Buddhist Monuments Near the Lower Krishna River, India (Part 3 of 3)

For photos, see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see buzzsprout.com/1970784

Transcript

I have almost no contact with important people, let alone aristocrats and their world, but I once got a glimpse of the now-vanished world of the dancing girl of Jaggayyapet.  

It happened like this.  The British had officers in direct charge of a little over half of India.  The rest they left in the hands of nearly 600 princes allowed to sit on thrones and pretend they were in charge.  Princes with large or populous states had to endure the presence of a British officer called the Resident, whose job was to make sure the prince behaved.  

Lots of new hotels in India today are named The Residency.  It’s an odd choice, because that’s what the palaces of the Residents were called.   So here’s a hotel owner seeking to create an aura of exclusivity.  What does he do?  He chooses a name arising from India’s humiliating subservience to foreigners. Go figure.  

Anyway, I remember once visiting a very grand residency–by the time I saw it, it was a women’s college– and testing the bars on one of its porches.  A team of horses could not have pulled those bars out of their anchoring stonework, which I take as proof that the architect was charged with designing a building able to withstand an attack by a prince who had decided that the time had come to kill that damned Britisher.

Hyderabad was the capital and largest city of the most important princely state.  The state was about the size of Oregon and straddled the area between the Godavary River on the north and the Krishna River on the south. Though the city is roughly equidistant between the two rivers, it’s on a tributary of the Krishna called the Musi River, The River of Moses.  Great name.   I’ve forgotten why it’s called that.

Formally, the state was called the Nizam’s Dominion, and its ruler  was called not maharajah but nizam, a Persian word signifying “regulator.” Thanks to the Pax Britannica, the later nizams enjoyed peaceful reigns so long that the sixth and seventh nizams between them spanned the nearly 90 years between the end of the East India Company in 1858 and India’s Independence in 1947.  

Railroads reached Hyderabad in the 1880s, which made it much easier for viceroys to visit at least once during their 5-year term of office.  There’s a photograph of one such occasion in the 1930s.  Lord Willingdon sits next to the seventh nizam, Mir Osman Aly Khan.   There seems no doubt in Willingdon’s mind that the nizam is a puppet, but there’s also no doubt that the nizam thinks the same thing of Willingdon.  It’s true that the nizam didn’t have much of an army, but I’m reminded of another Indian prince who consoled his son by saying that the English officer who humiliated them would soon retire to a miserably cold country where he would shiver in a boring little house and remember his days of glory.

The nizam presided over a court of nobles whose wealth came from jagirs, groups of villages that a nizam in the past had more or less given as property to his lieutenants.  Some fraction of the taxes collected annually from each village went up the chain to the nizam, but some stayed with the men owning the jagirs.  If they owned large or prosperous jagirs, these jagirdars became very wealthy.  

Something similar prevailed across princely India, and Nehru, despite his own elite upbringing at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, despised these pasteboard aristocrats.   Bloodsuckers, he might have said, and within a  year of Independence all the princely states had been abolished.  Hyderabad was the last to bite the dust.  

The Nizam tried to resist.  After all, the British government had assured the princes that with independence each princely state would revert to the status quo before the arrival of the British in India.  The Nizam thought this was a fine idea, but Nehru was having none of it.  There are photographs of the nizam’s general surrendering in 1948 to Nehru’s general, who, as though the British had never left, carries a swagger stick.  

All of which is background to how in Hyderabad in 1981 I met the nawab thirty-odd years after he had lost his jagir.  I never knew his name or where he ranked in the Hyderabad nobility–he was simply “the nawab,” the nobleman–but there was a photograph of him on a wall in the small home to which he had retreated after losing his palace and property.  It was no more than a few rooms around a simple courtyard.  In the photo he wore a tweed sport coat and had one arm on the window sill of a shiny new Buick.  There was also a picture of him carrying a rifle; I don’t remember but he probably had one foot on a tiger.  The nawab also kept a few bits of old furniture.  He showed me a cupboard where two doors, facing each other, swung open to reveal a dozen or more pairs of bespoke English shoes, unworn for years and covered in dust.  The doors of the cupboard swung as smoothly as the doors of a bank vault. 

Reduced to genteel poverty, the nawab still wore an impeccable sherwani, that long coat buttoned up from knee to neck, and his posture was excellent.  The nawab, in a word, was courtly even though he no longer had a court to attend.  The man who would have been the eighth nizam, had emigrated to a sheep station in Australia.

