OSWALD
COULDREY, M. A. (OXON.), I.E.S.
My
bungalow stood among the maizefields on the municipal
boundary, and all about me, when I was at home, the little neatherds followed
their idyllic trade, ‘fleeting the time carelessly, as they did in the golden
age.’ They played on bamboo pipes, after the fashion of the neatherds of Theocritus, or like the god
It
is the fashion nowadays (if I may glance for a moment beyond our immediate
theme) to pretend impatience of traditional motives in art and letters; and
perhaps it is not unreasonable in us to require that art should alter even as
life too swiftly alters; but of life itself it can still be said, and perhaps
more truly now than ever, that never is it more delightful than when it
recaptures for us one or another of the forgotten
themes, which the poets and painters of the past found most delightful. The
simple world of the neat herd appealed to my imagination
largely, no doubt, in its own right, as it appealed once to Theocritus
and the sacred singer of the Bhagavata; but it was the authority of their old
consecration that, made it irresistible. The visible
(and audible) neighbourhood of this remote bucolic
world, so poor and rude, and yet so dignified, so entirely innocent of bookish
learning, and yet so incredibly true to the, delicate conventions of poetry and
scholarship, was a perpetual pleasure to me in those days.
The
music of the pipes, by which it oftenest and most sweetly spoke, was never so
insistent as to become wearisome. Like the birdsong which it resembled also in
pitch and slenderness and artless impulse, it was fullest and most frequent in
the Spring; partly to celebrate the gladness of the time (for even in the; tropics men welcome
the Spring) and partly because at the end of January the Lumbadi
gypsies brought fresh supplies of pipes from the bamboo forests of the hills.
In the barren heats of May and June the music languished, and the July rains
drowned it altogether, but it revived prettily to greet the occasional sunny
days of August and welcomed the final return of the sunshine with an almost
vernal concert. The cool weather at the ends of the year, which the European
prefers to all the other seasons, passed unhonoured
of the neatherds. In a double sense, no doubt, it ‘left them cold’ for the
scantiness of their garniture would not have shamed the golden age. They
sometimes wore a cotton cloak against the winter; otherwise a big white turban
with sash-ends that hung down behind, a strip of cloth hardly bigger than a
statue's fig-leaf, a bamboo staff, a bamboo pipe, and in the rainy season a
large palmyra-leaf umbrella shaped like a toadstool, were a neatherd's whole
equipment. They ate palmyra-nuts and custard-apples and other wild fruits, but
one seldom saw them lunching from a " bowl in the
open, like the older field-workers.
One
other simple property of theirs I remember, not a generality but a particular
piece, which I nearly always I noticed with delight, familiar though it was. It
seemed to bring us nearer together than anything else, for though it
belonged, in use and form, to them and the idyll as intimately and almost as
prettily as the pipes themselves, it also belonged, in a material sense, to me.
Apparently the board of a game like noughts and
crosses, but triangular in plan and far more complicated, (‘goats and tigers,’
I believe, was its proper designation) it was as wonderful to me as one of
those curious chess-boards recently found by the archeologists in the
labyrinth of Minos. My personal claim upon it
arose from the fact that it was engraved upon the slant coping of my
paddock-wall; like a magical diagram, or the checquer
frame of a horoscope.
Bhulokam,
when I noticed him first, was the most noticeable of my small bucolic
neighbors. He must have been then about ten years old. He belonged to a Mala
village of mud and palm-thatch that stood under the floodbank
of the river about half a mile away, decently screened from the main road, by
an orchard of custard-apple trees. He looked much too refined to have come out
of so squalid a cluster of hovels. He had a curiously wise and rather beautiful
face, in which I found a distinct resemblance to that of a Brahmin student of
mine, whom I will call Nagabushanam, and who was the
first of my scholars to exhibit the shy but authentic marks of poetic
endowment. I used often to amuse myself by finding such resemblances in Indian
faces. Usually the reference was to somebody once personally or otherwise
familiar to me in
I often wonder how far and with
what reason our personal reactions are governed by such resemblances. I always
regarded that sweeper-woman with a certain awe. So
also Bhulokam's likeness to the Brahmin poet suggested the notion that our
little neatherd was born under a poetic star, and had music, or the soul of
music, in his soul. His love and mastery of the rustic pipe, in which he easily
excelled all his companions, lent a reasonable colour to this fancy. So also,
but less definitely, did something in the very fashion of his little naked
body, which was almost painfully meagre, but suggested like a sketch, a rare
shapeliness and poise, and favoured languid, graceful attitudes, like the
statues of Praxiteles. These vague indications were
all that was forthcoming on either side of the question at the time, for
Bhulokam was a shy little boy in those days, and would hardly so much as smile
at me.
