THIS ABOVE ALL
Great but petty

The 25th death anniversary of Indira Gandhi occasioned a flood of literature and huge media coverage across the country. That was as it should have been because she was in fact the Queen Empress of India for long years, and she changed the face of the country by ruthless plastic surgery. She made the Congress subservient to her wishes, she nationalised banks, deprived princely families of their unearned privy purses, inflicted a humiliating defeat on Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh.

Dev Kant Barooah was not much off the mark when he hailed her: "India is Indira, Indira is India. Teyrey naam ki jai! Teyrey kaam ki jai." However, it must not be forgotten that there were two distinct sides to her character — the public persona and the private. She was a great public leader, but at the same time very petty in her private life. She was undoubtedly the most beautiful woman; at the same time she disliked other good-looking women and humiliated them. Among them were Tarakeshwari Sinha and Maharani Gayatri Devi. She disliked her aunt Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and denied her senior diplomatic assignments.

She cold-shouldered her cousin Nayantara Sehgal, and refused to promote her husband N. Mangat Rai, one of the ablest and honest civil servants. She was gratuitously offensive to people who had stood by her because she did not want to remain beholden to anyone — Romesh Thapar, Jagat Singh and Kewal Singh, to name a few.

The number of people she and her family put behind bars during the Emergency makes one sick. I was not very keen to recall all she did but could not resist going over the newly reprinted version of her life, achievements and failings by Pranay Gupte, Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi (Penguins-Viking). Gupte is an eminent journalist who was correspondent of The New York Times and some of the most prestigious American, English and Indian journals. He is currently based in Dubai but was a frequent visitor to Delhi to keep up acquaintance with my one-time neighbour Jyotsna Varma. I doubt if he will visit Delhi as frequently now as Jyotsna has got a job with the Asian Bank in Manila.

William Dalrymple, a Scotsman, first came to India as a young backpacker. Something told him that he belonged to India and not to Scotland where he was born. Next, he returned with his pretty Scottish bride and made Delhi his hometown. He rented a large farmhouse beyond the Qutub Minar, where he now lives with his wife, three children, goats, a cockatoo and books.

He has already six books under his belt and has now published the seventh — Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury). I have read most of his books and can say without hesitation that every one of them is full of information and written in beautifully lyrical prose. He is, as the clich`E9 goes, unputdownable. Nine Lives`85 came as a surprise to me. It is about Indian, Tibetan and Pakistani sects in their quest for the ultimate Truth. It is hard to believe that he is not writing of times past but present. There is a girl from a wealthy Jain family who gives up her family, all her possessions to become a nun, walking barefoot from village to village, going without food for days on end, and planning to starve herself to death to attain moksha (salvation).

There are tribals in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh who dance all night to the beat of drums, slaughter chickens and drink their blood before cooking them. There are poor families in Maharashtra and Karnataka who dedicate their daughters to goddess Yallama to become Devadasis. They are not very different from prostitutes and within a few years after bearing illegitimate children of unknown fathers get AIDS, and die before they are 50.

There is a fat Bihari Muslim woman who has to flee for her life when Hindu gangsters attacked her village. She seeks shelter in Muslim Bangladesh, and is then forced out by Bengali Muslims because she cannot speak Bengali and finds sanctuary in the shrine of the Sufi Peer Shahbaz Qalandar in Sindh. She dances as she sings dama dum mast Qalandar.

At the end of the street is a newly set-up Deobandi madrasa. Its teachers are determined to destroy the Sufi dargah as un-Islamic heresy. There are Tamilian idol-makers whose families have been in the trade for 700 years, sculpting images of gods and goddesses for temples and art collectors. There are many others — all convinced that they are in the right path to discover divinity. The most ghoulish and spine-chilling are tantrics of Tarapith in Bengal, who collect human skulls, live in cremation grounds, drink hard liquor, smoke ganja, slaughter goats by the dozen, indulge in sex — all to realise the truth.

And there are ballad singers moving from villages to towns, singing soul-stirring songs in praise of Sri Krishna, Radha and the gopis. Dalrymple never passes judgements, nor questions the rights of these people to the truth as they see it. It is a priceless documentary of different people whose existence I was only vaguely aware of. I feel enriched after reading Nine Lives and strongly recommend it to my readers.

Banta married a nurse. His friend Santa came to see him and asked: "Banta, how is your marriage going?" Banta replied: "Yaar OK, but my wife insists I address her as sister."