Well, let me not descend into the nostalgia of historical fiction.  When the nawab in the old days visited his jagir, which I bet he did at most once a year, he would have been treated as a god.  Still, I suspect he would not have enjoyed the visit.  I think he had a shred of conscience, or it may just be that he had such refined tastes that it pained him to see his peasants.  Yes, it’s a lot like France before 1789 or Russia before 1917.  

Good riddance, Nehru said, and I get it.  I recall an anecdote from the appalling but fascinating diaries of Chips Channon, an American from Chicago who did his damnedest to become a British aristocrat.  Channon writes that Field Marshal Julian Byng, a British general in World War I and then the governor-general of Canada, had been invited to Buckingham Palace.  He was denied entrance because he was wearing Court Dress and not Full Dress.   Such was and perhaps is the idiocy at the summit of British society.

Still, if the nawab was alive today and if he walked into a jeweler’s shop, he would recoil in disgust at the sight of cultured pearls.  He would wave angrily if a carpet merchant showed him rugs colored with synthetic dyes.

The nawab, in short, was a connoisseur, and when connoisseurs bite the dust, they take boatloads of artists and craftsmen with them.  So Virgil was a hanger-on in the court of Augustus.  Bad example, you say, because we don’t read Virgil any more, so substitute Michelangelo eating dinner courtesy of the Medicis.  Beethoven’s archduke trio was written, by golly, for a real archduke, and his Waldstein sonata was written for a real Count Waldstein.  Even Bach, struggling with a dozen kids in a Leipzig apartment, welcomed the coins tossed to him for coughing up the Goldberg Variations for a diplomat with insomnia.  

Artists today do something similar, submitting application after application for grants from various foundations.  It’s not so different from Virgil.  But the nizam had not only court musicians and painters but dancers like the girl at Jaggayyapet.  He had calligraphers and cabinet makers and barbers and tailors and shoemakers and perfumers and turban wrappers–I’m not kidding on that one; they were called dastars.  They all did beautiful work, and they’re all as good as gone.  Philanthropic foundations help some composers and painters and poets, but they aren’t going to help the guy who made the silk-wrapped slippers for the Nizam.

That seventh nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had palaces inconceivably grander than anything Lord Willingdon owned.  One that survives, the Chowmahalla, was built in the late 19th century in a heavily Europeanized style, replete with iron railings and lamp posts from Macfarlane’s of Glasgow.  Nothing but the best.  

Another, Falaknama, is now a hotel with a fine view and ridiculous prices, but 20 years ago, when I looked around the place, it was a ghost with a caretaker.  Actually it had lots of ghosts, because the entrance hall was rimmed on three sides with a tremendous staircase on whose walls hung oil portraits of the viceroys.  The nizam parked them there–I mean the viceroys, not the paintings–in august hilltop isolation when they came on their ceremonial tours.   It was blatant flattery, but the viceroys probably thought it was their due.  There was a dining room with bookshelves lined with dozens of copies of a heavy mugbook called Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominion.  Apparently the sixth nizam had ordered enough copies to guarantee the book’s publication. It’s a scarce item today, though reprints are available.  Speaking as a wannabe aristocrat myself, I would never buy a reprint.  

The best example of Hyderabadi architecture–by which I mean buildings that didn’t mimic European styles–may be the line of tombs built for a family at the top of the Hyderabad nobility.  These were the Paigahs, who, like Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, wanted their graves to be open to the sky.  Each of the more important tombs, made of marble, was enclosed in a room-size space, unroofed and without solid walls.  The spaces instead were bordered with see-through stucco screens. 

As I was leaving India on this most recent trip, I visited the tombs for the first time in many years.  It was a bit of a shock, because I found them embedded in a residential neighborhood and only about 600 feet from a busy, elevated highway.  I had once stopped to listen here to a street singer who accompanied himself with a harmonium, an instrument I like very much.  The musician was gone, and his voice would have been lost today in traffic noise. 

I pushed open the old wooden door to the grounds of the tombs and found myself in a construction zone. The stucco used in the screens is made of finely ground limestone and is very hard, but the screens were now broken in many places, leaving gaps big enough for a dog to jump through.  This would have been inconceivable to the Paigahs, who had built and endowed a mosque next to the tombs so that, as at the Taj Mahal, someone would forever recite the Quran.  It’s a nice idea, but the money for that had run out, here as at the Taj.

Still, a crew was fixing the screens. They are not made as solid panels that have holes punched or drilled.  Instead, they are built as if you were weaving a chain-link fence from cookie dough.  There is no wire, no armature, just a patient forming of one link after another, leaving more than half the screen open, with holes big enough for two or three fingers.

