PATALIPUTRA

I would not have turned to writing if I was able to draw. When I was thirteen or fourteen, and attending school in Patna, I had not yet given up my ambition to become an artist. My earliest models were rulers and saints from our past. The teacher would be delivering his dull lecture on ancient Indian history, and I would try to copy, over and over again, the illustration printed in the textbook.

The Buddha posed a difficulty. The illustration in the book must have been based on a statue in the Gandhara style. His shapely eyes, shut in serene meditation, were the easiest to outline, and above them, the long arched eyebrows in flight; ditto for the full, feminine lips. The trouble began with the intricate, knotted rings of hair; and, it was altogether impossible to draw the perfect circle of the halo around his head.

Pataliputra, which later became Patna, was mentioned very early in that textbook, certainly by page twenty. The city was founded in the sixth century BCE by Ajatshatru, a monarch who was probably a regicide and a patricide. Until he built the fort-city at the confluence of the Ganga and Sone rivers, it was just a village named Pataligram. Gautama Buddha visited Pataligram shortly before his death and, if guidebooks are to be believed, delivered a prophecy that a great city would rise there.

Chandragupta Maurya and then Ashoka the Great ruled from Pataliputra. Did I draw them in my notebook too? I don’t recall. I remember learning about Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court: he had written that the palaces in Pataliputra were more beautiful than the palaces of Susa and Ecbatana in ancient Persia. In K.K. Datta’s history of Bihar,3 I read that Megasthenes had described a city oblong in shape, nine-and-a-half miles long and just over a mile broad. It was defended by a moat and a massive timber palisade furnished with sixty-four gates and five hundred and seventy towers. But all this is academic knowledge. What I remember most vividly about Megasthenes from my boyhood is the claim, perhaps apocryphal, that in Pataliputra people left their doors unlocked.

Those were the days! More than a decade ago, sitting in a room in Brooklyn, when I began to write for the first time about Patna, the words of the Greek ambassador came back to me. In my notebook, I wrote: Those were the days. But they were never there, those days. Or even if they were, they existed only in the pages of the history books.

When Megasthenes wrote in his diary in 303 BCE about people leaving their doors unlocked, I wondered if he could have ever imagined the reality of present-day Patna where my mother cannot think of not locking her doors, day or night.

Pataliputra’s ancient glory is buried in history, but in Kumhrar at the edge of Patna are the sunken remains of a huge Mauryan hall that was once supported by eighty sandstone pillars. Chandragupta Maurya was born in Pataliputra and established India’s first empire. He was called ‘Sandracottus’ or ‘Andracottus’ by the Greeks, and Plutarch writes that ‘Andracottus was only a stripling when he met Alexander’. He was barely in his twenties when he had defeated Alexander’s army; his rule extended from the Bay of Bengal in the east to beyond the Indus river in the west. Chandragupta was helped in his conquests by his advisor, Chanakya, the author of Arthashastra, and forever condemned to being called ‘the Indian Machiavelli’ even though he predated the Italian by about 1,800 years. Before his death from starvation, as prescribed by Jain edicts, Chandragupta had led his army, made up of what Pliny reported as 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, and 9,000 elephants, to triumph over kingdoms south of the Vindhyas and across the Deccan Plateau. The Mauryan rulers, writes the historian Romila Thapar, ‘gave expression to an imperial vision which was to dominate succeeding centuries of Indian political life’.4

