The Moor in the Idol Junkyard

The next day we set out for the Dhauli hills on the outskirts of Bhubhaneswar to see the famous edicts of Ashoka. Ashoka’s has to be one of the most telling epiphanies in history that stupefies even the most accomplished purveyors of melodrama in fiction. A raging warrior emperor on a mission to conquer all, Ashoka conquers the kingdom of Kalinga, modern day Orissa, at great human cost. He surveys the battlefield strewn with bodies of dead soldiers, the cries of widows and the devastation of stricken bodies; the loss of humanity seared into his head and into the cavernous depths of his soul like the primeval scream of Edward Munch.

The mighty emperor has a change of heart and forsakes violence for ever. He embraces Buddhism and devotes the rest of his life to propagating the principles of Buddha. Fiction has few parallels to this historic event in terms of scale. Almost never has history given us a moment where power so completely capitulates in victory to the futility of conflict. Imagination is still flailing for a probable situation where the victor is above both graciousness and condescension, and actually arrives at a realization that overwhelms dramatic conflict and redefines universality in art. Ashoka’s response to the situation that evokes remorse and repentance is not directed to those he vanquished alone. In fact history is more or less silent on his personal reparations to Kalinga.

The instance would have been an exquisite moment of drama had it not been actual history. It is a challenge that drama, with all its preposterous rights unbound by possibilities, still has to meet. Fiction’s world of debilitated morality is still content with vanquished heroes glowing in private tales of colloquial heroism hoping to be inspirational to individuals, selling the dilemma in place of happenstance. And the modern world is too sceptical of a hero to let him ever accomplish an act that catapults over the minutiae of his conflict with his adversary into imaginable perfection. The Greek tragedies have exhausted the genre, as it were.

When we reached the Dhauli hills, the lack of people did not surprise me. History, or its tourism highlights have never held much fascination for Indians. Religious legends and relevance has been the sole indicator of the popularity of sites.

Not surprisingly, I also encounter the obvious disqualifictions of the site first hand. All said and done, Dhauli is a small unspectacular hillock with a rock face and inscriptions that are jailed behind crass cast-iron grills of the Archeological Survey of India’s wisdom. Behind that grill is a rockface filled with equisized characters in neat rows.

Fortunately, the ASI had arranged for translations of the edicts displayed on boards near the historic 2263-year-old rock face.

The edicts are uncannily contemporary. They almost seemed like streaks of some prophesy that welded the tectonic plates of my snapshots of middle class Indian response to the communal divide. If Gujarat of the twenty second century had any lessons to teach and if there were any answers to the question of India’s continued wrangle with the curse, Ashoka’s edicts seemed like the chronicles of a nation’s curse foretold.

Dhauli is said to be the location where Ashoka was transformed, and the landscape around the present day Dhauli hills was the battlefield of Kalinga. The Shanti Stupa, located on an atoll a couple of kilometres to the South of the rockface, consecrated to Lord Buddha in 1972, is said to mark the exact spot where Ashoka had renounced military conquest. At the foothills are the rock edicts, guarded by a stone elephant. Incidentally, the Dhauli edicts do not have the thirteenth edict, which was the one that glorified the conquest of Kalinga.

“A man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another

sect without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reason only, because the

sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another. By thus

acting, a man exalts his own sect, and at the same time does services to the

sects of other people. By acting contrariwise, a man hurts his own sect and does

disservice to the sects of other people.”

It had an added resonance when I thought about the king who authored it

was a new convert to a new religion Buddhism. That new religion itself had

largely exiled from the country of its birth, and yet India’s national symbol was

this Buddhist king’s legacy. And, the primary polarities convulsing the country is a

fight between the followers of the religion this king gave up to embrace

Buddhism, and the followers of another religion still in the womb of time. Islam

was to be born only 800 hundred years later, in the seventh century. Ashoka’s

edicts were issued in 256 B. C!


