Читать книгу The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India - William Dalrymple - Страница 11

GWALIOR, MADHYA PRADESH, 1993

The Inspector General of Police had thick tufts of black hair growing out of his earlobes; his sunglasses glinted in the bright winter sunlight. He looked out over the dusty airstrip towards the heavily armed guards lining the perimeter fence. Facing them, at the end of the strip, a group of local dignitaries sat waiting in the shade of a tarpaulin. The IG looked up in to the sky, down at his watch, and then felt at his hips for the reassuring hilt of his carbine.

‘So,’ I said. ‘You’re expecting trouble?’

‘Trouble?’ he replied. ‘What is trouble?’

‘Protests? Demonstrations? Riots?’

‘Anti-social elements are there,’ said the IG, patting his carbine again. ‘But we can deal with them.’

Suddenly the dignitaries rose from their chairs; from the sky came the faint buzz of a distant plane. The small jet circled lower and lower then came in to land, throwing up clouds of dust in its wake. After a pause, the door opened and the guards stiffened to attention.

From the dark aperture in the side of the plane emerged the figure everyone had been waiting for. It was no peak-capped general or briefcase-carrying government minister. Instead, an old, grey-haired woman tottered down the steps of the private jet, clutching a small white handbag. She wore a white sari, and as she emerged in to the sunlight she covered her head with a thin muslin veil. Waiting for her at the bottom of the steps was a thick-set figure in a leather jacket and rollneck pullover. He was bald and slightly sinister-looking: not dissimilar to Blofeld in Goldfinger.

As the woman stepped off the bottom rung, the assembled reception committee ran up and threw themselves to the ground, competing with each other to be the first to touch her feet. The woman acknowledged the scrabbling dignitaries with a slight nod of the head, then handed her bag to Blofeld and walked on towards the waiting limousine. A liveried bearer slammed the door. Blofeld got in the other side, and the chauffeur drove off.

Behind the car followed a convoy of open-topped police jeeps. Each was filled with paramilitary troops armed with assault rifles and sub-machine-guns. With a screeching of tyres, the convoy passed through the gates of the airstrip and disappeared past the bullock carts and bicycle rickshaws in to the dusty heat-haze of the Indian evening.

If you ask people in India what they think of Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia – the Dowager Maharani of Gwalior, Vice-President of the World Hindu Council and doyenne of India’s growing army of militant Hindu revivalists – you will get many different replies. All of them will, however, be forceful. Like Lady Thatcher – whose unshakeable convictions and sense of destiny she shares – the Rajmata provokes the strongest of responses.

In her time the Rajmata (Queen Mother) has been called a madwoman and a saint; a dangerous reactionary and a national saviour; a stubborn and self-righteous old lunatic and a brave and resilient visionary. At the age of seventy-nine she is still an enigma. Though her father was born to an ordinary smallholding family in an anonymous Indian village, she managed to win the hand of one of the subcontinent’s premier Maharajahs, and for many years ruled with him over an area the size of Portugal. Her vast baroque palace contained – among other treasures – the second-largest chandelier in the world; but her kingdom was dissolved at Independence in 1947, and by the mid-seventies her politics led to her spending months in a filthy Indian prison, sharing a cell with prostitutes, gangsters and murderers.

The Rajmata is very religious, and spends at least two hours every day deep in prayer. Few, even among her enemies, would deny that she is one of the most remarkable politicians in India, and for nearly fifty years she has ceaselessly fought and suffered for what she believes in: the toppling of the increasingly corrupt and power-hungry Congress Party and its replacement by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Yet it is far from impossible that the political revolution the Rajmata hopes to effect could in the long term change India from a tolerant secular democracy to some sort of ultra-nationalist Hindu state. Moreover, if she succeeds in her aims, India’s largest minority – its 150 million Muslims – will effectively find themselves second-class citizens in their own country. Although the Rajmata may personally be a good and even a holy woman, many aspects of her party’s agenda remain deeply troubling.

