The dance, which involves Krishna, 14 milkmaids and a demon who Krishna fights off with a tree, takes place in the Kirtanghar. It’s exquisitely executed, requiring the most concentrated co-ordination, as every tiniest body movement, of arms and legs and hands and feet, is precisely choreographed, and every facial expression has to be exactly in accordance with tradition. Fingers must always be turned up at the ends to resemble the lotus, and when they make their delicate curlicue movements the eyes of the dancer must always follow them, creating the effect of the whole body as a stream in motion. A white butterfly flutters across the room as if to set them an example.
The performance attracts a small audience, and I notice that women spectators who wish to watch these men dressed as women are not allowed inside the prayer hall, but have to watch from behind bars outside.
Day Ninety Eight : Majuli Island
The air is warm and the light soft as I cycle along the high track between the fields. The bike I’ve been given is enormous, but then the sandy roads of Majuli are full of people riding bicycles much bigger than themselves. Maan is with me and we stop to see flying foxes hanging from the branches of a capacious banyan tree. A well-placed missile lobbed at the tree wakes a few and sends them soaring into the air on wings over three foot wide. The banyan is intertwined with an equally magnificent bo tree, with a geometrically elegant rattan palm somehow squeezed in there too. The rank luxuriance of the island is the result of regular flooding, which probably accounts for the impermanence and adaptability of human settlement. Bridges are light and mainly bamboo, houses are on stilts with grain and hay stores well off the ground. Nothing looks as though it expects to last long.
One of the minority people on the island are the Mishing. There are an estimated 45,000 of them, believed to be the original lowland people, animists, believing in the sun god, Donyi, and the moon god, Polo. They took refuge on the island, where they could practise their unorthodox Hinduism without interference.
It’s the custom throughout Indian villages that the men plough and carry, but the women are responsible for the more specialized tasks of cultivation and harvest. In one of the many small ponds left behind by the floodwaters I witness the extraordinary sight of Mishing women catching fish.
About 20 of them, dressed in off-the-shoulder saris, walk through the shallow water, leaning on upturned conical baskets held out in front of them, rather like Zimmer frames. As they move forward, they stamp the baskets up and down to flush the fish out of the mud. Once they have a fish trapped in the bottom of the rattan frame, they pick them out, still wriggling, and drop them down their cleavages. Pausing only to tighten the waist band on their saris, they move on, the odd tail flapping defiantly between their breasts.
The whole process is carried out with much singing, chanting, laughter and general exuberance, which only adds to the strangely erotic quality of this particular harvest.
Day Ninety Nine : Majuli to Kaziranga
At 6.30 in my monastic cell in the satra‘s guesthouse in Kamalabari town, I’m woken with a cup of ‘bed tea’. The tea, milk and sugar have been boiled up together in the Indian fashion. There are no windows in my room but I can tell the sun’s up by the pattern cast on my wall from a ventilation grille. A cow moos brusquely, crows screech in the trees nearby.
A bucket of hot water is delivered next and I take it into my dark, stained cubicle of a bathroom, looking round rather hopefully for the giant spider with whom I shared it last night. He seemed a friendly sort. Unable to find him, I wash carefully, nose pursed against the reek of the drains.
I’m at the satra by seven. From inside the Kirtanghar comes the sound of ragas being practised, and outside a class of a dozen young boys are being taught the 64 exercise positions needed to learn dancing. They’re pretty good at back rolls and walking on their hands but less deft at the ora position, which requires them to balance on one leg, with the other straight out, almost doing the splits.
A young monk who has just finished milking the cow is washing himself clean under one of the old handle pumps. There’s no running water here.
Dulal has agreed to give me a lesson on the kohl. First, he ties a dhoti around me. Dhotis, a variation on the sarong, must be worn when playing. I sit cross-legged facing him on the smooth, mud-floored passage outside his room. The first surprise is the weight of the cigar-shaped drum. When I draw attention to this, Dulal, a man of supreme calm, whose brother is a taxi driver, smiles. He teaches children of seven on that same drum.
Dulal shows me three basic movements. Tao, a slap with open palm on the smaller end, dhei, the same on the wider side and khit, resonating then damping the sound with the fingers.
He nods generously and compliments me on having grasped the basic moves. I wipe a few beads of sweat from the brow and allow myself a moment of smugness, which is swiftly despatched.
‘You will need another five years to get it right.’
Hearing that we’re leaving today, Jadab Burah, who played a milkmaid yesterday, and Lila Ram, who played the devil, invite me to have a last tea in the room they share. Jadab is 18 and first came to the monastery when he was nine. His parents live less than a mile away and he still attends the local school and has friends, including girlfriends, outside the satra. He came here to learn dancing and is quite sure he’ll stay for life. Lila Ram, who has been here for 16 years, is learning gayan, the art of cymbal playing.
They are delightful company, but when I leave they have to work out what I’ve touched in the room, as that object will now be impure and their vows require them to wash thoroughly should they come into contact with it.
All this is done with great ease and much laughter. In most institutions, however benevolent, you feel like an outsider looking in, but the special quality of Uttar Kamalabari is that everyone, from the young boys to the grey-haired older monks, has gone out of their way to include us in the life of the satra.
It seems a place of rare and genuine happiness, where the hardest disciplines are artistic rather than religious and the goals are more concerned with fulfilment than denial. I catch myself thinking it’s too good to be true, but maybe that just sums up the difference between our world and theirs.
Back on the river, the wide, open reaches of the Brahmaputra are as calming as the monastery. Most of the vast, impermanent mud flats are devoid of humans or livestock. A few other boats pass, including a travelling theatre group in a green barge, noisy and low in the water. Mobile theatre is highly popular in Assam.
Time drifts by. A flock of lapwings from the other side of the Himalaya wheels above us. A solitary vulture turns slowly over the southern bank. Maan takes my binoculars and has a closer look. He is searching for more vultures and their absence confirms his worries over their dramatic decline in numbers, thought to be largely the result of chemical pesticides.
Where we shall be tonight is considered a shining example of how environmental protection can work. Kaziranga, which boasts the disconcerting slogan ‘Come. Get Lost’, is a 293-square-mile (760 sq km) reserve on the banks of the Brahmaputra. It was the first wildlife sanctuary in India, set up 100 years ago, by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, after his wife had gone to see the famed horned rhinos of the area and returned without encountering a single one. Since the Rhino Protection Act of 1913 the horned rhino has returned from the brink of extinction, and Maan tells me there are now 1500 to 1600 of them in the park, 70 per cent of the world’s population, protected by 400 staff and 120 anti-poaching camps.