Rakesh wrote this in 2009 after three of us -- we two and Manoj Nair -- drove around in Rajasthan just before the elections. Meeting this raja was one of the highlights of the trip. I was so impressed with this piece that when I read it I was like, wow! I couldn't have said it so well in my entire life. So, please, don't deny yourself the pleasure :)
In parts of Rajasthan where blue blood is the lifeblood of politics, democracy exists like the scorching sun: outside, its searing heat is present everywhere; inside, in the cool and stolid confines of even a small village house, it's absent.
Almost completely in villages. Rajasthan is a huge state (Barmer, a district bordering Pakistan, is bigger than Kerala) and large parts of it are bereft of any habitation. Where it exists, it's wondrously colourful and, at times, suffocatingly crowded.
Along the state's superb highways is nothing but barren landscape sending its short messages of alienation in the ubiquitous mirages on the nicely metalled roads. An apt image for infrastructure and, of course, the crying lack of it. There's no water here; there are roads, wonderful in their make and lacquered in their length.
It was on these roads — 1,900 km in four days — ET went looking for democracy's delights and its denials. In one of our many stops across the state, we detoured to meet a former raja. Rajasthan is a princely state and along its roads are many hollowed-out forts, phantoms of a glorious past.
The raja, rather his father, ran his domain somewhere between Ajmer and Jodhpur. A small road — this too evenly laid but much shorter in spread — branches off the main highway. The road to the raja and his former kingdom. As we slowly turn and go a few metres, we stop to ask for directions to the raja's house. As the car window is rolled down, a handlebar-mustached man of 40 frames it. He's carrying a double-barrelled gun which he says he's been asked to deposit at the local police station because of impending elections.
We ask him about the raja and his face, all of a sudden, tenses up and he straightens himself, leaving just the twin barrel of the gun in the window frame. We ask him again. He bends, his serious face back in the window, and says: "Hukum, this is the right way."
ET decides to give him a lift till the police station and offers him some beer. The man refuses. It's not that he doesn't drink. He does but won't do it now for he fears the inspector, a Muslim from Jaipur, will smell it on his breath. Why does a man carrying a double-barrelled gun, an instrument to instill fear, feel afraid? The man quickly looks at the gun whose barrel nearly touches the roof lining of the car, takes a fast swig and says it's his grandfather's weapon. Past is a constant presence in the present.
A fearless past in a fearful present. His ancestors have hunted big game with the weapon; he cradles it with fear.
That he might be caught with beer on his breath. We drop him at the police station and he 'hukums' us off and off we go in search of the raja, following the man's maplike directions.
The raja's citadel (the Hindi word garh, however, has more heft) is on a small bluff and the narrow road to it winds through a stiflingly crowded bazaar and cheek-by-jowl houses. There's no sense of any freedom and intimacy is out taking a walk on the claustrophobic road. Only the raja is afforded privacy and his citadel overlooks the entire town. The facade is crumbling and the antique Rajasthan doors creak as they open. But in the whole town it's only outside the raja's 'garh' two cars can be parked.
Narrowness suddenly opens into a large space outside the raja's citadel. The sky's visible but in the foreground are the decaying walls of the 'garh' and just behind the exalted escarpment. The brilliant sky, like democracy, forms the background, splendoured yet with a faraway look in its inertness.
Inside the raja's living room to which a boy of 13 has guided us, we sit on musty sofas, its cloth worn down to a thin shimmery look. A general air of decadence prevails. The window overlooks the entire town: the raja's perch of impervious imperium. The influential powers have dissolved and stay, in their weakened form, within the deteriorating building. But past majesty stares hollowly at you from the lifesize portraits of the raja's ancestors.
The coloured incarnations adorning the walls have black-and-white company: King George V in all his regalia. Why does royalty hang only B&W photos on its walls? Is it a love for the rich past or does it look at democracy and its many hues with sepia-tinted glasses?
The raja takes some time to arrive but when he does, his almost bald pate bobbing, the air of decadence becomes all-pervasive. At 12 noon, the raja is plastered and through five minutes of mumbling keeps putting tobacco-spiked paan masala in his mouth. He chews his masala; he chews his words.