We did not visit the stupa, a relatively modern structure funded by a Japanese Buddhists sect. Somehow, I thought the structure would interfere with the turbulence the words of a King dead 2300 years ago had triggered in me in the context of an entirely different conflict. The only thing common was blood.

The next day’s trip to Hirapur village repaired the jump cut between Gujarat and the Ashokan edicts. Hirapur, outside Bhubhaneswar, was the site of the ancient temple of the 64-yoginis. It was a tantric centre devoted to the worship of yoginis.

The temple actually was not much of a temple. It was an uncovered structure, with small beautiful statues of the 64 yoginis and some other similar god heads, predominantly female forms. These statues were all in neat niches along the inner and outer walls of the square structure which had a pillar in the centre. They were small by the standards of other temples. However, each of them was ethereally beautiful and shiny black due to the structure still being an active place of worship, and therefore the oil and soot from offerings and incense had formed a protective covering that resisted the corrosion of ten centuries.

There were 80 statues in all. And each of the statues was mutilated. They had their arms or legs broken, or faces disfigured. It was obvious that the mutilation was not by wayward visitors; it was too organized and wilful to be that. It clearly was evidence of a pre-meditated, powerful and demonic rage wreaked on the temple. The caretaker of the Hirapur temple was an Archeological Survey of India authorized local man. Incidentally he found us instead of us finding him. He recognized Anupam and was trying to cadge a job for his son at the Intach centre.

He told us how each and every statue was mutilated by Kaala Pahaad. The story was something I heard from several people; the legend of Kaala Pahaad or the black mountain.

Throughout Orissa there are several beautiful sculptures of the Hindu pantheon. The state’s marvellous ancient temples are treasure troves of stone sculptures. But the common element in all these historical and heritage sites is that virtually each has some exquisite sculptures with broken hands, feet, or head. In cases of statues carved into the stone, where there were no protrusions for the limbs, the faces of the statues have been crushed, or plainly blown away. There are countless statues with broken noses, caved-in heads, and torsos torn away.

It was as if Bhubhaneswar was one vast battlefield strewn with mutilated beauty in stone. And all responsibility for this senseless act of violence and vandalism lies on Kaala Pahaad. The legend of Kaala Pahaad is the medieval missing link that connected the Ashokan rock edicts and the Gujarat riots in my mind.

Local folklore has it that Kaala Pahaad was a Hindu man gifted with extraordinary physical prowess who fell in love with a Muslim woman. He got the hand of his beloved on the condition that he converted to Islam. He did, and was married to his love. So far, there is little discrepancy in the three or four versions of varying details I heard from people. However, after that the story strays into two roughly distinct strands. One says that Kalaa Pahaad was not allowed to enter the temples he loved and had prayed at after he married the Muslim woman and converted to Islam.

Enraged at being disallowed entry into the temples of his childhood and youth after his conversion he vows to destroy the icons he had loved and was now denied. This version lays accent on love gone berserk and destructive when denied.

The other version has it that after conversion to Islam, Kaala Pahaad embraced the new faith with the passion of the convert. In tune with the dictates of this new faith, he now believed that idol worship was a heathen activity, and went about destroying all Hindu idols in the region.

I f one goes with the first version, this legend is interesting because the Hindu temples and their precious heritage are actually not destroyed by an invader wanting to stamp his victory over the vanquished. It is the case of an insider enraged at being denied his heritage because he had married outside his religion. And the breathtaking scale of destruction suggests an Othello-like blinding rage, rather than a sustained and wilful campaign like that of Aurangzeb, the fanatic Mughal emperor credited with a large share in the destruction of very many Hindu religious sites out of sheer religious zeal. The stories of Kaala Pahaad are many, as befits legends.
One was that he was born in a Brahmin family and was known as Kalachand until he fell in love with a beautiful Muslim girl and married her. He was a big-built dark man, whose very appearance used to inspire awe. For years after his marriage to the Muslim girl he kept away from Orissa, but he wasn’t happy with his conversion. So when he wanted to return to the fold, he went to the Muktimandap, the Jagannath temple council, for advice, he was shooed away. He was so infuriated that he decided to wreak vengeance on the Hindu gods and goddesses.