And here were two men, sitting on the ground with a palette of fresh goo.  When I saw them, they were using a tiny knife to cut delicate traceries in the not-quite-set material.  Behind them,  a team was making fresh goo by sitting cross-legged on the ground and sliding a block back and forth across a wet board until the lime bits were like granulated sugar.  Blocks of limestone were awaiting grinding into fresh goo.

I bet that somewhere you can buy plastic screens that look like these and come from a Chinese factory.  Why not do that?  You wouldn’t have people sitting on the ground and sliding a rock back and forth all day.  Well, while you’re at it, why not buy cultured pearls?  Why not buy rugs made with synthetic dyes?   

Did I mention that the sixth nizam accumulated his dirty laundry until he had a mountain of it?  Then he put it in trunks and sent it to Paris for cleaning.  Time didn’t matter.  As for cost, as the commodore says, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. 

Shipping your laundry for washing in another continent is ridiculous, but think how much poorer we’d be without these generations of bloodsuckers.  And if they were fussy as connoiseurs, think how fussy craftsmen and artists can be.  A young and promising violinist is invited to play for Jascha Heifetz.   He comes with Brahms under his arm, but Heifetz tells him to skip it.  “I just want to hear you play scales.”  

Well, this defense of aristocrats as supporters of arts and crafts would probably not please the aristocrats themselves.  They want to be more than deadwood scattering coins here and there.   Perhaps we should recognize another line of defense, which is that aristocrats are simply better than everyone else.  “My hair is sleek, my cheek is pink, I dine at Blenheim once a week.”

It’s time for Edmund Burke and his 1791 pamphlet called “An Appeal from the New Whigs to the Old Whigs.”  The title isn’t catchy, but after many, many pages of palaver Burke gets around to defining what he calls a natural aristocracy.  Burke writes that these are the men (they’re all men), “without which there is no nation.”  

Well, I’m inclined to reply there’s no nation without cooks and coachmen, but I’ll give Burke some rope.  He’s going to tell us how to make a superior person, and he does it in a single sentence of prodigious length.  I count 38 lines in the original edition.

Burke doesn’t say anything about appearance, which is a pleasant surprise, and he doesn’t explicitly say aristocrats have to be rich, which is even more surprising.  He does brush against it by saying that aristocrats must come from an “estimable” background.  I fear that means that the young aristocrat’s parents must also be aristocrats, but again Burke doesn’t say anything about them having to be rich.  

So far, so good.  Burke says that the aristocrat in training must have the leisure to be broadly educated in the sciences and humanities.  No problem there.  He must also be taught to be honest and brave and willing to fight.  That’s sobering.  The young aristocrat must “be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty.” 

Gulp.  The air is getting thinner, and Burke gets us into the stratosphere by insisting that a young aristocrat must “see nothing low and sordid from… infancy.”  Oh, oh.  Goodbye, Netflix.  Sure, parents can insulate junior from smartphones, but are they going to deny him friends with smartphones?  And even if we put a group of children on an island where they never see or hear a comedian with expletives in every hilarious sentence, how will the kids cope with the real world when they finally see it?  I predict life in an asylum.

I’ve been trying to think of people who come close to meeting Burke’s definition. My nominee is Leon Battista Alberti, a Renaissance man in both senses.  In my own lifetime, Nehru himself is a fair candidate, though inclined to lose his temper too often.  Americans might suggest John F. Kennedy, who had the charm of an aristocrat but who deserved his Secret Service nickname of Lancer.  Rory Stewart comes close, too, although he shamelessly hustles the books he’s written and the tickets he wants you to buy to his shows.  It’s just business, but it’s also not something an aristocrat would do.  My point really is that Burke’s natural aristocrat does not exist any more.  I will make an exception for the incoming class at Stanford.

So much for my two defenses of the nawabs of this world.    I’ve done what I can for them.  Now it’s time to say something about the people who make their lives possible.

Many years ago, I was driving along a lonely road in India.  I passed an old woman so tired that she was struggling to put one foot after the other.  I slowed down, then stopped.  I believe now that I probably then made her life worse, not better.  That wasn’t my intention, but I reached into my wallet and pulled out a rupee bill worth perhaps five dollars, maybe 10.  I handed it to her.  She was too tired to react, though I read confusion in her face.  What happened after I drove off?  How much suspicion did it arouse when she showed the bill to a shopkeeper or even her neighbors?  I bet they just took it from her.  She had no business with that kind of money.  I should have given her a bunch of tiny bills, even coins.  Should I have offered her a ride?  Sure.  I don’t know why I didn’t.

