India (46 page)

Seven or eight years before, in the north of Tamil Nadu, there had been a peasant rebellion – or a Maoist rebellion. It had been destroyed. In the 40 years or so since independence the Indian state had had to deal with many kinds of insurgency, in many parts of the country. The state had learned how to manage, when to stamp hard, when to lay off.

There were survivors of that peasant rebellion. They had been restored to civilian life, and were probably doing better now than they had ever done. The police were still in touch with these men; and it was through the police that a meeting was arranged for me with two of them.

They had been summoned from a district far away, and the meeting took place in my hotel room. A plain-clothes police officer came with them. On my side were two newspapermen, one a crime reporter, to interpret, the other a sports writer, to observe. So there were six of us in the hotel room. The number made for formality. The hotel’s tea and biscuits, and the solicitous room-service waiter, made everyone a little stiffer.

I didn’t know what to make of the former rebels. They were
very dark, solidly built, and in something like a uniform: long dhotis and loose-hanging cream-coloured shirts. Their hair was thick and long and well oiled, combed back from the forehead and from the sides, and cut at the back in a straight line just above the shirt collar.

The older of the two was the spokesman. He had a heavier build, a chunkier nose, and a shinier skin. He said his brother had been a communist, and it was this brother – later killed by a landlord – who had indoctrinated him. He, the speaker, had indoctrinated the second man, who was younger, and was his brother-in-law. It had been easy to indoctrinate the brother-in-law. His father worked in the Railways, in the canteen. One day the father’s toes were cut off in an accident in the railway yard. The son then applied for a job in the Railways. He should have got a job: there was a tradition in the Railways that when a man was injured and had to retire, a member of his family was given a job, for compassionate reasons. But the son didn’t get a job, because other people had bribed the assistant station-master or some official of that standing.

The police officer nodded: that was the way it was, at that level – and the officer’s compassion was interesting. The newspapermen agreed. It was like that with those jobs.

There were very few brahmins in their village. It was an area of backward castes and
Adi-dravids
, the first Dravidians, aborigines, tribal people. These people were exploited by the big landlords or zamindars. A big landlord here was anyone who owned more than 50 acres. Many of the zamindars were people of the Reddiar community who had come from the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh. But there were also Adi-dravid zamindars.

The zamindars employed women for three rupees a day and men for five rupees a day. The minimum wage at that time was five rupees for women and nine for men. The aim of the Maoists was to create enmity between the workers and the landlords. They did this by telling the workers about the minimum wage, and encouraging them to ask for it. The landlords often refused, and brought in workers from other villages. Sometimes the landlords became rougher. The older man’s brother had been killed by a zamindar. After that, it was war: that zamindar had to be killed.

Three attempts were made to kill the zamindar. He was shadowed, and one day, when he was on a bus, six of the Maoists
got on the bus. But nothing happened. The rebels became indecisive, thinking of the other passengers; and in the confusion the zamindar got away. The second time they waited for the zamindar early one morning in a field. He came; they shot at him; they missed. The third time they got their man. A party of eight assaulted the zamindar’s house and threw pin-grenades. They killed three people: the zamindar, his mistress, and a baby. They didn’t know about the baby; the death of the baby upset them.

After that they did only two more killings. They were just following orders at this stage. The orders were more like decisions: these decisions were made at group meetings. Their wish was to overthrow the government, and their aim, when they were dealing with people whom they had decided were ‘enemies’, was simply to kill them.

Then the police began to move in. They threw a vice, a ‘wrench’, around the area where the Maoists were operating, and the wrench was gradually closed. Thirty Maoists were killed. The two men in the hotel room were lucky. They had surrendered to the police some time before, and were in prison, charged with the murder of the zamindar and his mistress and the baby. (This was how the story was told: it was blurred and unsatisfactory at this point. But because of the formality of the occasion, because of the time gap between what the speaker said and what came out in translation, because of the compression of the translation, it didn’t occur to me to ask further questions at the time. It was only later that the blurring became apparent.)

The police could make no case against the two men. They couldn’t find witnesses, and the reason was that a warning had been sent out by the two men, 10 days before the hearing, that if anyone came forward to give evidence, he wouldn’t be alive the next day. This was said quite coolly in the hotel room; and the plain-clothes police officer, nodding, sucking in his breath, took it coolly too, as though it was all part of the game.

Eventually the two men were released. Since their group had been wiped out, they had nothing to go back to – and here, though the question hadn’t been asked, they both said they had betrayed no one in their group. The younger man, the brother-in-law, said that the police had cut the ‘nerves’ on one of his feet. He showed a dark scar, like a burn mark, on the top of his sandalled foot. But even after that, the younger man said, he hadn’t given anyone
away. The police officer didn’t look put out and didn’t try to interfere in what was being said; it was as though that, too, that wretchedness about the nerves and the foot, was part of the game, and everyone knew it.

With the help of the police – and no doubt as part of the state policy of rehabilitation – the two men went into business. Neither did well. The older man went into the tomato business, deciding for some reason to ship his tomatoes all the way to Calcutta. He lost 25,000 rupees, about £1000. The brother-in-law started making
beedis
, cheap leaf cigarettes; he said his employees ran away with the money. Neither man looked cast down by his business failure; they both seemed quite content.

I didn’t know what to make of what I had heard. There were so few word-pictures in what they had said, so few details. That might have been because of the translation, or because of the formality of our meeting, or because they had spoken their stories too often. There was an obviousness about them. I was reminded of the obviousness of the gangsters I had met in Bombay; they, the gangsters, were obvious because their lives were, after all, very simple. And perhaps the foot soldiers of a revolution, such as these men might have been, had to be simple people too, receiving messages simple enough for their capacities and needs.