For the BJP is not like other Indian political parties, in that it was founded as the political arm of a neo-fascist paramilitary organisation, the secretive Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (Association of National Volunteers, or RSS). To this day most senior BJP figures have RSS backgrounds, and several hold posts in both organisations. The RSS and the BJP both believe, as the centrepiece of their ideology, that India is in essence a Hindu nation, and that the minorities, especially the Muslims, may live there only if they acknowledge this.

Like the Phalange in Lebanon, the RSS was founded in direct imitation of 1930s European fascist movements; and like its models it still makes much of daily parading in khaki drill. The RSS views this as an essential element in the creation of a corps of dedicated and disciplined paramilitary followers who, so the theory goes, will form the basis of a revival of some long-lost golden age of national strength and purity.

It is easy to laugh at the RSS as they line up every morning in shabby mofussil towns across northern India to drill with their Boy Scout shorts and bamboo swagger-sticks, but their founding philosophy is anything but comical. Madhav Gowalkar, the early RSS leader still known simply as ‘the Guru’, took direct inspiration from Hitler’s treatment of Germany’s religious minorities: ‘To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by the purging of its Semitic race, the Jews,’ Gowalkar wrote admiringly in We, or Our Nationhood Defined. ‘National pride in its highest has been manifested there. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated … The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must learn … to revere the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving nothing.’

During Partition, the RSS was responsible for many of the most horrifying atrocities against India’s Muslims, and it was a former RSS member, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, for ‘pandering to the minorities’. Today, both the RSS and the BJP have moved a long way since the time when they were little more than a vehicle for an extreme form of neo-fascist Hindu fundamentalism, and the BJP in particular now embraces a wide spectrum of conservative and nationalist opinion. Moreover, the rise of the BJP has taken place, at least partly, due to Indian Muslims’ increasing distrust of the Congress, which despite claiming to be a secular party has, since the 1980s, done less and less to protect India’s minorities.

Nevertheless, the BJP and its Hindu nationalist allies have been consistently implicated across northern India in the almost monthly anti-Muslim pogroms which are becoming such a defining feature of India at the close of the twentieth century. However respectable its leaders have become, and however inured the Indian élite have become to its message, when communal riots break out the local cadres of the RSS and the BJP are rarely far away. Indeed, as the Rajmata’s BJP gathers momentum, and its ideology grows in popularity and respectability, India has seen communal conflict assume a scale and significance not witnessed since the massacres of Partition half a century ago.

Yet for all this, to meet the Rajmata, and to sit listening to her over breakfast, you would never guess she could be capable of anything more sinister than winning an award for Most Loveable Granny at an English village fête.

‘Please, Mr William,’ she said, ‘you must have one more guava. This is the height of the season.’

‘I mustn’t. I’ve got to watch my weight.’

‘When I was a girl I always thought it better to have a little extra round the middle. In those days we thought it a sign of good health.’

‘No. Really. Thank you.’

‘Never mind. I’ll keep it for you for tea.’

She clapped her hand, and the small green piece of fruit was carried away on an escutcheoned plate by a liveried bearer.

The Rajmata was sitting at the top of the table in the grand dining room of the Jal Vilas Palace in Gwalior. As she nibbled at pieces of fruit from the huge crystal bowl in front of her, she chatted happily about the progress of her day. Although it was only eight o’clock in the morning, the old lady had already been up for two and a half hours performing her lengthy morning puja (religious devotions).

‘Everyone gets very angry,’ she said, ‘because before I do anything in the morning I must spend at least two hours bathing my little Krishna, putting on his clothes and decorating him with garlands. I do it just the particular way he likes it.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You have a … close relationship with Krishna?’ I asked.

‘I can’t really describe what it’s like,’ said the Rajmata. ‘I mean, I really shouldn’t: it’s so personal. It’s … it’s like two lovers: you can’t say to them, “Describe how you behave when you are together.”’

Sitting silently beside me, still in his leather jacket, was Sardar Angre, the Blofeld-figure I had seen the day before at the airport. He kept out of the conversation about the Rajmata’s puja, and for its duration appeared absorbed in his omelette.