So I was an idiot, but you can understand where the impulse to help comes from.  And along comes Eric Blair, not yet known as George Orwell.  Born in India, educated in England, he’s off to Burma as a policeman.  A few years later he moves back and publishes a novel about Burma that guarantees he will not get his old job back.  He then publishes Down and Out in Paris and London, a book that says to comfortable readers, “Here’s what I saw.  Here’s how the working class lives.”  

Four years pass, and in 1937 he’s back with The Road to Wigan Pier.  On the very first page he uses the words beastly, defiled, hideous, and squalid.  That must be some kind of record.  Orwell is writing about a boarding house where his room “stank like a ferret’s cage… the smell hit you in the face with a smack.”  In the second chapter, he’s moved on to writing about buttons down the back.  He’s talking about the line of scabs on the spines of coal miners who walk long distances in tunnels whose roofs are low and bumpy.

I spent a few hours in Wigan back in 2006.  I walked down the set of 23 locks used by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to drop 200 feet.  The gates were all wood, all manual, very picturesque, and I suppose fun for vacationers on rented narrow boats, or at least fun until the fourth or fifth lock.  

The last coal mines had closed in the 1990s.  I saw no textile mills, either, though the buildings survive, some of them repurposed for apartments and offices much as they have been elsewhere in the UK.  Wigan was Tesco country now, with Lidl and Aldi for variety. 

I should explain that there is no road to Wigan Pier.  There’s no Wigan Pier, either, or at least none that Orwell saw.  Orwell’s title, The Road to Wigan Pier is a metaphor for the line of thought followed by Orwell as he considers the state of Britain.

On the face of it, Orwell is a socialist impatient with idealists, but dig a bit and in the twelfth chapter you come to this sentence:  “The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.  That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there.”

Fast forward nearly a century.  On the way home from India I stopped overnight in London and took the Heathrow Express into town.  No more ticket-punchers on board.  Yes, there was a guard at the turnstile to help people like me figure out where to put the damned bit of paper.  Of course the cash registers at the grocery store an hour later were all self-checkout, again with someone to help customers too stupid to figure out how to use the machines..  A day after that, I whizzed through U.S. immigration without any documents.  It was a relief, though I wonder where the old inspectors went.  I took an airport tram, remotely controlled, of course.  

Orwell was seeing an end to work of every sort, and although we’re not there yet, it seems that many kinds of professional jobs will in the next few decades bite the dust as surely as bank tellers and full-service gas station attendants.  

Optimists argue, and Orwell points this out, that this is the best of all possible worlds, because we will be set free to climb mountains, write poetry, and explore the cuisines of the world.  Orwell thought that this was a delusion.  He writes, “The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the activities of the eye and the hand.”  

People used to sing; now they listen to professionals.  People used to draw or sketch, but it’s so much easier to take a photo with your phone.  Women used to sew.  Now–maybe you live someplace where this isn’t true–it’s hard to find a fabric store, let alone a spinning wheel or loom.  People still do cook, but supermarkets devote an increasing amount of space to meals in a box.  You’ve seen it on TV: the detective goes home and takes some ready-to-eat thing out of the fridge.  He or she lacks the will to cook partly because of fatigue or depression but also because there is no need to cook.

Yesterday I bought a loaf of bread.  It was in a plastic bag and sealed with a twist tie.  I handed it to a man behind the counter and asked him to please slice it.  It’s not that I can’t slice bread.  I can, same as I can change a light bulb.  I asked him to do it for the same reason that grocery stores now sell finely sliced cabbage.  Why not?  I like coleslaw.  Why should I bother slicing it?  We resist some of these things and we certainly mock some of these things, but everyone I know also succumbs to some of these things.  

And it’s not just physical activities that atrophy.  I was listening today to Harry Truman speaking about the 1960 election.  Nobody’s ever accused Truman of being an intellectual, but his sentence structure had a complexity unknown to political leaders today, and there’s a linguistic cliff between the Federalist Papers and today’s debates.  The old stuff is almost unreadable.   We’re stupefied, as in stupidified.    

So, the dancing girl on the base of the Jaggayapet stupa is a surviving bit of a forgotten kingdom.  The collapse was painful but not terminal, because the dancing girl has a successor in the girls who danced for the Nizam and the Paigah nobles and perhaps even for the nawab I met that day in 1981.   What happens when our own culture takes us to that place where we have no intention of going, where we will be rich beyond belief, yet stupidified?  The answer is about as bleak and as terminal as what Charlton Heston found on the beach.  The big difference is that it will probably happen without our noticing.  Why just now I’m wondering what’s for dinner.  I regret to say that my wife, who’s more alive than anyone I know, periodically lusts after hot dogs.