Krishna and Kamsa - Notebook I

Kamsa

Kamsa, lying in his bed at the top of the palace, fanned by an unseen servant, is unable to sleep. Palace intrigue, assassination attempts, his ultimate place in history, his lack of an heir, all weigh on his mind.

He is a modern man, with existential fears. He feels trapped by the extent of his personal power and the use he has made of it; all his plans have come to naught.

Kamsa gets up and walk about the walls of the fort, bathed in moonlight, feeling very alone yet followed by a cadre of guards.

He is ruler of all he surveys, yet it brings him no happiness. Everywhere events are spinning out of his control. He sees foreign armies marching on him from beyond the horizon, his infrastructure collapsing, himself as an old man.

Gorbachev – the last Communist?

Kamsa awoke, and was afraid. For many years he had thought that this was a consequence of being a king; it was only recently that it had occurred to him that fear was a consequence of being a man rather than a king. 

In his youth, in the palace of the emperor, he had encountered the greatest minds of his generation, absorbed the riches of a thousand cultures, observed first hand the greatest philosopher king of his era rule with wisdom and justice, for the god of the people and the glory of the empire. He had travelled among the people, incognito, learning their ways and their speech. When he ascended the throne, he felt as if the world was at his feet and history at his fingertips. He was still a young man.

He began with radical reform. The ministers, sycophants, hangers-on, and flatterers of his father’s court, who had served for many years in their posts, grown comfortable and content, he fired. He brought in his own advisors, friends who he had met on his travels, his teachers, and his followers, all men he knew and trusted, who bad been with him through the thin, he brought with him for the thick. They were friends of his boyhood, he thought of the as his friends for life.

 

Glasnost and Perestroika

Kamsa’s first move was to abolish the class system. That priests and nobles should enjoy wealth and privilege simple by virtue of their birth seemed to Kamsa inherently wrong, he himself brought an untouchable to the palace, and washed the man’s feet, and embraced him as a brother. The crowds cheered, the priests sat in stunned silence, the nobles gathered and issued a call to arms.

Kamsa impounded the noble’s arms and the priest’s temples and icons. He seized all the wealth in the kingdom, and then redistributed it, according to the amount of need and the enhancement of labor; he gave the beggar enough to feed his family and the skilled weaver his own loom. He gave land to those who worked the fields, horses to those who cleaned the paddocks, houses to those who cleaned the floors. He decreed that every citizen was entitled to food, shelter, and clothing, and that any citizen who needed could simply come to the palace, and ask, and it would be given. All this he called restructuring.

He threw out all the unjust judges and said all trials and crimes would be judged by a jury of peers, in an open court. He created a forum where any man could come and protest a law he felt was unjust; if enough people agreed with him, the law would be changed. If there was no law, one would be created, according to the concerns of the people involved. Private estates were turned into public parks. And all people were invited to take any dispute straight to the palace, where the king would personally hear their complaint, and rule in favor of the wronged party, and see that justice was done. All this he called openness.

Kamsa issued decrees; that did not make it so.  A group of nobles banded together in a castle on the outskirts of the kingdom. They banded together under the aegis of “tradition” and “our sacred way of life”.

Kamsa, gathering the friends of his youth around him, massed his troops and marched 20 days across the desert, and defeated the rebels. He used a new technique of battle, discovered on his travels, called “blitzkrieg”. The battle was bloody, but it was the first step.

 

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” != “Peace, Land, Bread”

His time, incognito among the people, taught him the reality that all men are equal. But over time, as he surrounded himself with advisors, it became less of a reality and more of a concept, until finally it was simply the words that were said while know-towing to the king. Perestroika became patronage. It was difficult to explain the concept; the kind himself, when pressed, would say it meant that when you meet a man in the desert you give him water. As Dwaraka was on the sea, this made very little sense to the people.

The problem is administrative. Kamsa himself could not hear the facts of every dispute; he then appointed the incorruptible friends of his youth as judges; they became corrupt.

Kamsa wondered why people continued to steal when property had been equitably distributed. He thought it reasonable for the poor to steal from the rich; in the end the poor stole from the poor; the courts were full as before, and equality slipped further into a concept.