When the Rajmata’s husband died in July 1961 and the Dowager Maharani became estranged from her son Mahadav Rao Scindia, the new Maharajah, Sardar Angre stepped in to the breach and began acting as her constant companion and adviser. A nobleman whose family has served the Gwalior Maharajahs since the eighteenth century, the Sardar holds the Rajmata in an awe and respect which has not dimmed with time. She in turn looks to him for advice and guidance. They make a good team: he is as dry, sober and practical as she is mystical and quixotic.

As the conversation at the breakfast table turned, inevitably, to politics, the Rajmata commented that the recent dramatic rise in the popularity of the BJP seemed to be almost supernaturally guided.

‘Really,’ she said, ‘it is nothing short of a miracle.’

‘No, no, Highness,’ said Sardar Angre in his measured tone. ‘It is the will of the people.’

‘This is your view,’ said the Rajmata firmly. ‘But I see the hand of God. I believe it is the doing of Hanuman.’

‘You really think the BJP is somehow … divinely propelled?’ I asked.

‘I have a feeling so,’ said the Rajmata, turning to me with an excited conspiratorial whisper. ‘Miracles can happen even these days.’

Seeing me scribble the Rajmata’s comments in to my pocket notebook, Sardar Angre sensed danger, and whispered sharply to the Rajmata in Hindi: ‘The modern world does not believe in miracles.’

‘You are wrong, Sardar,’ said the Rajmata, holding her ground. ‘Only yesterday I was reading in the Reader’s Digest about a great miracle in America: some invalids being healed – I can’t remember the details. But if these people are believing …’

Sardar Angre frowned.

‘If you are on the right path,’ persisted the Rajmata, ‘truth will always prevail. My Hanuman is always on the side of truth. I have taken His protection, and Hanuman will always sort out our problems. He will remove all obstacles from our path.’

Seeing the Sardar’s expression, I said: ‘I don’t think Sardar Angre likes you to talk about religion.’

‘No, no – you are quite wrong,’ said the Rajmata. ‘He also is very religious. One day I was looking for him and he would not answer my calls. So I went to his room and there he was sitting cross-legged in front of his Krishna idol …’

Sardar Angre was visibly blushing, but the Rajmata was in full flight.

‘… and tears were running down his face. I would not have thought – such a practical man …’

Sardar Angre was spared more embarrassment by one of the bearers bringing in a great pile of the morning’s papers. He and the Rajmata began scanning the headlines.

‘Riots, riots, riots,’ said the Rajmata. ‘Every day it is the same.’

Sardar Angre was however engrossed in a report in a Hindi newspaper concerning the latest episode of his own long-standing feud with the Rajmata’s son. The dispute, which had been going on for some fifteen years – and which had, since its outset, been closely followed by the whole country – was currently enjoying one of its periodic flare-ups. Sardar Angre read the report out to the Rajmata.

‘This is all my fault,’ said the Rajmata, shaking her head. ‘A mother’s weakness.’

I must have looked a little confused by all this, for I was immediately treated to a résumé of the whole celebrated affair. In 1975, when Mrs Gandhi locked up the opposition, suspended the Constitution and declared the Emergency, the Rajmata found herself transferred from the splendours of Gwalior to the less familiar surroundings of the infamous Tihar jail near Delhi. Her son, however, did a deal with the Congress and escaped to Nepal, leaving the Rajmata to fester in prison. She has never forgiven him. Moreover, as a minister in the current Congress government, the Maharajah remains a political as well as a personal adversary, the battle within the divided family mirroring the political divide of the nation at large.

‘He did not fight the people who imprisoned his own mother,’ growled Sardar Angre. ‘He should have gone underground and joined the resistance against Mrs Gandhi. Instead he totally surrendered. Nobody in this great family has ever done that. He betrayed his own ancestors.’

‘When he was in power Sardar Angre’s house was attacked [by the police, apparently acting on Mahadav Rao’s orders]. Half his possessions were taken, photographs were smashed …’

‘My two Rottweillers were shot dead …’

‘But worst of all,’ continued the Rajmata, ‘in the Emergency he left me inside that jail with the criminals and prostitutes. Imagine it: one of the inmates had twenty-four cases against her, including four murders. These were the companions he thought suitable for his mother.’