Uniquely perhaps among my country’s most iconic cities, Patna’s glories seem firmly lodged in the distant past. Besides its position of prominence as the capital of some of the greatest monarchs of Indian history such as Chandragupta Maurya, and Ashoka, it was also where the Gupta kings reigned during what was called the Golden Age of India (320-550 CE). (I was conscious, while learning about the Gupta Empire, that there was a boy in my class with the surname Gupta. He was short, with oily hair, and, if I remember right, his family owned a local business in bathroom tiles.) The founder of the Gupta Dynasty, Chandragupta I (320-335 CE), what did I know about him? Or, for that matter, about Chandragupta II (380-415 CE), who was distinguished from Chandragupta I by his promotion of the arts? Very little and, what was worse, as a schoolboy I confused both with Chandragupta Maurya. Later, I discovered that I wasn’t alone in doing this. When I interviewed former Bihar chief minister, Lalu Yadav, about a decade ago, he did the same. His wife Rabri Devi was chief minister at that time, and the three of us sat outside their home, sipping lemon tea. Lalu was delivering a brief history lesson to me on the importance of our city. He said piously, ‘Itihaas padhne ki zaroorat hai’ (It is necessary to read history). He recited the familiar names from history. Rather pointedly, he said, ‘It was here that we had Chandragupta II. His reign is called the Golden Period in Indian history. Chandragupta II was a shudra. Ask the historians.’ I did. The historians clarified that the ruler Lalu had in mind was Chandragupta Maurya who, it is speculated, was the illegitimate son of a Nanda ruler and a palace maid. Clearly, what was more significant in Lalu’s mind, and what he wanted to convey to me in passing, was that Bihar had been ruled by a person who had been born low.

But let us also give Chandragupta II his due. During his reign, towards the end of the fourth century, a Chinese monk named Fa-Hien came to Pataliputra on his way to Buddhist shrines. (Looking now at what Fa-Hien wrote about his visit, I discover in a footnote in his book, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, the following piece of information: ‘The modern Patna, lat. 25d 28s N., lon. 85d 15s E. The Sanskrit name means “The city of flowers.” It is the Indian Florence.’) Fa-Hien described a kingdom where prosperity reigned and the elements of the modern welfare state appeared to be already in place, particularly in the matter of caring for the sick.

Another notable Chinese monk, Hiuen Tsang, is also associated with Pataliputra. Hiuen Tsang came to India in the second half of the seventh century CE. Portraits of him show a man carrying on his back a strange and elaborate apparatus—it appears to be an enormous cane backpack, curving like a staircase; attached to it is an umbrella which, in turn, has dangling from it a small lamp. Hiuen Tsang spent fifteen years in India, six of them close to Pataliputra at the university at Nalanda. One of the first great universities in recorded history, Nalanda housed ten thousand students and two thousand faculty, all drawn from a variety of nations. An initiative has recently been taken to revive, after a gap of eight hundred years, the university at Nalanda. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is among those leading the effort; faculty members from a variety of east Asian nations have promised support. About four hundred and fifty acres of land has already been earmarked close to the ruins of the old university for the site on which the twenty-first century Nalanda University will be built. On the institution’s website are calls for tenders from interested security agencies as well as from architectural design firms and for soil investigation. This is good news. Still unclear is the steps that will be taken to improve education in already existing institutions. In Patna University, a faculty member told me, it is entirely possible for examinations to be delayed by two or three years, and when examinations are finally held, everyone feels free to cheat. A nun who was the invigilator at an examination in Patna Women’s College was asked by a woman she had caught copying answers from hidden notes, ‘What kind of a Christian are you? Why are you not showing any compassion? My husband was sick all night. I took care of him.’ One doesn’t need to recall well-worn stories, about how Nalanda University’s nine-storied library burned for months after being destroyed by invaders in 1197 CE, to point out how impossibly distant the history of a cosmopolitan university founded in the fifth century appears in comparison to the meagre reality of present-day Bihar.

But comparisons are invidious… Let us return to the gallery of historical portraits in a schoolboy’s notebook. The record began with the leggy and bony dancing girl in bronze from Mohenjodaro dating to 2,500 BCE. She was naked except for the bangles on her left arm, her right hand resting insouciantly on her jutting hip. Then there was Buddha’s transcendental smile. King Kanishka (127-151 CE), whose kingdom spread from Afghanistan to Pataliputra, appeared in the illustration with his squat, broken swords, and weird footwear resembling outsized clogs. I recall committing to the page the smooth polish of Ashoka the Great’s pillars and the lions mounted on the top, an example of which I had seen in Vaishali district of Bihar while accompanying my father on an official tour. There was also one of Samudragupta (335-380 CE) on a gold coin. The great emperor, whose long reign from Pataliputra was one of unprecedented military expansion, sat with one leg folded under him, just as an ordinary day-labourer would while waiting on a platform under a peepul tree.

