India (69 page)

‘I had to reach women who don’t read Hindi. It is the English-reading, English-speaking people who control things in this country. All this feminist Woman’s Lib movement is conducted by English-speaking people. You don’t find it so much in Hindi or the Indian languages.’

Nandini had said of
Woman’s Era
, The editors know what they are doing.’ The words had suggested that, in India’s professional
and competitive magazine business, the people who ran the magazine had done ‘research’ of some sort, like the research the people at
Savvy
were said to have done. But Vishwa Nath, I felt, moved by instinct; no amount of research could have led to his formula.

The
Woman’s Era
formula couldn’t be copied, because the personality of the editor couldn’t be copied, with its many ambiguities: the tears for the past, the iconoclasm, the fear of chaos coming again, the strong nationalist feeling, the homespun, with the over-riding love of print that had come down from the ancestor who, less than 20 years after the Mutiny, had worked on Dr Fallon’s
Dictionary
, applying a new kind of scholarship to the everyday India he knew.

In the beginning, at independence, women’s magazines (as Nandini had said) had been a borrowed idea, appealing to a few at the top.
Woman’s Era
was an expression now of a purely Indian social order much lower down, offering instruction and reassurance, and a subtle transformation of the hard real world, to women just emerging, women whose lives were a tissue of ritual and given relationships, and didn’t want to rebel or dream.

The formula couldn’t be copied, or transferred. Vishwa Nath himself had tried to apply the
Woman’s Era
formula to a general magazine,
Alive. Alive
hadn’t found a public. What made sense in the shut-in woman’s world came out in the general magazine as quirky and insubstantial.

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.

Every day the newspapers carried plain official accounts of events in the Punjab: so many killed by Sikh terrorists; so many people arrested for harbouring terrorists; so many terrorists killed by police; so many ‘intruders’ from across the Pakistan border killed.

In the wide streets and roundabouts of New Delhi there were reminders of the trouble in the north. At night there were roadblocks. At places below the trees there were sandbags, guns, and policemen. In some areas there was a policeman every 100 yards or so. In the city which Vishwa Nath remembered as being empty and sleepy when he was a child (and where the trees would have been little more than saplings: still only a dream of a new Delhi) terrorism had led to the creation of this new and effective police apparatus.

The British forces the correspondent William Howard Russell had seen at the siege of Lucknow had been made up principally of Scottish Highlanders and Sikhs. Less than 10 years before, the Sikhs had been defeated by the sepoy army of the British. Now, during the Mutiny, the Sikhs – still living as instinctively as other Indians, still fighting the internal wars of India, with almost no idea of the foreign imperial order they were serving – were on the British side.

During the assault on Lucknow an incident took place that
sickened Russell, who was a tough man, and a hardened relisher of war. One of the Lucknow palaces – the ‘yellow house’ on the racecourse – was being attacked by Sikh soldiers. The defenders fought back with spirit; at one stage they shot and killed one of the Sikhs’ British officers. When it was clear that the defenders intended to fight to the end, the attacking soldiers were withdrawn, artillery was brought up, and the yellow house was blasted with shot and shell. The defenders were brave men, Russell said; they should have been sung in ballads. But no mercy was shown them in Lucknow. Those who had survived the shelling were bayoneted by the Sikhs and quickly killed – all but one man. For some reason this man was dragged out by the feet, bayoneted about the face and chest, and then placed on a fire. The tormented man struggled; half burnt, he managed to get up and tried to get away; but the Sikhs held him down in the fire with their bayonets until he was dead. Russell, in a footnote, said – a characteristic touch – that he saw the charred bones on the ground a few days later.

Russell was told that during the Punjab war the Sikhs mutilated all the prisoners they took. So this bayoneting and burning of the man who – possibly – had killed their officer might have been no more than their practice. Perhaps it was part of the barbarity of the country; or simply the barbarity of war. Russell loved war, but he had no illusions about it. ‘Conduct warfare on the most chivalrous principles,’ he wrote, ‘there must ever be a touch of murder about it.’