Kamsa began as a populist and became a tyrant.

 

Absalom, Absalom 

The circle of advisors grows closer …

While there were problems, Kamsa continued, in large part because of the class structure he had worked so hard to dismantle. Eventually, as the momentum for reform slowed, and Kamsa’s personal popularity waned, the divine right of kings became the sole backing of Kamsa’s populist edicts.

After the clergy had been banned, the temples stood empty for many years. Kamsa tried to turn them into housing for the classes that had been oppressed. But the people would not inhabit the dwellings, saying the old prayers and covering themselves with ancient superstition, they could only be put into the sanctum by force, against a frenzy of fear for their everlasting souls, and the backed out of the temple as soon as the guards had left, murmuring fervent apologies to the idol and leaving the temples once again deserted.

The sycophants eventually proposed a solution; the structures should become temples once again, but re-dedicated to Kamsa, who of course would merely represent the collective will of the people.

The priests were brought out of hiding to maintain the edifices and write new prayers. The idols were brought back. The people once again came to humbly pray. The only difference was that the name over the doorway was Kamsa’s, rather than Vishnu’s.

In the temple of Kamsa, before mirrors rather than idols, the people prayed to Vishnu for deliverance. The untouchable man Kamsa had brought to the palace, and seated on the throne, and washed his feet, this man knelt outside the temple, fervently praying for a Messiah to come and free the kingdom from the yoke of the great Satan. Vishnu answered him, “yes, I shall come, and live among you, and when the time is right, I shall reveal myself, and slay this tyrant.”

The untouchable, his prayers answered, returned to the hole in the ground where he slept and where the priests dumped the waste of the temple.

 

David and Jonathan 

The level of intrigue increases proportionally with the amount of power involved.

To ensure loyalty and obedience, the emperor required that the eldest sons of all the kings in his domain be raised in the court of the emperor. Kamsa, less than a year after his birth, was separated from his family and brought to the court of the emperor, where he was to spend the next twelve years.

In the court Kamsa learnt many things: astronomy, mathematics, music, archery, painting, horsemanship, law. The most learned men in the world came to the court, to pay their respects to the emperor, and Kamsa listened to their tales and stories of distant lands and different peoples and cultures with great interest.

He got an exposure to learning and a respect for ideas. He also saw the imperial glory that wealth, power, and sophistication can create. He learned the language of the court, the lingua franca of scholars and poets. He heard the greatest poets of the age recite their works, and the saw the emperor get up and recite some couplets of his own composition, and head the court arise, and applaud, and praise the greatness and qualities of the emperor.

He had with him a small retinue of servants and keepers. His nanny sang him to sleep with the lullabies of his home, his cook prepared traditional meals, despite the differences in produce and spices. They spoke their local dialect, played the tribal game with stones and sand, dressed in the style to which they were raised and kept the customs of their home alive. Once a year, on the emperor’s birthday, Kamsa’s father, the king, would come, to pay the tribute to the emperor and to visit his first son. Kamsa thought it was odd, this old man who came with hundreds of strangers, and asked him what he had learned. When he was very young, Kamsa had hidden in his nanny’s skirts, when he was older, he learned the proper modes of address and bearing, and these yearly meetings took on a formal and staged air. Kamsa never met his mother, he had not yet been weaned when he was taken to court, and his earliest memory was taking suck at the breast of his nanny, a local peasant woman who worshipped him as her life’s glory, that she had nursed this future king.

Kamsa had a group of peers in the court, other local princelings of his age. He became friends with the heir apparent of a neighboring kingdom who was almost his age, Jinnah. They grew up together, playing children’s games, then learning the adult pastimes. In the arts of war they were evenly matched, many nights they stayed awake, reconstructing the great battles of history with pebbles and sticks, creating the terrain with the contours of a blanket. They swore undying love for one another and shared blood; in swordplay, when one had the other at his mercy, he would laugh, and pick to other up, and embrace him.