Ancient India gave way, after a hundred pages, to medieval India. Now, the figures were bearded—a gift to the young artist in the classroom. I didn’t know this then, but at the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna there were brilliantly illustrated manuscripts and books—for example, the Kitab-ul-Hashaish from the thirteenth century CE, in which, as the librarian was to tell me many years later, even in the crowded war scenes no two faces are alike. There was also in the same library a priceless book of poems by the Persian poet, Hafiz, gifted to the Mughal emperor, Humayun, by the ruler of Iran. In the margins of that book was a notation made by Humayun’s son, Jahangir, who had opened the book to that page to find an augury during a time of uncertainty in his youth. The words on which his eyes had fallen proclaimed that he would one day become emperor.

The Mughal rulers wore long tunics, and sported turbans; and, in a few of those pictures, the emperor held a delicate flower in his hand. I drew all these details diligently in my notebook. I had special affection for the Afghan, Sher Shah Suri, who lay buried in the nearby town of Sasaram. We were taught in school that Sher Shah had built the Grand Trunk Road. He was shown in the textbook with a fierce beard and hazel eyes; he wore a tapering steel helmet with mail descending from it to his shoulders. Did our history teacher tell us that it was Sher Shah who gave Patna the name by which it is known today? The teacher didn’t, and it is possible he didn’t know; the textbook was produced by a national education body, it wasn’t designed to pander to local sentiment. Sher Shah’s original name was Farid Khan. Under the Mughals, he was the governor of Bihar, during which he reportedly once killed a tiger in a forest with his bare hands. When he became emperor in 1540, he took the name Sher Shah Suri. In Patna, he built a fort and a mosque; the fort, on the banks of the Ganga, has nearly vanished, but the mosque survives to this day.

Ralph Fitch was the first British traveller to visit India and during a visit to Patna in 1586 he described it as ‘a very long and great Town’ with a flourishing trade in cotton, sugar and opium. Within a century, the English and Dutch India companies had made Patna an important site for their commercial operations. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other Europeans, like the Portuguese and the Danes, and non-Europeans, among them Persians, Central Asians, and Armenians, came to Patna to trade. Cotton textiles, saltpeter, indigo and opium were among the commodities that made Patna rich.

I didn’t learn any of this from my history textbook. The teaching of the history of India had obliterated Bihar. Delhi had swallowed Patna. The Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, who reigned from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth century, made an impact on me. In the textbook, Aurangzeb was shown with a narrow, concave chest, as if the artist had tried hard to capture his cruel intolerance. Unlike his great forebear, Akbar, who came to Patna to defeat an opponent in battle, Aurangzeb never set foot here. However, at the request of a favoured grandson, Muhammad Azim, who was the subedar of Patna, he allowed the city’s name to be changed to Azimabad. In the opinion of some historians, if the first great phase in the city’s history was its role as an ‘imperial megalopolis’ during Mauryan rule, then the second phase, one marked by the spirit of ‘cultural renaissance’, stretched from the city’s revival under Sher Shah Suri in the sixteenth century to the rule of Prince Azim in the early eighteenth century. During this period Patna became ‘a center of Persian learning, Urdu literature, painting, music and other performing arts’.

As far as the drawings in my history textbook went, the only competition to the Muslim rulers came, if a bit late, from the Sikh gurus because of their beards and penetrating eyes. The last of the line of Sikh gurus, Guru Gobind Singh, who was born in Patna in 1666, was depicted with a warrior’s mien. A trim beard framed a face on which sat a turban with a white plume; at the Guru’s waist hung a dagger, and on his back, a bow and a quiver full of arrows. More picturesque still, on his shoulder there perched a falcon, sleek and keen-eyed. All this was eminently sketchable.

As I try to enter the mind of the schoolboy who connected to the great figures of his hometown’s history, I realize that what attracted me most were signs of masculinity such as beards and weaponry, an attempt to cast my own identity in that mould. Coexisting with that impulse of masculinity was the less visible, and not always contradictory, drive toward ascetic renunciation. This might have been due, in part, to the veneration of self-sacrificing saints in a poor land. But I also suspect that my attraction to such figures—and my interest in drawing them—might simply have been the result of guilt induced by an incipient sexuality.