‘How did you cope in jail?’ I asked.

‘I had faith in my Hanumanji,’ replied the Rajmata. ‘He sent help.’

‘Hanuman came to you in person?’ I asked.

‘No,’ replied the Rajmata, sighing and shaking her head sadly. ‘But He spoke within me and showed me that all human beings – even the most hardened criminals – will respond if you show them affection.’

The Rajmata raised her eyes to heaven:

‘And He was quite right, you know: they did. One murderer became my cook – I don’t think I’ve ever had such a faithful servant. I wept when I finally left the prison – I was leaving so many close friends.’

From the front hall a bearer appeared and whispered in the Rajmata’s ear. She nodded, dabbed her mouth with a napkin and got up.

‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘There are some ladies here to see me.’

She added: ‘Sardar Angre would, I’m sure, be pleased to show you around.’

Sardar Angre duly took me around the palace.

I followed him through room after room, hall after hall – great prairies of marble reflected back and forth by tall Victorian pier-glass mirrors.

Upstairs, all was rotting chintz and peeling plaster: a faint but unmistakable scent of decay hung in the air. Several of the rooms were unlit and seemed to be unused. They were visited only by the sparrows nesting in the wooden hammerbeams of the roof; a heavy lint of old cobweb formed fan-vaults in the corner-angles. When the shutters were opened the intruding beams of light illuminated thick snowstorms of swirling dust-motes.

Only the Rajmata’s bedroom really seemed loved and cared for. In a corner was a little silver shrine, full of idols. In front, a line of incense sticks were still smouldering. Every surface in the room was heavily loaded with other pieces of devotional clutter: photographs of Hindu saints and sadhus; a pair of Shiva lingams and a black mirrorwork image of the boy Krishna playing his flute.

By the bed, somewhat surprisingly, stood a photograph of the Rajmata’s son taken on his wedding day. Despite all the hurt of their disagreements and public wrangling, the Rajmata’s maternal ties still remained strong.

‘Come,’ said Sardar Angre, seeing where my eyes were resting.

He opened the double doors and stepped out on to the balcony. Together we looked out over the long lawns of the garden leading up, past groves of palm trees, to a delicate Moghul pavilion at the end.

Then I noticed that to one side of the palace, a few hundred yards away, lay another, even larger, edifice. Suddenly I realised that the vast building I had just toured was only a small, detached wing – a kind of garden cottage – tucked off to the side of the main bulk of the Jai Vilas Palace. This far larger palace was the home of the Sardar’s enemy, the Maharajah. Like the building we were standing in, it was a late-nineteenth-century construction built in an Italian baroque style: a kind of massive Milanese wedding cake air-dropped in to the jungles of central India.

It was here, in the larger palace, that lay the two most celebrated follies of India’s nineteenth-century Maharajahs. Upstairs glittered the great chandelier, said to be rivalled only by that in the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. So heavy was it that before it was hoisted in to place, a ramp a mile long was built, allowing twelve elephants to climb up on to the roof. Only after it was confirmed that the vaults could indeed bear the weight of all twelve of these massive beasts did the architect feel confident enough to order the chandelier to be raised in to place.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the dining room, the palace’s other great eccentricity was being constructed: a solid silver model railway that took the port around to the Maharajah’s male dinner guests. When a guest lifted the decanter from its carriage, the train would stop until it was replaced. Then it would hoot and shunt its way around the table to the next guest.

Both of these follies, and indeed the entire palace complex, were built for the ill-fated visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Gwalior in 1875. Realising that his present palace was ill-suited for entertaining European royalty, the Scindia of the day had given orders that work should begin on the grandest and most modern palace in Asia. A fortune was spent on the new building. In its nine-hundred-odd rooms gold leaf covered every dado, while solid marble flagged every floor. Everything was to be of the best: a warehouseful of Bruges tapestries, Chippendale chairs and huge Louis XIV mirrors was imported from Europe. Only one thing was lacking: it never occurred to the Maharajah to take the trouble to find a proper architect.