As ET requests him to say something on elections, the raja keeps fiddling with a back-scratcher and, at times, uses it to make a point. He just swats it through the air or points it at us, sometimes menacingly, sometimes merrily. But he stays mostly mum on democracy.
Soon, an air of boredom starts travelling through the large room and the raja, even in his sozzled state, discerns it. He gets up with alacrity and asks us to come on a tour of the town. His minions, three teenaged boys, scatter like carrom disks at the first strike. A boy goes down, two go out of the room. Down we go too, first to the toilet and then to the portico. One of the boys who went out of the room takes us to the back of the citadel and points to a flight of steps. Ascend and you almost descend to the ground.
These are old-fashioned toilets where, through the hastily attached PVC hole, one can see the load drop to the ground. This is for the hoi polloi: the raja's supreme standing in the town's hierarchy stays even when the body performs its most plebeian tasks.
Inside the raja's rundown jeep, one of us rides shotgun with the now-hatted raja. At the back sit his teenaged satellites and two of us. The jeep, a Mahindra, takes some time to come to life and each time the raja turns the key he smiles. On the third attempt, the key catches and the engine roars with a shudder. The raja and his jeep are of a piece. Both of them revel in slumber most of the time but when they come alive they do it with a convulsive tremble.
As the clangorous jeep takes the common ground with the raja, taking quick swigs of water, at the wheel, the masses start getting out of the way with a bow of their 'safa-ed' heads. The raja keeps honking to let people know that it's him and the startled crowds, on their cycles and motorbikes, stop in their tracks and turn their heads and bow. This supplication puffs him so much he doesn't even look back when his jeep hits a stray cow.
As the animal bawls in pain, the raja accelerates on the unpaved road and starts railing at 'tumhara Hindustan'. In fact, so narrow is the route, prickly plants overhanging it keep abrading our skin. The raja's wife, however, works for a party in Hindustan. She is campaigning for BJP's Kiran Maheshwari, who is pitted against Sachin Pilot in Ajmer.
Whenever he sees a group of people, he stops, gets down from the jeep and chats with the people, whose beefs run the entire gamut from domesticity to dyspepsia. The raja looks at them, then looks at us, adjusts his hat in the dry heat and preens and looks back at his people, his hands, in a small gesture of solidarity, now variously resting on their shoulders. His is an assurance they believe. He stops his peacocking and says: "This is what Hindustan has given them. You can see... this is what they have got. No one listens to them."
No one talks of democracy here. It's just the link, however tenuous, between the raja and his people that works at times. That's the machine that works here, not the electronic voting machine. Everyone complains. Some of callousness of clerks, some of lack of water and some of infected water.
"See," says the raja, "what they got from Hindustan... their lot was better under my father." The crowd, without understanding, bows in unison.
The raja takes a sip of the afeem-laced water that someone proffers and moves on, his retinue in Indian file.
Then there's the story of a stunning statue that was found when some digging was going in a small village, some 6km from the citadel.
The statue was taken away to be installed at a temple the raja built but the next day the water level of the village receded to almost zero. The statue was brought back to the village and put up in a temple that stays locked all day for fear of theft. Rajasthan is notorious for its smuggling in artifacts.
For the village it's the statue that has worked a miracle, not democracy. The raja shows ET two dilapidated baolis (stepwells) and trots out an old villager, who completely overlooks its devastation in narrating its history.
He takes us down some 200 steps to show how one of the two baolis contains in its capacious cavity 24 more baolis. All you see is nothing but ravages of time: broken steps, algaed water, spider webs, defaced walls and crushed bottles of plastic. The refuse of present in the haunting past.
The climb up all those stairs leaves us out of breath and in the air we quickly gulp there's no trace of democracy. There's just the harshness of survival — a brutal hand-to-mouth living that doesn't and won't understand the power of vote.
The road back from the raja's 'garh' is eerily empty in the evening. The air's a bit cooler and as we pass the yellow-fronted police station we steal a glance hoping to see the man with the double-barrelled gun. The vacant road gives more purchase to the car and as we whish past desiccated trees and bone-dry land they acquire a ghostly feel. Evanescent specters waiting for the phantom of democracy. There they'll wait till it comes to breathe life into them, to free them of their trouble, to rid them of their haunted past.
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First published in The Economic Times, May 1, 2009