(A small detour. Abhay Mohan Jha, a journalist whom I had known in school in Patna, sent me a document on Patna’s antiquity that he and a few others had prepared for the Bihar government. The text unabashedly proclaimed Patna’s past greatness. It had annotations like the following one: ‘In 1663, the Italian traveller Manucci found Patna to be a big town containing many bazaars which were generally thatched. Manucci was in particular impressed by the fine earthen pottery and the cups of clay made in Patna that were finer than glass, lighter than paper and highly scented.’ This was interesting but the real story lay elsewhere. After the English edition of the book had been published, the government brought out another edition in Hindi translation. The book had the same title, but this time the names of the contributors and the editor had been replaced by those of senior bureaucrats of the Bihar government’s Department of Art, Culture and Youth.)

Modern India had its own galaxy of iconic figures but none of them were from Patna. The textbooks of history carried the likenesses of martyred freedom fighters. And so did the trucks plying on Patna’s roads: gaudily painted portraits of Bhagat Singh, handsome under a hat, or Chandra Shekhar Azad, plump and bare-chested, forever twirling his moustache. In the textbooks, and again, also on the trucks, there were the crude paintings of nationalist leaders: Gandhi, bald and bespectacled; Nehru, with sharp, angular features under the trademark cap, and a rose in his buttonhole; and the great Ambedkar, with a little bit of his outsider status reinforced by showing him dressed in an ill-fitting blue or black Western suit. I didn’t try to outline any of them, perhaps because these figures didn’t give me much scope for figurative interpretation. Simply put, their faces were familiar to us from photographs, and to depict them artistically was beyond any talent I had.

I stopped drawing. That was not surprising; but what is astonishing to me now is that I never asked myself whether or not Patna’s past had any artists. When I began work on this book, I read the Patna historian Surendra Gopal’s authoritative account of the city in the nineteenth century. He writes about the arrival of painters in Patna after the decline of the Mughals and the Bengal Nawabs: these new artists gave rise to the Patna School of Painting or Patna Qalam. Their principal patrons were the Europeans, those in government or in trade; and they focused mostly on portraiture and the depiction of Indian flora and fauna. Gopal’s chapter on art and calligraphy in Patna is often celebratory, giving a rich sense of the city’s past, but what struck me the most was a melancholic note in the following passage:

In the nineteenth century one of the widespread hobbies of the rich of Patna was to maintain aviaries, where they kept varieties of birds of different gorgeous colours. These artists painted birds, which they saw around, and they also painted rare birds, kept in the aviaries of their patrons. According to the connoisseurs, these birds are ‘admirably drawn and very delicately painted’. However, it has been noted that with rare exceptions there is no foliage, no environment to complete a picture, such as it is found in the beautiful bird pictures of Manohar, the master court painter of Akbar and Jahangir.5

The environment that was being erased in the bird paintings, the missing Patna, what was it like? In his journal kept while compiling survey reports on Patna and Gaya during the years 1811-12, the Scottish physician and botanist Francis Buchanan wrote that it was ‘difficult to imagine a more disgusting place’ than the nine-mile-long city.6 The congested sections of Patna were distinct from the sprawling expanse in which were scattered the homes of the Europeans. The European portion stretched close to the Ganga; this area, called Bankipore, included the court, the office of the collector, a customs-house, the office of an opium-agent, and a provincial battalion. ‘The inside of the town is disagreeable and disgusting and the view of it from a distance is mean,’ Buchanan wrote. When approaching the city from the river, the view was better, mostly because of the European houses. But also because, as the good doctor noted, the scene was ‘enlivened by a great number of fine-formed native women that frequent the banks to bring water’. This afforded little consolation to him because, then as now, what was inescapable was the sight and smell of shit on the banks of the river. Buchanan noted that what the visitor saw when approaching the bank was a steep clay slope devoid of any greenery ‘and covered with all manner of impurities, for it is the favourite retreat of the votaries of Cloacina, accompanied by the swine and curs that devour the offerings’.

÷

I have written about myself in these pages as a young aspiring artist. But how is art viewed or collected in Patna? I went to Quila House on the banks of the Ganga because, thumbing through an old copy of India: The Rough Guide, which had cost me 25 cents in a garage sale in upstate New York, I had made the discovery that Napoleon’s four-poster bed was in a museum in Patna.