Instead, he turned to a jobbing amateur, and instructed a local Indian Army Colonel to knock something up. Colonel Michael Filose had no formal architectural training – in fact, prior to starting work on Jai Vilas he had worked on only one building: the Gwalior jail. But the Maharajah saw this as no obstacle: he packed Filose off to Paris to see Versailles, instructing him to come back quickly and build something similar in Gwalior before the Prince of Wales arrived.

It is not clear exactly what went wrong, but on the night the Prince of Wales came to stay, the silver train braked suddenly and toppled the port decanter right in to his lap. Later that night there was another disaster. Before she went to bed, the future Queen Alexandra decided to have a bath. As the vast marble tub filled with water, it quivered imperceptibly, then slowly sunk out of sight through the floor.

As we were leaving Jai Vilas, Sardar Angre and I bumped in to a couple of other elderly sardars, or noblemen, from the old Gwalior kingdom. Brigadier Pawar was in the lead, accompanied by his wife, Vanmala, and another old gentlemen who was addressed throughout merely as ‘the Major’. As Angre and Vanmala stood chatting, I asked the two old sardars what they missed most about the old days when the Maharajah and Rajmata ruled Gwalior.

‘Well actually,’ said Brigadier Pawar, ‘the old days we miss altogether. We miss them so much you can’t pinpoint any one thing: everything is missed.’

‘In the old days everybody had time,’ said the Major.

‘There was time for processions, for riding, for tiger-shooting …’

‘There was not much competition,’ continued the Major. ‘Things were just there. Now you have to struggle for each achievement.’

‘Before it was a very much sheltered life. Now it’s more competitive.’

‘Unless you pull someone down you can’t go up.’

The two old men looked at each other sadly.

‘You cannot imagine the splendour and affluence of those days,’ said Vanmala, filling the moment’s silence. ‘If I started telling you, you would feel it is a story I am making up.’

‘In those days every sardar had fifteen horses and an elephant,’ said the Major. ‘But now we cannot afford even a donkey.’

‘But it’s not just the sardars who are nostalgic,’ said Vanmala. ‘The entire population is nostalgic. That’s why the Rajmata – and all Scindias – are still so popular. Whenever any of them stands for election they are voted in by the people.’

‘But why is that?’ I asked. ‘Don’t people prefer democracy?’

‘No,’ said the Pawars in unison.

‘Absolutely not,’ said the Major.

‘You see, in those days there was no corruption,’ said the Brigadier. ‘The Maharajahs worked very hard on the administration. Everything was well run.’

‘The city was beautifully kept up,’ said the Major. ‘The Maharajah would himself go around the city, you know, at night, incognito, and see how things were being managed. He really did believe his subjects were his children. Now wherever you go there is corruption and extortion.’

‘Today,’ said Vanmala, ‘every babu in the civil service thinks he is a Maharajah, and tries to make difficulties for the common man. But in those days there was just one King. The people of Gwalior had confidence that if they told their story he would listen and try to redress them.’

‘The Maharajah and the Rajmata were like a father and mother to them,’ said the Major.

‘Now all of that is no more,’ said Brigadier Pawar.

‘That world has gone,’ said the Major.

‘Now only our memories are left,’ said Brigadier Pawar. ‘That’s all. That’s all we have.’

When they died, the mortal remains of the Maharajahs were cremated at a sacred site not far from the Jai Vilas Palace. After saying goodbye to the Pawars and the Major, Sardar Angre took me over in his jeep to see the place.

The memorials – a series of free-standing marble cenotaphs raised on the site of the original funeral pyres – were dotted around an enclosure dominated by a huge cathedral-like temple.

‘The complex has its own staff,’ said Sardar Angre as we drove in. ‘In each of the shrines is a small bust of one of the Maharajahs. The staff changes the clothes of the statues, prepares them food and plays them music, just as if they were still alive.’

He jumped out of the jeep and led me towards one of the cenotaphs.

‘The same will happen to the Rajmata when she dies,’ he said. ‘You see, in Gwalior the people still believe the Maharajahs are gods – or at least semi-divine. They think the departed Maharajahs are still living in the form of the statues.’

‘You believe this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Sardar Angre.

