Unveiling India Read online

  It is the mandalam season. The temple is fervent with believers. With ash marks on their foreheads they stand in a line like disciplined children singing fervently as the god in the sanctum is being put to sleep. The doctor is among them. His dress, his manner and his devotion distinguish him as a man of religion rather than of science. Does he question the rituals? Does his mind ever contradict what his heart naturally accepts? ‘I don’t question anything. There is no conflict between my mind and my heart. Each is in its place. Religion gives me peace. It does not interfere with my work or the way I live.’

  ‘That’s exactly where the dichotomy lies,’ rejoins Mable Arole, a Christian lady doctor whose religion lights her work and her life. ‘Glory of God is Man Fully Alive’ reads a poster in her living room. She is seated with a group of harijan women who work with her, carrying the message of health into forsaken villages. ‘My religion is what I do,’ says Mabel, almost in a whisper. ‘It determines my actions, gives me a value system. I am at peace as long as I do what I believe is the truth. God is love and where there is love there is no fear. By loving a person you give that person dignity and bring out the best in him.’ Mable Arole, along with her doctor husband, has helped bring about a human revolution in two hundred villages of Jamkhed district in Maharashtra. Dignity walks in these villages—places that twelve years ago were parched, forlorn and dismissed as backward. Religion here is not one that is preached by a shastri or practised by a sadhu. The poor know no doctrines, recite few mantras, know not the names of gods who have ruled them and their families. It is not religion but a reality more immediate that spurs their daily actions. ‘We decided to have our own temple,’ says Saadu Bai, born an untouchable, denied entry into a Hindu temple. ‘We put up a picture of Buddha and began chanting Buddham.’ She is among a group of untouchables who now call themselves Buddhists. When I ask them about Buddha they look at each other and grin. ‘We were not allowed to go into the temple, not even sit on its parapet. We had no space to hold our marriages. So we decided to have our own temple. Buddha gave us the space. He became our god.’

  ‘For years I touched the feet of gods and got nothing,’ adds Lallan Bai, also an untouchable. ‘The gods sent me into the world. But it was the doctors who gave me a new lease of life. If a priest throws some flowers on a lump of shit and bows to it, it becomes God. Others follow and bow. For the poor anything that gives hope becomes God. By putting a garland of a hundred rupees around the head of Vithal we do not get close to God. We do when we give dignity to man.’

  Gods in village India evolve out of a need that is strong, real and immediate. Faith too is determined by it. As in Koppa where a new goddess has evolved. A village like any other, Koppa has homes that are a few square feet wide. Here women cook, work, make love and pray. They have emerged out of this space to have a temple of their own, a small, dark sanctum barred to men. Kallamma, a widow, is the keeper of the temple. When she circles her arti the gods on the dark wall come alive.

  Among them is Akkamahadevi, a woman saint who shed her clothes and covered her body with her long tresses as an ultimate defiance against being a woman and a body. Her picture, visualized and painted by a pop artist as a coy maiden, hangs on a wall along with Shiva, the Lord of the white jasmine, in whose oneness Akka lived and died in her twenties. Also on the wall is Basavva, the bull, Shiva’s vehicle. Amidst calendars and registration certificates is gaily painted Kalyaneshwari, the latest addition to the pantheon. She is the goddess of family welfare and evolved out of an artist’s doodle in the office of the local Family Planning Association. Akkamahadevi, a recognised goddess in these parts, is a way to reach every home. Kalyaneshwari has been invented to inspire women to have small families. One is an income-generating force. The other a guiding force. Women need both. The temple that is a sanctuary for women’s hopes and aspirations now has two goddesses who, while keeping a faith alive, also provide the social sanctions.

