The Great Indian Novel (6 page)

Gangaji looked up at the perspiring Pandu, who was visibly hanging on his every word, his eyes roving restlessly from his uncle to the open dossier before him. ‘It seems,’ he went on, ‘that Miss Yadav might have conducted a brief and entirely unwise liaison with a certain Hyperion Helios, a foreign visitor at her father’s palace. From what I have been able to ascertain and divine, it would seem that Mr Helios was a very charming and wealthy man of the world, who radiated an immense presence and warmth, and it is easy to imagine how an impressionable and inexperienced young maiden could be taken in by the blandishments of this plausible stranger. No one knows what exactly transpired between them, but it does appear that Mr Helios was ordered summarily out of the palace by his host, and,’ Gangaji looked up at the anxious Pandu, ‘that Miss Yadav went into near-total seclusion for several months. Some people draw conclusions from all this that are not flattering to the young lady. For myself, having reviewed all the elements of the case, I cannot see that much blame attaches to the Princess Kunti. If we were all to be punished for ever for the errors of our youth, the world would be a particularly gloomy place. Certainly, there has been no suggestion of the slightest misconduct since by the lady, but our princely marriage-makers have unforgiving hearts. I believe we in Has-tinapur have a somewhat more generous spirit. Will you accept her, Pandu?’

‘If you, sire, are willing to admit her into our home, I shall be only too happy to follow suit,’ Pandu replied, somewhat formally.

‘Then it is settled,’ Gangaji said, closing his file. ‘But I do not wish your reputation to suffer as a result of my, ah . . . progressive ideas. Lest it be said that you are in any way inferior to those who have so far disdained the hand of Kunti Yadav, I have resolved upon a second marriage for you as well, of a princess not as glamorous, perhaps, but completely irreproachable.’ Seeing Pandu’s raised eyebrow and flushed face, the old celibate allowed himself a chuckle. ‘The British have put an end to our practice of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, but they have not interfered very much with our other customs. Whom you marry, how old you are, how much you pay, or how many you wed, are issues they have sensibly refused to touch upon. So I have found a very good second wife for you, Pandu. She is Madri, sister of the Maharaja of Shalya. The Shalya royal house has a rather peculiar tradition of requiring a dowry from the prospective bridegroom rather than the other way around, and their womenfolk have the reputation of being somewhat self-willed, but I am willing to overlook both these factors if you are, Pandu.’

‘Oh, I am, Gangaji, I am,’ Pandu responded fervently.

‘Good,’ said the Regent. ‘I shall visit Shalya myself to arrange it.’ He turned at last to the youngest (youngest, that is, by a few days, but in royal households every minute counts. It is one of the miracles of monarchy that no king has ever started parenthood with twins, but you can take my word for it, Ganapathi, that if he had, the second one out of the womb would never have been allowed to forget his place for an instant. And Vidur, don’t forget, was not in contention for a princess’s hand: Ambika’s deception and my indiscriminate concupiscence had ensured that.) ‘As for you, Vidur, I have identified a young lady whose circumstances perfectly match yours. The Raja Devaka, no mean prince, had a low-caste wife, who gave him a most elegant and lissom daughter, Devaki. She may not be of the highest rank, but she was educated at the Loreto Convent and is fluent in English, which can only be an asset in your work.’

‘I am satisfied,’ said Vidur humbly.

The sage heaved a deep sigh.

‘Well, there it is then, at last,’ he said. ‘Once these marriages are all arranged, I shall turn over the kingdom to Dhritarashtra and Pandu, knowing too that Vidur is at the States Department, keeping an eye on Hastinapur. And I shall be able to devote myself to broader pursuits.’

‘What will you do, sire?’ asked Vidur politely.

‘Many things, my son,’ replied the terrible-vowed elder. ‘I shall pursue the Truth, in all its manifestations, including the political and, indeed, the sexual. I shall seek to perfect myself, a process I began many years ago, in this very palace. And I shall seek freedom.’

How shall I tell it, Ganapathi? It is such a long story, an epic in itself, and we have so much else to describe. Shall I tell of the strange weapon of disobedience, which Ganga, with all his experience of insisting upon obedience and obtaining it toward himself, developed into an arm of moral war against the foreigner? Shall I sing the praises of the mysterious ammunition of truth-force; the strength of unarmed slogan-chanting demonstrators falling defenceless under the hail of police lathis; the power of wave after wave of
khadi-clad
men and women, arms and voices raised, marching handcuffed to their imprisonment? Shall I speak, Ganapathi, and shall you write, of the victory of nonviolence over the organized violence of the state; the triumph of bare feet over hobnailed boots; the defeat of legislation by the awesome strength of silence?

I see, Ganapathi, that you have no advice to offer me. You wish, as usual, to sit back, with your ponderous brow glowering in concentration, that long nose of yours coiling itself around my ideas, and to let me choose my own thoughts, my own words. Well, I suppose you are right. It is, after all, my story, the story of Ved Vyas, doddering and decrepit though you may think I am, and yet it is also the story of India, your country and mine. Go ahead, Ganapathi, sit back. I shall tell you all.

