bank Holiday, would you dismiss him in a paragraph, and devote the rest of your article to the behaviour of the crowd ? " My answer is that I would ; that what I have written may wrong, but that it is at least sincere and fused in the crucible of experience, not second-hand stuff. I have tried to show the mass-mind, not perhaps of 240,000,000 Hindus, but of that large proportion of them who are still unedu- cated. However, India is a land of glaring contrasts. Next week, in describing Dayalbagh, I shall show how a group of Hindus have built a Garden City, nicely balanced between industry and agriculture, which is in somo ways superior to anything yet achieved in Europe or America.

* A sight of a Master.