The Great Indian Novel (20 page)

With the agitation suspended, the British, immensely relieved, dropped all charges and released the prisoners. In a gesture interpreted variously as one of appreciation, of consolation and of contempt, depending on who was analysing its implications, the Viceroy (‘Dear Friend’) invited Gangaji to tea.

To everyone’s surprise but my own, Gangaji accepted the invitation. He entered the cavernous living-room of the viceregal palace swaddled in his habitual white, and found himself being greeted by our old friend Sir Richard, now Principal Private Secretary to His Majesty’s representative in India.

‘His Excellency will be with us shortly,’ Sir Richard said, ushering him to a chair without the trace of a welcome on his lips.

Gangaji sat comfortably, his long spindly legs resisting the temptation to cross themselves on the Viceroy’s brocade cushions. Sarah-behn, who accompanied him to most of his meetings, stood a few paces away behind a sofa. Sir Richard, regarding her with distaste, and standing himself, found it more convenient not to offer her a seat.

‘While we are waiting, Mr Datta, may I offer you some tea?’ he asked his patron’s guest.

‘Thank you,’ Gangaji replied equably, ‘but I have brought my own.’ He moved his head in the direction of Sarah-behn, who held a stainless steel tiffin-carrier in her hand. ‘Goat’s milk,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘That is what I drink at this time.’

Sir Richard opened his mouth as if to speak, then - defeated by the occasion - shut it again. The ormolu clock on the wall ticked loudly in the silence.

‘I hope I have not come too early,’ Gangaji said at last.

‘No, not at all,’ Sir Richard found himself forced to reply. ‘His Excellency has . . . er . . . been unavoidably detained.’

‘Unavoidably detained,’ Gangaji repeated. ‘Unavoidably detained.’ He savoured the words, seeming to taste each syllable as he uttered it. ‘Another one of your fine British phrases, suitable for so many occasions, is it not? I wish I knew some of these myself. I always listen carefully to my English friends, like His Excellency or indeed you, Sir Richard’ - Sir Richard coughed unaccountably - ‘and I always intend to use these phrases myself, but somehow they never come out of my mouth at the right time.’ He laughed, shaking his head, as Sir Richard reddened dangerously. ‘I often say to Sarah- behn, we Indians will never learn this English language properly.’

Sir Richard did not know if his leg was being pulled, but he did know that he did not care too much for the trend of the conversation. He took a deep breath, as much to control himself as to punctuate his next utterance: ‘I trust you are not greatly inconvenienced, Mr Datta. I am confident that His Excellency will be with us shortly.’

Gangaji laughed. ‘Me? No, no, oh dear, not at all inconvenienced,’ he chortled. ‘I am sitting in this comfortable chair, in this comfortable room, large enough to accommodate a small train, with an eminent representative of His Majesty’s government - you, Sir Richard - offering me tea. Why should I be inconvenienced?’ He paused, waving a casual hand at his companion. ‘Now she, Sarah-behn, she is not sitting in a comfortable chair. Perhaps if you asked
her
she might give you a different answer.’

It was, of course, Ganapathi, simply brilliant: it left the hapless Sir Richard no choice but to turn hastily and proffer a seat to the renegade Englishwoman. This, Sarah-behn, her expression unchanged, calmly took, smoothing down the folds of her sari and placing the tiffin-carrier with an audible clink at her feel.

‘My goat’s milk,’ Gangaji said unnecessarily. ‘She takes good care of it for me. It was all her idea, you know.’

‘Indeed.’ Sir Richard’s tone was distant. He could not bring himself to feign interest in the dietary predilections of this oddly matched pair.

‘Oh, yes.’ Gangaji warmed to his theme. ‘You see, I had this terrible dream one night.’

‘A dream,’ Sir Richard echoed dully.

‘That’s right. I dreamt a cow spoke to me.’

‘A cow?’

‘A large, sad-eyed white cow, with a long downturned mouth. “Don’t let them do this to me, Mahaguru!” she was crying. And then I saw she was standing and swaying terribly, and there were all sorts of people crouching on the floor beneath her, boys and girls and children and adults and peasants and clerks, all tugging and pulling at her udders, milking her as she cried piteously to me.’