What a life Gangaji led, and how much we know of it, for in the end he spared us no detail of it, did he, not a single thought or fear or dream went unrecorded, not one hope or lie or enema. It was all there in his writings; in the impossibly small print of his autobiography; in the inky mess of his weekly rag; in those countless letters I wonder how he found the time to write, to disciples, critics, government officials; in those conversations he conducted (sometimes, on his days of silence, by writing with a pencil-stub on the backs of envelopes) with every prospective biographer or journalist. Yes, he told us everything, Gangaji, from those gaps in his early years that the British had been so worried about, to the celibate experiments of his later life, when he got all those young women to take off their clothes and lie beside him to test the strength of his adherence to that terrible vow. He told us everything, Ganapathi, yet how little we remember, how little we understand, how little we care.

Do you remember the centenary of his birth, Ganapathi? The nation paid obeisance to his memory; speeches were delivered with tireless verbosity, exhibitions organized, seminars held, all on the subject of his eventful life. They discussed the meaning of his vegetarianism, its profound philosophical implications, though I know that it was simply that he didn’t want to sink his teeth into any corpse, and you can’t make that into much of a philosophy, can you? They talked about his views on subjects he knew nothing about, from solar energy to foreign relations, though I know he thought foreign relations were what you acquired if you married abroad. They even pulled out the rusting wood-and-iron spinning wheels he wanted everyone to use to spin
khadi
instead of having to buy British textiles, and they all weaved symbolic centimetres of homespun. Yet I know the entire purpose of the wheel was not symbolic, but down-to-earth and practical: it was meant to make what you South Indians call
mundus,
not metaphors. And so they celebrated a hundredth birthday he might have lived to see, had not husbandless Amba, after so many austerities, exacted her grotesque revenge.

We Indians cannot resist obliging the young to carry our burdens for us, as you well know, Ganapathi, shouldering mine. So they asked the educational institutions, the schools and colleges, to mark the centenary as well, with more speeches, more scholarly forums, but also parades and marches and essay contests for the little scrubbed children who had inherited the freedom Gangaji had fought so hard to achieve.

And what did they find, Ganapathi? They found that the legatees knew little of their spiritual and political benefactor; that despite lessons in school textbooks, despite all the ritual hypocrisies of politicians and leader-writers, the message had not sunk into the little brains of the lucubrating brats. ‘Gangaji is important-because he was the father of our Prime Minister,’ wrote one ten-year-old with a greater sense of relevance than accuracy. ‘Gangaji was an old saint who lived many years ago and looked after cows,’ suggested another. ‘Gangaji was a character in the
Mahabharata,’
noted a third. ‘He was so poor he did not have enough clothes to wear.’

Of course, it is easy, Ganapathi, to get schoolchildren to come up with howlers, especially those whose minds are being filled in the bastard educational institutions the British sired on us, but the innocent ignorance of those Indian schoolboys pointed to a larger truth. It was only two decades after Gangaji’s death, but they were already unable to relate him to their lives. He might as well have been a character from the
Mahabharata,
Ganapathi, so completely had they consigned him to the mists and myths of historical legend.

Let us be honest: Gangaji was the kind of person it is more convenient to forget. The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow. While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

When he spoke of his intentions to his three young wards, trembling tensely before him at the brink of adulthood, he was not lying or posturing. It was, indeed, Truth that he was after - spell that with a capital T, Ganapathi, Truth. Truth was his cardinal principle, the standard by which he tested every action and utterance. No dictionary imbues the word with the depth of meaning Gangaji gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefore right. Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’, or unjust, or violent means. You can well understand why Dhritarashtra and Pandu, in their different ways, found themselves unable to live up to his precepts even in his own lifetime.

But his was not just an idealistic denial of reality either. Some of the English have a nasty habit of describing his philosophy as one of ‘passive resistance’. Nonsense: there was nothing passive about his resistance. Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

That is where Ganga spoke for the genius of a nation; we Indians have a great talent for deriving positives from negatives. Non-violence, non-cooperation, non-alignment, all mean more, much more, than the concepts they negate. ‘V.V.,’ he said to me once, as I sat on the floor by his side and watched him assiduously spin what he would wear around his waist the next day, ‘one must vindicate the Truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.’ In fact he said not ‘oneself but ‘one’s self’, which tells you how carefully he weighed his concepts, and his words.

I still remember the first of the great incidents associated, if now so forgettably, with Gangaji. He had ceased to be Regent and was living in a simple house built on a river bank, which he called an ashram and the British Resident - who now refused to use ‘native’ words where perfectly adequate English substitutes were available - referred to as ‘that commune’. He lived there with a small number of followers of all castes, even his Children of God whom he discovered to be as distressingly human as their touchable counterparts, and he lived the simple life he had always sought but failed to attain at the palace - which is to say that he wrote and spun and read and received visitors who had heard of his radical ideas and of his willingness to live up to them. One day, just after the midday meal, a simple vegetarian offering concluding with the sole luxury that he permitted himself - a bunch of dates procured for him at the town market many miles away - a man came to the ashram and fell at his feet.

We were all sitting on the verandah - yes, Ganapathi, I was there on one of my visits - and it was a scorching day, with the heat rising off the dry earth and shimmering against the sky, the kind of day when one is grateful to be in an ashram rather than on the road. It was then that a peasant, his slippers and clothes stained with the dust of his journey, his lips cracking with dryness, entered, called Gangaji’s name, staggered towards him and fell prostrate.

At first we thought it might simply be a rather dramatic gesture of obeisance - you know how we Indians can be - but when Ganga tried to lift the man up by his shoulders it was clear his collapse had to do with more than courtesy. He had lost consciousness. After he had been revived with a splash of water he told us, in a hoarse whisper, of the heat and the exhaustion of his long walk. He had come over a hundred miles on foot, and he had not eaten for three days.