AN INDIAN PARADISE
By MARTIN HALLIWELL
FORGET for ten minutes the uncertainties of an English May and come on holiday to Rajputana, where the sun shines confidently and predictably every day for nine months of the year: and in particular to the ancient Hindu State of Udaipur. The majesty of the Udaipur palaces, rising 200 feet sheer up from the lake, is already a tourist's commonplace ; but there are other features of this sunny and romantic paradise also worth your attention.
The railway climbs up through typical Indian scrub to enter the State through red wooden doors built into battlements stretching across a valley. At the first station monkeys take possession of your carriage, but are schooled to leave it as soon as the guard's whistle blows—remarkable self-denial for a monkey well away 'with one of your old banana-skins. But it is a first taste of the slightly lunatic, timeless and other-worldly atmosphere you will enjoy here at every turn.
Take, for instance, the feeding of the royal swine. Probably not even India has any odder spectacle than the six o'clock parade of 30o wild boars which come in daily from the hills around and assemble among some very Gadarene rocks on the far side of the lake. Some of the timelessness of the place is shown by the fact that every single evening, without a break, for the past eighty years two boatloads of royal corn have been rowed across the lake for this ceremony. You watch it from the roof of a gaily-painted little shooting-box, glad to be well above the pigs on the rocks below, scuffling furiously for the grain as it is scattered to them, and soon almost lost to sight in a cloud of dust ; the sound of their hooves on the rocks is that of waves ebbing from a shingle beach. The gamekeeper superintendent has had his job in the family for generations, and will draw you aside to show you his real pride—two or three specially bred prize-fighting pigs scorn- fully masticating a private mash of .their own on a little mound apart ; they would eat more than their fair share if turned loose with the comment herd. Leopard-pig fights are still sometimes Staged here in a sunken arena and, somewhat surprisingly, are usually won by the pig, who is trained to make good use of his powerful undertusks.
Miracles can happen, too ; I saw one. The guide led us one afternoon to a remote shrine out in the country where a stone image of the fish god Shiva is said to move in an incalculable manner from side to side of a sunken tank. This tank is itself remarkable in that the water level remains constant, wet or dry, flood or drought ; in consequence the tank is so holy that to bathe in it four times equals once in the Ganges itself. As we waited with eyes fixed on Shiva (we waited entirely in vain for half an hour) there was a sudden miraculous shower of grain from heaven, which fell and kept on falling at the roots of an immense banyan tree. With as much of the spirit of scientific enquiry as I could muster on a hot afternoon in this very numinous place, I searched for the source of the grain, but found no clue at all: grain does not grow on banyans, and there was no boy-accomplice in the branches nor anyone else anywhere near. Anyway, flocks of pigcons and brilliant green parakeets fell at once on this unexpected feast, and my companion was inspired to a burst of divination ; " if more than 12 parakeets arrive to eat this grain," he procla-med, " the war will be over within three months." (We counted 15 in all, but the war is not yet over. Nevertheless it was a miracle all right.) As we came away our guide said, " The top of that hill you can see over there turns to solid gold for an hour once every year." Again with my much too insistent curiosity, I asked was this just at sunrise or on midsummer day perhaps? " We cannot tell, but it turns to solid gold."
A little' nearer to hard fact is the story of the dancing girl whi many hundreds of years ago won the infatuated love of the young ruling prince. His wise old counsellors refused to approve the match, but allowed him to promise her " the half of my kingdom " if she could cross the lake successfully on a tight-rope. When, before a vast and excited crowd, she was well out over the water, the wisest of all the old counsellors had the tight-rope cut: in she fell, and was conveniently drowned, at a spot now com- memorated by an austere and somewhat pointless stone platform in the centre of the lake.
What else? At local tennis parties the young noblemen turn up with a racket in one hand and a sword in the other. In a certain street of the city, at about 10.30 p.m., you will see hurrying past you the hooded figures of the girls who still sing the reigndg prince to sleep every night. Elephant fights (not to the death) are still staged here, and certain traditional decoctions are added to the comba- tants' food to stimulate pugnacity. In the whole pattern there is little enough of the twentieth century, when you have excepted the 7o motor cars in the royal garage and the quiet luxury of the State guest-house.
Now your bright-eyed Marxist will stop his ears at the suggestion that any good can come nowadays from so antiquated a system of government as a religious despotism ; but be it recorded that in two years in Northern India I never saw happier faces, busier bazaars, gayer clothes, fewer beggars and flies, or a more general air of communal well-being than in the streets of this colourful city — least of all were such features to be found in Bombay or Calcutta, where India has most fervently and blindly embraced the gospel of the modern West. It is clear that the wise men—of whom we shall need all we can get in the coming years of political adjustment — will need to think twice before breaking up, just because they appear backward and unfashionable by our standards, systems of administration which still answer fully the deep-seated aspirations and loyalties of Millions of Indians. The problem is how these systems can be controlled and co-ordinated, not how they are to be replaced.
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