After a while my little Thyrsis went away, and what became of him in the years that
followed I never knew. He must have been hired to a
distant farmer, for I rode far afield and often in those days and never saw
him. I got appreciably less ‘music for noting’ after his departure, and for a
time I missed his pensive little figure along the field road that skirted my
paddock-wall on the west, or about the turfy banks of
the old canal, swelling like the scarp of a Roman earthwork, which served me
for a moat toward the east, or amid the bosky ruins of the nineteenth-century
sugar factory at the head of it; ruins which had already acquired something of
the dignity of a mediaeval relic, thanks partly to the figures of the
grazing cattle, now ruled by other staves.
I had almost forgotten the boy's
existence, when one day I happened to notice what I took for a strange, rather
graceful youth at the tail of a train of labouring
ploughs. As I rode by he looked up, and with some difficulty I recognised my
lost neatherd. He had become nearly black (the usual colour of his caste) from
toiling in the open, and the look of the poetic Brahmin was now, hardly
traceable. His frame, though still gaunter than youth should be at the
flower, was supple and sinewy, and he steered his wooden plough, and controlled
his yoke of oxen, with skill and assurance and a touch of pride.
The
team of ploughs belonged to a near neighbor of mine, a prosperous ryot of the
Kamma caste named Bobu Seshayya,
with whom Bhulokam now took service, and for all I know he serves him still.
Old Bobu (whom in my secret heart I nicknamed ‘Bobus
or Bubus’ 1)
owned more and better oxen than anyone else I knew, great
white muscular beasts of the Nellore breed, and as many ponderous buffaloes.
These animals were pastured on the broad plain between the floodbank
and the river, where the grass remained succulent long after the rains.
Bhulokam presently forsook the plough and reverted to his boyish
employment, assuming the special care of Bobu's
buffaloes, I was fond of riding and walking on the Lanka (Naga Lanka,
The
Indian rustic, in another sense than Shakespeare's nightingale, ‘stops his pipe
in growth of riper days,’ and I began to fear that Bhulokam's musical
propensity had faded, like intimations of immortality, into the light of Common
day. With it, apparently, went my last excuse for fancying him a kind of
mute, inglorious
It
was the custom for the various guilds and castes of the neighbourhood to send
choirs of dancers to the Dowleishwaram car-festival, which was held every
year on a day in February about two miles down the river. These choirs
danced in the village street after nightfall, each choir forming a ring
about a lamp with many branches, like a burning bush of brass, and singing in
response to their choirmaster or, coryphaeus, whose exacting business it
was, not only to lead and to inflame the dance and song, but to keep
alive the many fiery tongues of the lamp as well. How alike
throughout, beneath its manifold variety, was the ancient world, and how true
to that likeness
Now at the time of
which I write, and probably long before, one of the said choirs came from the
dingy Mala village where Bhulokam lived. I used to hear the clamor of their
choir-practice through the screen of custard-apple trees as I came home along
the road at night. In one respect, as far as I know, the custom of our festival
differed from the Athenian, that with us there was no
formal competition between the dancing-choirs. Otherwise that of the poor Malas would have stood a sorry chance in the matter of
equipment (which is said to have been a determining factor even in Periclean Athens) against most of the others. The
orchestral lamp of the smiths of Dowleishwaram, for instance, was glorious with
parrots of brass and branching tracery, and twinkled with points of light like
a little universe, while the choristers themselves were nearly as splendid in
their golden ornaments and muslin tunics of purple and crimson; whereas the Malas danced naked to the waist, and their candelabrum was
a sorry skeleton of scrap-iron. But in actual dance and song the poor outcasts
were by no means out of the running. Certainly in the year of which I write,
they yielded to none as regards the grace, the tunefulness, and the
transfiguring fervour of their youthful coryphaeus, who proved to be no other
than Bhulokam himself.
