The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters

by William Dalrymple

book’s title is a reference to the concept in ancient Hindu cosmology that time is divided into four great epochs. Each age (or yug) is named after one of the four throws, from best to worst, in a traditional Indian game of dice; accordingly, each successive age represents a period of increasing moral and social deterioration.

was told again and again on my travels around the subcontinent, India is now in the throes of the Kali Yug, the Age of Kali, the lowest possible throw, an epoch of strife, corruption, darkness and disintegration.

According to the Puranas, the Kali Yug is the last age before the world is destroyed by the ‘fire of one thousand suns’, after which the cycle reaches its conclusion and time momentarily stops, before the wheel turns again and a new cycle begins. Rather ominously, the very week I decided on The Age of Kali as the title for this book, Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s first BJP Prime Minister, let off his ‘Hindu’ nuclear bomb at Pokhran, in what some in India have seen as a sign that the Kali Yug is now approaching its apocalyptic climax.

seems to be surging purposefully towards a future of modest prosperity, health and full literacy, Bihar has begun to act as a kind of leaden counterweight, dragging the north of the country back towards the Middle Ages. One of the state’s few really profitable industries is

despite exceptionally rich mineral deposits and fertile soil, the state remains the poorest in India.

Not only is the economy stagnant, crime is completely out of control: 64,085 violent

2,625 murders, 1,116 kidnappings and 127 abductions

you choose, Bihar comes triumphantly at the bottom. It has the lowest literacy, the highest number of deaths in police custody, the worst roads, the

According to Sengupta, what was happening in Bihar was nothing less than the death of the state. Much of the problem, he

was broke and unable to provide the most basic amenities. The National Thermal Power Corporation, the Indian national grid, had recently threatened to cut off Bihar’s electricity supply unless its dues were paid. In the Patna hospital there were no bedsheets, no drugs and no bandages. The only X-ray machine in the city had been out of order for a year; the hospital could not afford to buy the spare parts. Patna went black at night, as there were no lightbulbs for the street lamps. (According to the writer Arvind Das, who researched the problem in some detail, the city apparently required six thousand

electricity, health care or education, those who could had had to provide them for themselves. Middle-class residents in blocks of flats had begun to club together to buy generators. There had been a mushrooming of private coaching institutes

to Barra on my last visit were brothers, who were returning from carrying a woman to her relatives in a nearby village. They had made their palanquin themselves, they said, and were now bringing in more money from it than they were from their fields.

may be a kind of Heart of Darkness, pumping violence and corruption, pulse after pulse, out in to the rest of the subcontinent. The first ballot-rigging recorded in India took place in Bihar in the 1962 general election. Thirty years later, it is common across the country. The first example of major criminals winning parliamentary seats took place in Bihar in the 1980 election. Again, it is now quite normal all over India. So serious and infectious is the Bihar disease that it is now throwing in to

the south and west of the country can outweigh the moral decay which is spreading out from Bihar and the east. Few doubt that if the ‘Bihar effect’ – corruption, lawlessness, marauding caste armies and the breakdown of government – does prevail and overcome the positive forces at work, then, as Uttam Sengupta put it: ‘India could make what happened in Yugoslavia look like a picnic.’ Everyone I talked to that week in Patna agreed on one thing: behind much of Bihar’s violence lay the running sore of the disintegrating caste system. One

leading a low-caste guerrilla army against high-caste landlords and attempting a Bihari variant of ethnic cleansing, emptying his constituency of Rajput and

closer you look, the more clear it becomes that caste hatred and, increasingly, caste warfare

‘The backward castes will rise up,’ he said as he led me back to my car. ‘Even now they are waking up and raising their voices. You will see: we will break the power of these people …’ In the

Everything they have has crumbled so quickly: the owners of palaces and havelis have become the chowkidars. If you saw any of the old begums

Mushtaq shook his head sadly: ‘So you see, it’s not just the buildings: the human beings of this city are crumbling

‘Come,’ said Mushtaq. ‘Let us go to the chowk: there I will tell you about this city, and what it once was.’

times it seems almost impossible to believe that they date from less than two hundred years ago, and that at that period Lucknow

Much of the surviving architecture of the city reflects this unique moment of Indo-European intermingling. Constantia,

the nineteenth century progressed, the British became more and more demanding in their exactions on the Nawabs, and more and more assured of their own superiority. They learned to scoff at the buildings and traditions of Lucknow, and became increasingly convinced that they had nothing to learn from ‘native’ culture. Relations between the Nawabs and the British gradually became chilly:

was as if the high-spirited tolerance of courtly Lucknow was a direct challenge to the increasingly self-righteous spirit of evangelical Calcutta.