A choking sound emerged from Sir Richard.

‘But it was not milk, Sir Richard, that was coming out. It was blood! And in my dream, I could do nothing. I woke shivering, with that cow’s cries ringing in my ears. From that moment I resolved never to drink milk again. The cow is our mother, Sir Richard.’ Gangaji suddenly and earnestly turned to him. ‘Yours and mine. It is written in our scriptures. She provides nourishment and sustenance for us all. Is it right that we should cause her pain?’

Sir Richard remained speechless.

‘Of course it is not. There and then I decided I could not cause her any more suffering. I was determined not to drink milk ever again.’

He stopped. Sir Richard slowly exhaled. ‘I see,’ he said, not knowing what he saw but relieved he would no longer have to hear.

‘But then I fell ill,’ Gangaji added abruptly. ‘The doctors came. They said I needed minerals and protein in an easily accessible form.’ He smiled. ‘Another fine British phrase. I asked them what that meant, and they said I should drink milk. But I told them I could not drink milk. I had taken a vow in my heart never to drink milk again.’

Sir Richard looked toward the entrance of the room as if for deliverance. Gangaji went on.

‘I asked the doctors what would happen if I did not drink the milk they wanted me to.

‘”Why, then,” they said, “you will die.”

‘”But we will all die one day,” I replied. “What is wrong with that?”

‘”It is just that you will die much sooner than if you did drink the milk,” they said to me. “Next week, perhaps.’”

Sir Richard looked wistfully gratified at the prospect.

‘It was then that Sarah-behn came to my rescue,’ the Mahaguru said. ‘I was agonized at the thought of dying with so much work undone, so much left to do. Yet I was determined not to break my vow. I did not know how to resolve this terrible dilemma inside my heart, my soul. Then Sarah-behn said to me, “You must drink goat’s milk.” There I saw I had my answer. Just as nourishing, just as rich in minerals and proteins, yet free of the pain of the sacred mother-cow in my dreams.’

A footfall sounded faintly in the carpeted corridor, and a liveried
khidmatgar
entered, bearing a tea-tray. Gangaji accepted an empty cup, waved away the teapot, and allowed Sarah-behn to rise and pour him a cupful of goat’s milk from one of the compartments of the tiffin-carrier.

A second bearer entered pushing a silver trolley, its filigreed top-rack all but obscured by lace doilies on which rested elegantly laden plates. ‘Some cucumber sandwiches, surely?’ Sir Richard asked in a weak voice. Rarely had his breeding and good manners been placed under such strain. ‘I am sure your . . . er . . . doctors would wish you to have something to eat.’

An impish smile slowly spread across Gangaji’s face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Sir Richard,’ he said. ‘I have brought my own food.’ His hand disappeared into the voluminous folds swathing his torso and emerged holding a small, golden yellow, perfectly ripe mango. ‘To remind us of a more famous Tea Party,’ he announced. ‘In - Boston, was it not?’

The Seventh Book:
The Son Also Rises

J
ust look at that, Ganapathi. I begin a section vowing to stay clear of Gangaji, and what does the man do? He takes over the section. As long as he is around it will be impossible for us to concentrate on other people, to dwell on Pandu’s famous five or to pursue the darker destinies of Gandhari the Grim and the steatopygous Madri. In the olden days our epic narrators thought nothing of leaving a legendary hero stranded in mid-conquest while digressing into sub-plots, with stories, fables and anecdotes within each. But these, Ganapathi, are more demanding times. Leave Ganga to his devices and start telling fables about Devayani and Kacha, and your audience will walk away in droves. The only interruptions they will stand for these days are catchy numbers sung by gyrating starlets, and Kacha isn’t catchy enough, more’s the pity.

So I suppose we may as well continue our tale, Ganapathi: give Gangaji a good run. But in order to do that we have to acknowledge that the Mahaguru was no longer the only runner.

Yes, Ganapathi, as the story of our impending nationalist victory gathers momentum, so too does a cause which Gangaji had barely begun to take seriously. A cause led by a young man whose golden skin glowed like the sun and on whose forehead shone the bright little half-moon that became his party’s symbol. The cause of the Muslim Group.