In the Sikh fierceness at the battle of Lucknow there would have been a wish to get even with the ‘Pandies’ who had helped to defeat them less than 10 years before. There would have been a more general wish as well to get even with the Muslims. And it was historically fitting that the Sikhs should have helped to bring about the extinction of Muslim power in Lucknow and Delhi, because it was out of the anguish caused by Muslim persecution of Hindus that the Sikh religion had arisen, in 1500 – at about the time of Columbus’s last voyage to the New World.

People within the Hindu fold had always been rebelling against brahmin orthodoxy, Vishwa Nath had said; and everyone who had rebelled had started a sect with its own rigidities. Buddha had rebelled; Guru Nanak, the first Guru of the Sikhs, had rebelled. Two thousand years separated the rebellions, and they had different causes. Buddha’s rebellion had been prompted by his meditation on the frailty of flesh. Guru Nanak’s rebellion or breaking
away had been prompted by the horrors of the Muslim invasions – the horrors to which at that time no one could see an end.

Guru Nanak’s illumination was the quietist one that there was a middle way: that there was no Hindu and no Muslim, that there could be a blending of the faiths. Islam had its fixed articles of faith, however, its fixed, pervasive rules – no room there for Nanak-like speculation and compromise. The full Islamic ‘law’ could be asserted at any time; and 100 years later, at the time of the fifth Sikh Guru, the persecutions and the martyrdoms at the hands of the Moguls began. Nearly 100 years after that, at the time of the 10th and last Guru, the religion was given its final form, and Sikhs were given their distinctive appearance: the hair not to be cut, and to be wrapped in a turban, a kind of underpants to be worn, and a steel bracelet, and a knife – so that every day, with these intimate emblems, a man would be reminded of what he was.

As the Mogul power declined in the first half of the 18th century the power and numbers of the Sikhs grew. In the ravaged north of India, in the interim between the collapse of the Moguls and the coming of the British, there was for a short time the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh. This was the kingdom that the British defeated with the help of Tandy’ in 1849. But there was no great humiliation with that defeat; it might even be said that that defeat propelled the Sikhs forward.

The British, at the height of their empire, had a general disregard for all Indians. Even in 1858, while the Mutiny was going on, Russell noted this slighting British attitude towards the Sikh soldiers who were fighting on the British side. But by being incorporated into British India the Sikhs were immeasurably the gainers. They were granted a century of development. Without the British connection, north-west India – assuming that there had been no more regional or religious wars – might have been no more than Iran until oil, or Afghanistan: poor, despotically ruled, intellectually disadvantaged, 50 or 60 or more years behind the rest of the world.

Independence and the partition of India in 1947 damaged the Sikhs; millions had to leave Pakistan. But again, as after their defeat by the British, they quickly recovered. With the expanding economy of an industrializing independent India, with a vast country where they could exercise their talents, the Sikhs did very well; they did better than they had ever done. They became the
country’s best-off large group; they were among the leaders in every field. And then in the late 70s their politics, always sectarian and clannish and cantankerous, became confounded with a Sikh fundamentalism preached by a young man of a simple village background, a man born in the year of partition. There began then the train of events which were to lead to the daily budget of terrorist news in the newspapers; and the khaki-clad policemen with guns in the green streets of New Delhi.

For 150 years or more Hindu India – responding to the New Learning that had come to it with the British – had known reforming movements. For 150 years there had been a remarkable series of leaders and teachers and wise men, exceeded by no country in Asia. It had been part of India’s slow adjustment to the outside world; and it had led to its intellectual liveliness in the late 20th century: a free press, a constitution, a concern for law and institutions, ideas of morality, good behaviour and intellectual responsibility quite separate from the requirements of religion. With a group as small as the Sikhs, where distinctiveness of dress and appearance was important, there couldn’t be this internal intellectual life; even the idea of such a life wasn’t possible. The religion had reached its final form with the 10th Guru, and he had declared the line of Gurus over. Such a religion couldn’t be reformed; reform would destroy it. A new teacher could only restate its fixed laws and seek to revive old fervour. So it happened that India’s most advanced group could be called back by a village teacher to a simpler past.