  How did the women of Koppa come to have their own temple? ‘We wanted to see the world,’ asserts Kallamma. ‘We were tired of carrying mud on our heads. We wanted to get out of the village. Ten of us got together and went on a pilgrimage to Bijapur, a hundred miles away. There we met another group of women who besides worship of a god were doing other things. They gave us a picture of Akkamahadevi, the virgin goddess. We brought it back to our village and hung it in a home that had no son. For the goddess is a virgin. Women began coming and going. We soon needed privacy, a larger space. So we got together and made an application to the panchayat for a space. We got this temple. As women began coming and faith grew, they put some money at the feet of the goddess. It soon became a sizeable mound. We began loaning this money out on small interest to women. Now we meet at the temple regularly and discuss how we can generate more money and help each other. The nurse also comes and talks to us about new cures and foods good for the children. Worship is part of the programme. The temple has given us the space and the opportunity to meet each other and listen to each other. It gives us a place to be private, away from men.’

  Even a woman in the city needs a sanctuary. For Nalini, small, slender, soignée, a New Delhi meritocrat who works for an international organization, the day begins in the family shrine after her morning jog and the ritual bath. Though the smallest in the house, the prayer room is integral to the life of the family and to Nalini. It holds the essence of a daily rhythm that the family has not questioned for generations. With devotion Nalini cleans the room, lights the lamp and the incense, offers flowers, reads part of the Ramayana and rings the small brass bell, at times frantically, to summon her two children to prayer. She then packs them off to school and stuffing her files and bags into a brown Fiat drives herself to work. But before the office she makes a ritual stop at the Hanuman temple, dedicated to her favourite monkey god. ‘While you glimpse God He gets a chance to get a glimpse of you,’ she says, her eyes fervent with an emotion to which she tries to give a name.

  ‘I fast for Santoshi Ma every Friday. She is the goddess of contentment, a twentieth century incarnation of the ancient Mother Goddess. Her worship is monopolized by women, young and old, who flock to her temples across the cities of India, to pray for socially sanctioned goals rooted in contemporary anxieties. I am among those women. The goddess gives me solace. All is variable except the Mother.’

  Nalini moves between her home and office, seemingly without effort, managing the two with ease, lending to each a precision and a devotion reserved for the gods. There is no dichotomy in her life, she insists. She questions the ritual superiority of her husband, as sanctioned by the Hindu code, and yet fasts for his long life and well-being on special days of the year. She refuses to admit the caste hierarchy endemic in Hindu traditional society into her own life but would not feel happy if her children married outside the Brahmin fold. She analyses the phenomenon of Santoshi Ma with scepticism but never fails to fast in Her honour on Fridays, sprinkling the water that has washed Her feet in every corner of the house for plenty and for prosperity. Her rational mind questions the efficacy of rituals. But in their repetitive rhythm she finds a heady intoxication. ‘Rituals are necessary ways of reaching God,’ she says. In her life they have helped bring a balance between the weight of tradition and the rising anxieties of modernization. The prayer room it seems is the one room in the house where she has complete privacy from the demands of the family and work. Yet it seems ironic that a woman with her sensibilities, open to mobility and aware of the new freedoms should have this single space as her solitary refuge, a space that has been the traditional sanctuary of women over centuries of Hinduism.

  Unlike humans who are doomed to a feeling of inadequacy without marriage and family, celibate gods and virgin goddesses have a field day in the divine pantheon. In Kanyakumari stands a temple dedicated to the virgin goddess Bhagawaty—a resplendent gold figure with a garland in her hands waiting for her lord. Her marriage was arranged to Lord Shiva, says the legend. The bride waited garbed in splendour. The groom n
ever arrived. In anger she cursed the rice cooked for the feast, made it turn into sand and then turned herself into stone. Unmarried women come here to pray for grooms and take away packets of sand as her blessings. The land of the virgin goddess is blessed not by celibates but by hordes of children.