Lucknow gradually turned in to the melancholic backwater it is today.

when you listen to two Punjabis talking it sounds as if they are fighting. But because of the number of Punjabis who have come to live here, the old refined Urdu of Lucknow is now hardly spoken. Few are left who can understand it –

were clearly proud of him, and regarded him as a sort of repository of whatever wisdom and

wear colours or jewellery or to eat meat. She is forbidden to remarry (at least if she is of reasonably high caste; low-caste and Untouchable women can do what they want) and she is forbidden to own property. She may no longer be expected to commit sati and throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, but in many traditional communities, particularly in the more remote villages, she is still expected to shave her head and live like an ascetic, sleeping on the ground, living only to fast and pray for her departed spouse. This

birth of their grandchildren should disappear off in to the forest and spend their last days in prayer, pilgrimage and fasting.

They have no privacy, no luxuries, no holidays. They simply pray until they keel over and die. There are eight thousand of them at present in the town, and every year their number increases. ‘If

‘Some of the other widows. At least we are together. But many women I know were thrown out of their houses by their own children. When their sons discover that they are begging on the streets of Vrindavan they are forbidden from writing to their grandchildren.

Since then La Martiniere has educated several members of the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty, as well as producing great numbers of cabinet ministers, industrialists and newspaper editors.

castes have separate wells?’ ‘No, there is only one well. If a woman from a Harijan family wishes to take water from the public well, a person of high caste must come and provide it. The Untouchable cannot touch the bucket. It is the same in every sphere of life. In the village tea-house, the cups for the Harijans are kept separately and at a distance from the cups of the other castes. If

there is a public meeting, the Harijans cannot share the same durree [carpet] or charpoy as the Rajputs. If Harijan children are admitted to the primary school, then they must sit

As the Prime Minister V.P. Singh discovered to his cost in October 1990, the upper castes have no option: they must stand together and declare caste war.

‘Would you let a Harijan come in to your house?’ ‘If a bungi ever tried to come near my house I would beat him with my shoe, then I would kill him,’ said Bhera Ram without hesitation.

High-caste widows like her would be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the floor, wear only simple white clothes and to perform menial tasks; for a woman of Roop Kanwar’s caste there would be no possibility of remarriage.

‘But didn’t you feel you should have stopped her?’ I asked. ‘No one can stop a sati,’ replied Inder Singh. ‘We believe that if anyone stops a sati they will be cursed. Something

(open) sex, no drugs and hence no rock’n’roll. The middle class which had been emerging in increasing numbers ever since the fifties had yet to find its feet. But around 1989, in the last few months

Baba Sehgal appeared on the scene in 1992, and was immediately taken up by Star. Within a matter of months he had become India’s first serious rock star, transmitted daily in to the homes of forty-five million people across Asia, from Turkey to Japan, from the Gulf to Indonesia.

Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome.

Madurai was a major terminus of the Spice Route, linking the pepper groves of India with the groaning tables of the Mediterranean.

according to one contemporary estimate it amounted to at least £100 million in gold and silver bullion and £400 million in jewels, many of which came from his own Golconda mines, source of the Koh-i-Noor and the legendary

Nizam was also the most senior Prince in India, the only one to merit the title ‘His Exalted Highness’, and for most of the first half of the twentieth century he ruled a state the size of Italy – 82,700 square miles of the Deccan plateau – as absolute monarch, answerable (in internal matters at least) to no one but himself. Within

grandest members of the Hyderabad aristocracy – known as the Paigah nobles – were richer than most Maharajahs, and each maintained his own court, his own extraordinary palace – or palaces – and his own three or four thousand strong private army. Nor, despite all the dreadful inequalities of wealth, was Hyderabad a poor country: in its final year of existence, 1947–48, the state’s income and expenditure rivalled those of Belgium and exceeded those of twenty member

evolved their own distinctive – and often very sophisticated – manners, habits, language, music, literature, food