In Search of Amrit Kaur by Livia Manera Sambuy

Author:Livia Manera Sambuy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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So here Amrit Kaur was, at this new juncture, a woman who’d read Flaubert and played jazz, living in a town that combined a fascinating distant past with a long history of mostly dull rajas, admitting a few exceptions. In the fourteenth century, for example, we find one raja who was a cannibal. His name was Mangal Sen and he had a habit of eating a little fresh game each day, hunted down by his bevy of servants. One particularly rainy morning, his servants failed to catch anything. But rather than confess their failure, they carved some flesh from a recently dead man and served it to the raja – who, unwittingly, found it rather appetising. When he learned of their trick, the raja was at first horrified, but then decided to go on eating human flesh for the next 100 days, since this would allow him to aspire to the position of Abhdut, a kind of enlightened figure. As the days passed, however, his servants grew tired of sacrificing a human every morning and decided to rebel: demonstrating an admirable sense of equanimity, they set a trap for the raja in the woods and sacrificed their own king.

More poetic was the story of Sidh Sen. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this prince proved himself so astute in battle and so capable in the management of his kingdom that his subjects believed he had the power to fly. It was said that Sidh Sen possessed a book of spells, with which he was able to control Mandi’s demons and yoke them into submission. Every morning he’d leave to bathe in the Ganges and return in time for lunch, since all he had to do was put that little book in his mouth and, voilà, he took off flying. When he sensed his death approaching, Sidh Sen began to fear that someone would use his book for evil and decided to throw it into one of the deepest stretches of the Beas. His precious talisman was forever lost.

But apart from its more forward-thinking qualities, like the right to strike and its relative leniency towards adulterers, Mandi did remain a land of ignorance and superstition, where an attempt to vaccinate the population against smallpox – an evil administered by the terrifying goddess Shitala Devi – gave rise to a mass revolt that had to be squashed by force.

In the late 1800s, the British functionary John Maynard told of his troubles in assisting Raja Bijai Sen, who refused to make decisions without the advice of his astrologers and brahmins. Bijai Sen was the prince responsible for constructing the palace where Amrit and Joginder were to take up residence as young newlyweds and was considered to be Joginder’s grandfather – even though that wasn’t technically the case. Lacking any male heirs, Bijai Sen adopted a young relative, who in turn failed to produce any male heirs, leading him to adopt yet another family member, Joginder. John Maynard didn’t know whether to

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