Another story is when the priests of Lingaraj temple at Bhubaneswar apprehended his attack they filled the sanctum sanctorum with husk. Kala Pahad tried his best to take it out, but in the end set fire to the dump. After he left, the priests put the fire out, but by then the sivalingam had cracked and been disfigured.
There is a story that the queen of the defeated Hindu king, Mukund Dev, tried to placate Kaala Pahaad by offering him pearls on golden platters when he stormed the Barabati Fort at Cuttack. The ruins of the fort at Cuttack are still there. Two, when Kaala Pahaad wanted to break the idol of Goddess Ranachandi, the temple few kilometers away from Konark, the goddess turned herself into a flesh-and-blood woman and told Kaala Pahaad to wait until she fetched water to give the Goddess a bath. Kaala Pahaad agreed and the Goddess walked out of the temple. Kaala Pahaad waited and waited until he realized he had been had.
One story has it that Kaala Pahaad wanted to burn the idols of Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra and Goddess Subhadra, and in one of his attacks on the temple at Puri he did succeed in wrenching the idols from the temple. Legend has it that he threw the idols unceremoniously on the street and kicked them around a bit before carting them all the way to the banks of Hooghly and set fire to them. However, the ’brahmapinda’ or the core saligram stone (considered a sacred stone that is alive) had been removed from the idols beforehand by the priests who had anticipated the attack and had been secreted in a village on the Chilka Lake.
The closest historical veracity about Kaala Pahaad is also sketchy. Kaala Pahaad was indeed a general in the army of Suleiman Karrani, the Muslim ruler of Bengal, and he did participate in Karrani’s invasion of Orissa in 1568. Krushna Chandra Panigrahi, one of Orissa’s major historians, has mentioned it in his The History of Orissa. But whether all the disfigurements of Orissan temples and idols could be attributed to Kaala Pahaad is debatable. Perhaps a lot of smaller vandals of the same period, and the idol-thieves of the later period have taken shelter behind this historical figure whose animosity against the Hindus has assumed mythological proportions. Evidence is epigraphical regarding construction of temples, but next to nothing about their destruction.

One thing of note is that Kaala Pahaad was not a king or a potentate. The stories I heard in Orissa at least do not say he was a regent of any standing. The oral legend of Kaala Pahaad suggests to me more a case of a Marlovian hero twisted by his love into wreaking havoc entirely with his superhuman strength because he was denied his heritage possibly by Brahmin orthodoxy. That is why I imagined Kaala Pahaad to be closer to Othello; while his vandalism cannot be condoned in a legal sense, it evoked a queer kind of moral exoneration if not endorsement.

The sheer beauty of those mutilated statues in the Hirapur temple can bring tears to the eye. The mutilation itself kind of spirals a rage at the destructive spirit of the perpetrator, but also in a perverse way enhances the aesthetic appeal of incomplete beauty. By denying a restrictive definition, these exquisite sculptures spark the imagination, thus making the aesthetic experience of beauty as a joy forever real. The violence of their incompleteness opens doors of perception.

But imagination, especially the non-aesthetic, can easily be ignited by concentrating on the religious identity of the legendary perpetrator. It was so easy to direct mass hatred towards that man’s religion, especially since the gory evidence of that brutality was easily available to the naked eye in the temples of regular daily worship. It was all so potent to the poor in search of pride, so easily manipulated for people to vault over the centuries buried between events to seek immediate, bloody and irrational revenge for long ago dishonour. The legend of Kaala Pahaad seemed so vulnerable to spin-doctoring by the Hindu zealots of the VHP.

That my fears were not comfortably speculative was worse. For a journalist especially, the word speculative has a peculiarly refined idea of discredit. The next day’s events in Orissa’s capital actually underlined the reality and validity, if not spelt out the portents that this might happen, yet again, in the future. The VHP’s cadre stormed the Orissa assembly, the highest seat of the government, the very next day, a testimony to the concrete reality of that fear.