The preacher’s name was Bhindranwale, after the name of his village. His first name was Jarnail; this was said to be a corruption of the English word ‘general’. At his first appearance he was encouraged by the Congress politicians in Delhi, who wished to use him to undo their rivals in the state. This seemed to have given him a taste for political power. The word used most often – by admirer and critic – for Bhindranwale in this incarnation is ‘monster’. The holy man became a monster. He moved into – effectively, occupied – the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, built by the fifth Guru (who was more or less Shakespeare’s contemporary). He fortified the Temple, making use of its immunity as a sacred place; and, with a medieval idea of the scale of things, perhaps a villager’s idea of a village feud, he declared war on the state. To serve Bhindranwale and the faith,
men now went out with the mission of killing Hindus. They stopped buses and killed the people in them. Riding pillion on motor-scooters, they gunned down people in the streets. The resulting shock and grief would have confirmed the terrorists in their idea of power, would have confirmed them in their fantasy that it was open only to them to act, and that – as in some fairy-tale – an enchantment lay over everyone else, rendering them passive.

Eventually the army assaulted the Temple. They found it better fortified than they knew. The action lasted a night and a day, and there were many casualties, among soldiers, defenders, and Temple pilgrims. Hindus as well as Sikhs grieved for the violation of the holy place; Hindus also offered prayers there. Police officials were later to show that there was another, cleaner way of isolating the Temple. But at the time – to deal with a novel situation: a murderous insurrection conducted from the sanctuary of a holy place – the army action, heavy-handed though it was, seemed to be the only way.

The damage was done. Stage by stage, then, the tragedy unfolded. To avenge the desecration, Mrs Gandhi was murdered by some of her Sikh bodyguards. And, again, it is as though the men who planned the murder didn’t sufficiently understand that their action would have consequences, that by doing what they did they would be putting their community at risk: Sikhs were settled all over India. There were riots after the murder. The most dreadful were in Delhi, where hundreds died. Out of that great fire in 1984, these terrorist incidents in the Punjab, on the frontier with Pakistan, were the embers.

To most people what had happened in the Punjab was a pure tragedy, and not easy to understand. From the outside, it seemed that the Sikhs had brought this tragedy on themselves, manufacturing grievances out of their great success in independent India. It was as if there was some intellectual or emotional flaw in the community, as if in their fast, unbroken rise over the last century there had developed a lack of balance between their material achievement and their internal life, so that, though in one way so adventurous and forward-looking, in another way they remained close to their tribal and country origins.

*

Something went wrong with a tire of my hired car on the road to Chandigarh. It wasn’t only a puncture. The much-used, much-recapped tire had also split in an arc half-way down the wall. Chandigarh was more than three hours away, and the other tires didn’t look too good. There was no question of taking a chance; the ravaged tire had to be mended before we went on. Help was at hand, though. There was a Punjabi truck stop just a short way down the road – we could see it from where we were – and after we had changed the wheel we went there.

The truck stop was a dusty yard with brick sheds on three sides. Some of the sheds were walled, some open. Advertisements for Apollo tires nailed to a wall gave a reassuring technical feel to the place. At the back and sides of the yard were fields of ripe wheat; down one side was a ditch of stagnant, blackish water. Drivers turbanned and unturbanned sat above the dust on string beds in the open sheds and drank tea. The tea was prepared in an open kitchen at the back (a lot of blue smoke over black earthen fireplaces), and served by two boy waiters in long trousers and very dirty (and now perhaps uncleanable) long-tailed Indian shirts.