Bloody Legacy To Carpet Weaving

That haveli looks interesting," I remarked as we passed an ornate structure flanked by a temple, its outer wall covered by colourful friezes. "It belonged to the Shivala Mahant, who's believed to have been a direct descendant of Lord Shiva," said our friend Mohammad Khan, "When he died, it was sold and now we're getting some carpets made there."

We walked into a large hall, abuzz with activity. "See, there's a dungeon here," he said, adding, "we're soon going to put it to good use _ it's cool and a couple of tubelights will take care of the lighting problem." Somehow, the noisy business of carpet-making made it difficult to conceptualise what this hall must have been like in the Mahant's time.

 

"I told Mohammad not to get any work done in that ill-fated place!" commented his old and stately mother, when she heard where we'd been. The Shivala Mahant, she said, had a fabulous fortune and a sadistic temperament. "A lot of blood has been shed in the very hall where Mohammad is getting carpets made today," she said. People, we learnt, used to quake at the sound of his footstep, a fact that he knew and revelled in. He is rumoured to have had some ingenious torture implements, like a whip that was electrically charged, and a hungry alligator in a pond. Although the Mahant, the head of a religious sect, was not allowed to marry, he was anything but chaste. "In his heydays, the halls of the haveli echoed with the tinkle of dancing girl's anklets. He married too, though the marriage was illegal,"said Praveen Goel, who now owns much of the original haveli. As notorious as his cruelty, was his wealth. It is said he collected revenue from over 50 villages at one time, and owned half the land in Mirzapur. Old Mirzapuris still talk about his gold inlaid billiards table and his priceless gold walking cane, studded with emeralds and diamonds. "It was believed that he had about six boxes full of gold and silver hidden in his haveli," Goel told us, adding, "but we didn't find any of it!" Indeed, his fabled riches disappeared so suddenly after his death that many think they are still there.

"I'm sure some gold's hidden there!" asserted the half-naked man we found in the temple built on the Mahant's erstwhile lands. "I should know, I'm his younger son!" We looked at him in disbelief. He looked more like a poor sadhu than Shivala Mahant's progeny. "After my father died, everything collapsed. He didn't name his successor, which left us in the lurch. Relatives gathered like vultures and soon nothing was left of his riches. I'm reduced to just living in this temple," he said. For some time, the Mahant's sons peddled small things from their house to make ends meet. Soon even the ceilings were dismantled so that their girders could be sold.

How he died remains a mystery. Once in a while, people still speculate whether the Mahant's death was suicide or murder. Mohammad, who was quite young when the Mahand died, still remembers his extraordinary, though rather ghastly funeral."Mahants are not cremated, they're immersed in the Ganges. Shivala Mahant's corpse was propped into a sitting position, anointed with sandalwood and vermillon, and a laddoo put in his mouth. He was taken in a flower-bedecked boat to the middle of the Ganges for a ceremonious send-off," he recounted. That day marked the end of an era of terror.