The Heart of Poor Cattle-Keeper

BYOSWALD COULDREY

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 Krishna, himself a neatherd, whom they worshipped. Sometimes they drummed less delicate music, with longer bamboo instruments, upon the persons of the sacred kine, a variation which, while doubt- less' affording needed guidance to the kine, served artistically to link those airier passages of the symphony with a work a day world.

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, forthough 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 inthelabyrinth 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 Europe. The greater the difference in the status of the persons thus compared, the more amused was I at the resemblance, for the subtle philosophic flavour of the game was then accentuated. The quest was the more often fortunate because the lower orders of Telingana, unlike those of the further South, are often not inferior to the better-class Hindus in refinement of feature. One of my gardeners, a Golla, had a face like Julius Caesar, but handsomer; and my sweeper-woman, or scavenger, was quite ridiculously like an English lady of much local importance whom I knew at a respectful distance in my boyhood.

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. Hisframe, 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 presentlyforsook 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, Snake Island, as the riverside pasture was for Some reason called) and I soon began to see him as often as of old.

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 fancyinghim a kind of mute, inglorious Milton. But Bhulokamproved to have been truer to the star that rose with him than I to the instinct of my own fancy. He had found, I found, a delightfully romantic, I should rather say an appropriately classic substitute for the bucolic reed of his childhood. The story requires me to explain its nature somewhat exactly. It was the custom for the various guilds and castes of the neighbourhood to send choirs of dancers to the Dowleishwaram car-festival, whichwas heldevery year on a day in February about two milesdown the river. These choirs danced in the village street after nightfall, each choirforming 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 businessit was, not onlyto lead and to inflame the dance and song, but to keep alive the many fiery tongues of the lampas well. How alike throughout, beneath its manifold variety, was the ancient world, and how true to that likenessIndia remains to-day! Just so used each of the Athenian tribes, twenty-five centuries ago, to send a dithyrambic dancing-choir to the Dionysian festival, which meant no more to them, perhaps, than the feast of the god Narasimham, who dwelt in the temple on the Dowleishwaram promontory, did to us.

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 verysubstantial. 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 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. (From Triveni Nov. –1928)

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).