I laughed, but soon realised I had missed the point: ‘No, actually I believe in reincarnation,’ said Sardar Angre. ‘I think the Maharajahs are alive somewhere else in a different body, not in some statue.’

Sardar Angre removed his shoes and led the way in to one of the shrines. In the portico stood a small marble Shiva lingam; ahead, in the main sanctuary – the part of the temple normally reserved for the image of the god – sat a statue of a large, rather jolly-looking lady in 1930s Indian dress.

‘This is the mother of Her Highness’s late husband,’ said Sardar Angre. ‘Look! She has a new pink sari.’

She had, but that was not all. What looked like a diamond necklace had recently been hung around her marble neck; someone had also placed a sandalwood tikka mark on her forehead, between her eyes. A small cot with a mosquito-net canopy and a full complement of blankets and pillows had been left to one side of the statue; beside it, on the bedside table, stood a framed photograph of the old Maharani and her husband.

Sardar Angre explained the statue’s daily routine. It woke up in the morning to the sound of musicians. Then the priest gave it a discreet ceremonial bath, after which its clothes were changed by a maidservant. Later, the statue had lunch, followed by an afternoon siesta. In the evening, after tea, it was treated to a small concert before being brought dinner: dal, rice, two vegetables, chapattis and some sticky Indian pudding. Then the bed was put out and made ready – the corners turned back – and the lights turned off. The statue was allowed to make its own way between the sheets.

Grave goods – everything the Maharani would need for the afterlife – lay scattered all around. I felt rather as if I had stumbled in to a pyramid twenty years after the death of Ramses II.

‘Death is nothing to us,’ said the Rajmata later, as we went in to lunch. ‘For us it is only a change of circumstance.’

‘Like moving house?’

‘Exactly.’

I knew then, before it arrived, exactly what we were going to have to eat: dal, rice, two vegetables and chapattis, followed by some sticky Indian pudding. The same meal as the statues, cooked by the same kitchen, just the way the old Maharajahs liked it.

I left Gwalior that day, both charmed and amazed by the Rajmata: it seemed impossible to reconcile the old-fashioned, slightly batty Dowager Maharani I had met with the fire-breathing fascist depicted by her detractors in the Indian press. Her eccentricities seemed weird but endearing; there was absolutely nothing sinister about her.

I put my notebooks away in a bottom drawer, and forgot all about them.

Then, eleven months later, on 6 December 1992, the Rajmata hit the headlines again, this time in the most unsavoury circumstances.

For the previous five years Indian politics had been dominated by the Babri Masjid dispute. This concerned a sixteenth-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya, reputedly built by invading Muslims over a temple marking the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram.

Every year since 1989, various of the Rajmata’s Hindu organisations had held an annual rally at the disputed mosque. There they had performed sacred rites to indicate their wish to rebuild a temple on the site. In 1992 the rally was called as normal, but things did not proceed as expected.

Instead, having been whipped up in to a frenzy by the Rajmata and other BJP leaders, the vast crowd of two hundred thousand militant Hindus stormed the barricades. Shouting slogans like ‘Victory to Lord Ram!’ ‘Hindustan is for the Hindus!’ and ‘Death to the Muslims!’ they began tearing the mosque apart with sledgehammers, ropes, pickaxes and their bare hands.

One after another, like symbols of India’s time-honoured traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism, the three domes of the mosque fell to the ground. In little more than four hours the entire structure had been reduced not just to ruination but – quite literally – to rubble.

By the time the last pieces of the mosque’s masonry had been brought tumbling down, one group of Hindu militants had begun shouting ‘Death to the journalists!’ and attacked a group of foreign correspondents with knives and iron bars, smashing cameras and television equipment. Having tasted blood, the mob set off to murder as many local Muslims as they could find. They finished off the job by torching the Muslims’ houses.

While all this was happening, Rajmata Scindia – who had earlier signed a written pledge to the Indian High Court guaranteeing the mosque’s safety – stood on the viewing platform, cheering as enthusiastically as if she was a football fan watching her team win the World Cup. As the demolition proceeded, she grabbed a microphone and encouraged the militants over the Tannoy.