It was that evening that I was taken by Anupam to a night out with Bhubaneswar’s cognoscenti. Had the city a city paper with a page three, the ones I spent that evening would have been the heroes and heroines of that special page the Indian pax urbana have been lately busy turning into an institution.

But in Bhubaneswar they were available as human beings. Though they were unguarded, what I found was that introductions matter. It matters because, in India at least, bureaucrats always wear a loose second skin. A skin that is sensitized only to officialese, and here I mean not only to the language, but even more closely to the value system of the establishment. It is not as artificial as it seems. It has a very advanced, graduated sensor. It recognizes and measures everything in terms of its relationship and distance from the establishment. And I had the misfortune of being introduced as a journalist.

Immediately a few fake alarms were raised and doused soon enough. Eventually, we started talking.

Inspector General of Police,Singh, Muncipal Commissioner Vishal Gagan, and Superintendent of Police Bharati, Anupam, Ruchi, Rohan and I made the same table at Bhubhaneswar’s posh restaurant. That evening, there was little space for the discussion of the VHP storming of the state assembly.

Singh, who was the eldest amongst us, was profoundly untouched by the event. He brushed aside my unsubtle push to turn the conversation to current affairs. He was distinctly unimpressed by my interest in the issue. The VHP storming of the highest seat of power, the state assembly was immaterial to him. More specifically, my foreigner sensibility playing sincere student did not wash with him. It actually irritated him. He returned my question on how significant the event was with a casual imperious flick.

“There is no communal trouble in Orissa.”

Singh was a single Sikh of advanced age by Indian standards. But the man’s vitality was spent more in reliving and re-igniting the flashes of youthfulness by whetting his conversation against the younger intellects. Somehow, I felt that my presence was slightly uncomfortable, in the sense that I was trying to get them to talk of the event that seemed of some significance to me. However, Singh was not the only one to feel acutely my sense of foreignness. I felt that the kind of compassion fatigue Singh exhibited was the same as what most residents of Dharavi, Asia’s biggest and richest slum in North
Central Bombay, felt talking to newly arrived television news cameras. They have done it so often, they have become camera veterans.

They, the residents of Dharavi interviewed on television, now were an evolved lot. Though admittedly, their evolution was a hundred metres dash. It was not the marathons most mean by evolution. From the intimidated victims repeating their tales of woe they had become judgemental veterans of their trade, because victimhood was a fulltime casualty of their existence. And yes, repeating their version of life by then had become a trade.

Vishal and Bharati were not as bad at intellectual sluggishness. They were also younger. But there again, there were interesting differences. Vishal was quiet, but meditative. Bharati was passionate by nature, and I suspect therefore, overly concerned about checking her passion with pragmatic roadblocks, especially since Singh was her senior by miles. I was finally a formidable foreigner.

Soon Singh Saab’s personality took over, in the presence of pusillanimous noises. We had an evening of RD Burman’s disco songs in Hindi. RD, that genius music director of Hindi cinema, ruled the roost from then on. And conversation was kept deliberately below the surface of seriousness. Somehow, Bhubhaneswar’s powers hated to talk issues that night. The reason has little to do with their nature. I was an intruder. An intruder into a precious time that was designated by those intimate for relaxation. I was a Johnny- come- lately interrupting their daily life with questions as profound as two-minute-noodles.

They were finally individuals caught in that valley of ambiguity. They were sincere and profound students of their social situation. But when a parachute journalist lands at their relaxation party, they are taken by surprise. They do not have their sound bytes ready for the nine O’clock news of the journalist’s time zone. But they have the pride of their jobs. They are not going to forget that too many journalists are a nuisance to their department. Police. Administration. Whatever else.

The night, after that precipitous turn, the conversation remained airtight pleasant. We enjoyed the music, though Rohan and I did in some ways seem like foreign herbs in a local dish. We, in a sense of speaking, introduced the promise of newness, but finally left the preparation not too changed. We finished our respective cameos, without altering anything too drastically.