  ‘I am the second wife of my husband,’ says a white- haired woman, head of a family of forty-one—five sons and a daughter, twenty-five grandchildren and ten great grandchildren. She forgets as she counts the heads, raises her two shrivelled hands in the air and re-counts. ‘They are a blessing from God,’ she says raising her watery eyes towards heaven. The only problem is space.’ In a tiny hovel are gathered a crowd of faces asserting the collective identity of a family. The hovels repeat themselves—family after family, street after street, where naked children buzz like small, black flies amidst the ancient catamarans. To talk about the quality of life here seems ironic.

  At the edge of the village I see hope. In the one room that is home to Sosaimal and Sosaimaryam. Both are named after the Biblical Joseph. Married nineteen years ago, they have four sons and two daughters. While he fishes, she weaves nets and runs the house. There are no elders to help or hinder her. She makes her own decisions with the consent of her husband. ‘I was tired of bearing children. So I went on my own to the village nurse. She took me to the village hospital and had me operated upon. Women in the neighbourhood came to hear about it. When they saw me healthy and working they too were ready to go to the hospital. Fifteen of them had themselves sterilized.’ Did she consult her priest? ‘No,’ she says blankly. ‘He did not ask me. And I said nothing.’

  ‘The temple has nothing to do with our lives.’ adds her husband.

  What then does?

  ‘The sea is my house,’ he mumbles, pointing a finger towards a turquoise blue ocean where the waters of three seas meet.

  ‘The sea gives us our daily bread. Five rupees or fifty. Its bounty is plentiful and unpredictable. For four months of the year I don’t go near it. It is turbulent. I work for six days and go to my temple on Sundays.’

  Going to church is a habit that comes naturally to him. As does his fishing. He does not send his sons to school. They will, in his tradition, become fishermen. The two daughters, though, go to school, get free meals, and are learning to make jute bags. ‘They are learning to use their hands in more ways than one,’ says the mother. ‘They can do more than cook food and weave nets. They want to go to Vavathurai and see the big town. I never left my village.’

  ‘My problem is religion,’ mourns the Collector who presides over Kanyakumari district; fifty-one per cent of the district’s population is poor and Christian. His office is located in a rambling, red-roofed building that has not lost its colonial flavour. Men in antique uniforms and over-sized turbans usher in visitors. In an inner sanctum, behind a large table, sits the Collector. The meeting begins with ceremony—introductions, tea and biscuits followed by a briefing on plans for women’s development in the area. His co-operation will spell social sanction, accelerate change. He is concerned over women’s apathy to his government’s family planning crusade. ‘Fisherfolk here may have three families and fifteen children. Their earthly god is the bishop. They refuse to accept family planning, turn down all incentives.’

  ‘We don’t want to impose anything on people. It has to come through their own awareness,’ says Dr. Shesagiri Rao, project director of the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI). The language of the two administrators differs as does their manner and approach. Both, however, are single-minded in their objectives which are meant to spell health for all. For one the focus is immediate change. For the other it is the efficacy of change in a longer time span. Both project a missionary zeal. Rao’s thought has filtered down to men and women who administer projects evolving ways peculiar to the geography, needs and traditions of a people. ‘Development is not a cluster of benefits given to people but a process by which people acquire greater mastery over their own destiny’ reads a poster in the local FPAI office.

  The scene shifts to another colonial mansion—a splendid white house towering above the fishing shanty town. Here presides the Bishop of Kottar, the earthly god of the fisherfolk, in the words of the Collector. ‘The love and respect that I command from my community is born out of an old and revered tradition. My people accepted Christianity much before the coming of St. Francis to India. My church strives for the welfare of a community that includes both men and women. I have campaigned that women should be in the parish council. I can’t do anything if their own men protest. Women, they say, are already too dominant in the house.’ His voice sounds more like a politician than a bishop. He talks about women from a distance. His mansion has not known the presence of a woman for he is, in keeping with the rules of his church, unmarried. ‘Our women go to schools and colleges,’ says the other bishop, who lives in the tree-shaded mansion of the Protestant church of South India. He is a married man and claims that he speaks to women openly about family planning. ‘They listen, respond and come for advice. I give them the example of Abraham who had one son, of Adam who had three and me who only has two. A Biblical story speaks more directly to women than a lecture on family welfare.’