It was a period of great scientific progress, these young princes of the court, witnessing every day reports of tremendous advances, felt that the secrets of the universe were just around the corner, that one only had to take the next step, and all would be explained. They didn’t realize that ultimate knowledge retreats like the horizon, ad each step of progress only brings new vistas, not the edge of the world. Still, they felt armed with this knowledge, and their soon to be assumed power, that this was the dawning of a new age, and age that was theirs to shape and form according to the most enlightened principles on the age.

As the emperor’s birthday approached in the twelfth year of Kamsa’s captivity I the court, Kamsa noticed people treating him differently. Then, the night before the emperor’s birthday, Kamsa’s nanny woke him up. Outside the city was celebrating, the sounds of revelry and intoxication filled the air, and bonfires raged in the central squares. The nanny said “You must flee, your father is not going to pay the tribute. My brother will take you into the desert. Cover your face with this cloth and do not speak. Here is some food. May Vishnu be with you. Now go.”

Thus ended Kamsa’s youth.

 

Into the Desert 

The streets are alive with the sounds of celebration; laughter, screaming, music and drunken missteps. Kamsa slipped through the crowd, protected by his cloak of anonymity. He walked through the narrow, twisting alleys, stepping over cow feed and human excrement. Oxcarts rattle over the cobbled streets, pigeons roost in the carved sandstone facades of the havelis, men spit red-stained mucus onto the pavement. Kamsa moves across all this life, not entering but stepping carefully through the shadows.

The sentries are not at their posts; Kamsa slips unnoticed through the checkpoint and out the east gate.

A Camel’s Load of Silk 

Al-Haroun traveled at the head of a train of camels overburdened with bales over bales of silk, white foam covering the bits in the phlegmatic lips. They traveled by night.

Soon the tents and squatter’s huts set up to catch the wealth trickling down through the cracks in the royal edifice begin to thin out. They ascended a rocky incline, the camel’s strides keeping their narcotic rhythm steady. At the ridge Al-Haroun stopped the train and got down to piss onto the ground. Kamsa got down as well. Three strange men arrived on the rise and greeted Kamsa in the language of the court. Suddenly, as huge noise split the silence. All four turned back towards the city.

Fireworks, gifts of the emperor of China, flared across the sky, bursting into explosions of color, marking the first minute of the emperor’s birthday. They stood and watched until the explosions ended. The three kinds consulted among themselves in a strange tongue, pointing repeatedly at the spot in the sky where the fireworks had been. Finally, they remounted their camels and started down the incline, towards the city of the emperor. Al-Haroun started the train again, and they descended into the shallow sand, away from the kings, into the fathomless desert.

The moon rose full over the crest of a dune, surrounded by thousands of stars, pinpricks in the deep blue blanket of the nighttime sky. It was very quiet. They passed some tumbleweed and desert trees, where Al-Haroun stopped and let the camels feed on the prickly leaves. He offered Kamsa a drink of water, and Kamsa drank. He slipped off his chappals and felt the cool dry sand between his toes. Then they started again.

They travelled like this for several nights.

On the third night they were ambushed. A group of diacots came over the crest of a dune, screaming war cries and brandishing their curved Rajasthani swords. The fight was short, Al-Haroun was one of the casualties. Kamsa did not resist. The pirates led the camels to the north, into the loin of Ursa Minor.

The brigands returned to their camp, hobbled their camels, and unpacked their booty. The elders sat around the fire, in order of power and seniority, eating from a large common bowl with their fingers, hunkered and balanced on their heels, commenting on the quality of the items that the raiding party spread out before them.

Trussed and blindfolded, Kamsa listens to their speech. It is a patois of the imperial lingua franca and Kamsa’s native tongue.

The tribe feasted late into the night on the provisions that were to last Al-Haroun and his drivers all the way to Tashkent. As morning broke over the desert they reclined on bolsters of raw bundled silk.

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In the desert all men are brothers.

The women are beautiful and free.

How superficial is Kamsa’s understanding of the tribe?

At what level does division of labor take place? At what level does society generate splinter groups?

Cyclic theories of Political Economy.

A problem of scale.

Kamsa: Birth – Court – Desert – Coronation – Reform – Invasion – Fear

Krishna: ?

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Nagpur, 1991