Later that afternoon, a party of journalists stopped her limousine as she was leaving the town. They asked her whether she at least condemned the attacks on the correspondents. She replied in just two words: ‘Acha hoguy’ – it was a good thing.

Over the next fortnight, unrest swept India: crowds of angry Muslim demonstrators came out on to the streets, only to be massacred by the same police force that had earlier stood by and allowed the Hindu militants to destroy the mosque without firing a shot. In all, about two thousand people were killed and eight thousand injured in the violence that followed the demolition of the mosque.

Bombay was the scene of some of the worst rioting, but – as elsewhere – the trouble had pretty well died down by Christmas. Then, on the night of 7 January 1993, a Hindu family was brutally roasted alive when petrol bombs were thrown in to their shanty-hut. It is still unclear who was responsible for the killings – the evidence seems to point to criminal gangs working for unscrupulous property developers – but the local Hindu fundamentalists assumed it was the work of the Muslims, and set to work orchestrating a bloody and brutal revenge.

For the next week Bombay blazed as Muslims were hunted down by armed mobs, burned in their homes, scalded by acid bombs or knifed in the streets by mobile hit-squads. A few prominent middle-class Muslims – factory owners, the richer shopkeepers, newspaper editors – were also singled out for attack. Some of the poorer Muslim districts of the city were completely gutted by fire. In several places the municipal water pipes were turned off, and when the Muslims began to creep out of their ghettos with buckets in their hands, they found themselves surrounded by thugs who covered them with kerosene and set them alight, burning hundreds alive. In all, an estimated forty thousand Hindu activists went on a meticulously planned rampage, with the tacit support of the (96 per cent Hindu) police force. For a fortnight Bombay, India’s effervescent commercial capital, was transformed in to a subcontinental version of Beirut or Sarajevo.

When the army was finally brought in, a curfew declared and the acid bombs, flick-knives and AK-47s had been put back in their hiding places, at least fourteen hundred people – the overwhelming majority impoverished Muslims – had been slaughtered. Many more were injured and disfigured. Hundreds of thousands of others fled from the city to the shelter of their ancestral villages. According to a memorandum prepared by Citizens for Peace, a pressure group formed by Bombay’s business élite, the violence was ‘nothing short of a deliberate plan to change the ethnic composition of what was hitherto regarded as a cosmopolitan city’.

Behind the mass murder and ethnic cleansing was the local Hindu nationalist party allied to the Rajmata’s BJP: the Shiv Sena (Lord Shiva’s Army). Their leader, a former cartoonist named Bal Thackeray, made no secret of the fact that the mobs were under his control, and boasted in a magazine interview that he aimed to ‘kick out India’s 110 million Muslims and send them to Pakistan’. ‘Have they behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany?’ he was quoted as asking. ‘If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Germany.’

Yet according to one newspaper report that I read, the Rajmata, far from attacking the bloodshed, let it be known that she regarded Thackeray and the Shiv Sena as close allies of the BJP: their aims were right, she said; only some of their methods were a little questionable.

Her position on this, and her apparent lack of concern at the bloody massacre of several thousand Indian Muslims – indeed the whole country’s gradual slide towards communal anarchy – seemed irreconcilable with the impression I had formed of her in Gwalior as a cosy old grandma. Baffled, I decided to revisit the Rajmata, to try to understand how one woman could behave so very differently in different circumstances.

I telephoned her aides in Delhi and discovered that the seventy-nine-year-old was now busy campaigning in the jungles and villages of central India: after the recent upheavals, she expected the government to fall by March, and wanted to be ready for the general election when it was called. The Rajmata was uncontactable, said her aides: she was campaigning in the remotest corners of her old kingdom, far from any working telephone. But, I was told, if I went to the town of Shivpuri the following weekend I might be able to catch her on her way through.

I did as I was told. By Sunday morning I had tracked the Rajmata down to the house of the local Sardar in Shivpuri. She was heading south towards Bhopal in half an hour, she said. She did not have time to speak to me now, but if I came with her in her car I could interview her on the way.

