Chaube of Mathura || Part 6b of 8

While on the Braj Gaurasi Kos pilgrimage or out on tour to visit their clients, Chaube men do their own cooking. Many, then, are good cooks. Often during the year one of them will, for one reason or another, offer a Brahmans bhojanato his friends. It is an occasion much like a picnic where the men get together and have a party similar to, and often along with, the marijuana drinking sessions. Once again these are sessions in which all become and share masti with all the implications I have already noted.

My own pilgrimage priest had suffered two heart attacks. One day while going over his medical records with him, I mentioned that clarified butter was not good for heart patients. He said that he knew that but he could not live and be a real Chaube without clarified butter on his daily food. His doctor, he said, had first told him to eliminate butter from his diet; but the doctor relented when he learned that the patient was a Chaube for whom butter was more a beneficient necessity for life itself to continue than a harmful luxury. I mention this not because it sounds like a rationalization but because it illustrates how much social identity is tied to food and, for a Chaube, to a particularly rich and religiously significant item of Indian culture and cuisine.

Bhajana (prayers, hymns, saying the names of god) are the third means to become mast. On most mornings one can see in the porticoes around Vishram Ghat in Mathura city, Chaubes, usually older ones, saying prayers. Others will do so before the image of the Lord in their own homes. Women, it is said, say bhajana as their primary means of becoming mast. A Brahman woman devotee and professional singer of hymns, although not a Chaube, explained mast in a way with which they would agree: "Around here in masti one finds the Lord." Mast, she said, means "to forget oneself and become unconscious in love" and to become absorbed (lin jata hai) in Krishna. In reciting prayers and singing hymns, Chaubes say, one's mind becomes concentrated on the Lord alone, and this touch of divine bliss (ananda) is the very essence of divinity. One who has the time to say bhajana, and does so is happy, carefree, lost in the blissful pleasure of the Lord; he or she is mast.

Just as good food is necessary for good health, so too is good exercise. Chaubes say that exercise makes the body healthy (svast), and this makes one mast. Wrestling is Hindu science (mall vidya), and, as a science, it is a means to self-realization and contact with divinity. It is, informants say, like yoga. Wrestling and exercise, no doubt, also create, particularly in Chaube young men, the same sense of emotional well-being and release from tension that young men of the West get from a good "workout."

Scattered around Mathura city, especially to the south and west of Chaubiya Para, are gardens (bagica) owned and managed by groups of Chaubes. A garden has associated with it trees, a small temple, a meeting hall, and, for some, anakhara^[*] (wrestling hall or ground, gym, congregation, abode of ascetics). Before Independence in 1947 the institution of gardens and wrestling halls was vibrant and essential to communal life, solidarity, social control, communication, and male socialization.^[14] In the words of one informant,

When I was a child before 1948, many people used to go to the gardens. In the morning many young men went to exercise. I would say forty or fifty people went [to my garden]. Today only eight or ten men go. At that time people did exercises there, and in the evening old men would come and read Ramayana for the young men to hear. We took marijuana there. The young men would keep the place dean, fetch water [for both trees and people], and obey the elders whom they feared. It was like the golden age. Today all this has gone.

Gardens were and are places where the young men could work out and learn the science of wrestling. Masti and the sentiments of peace, obedience, and happiness were cultivated in the gardens, and all that I have said about marijuana was emphasized in them. This is not to say that conflict and tension were absent; they were certainly present.

In the gyms, bachelors and young men apprenticed, and to a minor extent still do apprentice, themselves to a wrestling guru who taught the science of wrestling. In the past, much more so than in the present, some Chaubes remained lifelong bachelors, especially when they had married brothers. Gardens were hangouts for the bachelors who would say, according to one informant, "We are mast." In the gardens bachelors ideally led a happy, carefree life, without family responsibilities and worries. The ideal of the mast bachelor was the wrestler, and many Chaubes were famous wrestlers often sponsored by rajas or maharajas who kept them and, most important, fed them as part of their entourage. Wrestlers require a rich diet of clarified butter, milk, sweets, and nuts such as almonds, in addition to daily bread and curry. Today many homes have pictures on the wall or in storage cabinets of recent ancestors who were wrestlers. Folklore about their fame, their brave deeds, their strength, and their matches with other wrestlers is abundant.^[15]

One Chaube wrestler is reputed to have been so strong and to have so husbanded his strength that he could ejaculate a liter of semen at a time, a sample of which is said to be in a Bombay museum. Wrestling, exercise, and proper diet reduce the desire for sex; the conserving of semen, which through exercises like standing on the head (sir sasana) goes to the head according to yogic belief, leads to insight. Wrestling and exercise have close relationships to Hatha Yoga. In Hindu belief control, development, and strengthening of the outer body through those disciplines correspondingly affects the development and strengthening of the inner body of mystical insight and religious experience. It is not accidental that the Hindi word for gymnasium (akhara^[*]) also means an abode of ascetics some of whom also engage in physical and yogic exercises. Dirt of the wrestling floor is said to be so beneficial to health that pimples and skin rashes fail to erupt.

Today the gardens, as social institutions, are vestigial and functioning gyms are few. What remains are festive occasions; for example, on Hindu New Year gardens and gyms are elaborately decorated with flowers, and pictures of famous wrestlers are taken out, hung up, and honored. Yet the husky wrestler and the mast bachelor remain part of the ideal of the mastram. A big bellied Chaube looking like a wrestler is still said to be mast.

Mast wrestlers were also reputed to have been courageous warriors when occasion required. The Hindu science of using weapons (sastra vidya) was also taught in the gardens and gyms. In some of them one can still find some old weapons. The Chaubes, or Chaturvedis, are divided into two divisions, the Karua^[*] (bitter, astringent) and the Mitha^[*](sweet). A true mastram is a Karua Chaube.^[16] Chaubes resident in Mathura say that when the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb began his persecution of Hindus, Mitha Chaubes fled to villages in neighboring districts and Rajasthan. The truly brave ones, the Karua, remained in Mathura to preserve the orthodox faith and its holy relics, for which behavior they tasted the bitterness of religious persecution. Mitha Chaubes, they say, took wives from other castes and diluted their pure blood; they also took up the impure habit of smoking cigarettes rather than chewing tobacco. They are not to be trusted with their sweet talk, fawning ways, and Western educations, all of which indicate pusillanimity and unorthodoxy. In the eyes of many in Mathura this condemnation also applies to other Chaubes who left Mathura well after the Muslim persecutions even though they are not strictly in the Mitha division. The label is important, not the facts.^[17]

Ideally, then, mast Chaubes care not for their lives but for their religion, orthodoxy, and holy birthplace, Mathura; they have a carefree and happy spirit that expresses itself in jokes, teases, and insults; and they have a tongue whose words cut with the biting, bitter truth. As persons, they are not emotionally blocked with an excess of sophistication and refinement, but, on the contrary, they are direct, spontaneous, gay, carefree, proud, and courageous. One who engages in the cultural practices I have described ought to imbibe and become the qualities they contain, such that his behavior spontaneously derives from masti.