The Muslims of India were no more cohesive and monolithic a group than any other in the country. Until politics intervened Indians simply accepted that people were all sorts of different things - Brahmins and Thakurs and Marwaris and Nairs and Lingayats and Pariahs and countless other varieties of Hindu, as well as Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Indian Anglicans, Jains and Jews, Keshadhari Sikhs and Mazhabi Sikhs, tribal animists and neo-Buddhists, all of whom flourished on Indian soil along with hundreds and thousands of other castes and sub-castes. Indian Muslims themselves were not just Sunnis and Shias, but Moplahs and Bohras and Khojas, Ismailis and Qadianis and Ahmediyas and Kutchi Memons and Allah alone knew what else. These differences were simply a fact of Indian life, as incontestable and as innocuous as the different species of vegetation that sprout and flower across our land.

We tend to label people easily, and in a country the size of ours that is perhaps inevitable, for labels are the only way out of the confusion of sheer numbers. To categorize people is to help identify them, and what could be more natural in a country as diverse and over-peopled as India than the desire to ‘place’ each Indian? There is nothing demeaning about that, Ganapathi, whatever our modern secular Westernized Indian gentlemen may say. On the contrary, the application of such labels uplifts each individual, for he knows that there is no danger of him being lost in the national morass, that there are distinctive aspects to his personal identity which he shares only with a small group, and that this specialness is advertised by the label others apply to him.

So we Indians are open about our differences; we do not attempt to subsume ourselves in a homogeneous mass, we do not resort to the identity-disguising tricks of standardized names or uniform costumes or even of a common national language. We are all different; as the French, that most Indian of European peoples, like to put it, albeit in another context,
vive
la
difference!

And, yes, when there are such differences, we do discriminate. Each group discriminates against the others. Your lot were free to be themselves so long as this did not encroach on my lot’s right to do the same.

Mutual exclusion did not necessarily mean hostility. This was the prevailing social credo of the time, but there was a high degree of constructive interaction among India’s various communities under these rules. It was, of course, Gangaji who taught us that the very rules were offensive. As with much else that he tried to teach the nation, we did not entirely learn to change our prejudices. But we became most adept at concealing them.

At any rate - and this is the point of my little sociological lecture, so you can wipe that the-old-man’s-digressing-again look off your face, Ganapathi - we had never taken our social differences into the political arena. Maharajas and sultans had engaged their ministers and generals with scant regard for religion, creed or, for that matter, national origin. Aurangzeb, the most Islamic of the Mughals, relied on his Rajput military commanders to put down rival Muslim satraps; the Maratha Peshwas, the original Hindu chauvinists, employed Turkish captains of artillery. No, Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil serpent who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord.

Divide
et
impera,
they called it in the language of their own Roman conquerors - divide and rule. Stress, elevate, sanctify and exploit the differences amongst your subjects, and you can reign over them for ever - or for as near to ever as makes no difference. Imagine the horror of the British in 1857 when their paid Indian soldiers revolted, Hindus and Muslims rallying jointly to the standard of the faded Mughal Emperor, deposed princes and disgruntled peasants making common cause against the alien oppressor. As soon as the national revolt - carefully disparaged by imperial historians as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ - was put down, British officials rediscovered their Latin lessons.
Divide
et
impera
was the subject of closely argued policy-minutes; everything had to be done to drive wedges between Indians in the interests of the whites and Whitehall. The British did not have far to look to place their wedges: they found the perfect opportunities in the religious distinctions which India, in its tolerance, had so long and so innocently preserved.

The strategy was amoral, the tactics immoral. The obvious cleavage to strike upon was between ‘the Hindus’ and ‘the Muslims’. It mattered little that such terms themselves (concealing as they did so many complex divisions and identities) made little sense, nor that they covered groups which had never, in all of India’s political history, functioned as monoliths. It mattered little, because Indians proved only too willing to echo Britain’s political illiteracy and agree to be defined in terms imposed upon them by their conquerors.

