A wounded paradise

By Manohar Malgonkar

Hamin ast wa hamin ast wa hamin ast!
It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!

WHAT? Paradise — no less. Paradise? This cavernous structure with peeling walls and patches of repair-work in brick and cement? A paradise?

O.K. admitting that the Dewan-i-khas in Delhi's Red Fort is today a bruised and battered pile of masonry, vandalised by avenging armies, Pathans Marathas, Jats. Its walls were hacked away in chunks for the semi-precious stones that were embedded in them; its ceiling, once lined with sheets of gold, was torn off. Its flooring has been dug up time and again for the gold and jewels that were buried by queens and concubines and eunuchs... .

Granting all this and also that, at the high noon of the Mughal Empire, this place was metaphor for pomp and reckless extravagance, with the surface of the peacock throne a jig-saw of sapphires and diamonds and rubies, its walls and pillars hung with brocade, its floor-space covered with the richest carpets from Persia, its fountains creating a khas-scented mist around the grandees of the Empire in their richest robes lined up in neat rows even at a full durbar — could it ever have been the paradise that its architect so arrogantly proclaimed it to be?

Can a building — a structure with walls and a roof — be likened to a paradise? If so, surely there would be dozens-hundreds of other buildings all over the face of the earth claiming to be so many paradises? Versailles, the Parthenon, the Guggenheim Museum, the Kailas temple at Ellora!

First things first. Paradise is created by God, not made by man. It is a wilderness, or a garden, or a park, and it must, must have wild animals roaming around freely. Its air must be pure, its climate temperate; there should be a plentiful supply of clean, sparkling water and hardly any people.

So where is paradise?

A question not easy to answer. The best one can do is to resort to citing what eminent thinkers have said on the subject of paradise. A serviceable definition if only because it supports my own line of thinking, was provided by Proust; that the only true paradises are those we have lost.

O.K. the principal indeed — the defining — attribute of all paradises was that they just had to have large numbers of wild animals as their natural denizens and that man was something of an intruder- a-transgressor. Unbelieveably, there was a time when the surface of the earth was positively peppered with such paradises.

For instance when the first white settlers from Europe went looking for a new homeland in the newly discovered continent of America, there, in the words of a handbook distributed by the USIS, they found: "quail, squirrels, pheasants, elk, geese and so many deer that in places venison was accounted "tiresome meat". And as to the bison, they roamed the Great Plan is in such astounding numbers that, when, as often happened, they stampeded, the very earth rumbled and shook, and the prairies resembled a river in flood.

Did the Pilgrim Fathers go down on their knees and told one another: Hamin ast, wa hamin ast?

Not a bit of it! After all, as Proust lays down, paradises are recognised as such only after they're lost.

Instead, these transgressors in paradise goggled in wonder at this abundance of wild life and gave thanks to their gods that he should have stocked their new homeland with so many animals for them to kill for food, for trade, or indeed merely for sport.

Oh, what fun!

So they primed their guns with power and shot, and set about slaughtering animals. Their lust for killing seemed insatiable. Two hundred years later, of the millions of bisons that filled the praries, only a handful were still left, in zoos and private parks.

Africa, in contrast, hung on to its share of paradises till well into the 20th century. This was because here man and beast had lived in balanced togetherness for centuries and evolved a pattern of life.

And then Africa was "discovered" and bloodthirsty Empire builders from the nations of Europe marched in and divided great chunks of the continent among themselves.

And then proceeded to slaughter the wild animals. The elephants were their favourite targets and they killed them in thousands for their ivory. It was the proud boast of hunters like Karamojo Bell and Van Kerckhoven that they had killed more than a thousand elephants.

They made a thorough job of finishing off Africa's paradises. What are called Safari parks in today's Africa are but a pale shadow — a thumbnail sketch — of what was there in unbelievable abundance. Until well into the 1960s, being a professional hunter, (men who assisted other hunters to kill elephants and lions and rhinos, was honourable and rewarding profession in the parts of Africa that still had some wild animals left.

How ironical therefore that it should be one of these trophy-hunters, the sort of man who thumps his chest and struts over his prowess at killing more birds than anyone else at a single shoot, or at the extravagant size of the tusks he had hacked out of the skull of an elephant he had killed, the American novelist Robert Ruark, who should have mused on the fact that, before he and his likes had killed off most of its wild animals, the African veldt was surely, what they described as a paradise.

Ruark did not say hamin ast, or it is this. What he said was, it was this.

As was our own land, a country just as bountifully stocked with a variety of wild life that was special to it: The tiger and the panther, and an elephant which, unlike its African counterpart, could be tamed and made to serve the purposes of mankind.

We had the handsomest of deer, the sambhar, more like a Landseer painting than any stag that Scotland ever bred, and finally we had the bison, the biggest of bovines.

True, we too, alas, killed off our wild animals in large numbers, wantonly and shamefully, but we did not go berserk. We did not kill an elephant because he was also a part of Ganesha, a God of happiness and plenty, and similarly we did not kill our bisons because they belonged to the same species as that of the cow and were thus touched with holiness.

Then the sahibs conquered India, and they held nothing sacred. They saw India as an unimaginably vast shooting preserve. Systematic to the last they proceeded to divide our forests into convenient "blocks" for the purposes of hunting. For a nominal fee, anyone could hire one of these blocks and shoot a permitted number of tigers or bisons or elephants. For other kind of "game" there were no restrictions. You killed as many as you want.

Such was the ultimate fate of our paradises — to be carved out into shooting blocks.