I asked them what they knew about Periyar. And at once, even in the crime reporter’s translation, they seemed to say more than they had done up till then – and it might have been because it wasn’t a question they were expecting.

They honoured Periyar, the older man said. His father had been a follower of Periyar. But Periyar had struggled against caste alone; he hadn’t thought of class. ‘He shook us up, but he wasn’t relevant to our kind of struggle.’ That was the crime reporter’s first translation. Later he amended it. What had been said was, in a more literal translation, ‘We had no connection.’ And that hinted better at the caste gap between the Dravidian Movement and the Maoists.

I asked them about the anti-religious side of Periyar’s message. The older man said they weren’t religious, but their women were. Though even the women had begun to do without brahmins in their ceremonies.

This sounded genuine. So, right at the end, I began to feel that
the two men, whatever their relationship with the police, might have been what they said they had been.

Before they left, the brother-in-law asked to use the bathroom. I had my misgivings, but the police officer waved the man into the bathroom. We waited. There was no sound of a flush. Then the man came out; and carefully closed the door behind him.

Later, opening that carefully closed bathroom door, I found the toilet bowl unflushed, and the seat and floor pissed over. Was it social inexperience alone? Or was there also – in this man who had fought the class war – some very deep caste feeling about the uncleanliness of latrines: places so unclean they were beneath one’s notice, places for other people to notice, other people to clean?

I talked this over with Suresh, the sports writer, a day or so later. He said the two men were among the lowest of the low. However little I might have been aware of it, they would have stood out in the hotel lobby. They were far below the shudras, and quite outside the reach of the Dravidian Movement. Would they have had any idea of what was religiously clean and unclean? At that level, Suresh said, though caste and community distinctions might not be easily visible to people above, they were nevertheless rigidly followed.

The shirt and long dhoti and oily long hair of both men had probably been modelled on some star of the popular Tamil cinema. This care with their appearance was a sign that they had moved forward, had been shaken out of their village ways. The little paunches were also an aspect of the self-respect that had come to them with their rehabilitation. They had said that they had given up the revolution, and wanted now only to look after their families. And that, Suresh said – whatever other ambiguities there might have been in their stories – felt true.

I went to say goodbye to Sugar. He was always there in his little ground-floor apartment, a prisoner of his reputation.

I found him giving advice to a man who had brought a computer print-out of two horoscopes. A marriage was being considered, and Sugar was giving an opinion about the horoscopes. He was being firm. The girl’s horoscope was not suitable; in six months or so the boy would find someone more suitable. The inquirer, a high-up civil servant, didn’t seem to mind. He was from the boy’s side. In
this business of match-making boys had the whip hand; girls and their families were the suppliants.

I said, ‘Does the girl have a bad horoscope?’

‘Not bad,’ Sugar said. ‘Not suitable.’

It was strange, finding him, with his own melancholy, so ready to play the tyrant as a seer. I felt that, in spite of what he had said about the selfishness and falsity of the people who came to see him, and what he had said about giving it all up, he took pleasure in his holy man’s work and reputation.

Then he must have felt he had to make me some offering. He made it in the way that was now natural to him.

He looked at me across the little room and said, ‘When I saw you in the Himalayas in 1962, your face was
bright
. It was one of the things that attracted me to you. Now you look troubled. Has it to do with your life? Your work?’

I said, ‘I was more troubled in 1962. But I was younger. Like you.’

‘Will you be coming back to Madras again? Come and see me. Come and see me before two years.’ He was exercising his gifts of prophecy on himself. ‘After two years – ’

He shook his head and, slumped in his chair, his illness and solitude now like pure burdens, he let his glance take in the little space that he had made his own – the drawing-sleeping, without the furniture jumble I had first seen there, with the holy pictures on the wall and the hanging shelves with his headache tablets, the adjoining hall between the kitchen, which he couldn’t clean himself and which he could allow no one else to clean, and the temple room with its forbidding images – the little space he was soon to vacate.

In India in 1962 I took much of the British architecture for granted. After what I had known in Trinidad and England, British building in India seemed familiar, not a cause for wonder. Perhaps, too, in 1962, just 15 years after independence, I didn’t allow myself to see British Indian architecture except as background. I was saving my wonder for the creations of the Indian past. Even Lutyens’s great achievement in New Delhi I saw in a grudging way, finding the scale too grand, looking in his ceremonial buildings for the motifs he had got from the Mogul builders, and finding in his adaptations further evidence of vainglory.

I looked in this partial way even at the lesser architecture of the British, the bungalows and houses built for officials in the country districts. They were pleasant to stay in; with their porticoes and verandahs, thick walls, high ceilings, and sometimes additional upper windows or wall-openings, they were well suited to the climate. But they seemed too grand for the poverty of the Indian countryside. They seemed also to exaggerate the hardships of the Indian climate. So that, though absolutely of India, these British buildings, by their exaggeration, seemed to keep India at a distance.

But the years race on; new ways of feeling and looking can come to one. Indians have been building in free India for 40 years, and what has been put up in that time makes it easier to look at what went before. In free India Indians have built like people without a tradition; they have for the most part done mechanical, surface imitations of the international style. What is not easy to understand is that, unlike the British, Indians have not really built for the Indian climate. They have been too obsessed with imitating the modern; and much of what has been done in this way – the dull,
four-square towers of Bombay, packed far too close together; the concrete nonentity of Lucknow and Madras and the residential colonies of New Delhi – can only make hard tropical lives harder and hotter.

Far from extending people’s ideas of beauty and grandeur and human possibility – uplifting ideas which very poor people may need more than rich people – much of the architecture of free India has become part of the ugliness and crowd and increasing physical oppression of India. Bad architecture in a poor tropical city is more than an aesthetic matter. It spoils people’s day-to-day lives; it wears down their nerves; it generates rages that can flow into many different channels.