‘Oh!’ she said as we headed down the driveway in the limo. ‘I wish you had been there at Ayodhya when the mosque fell! When I saw the three domes come down I thought: “This is what God wanted. It was His will.”’

‘But what about all the murders? What about the massacres in Bombay?’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t say Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena thugs were the hand of God as well, would you?’

‘I won’t criticise Thackeray,’ said the Rajmata benignly. ‘For so long the Muslims have been appeased by the Congress. What happened was a reaction. Thackeray is a bit extreme, but …’

‘No,’ said Sardar Angre. ‘He is quite right. The Muslims must be made to understand that they should be proud of Hindustan. We cannot tolerate Muslims in this country if they don’t feel themselves Indian. Look what happens at cricket matches: the Muslims always support Pakistan.’

I wondered whether Angre realised he was unconsciously echoing the sentiments of Lord Tebbit, but decided not to complicate the issue. I simply said: ‘You can hardly justify murdering people because they support the wrong cricket team.’

‘Hindus are docile people,’ said the Rajmata. ‘They always welcome anyone – even the Jews.’ She nodded her head as if to emphasise what she clearly regarded as an extreme feat of tolerance. ‘They are not violent.’

‘They don’t seem to be very docile at the moment,’ I said.

‘The Muslims have been appeased for so long,’ repeated Angre.

‘The police don’t seem to appease them much,’ I said. ‘They always take the side of the Hindus.’

‘Well, naturally birds of a feather will flock together,’ replied the Rajmata brightly. ‘You cannot expect Hindu policemen to attack their own Hindu brethren.’

‘And what about the police raping Muslim women? There have been many reports of that.’

The Rajmata considered this for a minute then replied: ‘I think that maybe those policeman who do that have seen some similar atrocity done to Hindu women by the Muslims. That would make them mad with anger and grief.’

She looked across at me, smiling benignly as if she had just solved the whole problem.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘if only the Muslims followed the Hindu ideology there would be no more trouble.’

‘But you can hardly expect a hundred million Muslims to abandon their faith and convert to Hinduism.’

‘That’s just the trouble,’ she replied. ‘The Muslims should realise that they are Indians. Babur [the first Moghul Emperor] was not their ancestor, Ram was. They should accept our common culture and unite with us in the name of God. This must be the answer. Anyway,’ she added with a frown, ‘they are too many to drive out.’

What can one make of a naive and pious old woman who can close her eyes to the massacre of innocent people carried out by her own supporters? Who can wilfully fail to make the connection between the emotions she whips up and the garrotted corpse lying in the dirt of a narrow alleyway? In her blindness, the Rajmata remains an unsettling reminder that you need not be personally objectionable to subscribe to the most deeply objectionable political creeds: charm and sweetness are clearly not guarantees against either violent nationalism or the most xenophobic religious fundamentalism and bigotry.

My last image of the Rajmata was the sight of her addressing an adoring crowd in a remote district in central India. After she had finished speaking and the crowds were cheering and clapping, the drums were beating and marigold garlands were being thrown over her neck, she slowly made her way through a police cordon towards her waiting helicopter. Already the rotor blades were beginning to turn.

‘Who is going and who is not?’ asked an aide.

‘I have no idea. I am going. That much I know,’ replied the Rajmata, looking at the helicopter with some misgiving.

‘Are you frightened of flying?’ I asked.

‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘Flying I am absolutely at home. But it has to be with wings.’

Then she smiled.

‘My Hanuman can fly too. He flew to Lanka to rescue Sita. But of course, he does not need a helicopter …’

The aides were waiting. Bending low beneath the rotor blades, the old lady scuttled in to the cockpit, ready for another bout of campaigning in some other district of her old kingdom.

As the crowd of villagers looked on, the blades turned quicker and quicker. There was a noise like a great wind, and clouds of dust blew over the podium where the Rajmata had been speaking just minutes before.

Some of the villagers, terrified, ran for cover; others prostrated themselves on the ground. When they raised their heads they saw that the Rajmata had risen like a Hindu goddess in to the heavens, carried, as it were, on the wings of Garuda, the great winged vehicle of the immortals.