Here
let me utter a reflection, in case this true tale should cause me to be accused
of unduly idealizing the Indian peasant. We of the West seldom realize what a
wealth of culture and refinement his ancient civilization has to bestow, and
how widely and with what a pleasant cunning it bestows the same. These choric
dances are performed by the villagers themselves in every village. In addition
to the music and the measure, the dancers have to memorize and rehearse the
long ballads which pertain to them, and which are based upon the sacred fables
of the race. Thus the leisure of the rustic, like the Greek word for leisure,
becomes a pleasant school. The dance furnishes him, not only with amusement,
but with a cultural exercise and ‘secondary’ education both in ‘music’ (in the
full Hellenic sense) and gymnastic, against which our democratic modernity,
with all, its parade of science and system, has astonishingly little to show.
About the time when Bhulokam took service
with him, old Bobu built a new stable for his
buffaloes in the middle of the Lanka, and Bhulokam was put in charge of it. It
was less than half a mile west of my house and directly in the line between me
and the river, and I took to visiting it often in the course of my morning
saunters. As a goal for idler mornings it came to rank second only in my
affection to the well-head in a certain garden, where I liked to watch the oxen
drawing fragrant water, and to hobnob with other morning saunterers.
Like the trees of the garden, the great shed afforded a welcome shelter from
the waxing sun if I happened to be late in getting abroad. It was not quite
always accessible, I remember, for about once a week the
ground before it used to be covered thick with precious cakes of buffalo-dung,
laid out in orderly rows to dry in the sun for fuel. I was not
realist enough to stomach the rude poetry of this arrangement on, the spot, but
otherwise I found the rustic dignity of the place (which was always kept
scrupulously clean within) and its difference from a College lecture-room, such
as claimed my working hours, as refreshing to the spirit as its shadow to the
body. It was merely a great roof on pillars, for the jagged leaves were so
close to the ground as to make, walls unnecessary; but though built only of
palm-timber and palm-thatch it was very substantial. The river washed
over the Lanka as far as the floodbank two or three
times in every rainy season, but the
buffalo-pandal stood unremoved throughout the
rest of my time, and may even be there still. I remember with what delight I
first inspected its furniture, which was as grandly rustic as its architecture.
The chief items were two solid and large teakwood chests, and a sleeping-shelf
with a sagging leather mattress high up under the roof-wall, like an upper
berth in a ship's cabin. The chests contained buffalo-bells and brazen
pitchers, the bamboo yoke on which Bhulokam carried his milk-pots daily to the
town, and other pastoral objects.
The
human interest of the buffalo-stable was less distinguished than that of the
garden well-head; whither people of every caste, Brahmins included, would
stroll out for air from neighbouring houses, or turn aside for a rest from the
trunk road adjoining. Brahmins will sometimes visit a cowshed as a religious
duty. There was a cowshed on the canal near my house, and I used sometimes to
see the Sanskrit pundit of the College lurking there in the early morning. The
venerable man, who was always attired on these occasions with matutinal and Vedic simplicity, would explain with some
embarrassment that he had come so far from the town to fetch the family milk,
not deigning to admit the sacramental import of his pilgrimage to such as I. But a buffalo shed has no such divinity, or I was alone
in discovering it. The only persons usually to be seen at the pandal were Bhulokam himself and his staff of some
half-a-dozen naked urchins like his earlier self. One of these was Janaki Ramayya, Bobu's own little
Benjamin, a sturdy and richly colored youngster of twelve for whom, as an
educationist, I had a sneaking regard because he had persistently and
victoriously refused to exchange the freedom of the pastures for the clothes
and captivity of the local High School. Perhaps Janaki respected my remoteness
in the same way, for we were very good friends. I still have a rude little
brass Lakshmi-lamp which he brought back as a present for me when the family
went on a pilgrimage to Tirupati.
It
was only now that Bhulokam himself became anything more to me than a figure in
a picture and a tune upon a pipe; more than a name, I was about to say, but
hitherto I had not even heard his name. It is a curious name, signifying the
Earth-region, as distinguished from the various upper and nether regions of the
Hindu cosmography. Though apparently not uncommon among the neatherds, for I
knew another who bore it, and also a feminine modification of it which I shall
mention presently, it is not found in superior circles, and its employment
seems on the face of it rather foreign to the spiritualistic sentiment of
Hinduism. Possibly, like other names among the Indian poor, it was given in
humility, to placate the envy of the gods, but to me it suggested a congenial
and refreshing sense of the uses of this vale of tears, or else an equally
pleasant piety towards our common Mother. Its feminine form, Bhuloki, was borne
by Bhulokam's little sister, who was introduced to me one morning at the
cattle-shed. She was a perfect little figure of a woman, in feature very like
Bhulokam as I knew him first, and hardly bigger. She was clad like a grown
woman, and her shabby clothes proclaimed her poverty as her brother's nakedness
had never done, but in a pencil-drawing of her, which I still have in an old
sketch-book, and which of course has no indications of scale or colour or
texture, she might pass, with her draperies and her bangles, her ear-rings and
her nose-ring, for an uncrowned Queen of Sheba.