So much for the strategy; but then look at the tactics. The British jettisoned or distorted many of their basic democratic precepts before applying them to India. Take elections, for instance. For a long time, there weren’t any. Indians couldn’t be trusted with the vote. Then, when the first set of ‘reforms’ introduced elections (to inconsequential bodies with absurdly limited powers, elected on the basis of a limited franchise, but still elections) a property qualification was required before you could vote. (The stipulation disenfranchised 90 per cent of Indians, and had been abolished decades earlier in the mother country.) When even the affluent voters showed a distressing tendency to vote for the moderate nationalism of the Kaurava Party, the Raj created ‘separate electorates’ for Muslims to vote for Muslim candidates. That was an example of the enlightened administration of the Raj. In their own benighted Britain they would never have thought of making the Jews of Golders Green queue separately to put a kosher
koihai
into the House of Commons - but such ideas were too good for the primitive, backward natives they were schooling in democracy. If you want to know why democracy is held in such scant respect by our present elite, Ganapathi, you need only look at the way it was dispensed to us by those who claimed to be its guardians.

So we had separate electorates, and inevitably the British encouraged separate political parties as well for each divisible minority interest. It did not take much to put up a few puppets to start a political association of, and for, Muslims. Every one of them was the recipient of a British title, a British subsidy, or (as in the case of their first figurehead, an overweight sybarite called the Gaga Shah) both. The Gaga’s Muslim Group could easily have amounted to something. But the only problem was that he and his gigolous grandees were so embarrassingly grateful to their paymasters that they tripped over themselves to protest their undying loyalty to the British Raj, which didn’t exactly help them win the popular esteem of the Muslim masses. The Gaga and his gang made speeches to each other, presented petitions to the British (to ask for the retention of separate electorates) and sailed off every ‘hot weather’ to spend their privy purses on the race-courses of Europe. Meanwhile, most serious Muslim politicians - and, for that matter, many Parsi and Christian notables - joined, supported and led the Kaurava Party.

So, too, did the man who was one day to lead the Muslim Group to its destiny. Karna emerged on the Kaurava political scene literally out of nowhere. Few things were known about this strange young man whose words glowed like his skin, who maintained a most un-Indian reticence about his origins, his family, his ‘native place’. It was as if he had dawned on the present to shine in the future, while his past existed only in other people’s imagination. But of his brilliance - and ‘brilliant’ was a word universally applied to his appearance, his intellect, his scholastic performance and his speech - there was no doubt.

He first came to national attention as a flourishing lawyer in Bombay, sharp, suave and self-assured, with a bungalow on Malabar Hill and an accent to match the cut of his Savile Row suits. Who he was, and what had made him, no one precisely knew. Mystery continued to swirl about him like mist at a Himalayan sunrise. He lived alone, seemingly without parents, friends, a background such as all Indians take for granted.

Inevitably the guessing-games were played, speculative stories floated, rumour-mills ground, till it became impossible to separate confirmed fact from culpable fantasy. For all one knew he was born into his present position, or rode into it on a white charger with nothing behind him but the sun silhouetted on the horizon.

Ah, the legends that built up around that young man, Ganapathi! Women gushed that he glowed like the sun from the heavens, and his imperviousness to them only made him more refulgent in their eyes. The matronly housewife in the adjoining bungalow swore that the sun emerged each morning from his window, and that on a grey afternoon he had only to appear on the verandah for the clouds to be dispelled. When he walked, crowds parted naturally, and people kept a reverential distance from him as if afraid to be singed by his warmth. The servants whispered that he used no soap or ointment to maintain that golden lustre, which shone untended by human hand. It was said he had all the skills of a classical warrior: some claimed he practised archery in the garden, and could shoot a single mango from a cluster without disturbing the others in the bunch; others spoke of his prowess at riding, recounting how one look from those blazing eyes could quell the most insubordinate of horses at the Mahalakshmi stables. If anyone, in the hushed discussions about him that animated every social gathering so much as breathed curiosity about his unknown origins, someone was bound to retort that there was no point in trying to judge a mighty river by its source. In any case, Karna’s was clearly no common pedigree, and his radiance was only the brighter for being encircled by the lambent touch of the unknown.