  ‘Five years ago there was a decline in faith, almost a crisis,’ says the rector of a monastery in Goa, another gateway through which missionaries arrived. They came from Portugal to rule and plant the cross, bringing European models of worship and a European lifestyle. ‘The church of India, isolated for a long time, is beginning to change,’ says the young rector. ‘The nature of a Goan Catholic, though Europeanized for centuries, essentially remains Indian. Like a Hindu, a Catholic here prays to all gods and saints.’

  ‘Believing is feeling. Even if you believe in a stone it becomes God,’ says Allen Noronho, a robust, young man who lives in a sleepy village that is mainly Catholic. Like many young Goans he too is unemployed and is looking for an opportunity to go abroad. ‘I have not had a job since I graduated from college ten years ago. I am ready to do any work, even clean toilets. I have applied, applied but there is no reply. How can I pray to God with a weight on my mind? So I play the guitar to pass time. Or I stay at home and hatch eggs. So far I have only hatched one,’ he laughs. A hunting cap on his head, a guitar slung over his shoulder, he exudes a quality of ease that is characteristic of a Latin temperament. As he talks, jokes and sings the layers peel off revealing a poignant young man, who met nineteen-year- old Ida at a dance party. He liked her bright eyes and easy smile and married her at the little white church in the village. ‘We have one child. How can we have more when we can’t even feed one? No, I will not have my wife operated on. Why should I, when I can control myself? I know nothing about the church. I go there on Sundays as it happens to be next to my house.’ Ida is a regular church-goer. ‘I believe in all the saints,’ she says. ‘I have prayed to them all, done novenas but no miracles have happened.’ It is Christmas time. Theirs is the only house in the village that has no crib for the baby Christ and no paper star lit on the porch to announce the coming of the three wise men, so poor are they.

  Away in Panjim, in a lit mansion, sits a lady surrounded by portraits of five lively children. ‘This house is made for a lot of children. When I married I had a nanny, a wet nurse and several servants. If I was to marry today I wouldn’t have been able to have more than two kids. I would have probably chosen a career and not had any servants. Even Catholic families now want fewer children. Though the priest’s blessing continues to be “Grow and Multiply”, few take it seriously.’

  ‘Life is uncertain,’ mourns a nun who runs a church family centre. ‘Marriages do not last, divorces are common and abortions not uncommon. Our church is totally against abortion and artifical methods. We propagate the natural methods. But if a woman comes to us who has already got herself sterilized and understands what she has done we tell her to follow her conscience.’

  ‘There are many women who cannot go in for the natural method,’ says Aurea Mascara
nehas. ‘I am a Catholic woman, I am married and I am a doctor,’ she announces. ‘I understand certain things which a nun or a priest cannot. I go to villages and give awareness talks to Catholic women. They respond very well. Many have taken to the natural method. But this involves a total understanding between husband and wife which does not always exist. Also women neglect keeping charts or are embarrassed doing it. I feel it is immoral to suggest to women not to use any methods but the natural. A number of them have husbands who work elsewhere, return once a year, stay for a couple of months, then leave. Today the girls are educated, are working, and do not want to be controlled. Goa has the lowest birth rate in the country. It also has the largest number of Catholics who go in for abortions in illegal clinics. Most of these are young people. When I once asked a class of young girls what family planning meant a thirteen-year-old girl stood up and said it is a method used by unmarried boys and girls when they don’t want a child. The school was a highly regarded convent.

  ‘Literacy has increased, standards of living have gone up. We have music, entertainment, good food and drink in Goa. We do not need sex as a distraction. The young today are practical. They cannot afford to be otherwise. The Pope will not come and maintain their families.’