Having
described at length his companions, his employments, and surroundings, I find
surprisingly little left to say about my hero himself. He was always cheerful,
but neither talkative nor mischievous, No ranks of his made themes, like Janaki's, for boorish banter and anecdotes among his
fellows, and our slender association itself was for the most part uneventful.
He remained, indeed, a little enigmatic in spite of comparative familiarity.
His distinction was that he never altogether shed the distinction, with which
my fancy had playfully clothed his childish nakedness. That this result was not
entirely due to his natural reserve my story (for which the reader is doubtless
by this time fully prepared) may help to suggest.
For
one day an incident happened, momentous only in that humble uneventfulness,
which nevertheless told me more of him than many confidences and many more
exciting adventures might have done. It seemed to me
to epitomize, while it developed, alike the idyll of Bhulokam and my own manner
of reading it, which was at the same time sentimental and skeptical, so that I
feel that I fared better than I deserved.
For
an early walk I usually wore only a shirt and ‘shorts’; and as I always carried
a small sketch-book and other oddments, my pockets were sometimes over-stuffed.
One morning, after sitting on the teakwood chest in the buffalo-shed for a chat
on my way to the river, I accidentally pulled out and left behind me a
five-rupee note, and Bhulokam found it lying on the lid.
What
emotions, and what deliberations, were excited in the mind of the poor cattle-keeper at the sight of this windfall
(which meant nearly as much to him as a month's wages) I do not know, nor for
what reasons he finally thought it wisest to act as he did. Some will suppose a
lack of enterprise, or a shadowy fear of the law, or a want of faith in the
generosity of the gods, when I relate that he almost at once brought it after
me, where I stood on the brink of the river-cliff, watching the sails and the swallows.
I, whose note it was, preferred and still prefer to regard his action, in the
spirit of the idyll, as an example of the famous integrity of the Golden Age,
and of the operation of that primaeval Justice which lingered longest, as
Virgil declares, in the pastoral country-side.
Wishing
to do what I could, even artificially, to bolster up so convenient a survival,
I told Bhulokam, on the spur of the moment, to keep the note for himself. He
wove it into his waistcloth with a smile of thankful surprise, and I sought my
house with a pleasing sense of the natural nobility of man, and of my own
readiness to recognise and encourage it.
But
the economic West is incurably afraid of ‘spoiling’ people, and I had not gone
far before I began to regret my part (not his) of this magnanimous transaction.
I began to fear that I had defeated my own end, and introduced into the state
of innocence an element of corruption rather than of conservation. I saw
visions of my poetic neatherd haunting the toddy-shops, or caught in the toils
of dancing girls, or acquiring the habit of hard gambling at cock-fights and
wrestling-matches.
As
the days went by and Bhulokam's usual modesty of demeanor was not visibly
impaired or altered, I began slowly to be reassured. But my fears were not
finally set at rest, nor my repentance turned again with shame upon itself,
till nearly a month later, when the Dowleishwaram car festival happened to
recur.
The
ponderous progress of the car, which formed the main pageant of the festival,
was over at last, and I was walking in the dusk to see the stalls and the
dancing-choirs. When I came to the dancing-place of the Malas
I thought for one ominous moment that they had changed their coryphaeus, for I
quite failed to recognize my friend of the pastures in the resplendent person
who served the wicks, and sustained the measure and the chant, with even more
than Bhulokam's wonted poise and fire. He was arrayed in a tunic of crimson
muslin every whit as fine as the purple of the smiths. Neatly sewn upon it
a downward row or chain of
silver-seeming tassels of a very delicate design, such as even the smiths had
surely never seen before, tinkled and glittered, like Urim
and Thummim, on the bosom of the young mystagogue. It was clearly the Corybantic ephod of his
dreams—and it would at least have cost him all my five rupees.
Then
I understood better the heart of the poor cattle-keeper.
1
Dative
and ablative, Bobus or Bubus, ‘to or for, by, with, or from oxen,’ (From the
declension of the noun Bos (an ox) in the Latin
Grammar).
(Reprinted From Triveni,
Nov.–1928)