the ashram consisted of two vast halls. On the floor of each squatted about a thousand widows in their identical white saris. Most of them seemed to be in their fifties or sixties, but there was a thin scattering of much younger women, while around the edge of the hall, leaning against the walls, or occasionally completely prostrate on the ground, were a number of much older women. Some of them were clearly mentally disturbed, letting out high-pitched shrieks like wounded birds, while others compulsively combed their hair or brushed away imaginary flies. The windows of the two halls were shuttered, and the only light came from a pair of naked bulbs suspended from the centre of the ceiling, leaving the edges of the rooms in a deep, Dickensian darkness. The whole establishment stank of urine and dirty linen.
Then a woman stood up in the centre of each room and began clashing cymbals; from another place a bell started to ring. A new shift was beginning. A cantor started up the chant, answered by two thousand widows singing as one, on and on, faster and faster: ‘Hare Ram, Hare Krishna, Hare Ram, Hare Krishna …’
This form of devotion was the invention of the great sixteenth-century Bengali sage Shri Krishna Chaitanya, an Orpheus-like figure believed by his followers to be an incarnation of Krishna. After Chaitanya’s wife died from a snake bite, the sage became a wanderer, travelling to all the sites connected with the life of Krishna, building many new temples and rescuing others from decay, particularly Vrindavan, whose shrines and temples had become overgrown and ruined.
Chaitanya’s devotion to Krishna was of a deeply emotional kind, and his contemporary biography, the Chaitanya Charit Amrita, is filled with accounts of him falling in to mystical raptures, ‘breaking in to song, dancing, weeping, climbing up trees, running to and fro like a madman and calling out the name of Radha and Krishna’. He encouraged his followers to come together and chant devotional songs called kirtans which, sung with a rising tempo and accompanied by the ringing of cymbals and bells, were supposed to lift the devotee in to a mystical rapture. In Chaitanya’s own time there are many accounts of thousands of devotees caught up in the mesmeric beat, falling in to a state of trance, dancing and jumping as if in a frenzy, carried away in torrents of religious hysteria. So unruly and ecstatic did many of Chaitanya’s prayer gatherings become that the Moghul governor of the area tried to ban his cult, and to arrest its leader for disrupting public order. According to the Chaitanya Charit Amrita, even the wild beasts were affected by his kirtans:
When the herd of elephants saw Chaitanya coming through the woods of Vrindavan they shouted ‘Krishna’ and danced and ran about in love. Some rolled on the ground, others bellowed. As the master sang a kirtan aloud, the deer flocked thither and marched with him on two sides. Then six or seven tigers came up and joined the deer in accompanying the master, the deer and the tiger dancing together shouting ‘Krishna! Krishna!’, while embracing and kissing each other. Even the trees and creepers of Vrindavan were ecstatic, putting forth sprouts and tendrils, rejoicing at the sound.
Yet anything less ecstatic than the singing of today’s widows in Vrindavan would be hard to imagine. At the back, the madwomen are shrieking. In the foreground, the exhausted old widows struggle to keep up with the cantor’s pitch, many nodding asleep until given a poke by one of the ashram managers walking up and down the aisles with a stick. It is difficult to think of a sorrier or more pathetic sight. Vrindavan, Krishna’s earthly paradise, is today a place of such profound sadness and distress that it almost defies description.
At the end of the shift, as darkness was beginning to fall outside, a pair of Brahmin priests walked in to the hall and began to perform the arti. Taking a burning charcoal splint, they revolved the flame in front of the idol of Krishna which stood at the centre of the room. As they did so the widows let out an unearthly ululation: an eerie, high-pitched wailing noise. Bringing their hands together in the gesture of supplication, they all bowed before the idol as the priests closed the temple doors for the night. Then slowly the women began to file outside.
‘This is not life,’ said one old woman who came up to me out of the shadows, begging for a rupee. ‘We all died the day our husbands died. How can anyone describe our pain? Our hearts are all on fire with sorrow. Now we just wait for the day when all this will end.’
Warrior Queen: The Rajmata of Gwalior
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