What was Napoleon’s bed doing in Patna? It turned out to be a part of the private collection of a local Marwari family. The four-poster wasn’t really Napoleon Bonaparte’s; instead, it had belonged to Napoleon III, Emperor of France from 1852 to 1870. But that wasn’t the main disappointment. I’m not sure why a royal personage would have slept in such a bed: it was not very large and appeared, no doubt because of its age, dull and unremarkable. On the wooden canopy and on the side rails were small painted scenes. The central painting showed a gentleman and a lady wearing the formal clothes of that era, a mix of pink and blue and yellow, seated outside among trees and flowers. A lamb had been placed peaceably close to them— this was something even I could have drawn. The bed didn’t have a mattress and bits of rotted fabric that might have once served as skirting lay limply on the floor. From the canopy hung dark tattered cloth like a widow’s veil forgotten in a theatre closet.

The man who had collected these artifacts was a Patna businessman named R.K. Jalan. Born in 1892, he was a merchant who it seemed had made his fortune under British rule. His great-grandson, a young man engaged in real estate development in Patna, had such a practiced air of urbanity that it seemed vulgar to dig for details. For his services in the 1914-18 war effort, the British gave R.K. Jalan the title of Dewan Bahadur. He was invited to royal ceremonies. He rented a bungalow in London for six months when he went to attend the Silver Jubilee celebrations of King George V in 1935. During that trip, he also visited several countries, including France, where he bought the sad relic that I stood facing. So far the story I was being told was of acquired greatness but then came a detail that spoke to me more of Patna: during the months that he was in London, all the water that the Dewan Bahadur drank was sent to him from India on ships bound for Europe.

This detail had been narrated to me to stake a claim to an aristocratic sense of luxury. But to read it simply as a story about extravagance or style would be a mystification. In that museum dedicated to the exhibition of the Patna merchant’s search for cosmopolitanism, was this detail about the stubborn clinging to a sense of one’s purity. I was intrigued by this traditional appeal to the authentic. The truth was that this traditional man, hospitable and good at making money, stuck to his taboos. As his descendant explained to me, he was close to the British, and he was also friends with the local Muslims; but he didn’t eat with either. A social and pragmatic man who was completely at ease with his prejudices.

R.K. Jalan might have accepted water only from his hometown, but there was no purity of taste in evidence at his museum. A bewildering, even unfathomable, eclecticism was everywhere on display. Silver plates on which Birbal, Emperor Akbar’s famous courtier, had dined, and also the Crown Derby dinner set designed for King George III; items of delicate china that had purportedly belonged to Marie Antoinette, and also a large collection of jade from China dating to the Han era; a broken wooden palanquin with fine inlaid ivory work, belonging to Tipu Sultan, and also an ordinary wooden chair which broke when Prime Minister Nehru stepped on it to get a better view of a clock. And ten thousand other items, or so it appeared, that were spread over several large halls with rain-stained walls and windows that overlooked the brown waters of the Ganga.

What particular imagination drove this collection? In a booklet I was given I saw a photograph showing a viceroy dining on the silver plates that had belonged to Birbal; during my visit I was told that Nehru had been persuaded to eat from them too, one Prime Minister following the example of another, half a millennia earlier. The artifacts had performed a function for Jalan. They had flattered power—the past serving the present, as when Birbal’s plates were laid out before the Viceroy, and then, in newly independent India, for Prime Minister Nehru—and they had allowed other visitors to glimpse a bit of the wonder that was the world. It is true that I didn’t marvel at, say, the jewellery and cutlery cabinet of King Henry II of France—such acquisitions represented an overzealous attempt on the part of the collector to identify with royalty—but I couldn’t deny my surprise at finding items from all over the world in this decaying house in Patna. Had R.K. Jalan so assiduously collected meaningless bric-a-brac because it helped him assume the mantle of worldliness? Did he spend a vast fortune on acquiring these objects because he wished to present himself as a citizen of the world? I don’t know. Napoleon’s bed was the first object I had sought upon my arrival in Patna because its existence there seemed so unusual. I decided I was henceforth going to look for more ordinary things, not least the people who made up Patna.

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