The Great Indian Novel Read online

  ‘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.’

  11

  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.

  We gave him something to chew and swallow, and the peasant, Rajkumar, told us his story. He was from a remote district on Hastinapur’s border with British India, but on the British side of the frontier. He wanted Gangaji to come with him to see the terrible condition of his fellow peasants and do something to convince the British to change things.

  ‘Why me?’ Ganga asked, not unreasonably. ‘I have no official position any more in Hastinapur. I can pull no strings for you.’

  ‘We have heard you believe in justice for rich and poor, twice-born and low-caste alike,’ the peasant said simply. ‘Help us.’

  He was reluctant, but the peasant’s persistence moved him and in the end Ganga went to Rajkumar’s impoverished district. And what he saw there changed him, and the country, beyond measure.

  12

  I was there, Ganapathi. I was there, crowding with him into the third-class railway carriage which was all he would agree to travel in, jostling past the sweat-stained workers with their pathetic yet precious bundles containing all they possessed in the world, the flat-nosed, wide-breasted women with rings through their nostrils, the red-shirted porters with their numbered brass armbands bearing steel trunks on their cloth-swathed heads, the water-vendors shouting Hindu pani! Mussulman pani!’ into our ears, for in those days even water had a religion, indeed probably had a caste too, braving the ear- splitting shrieks of the hawkers, of the passengers, of the relatives who had come to bid them goodbye, of the beggars who were cashing in on the travellers’ last-minute anxiety to appease the gods with charity, and finally of the guards’ whistles. Yes, Ganapathi, I was there, propelling the half-naked crusader into the compartment as our iron-wheeled, rust-headed, steam-spouting vahana clanged and wheezed into life and heaved us noisily forward into history.

  Motihari was like so many other districts in India - large, dry, full of ragged humans eking out a living from land which had seen too many pitiful scratchings on its unyielding surface. There was starvation in Motihari, not just because the land did not produce enough for its tillers to eat, but because it could not, under the colonialists’ laws, be entirely devoted to keeping them alive. Three tenths of every man’s land had to be consecrated to indigo, since the British needed cash-crops more than they needed wheat. This might not have been so bad had there been some profit to be had from it, but there was none. For the indigo had to be sold to British planters at a fixed price - fixed, that is, by the buyer.

  Ganga saw the situation with eyes that, for all his idealism, had too long been accustomed to the palace of Hastinapur. He saw men whose fatigue burrowed into their eyes and made hollows of their cheeks. He saw women dressed day after day in the same dirty sari because they did not possess a second one to change into while they washed the first. He saw children without food, books or toys, snot-nosed little creatures whose distended bellies mocked the emptiness within. And he went to the Planters’ Club and saw the English and Scots in their dinner-jackets and ballroom gowns, their laughter tinkling through the notes of the club piano as waiters bearing overladen trays circled their flower-bedecked tables.

  He saw all this from outside, for the dark Christian hall-porter who guarded the club’s racial character denied him entry. He stood on the steps of the clubhouse for a long while, his eyes burning through the plate-glass windows of the dining-room, until a uniformed watchman came out, took him by the arm and asked him brusquely to move on. I expected Ganga to react sharply, to push the man away or at least to remove the other’s grip on his arm, but I had again underestimated him. He simply looked at the offender: one look was enough; the watchman dropped his hand, instantly ashamed, eyes downcast, and Ganga walked quietly down the steps. The next morning he announced his protest campaign.

  And what a campaign it was, Ganapathi. It is in the history books now, and today’s equivalents of the snot-nosed brats of Motihari have to study it for their examinations on the nationalist movement. But what can the dull black- on-white of their textbooks tell them of the heady excitement of those days? Of walking through the parched fields to the huts of the poorest men, to listen to their sufferings and tell them of their hopes; of holding public hearings in the villages, where peasants could come forth and speak for the first time of the iniquity of their lives, to people who would do something about it; of openly defying the indigo laws, as Ganga himself wrenched free the first indigo plant and sowed a symbolic fistful of grain in its stead.

  Even we who were with him then were conscious of the dawn of a new epoch. Students left their classes in the city colleges to flock to Gangaji’s side; small-town lawyers abandoned the security of their regular fees at the assizes to volunteer for the cause; journalists left the empty debating halls of the nominated council chambers to discover the real heart of the new politics. A nation was rising, with a small, balding, semi-clad saint at its head.

  Imagine it for yourself, Ganapathi. Frail, bespectacled Gangaji defying the might of the British Empire, going from village to village proclaiming the right of people to live rather than grow dye. I can see him in my mind’s eye even now, setting out on a rutted rural road on the back of a gently swaying elephant - for elephants were as common a means of transport in Motihari as bullock-carts elsewhere - looking for all the world as comfortable as he would in the back of the Hastinapur Rolls, as he leads our motley procession in our quest for justice. It is hot, but there is a spasmodic warm breeze, touching the brow like a puff of breath from a dying dragon. From his makeshift howdah Ganga smiles at passing peasants, at the farmers bent over their ploughs, even at the horse-carriage that trundles up to overtake him, with its frantically waving figure in the back flagging him down. Ganga’s elephant rumbles to a halt; the man in the carriage alights and thrusts a piece of paper at the ex- Regent, who bends myopically to look at it before sliding awkwardly down the side of his mount. For it is a message from the district police, banning him from proceeding further on his journey and directing him to report to the police station.

  Panic? Fear? There is none of it; Ganga smiles even more broadly from the back of the returning carriage and we follow him cheerfully, bolstered by the courage of his convictions.

  Gangaji enters the police thana with us milling behind him. The man in uniform does not seem pleased, either with us or with the piece of paper in front of him.

  ‘It is my duty,’ he says, taking in the appearance and attire of the former Regent of Hastinapur with scarcely concealed disbelief, ‘to serve notice on you to desist from any further activities in this area and to leave Motihari by the next train.’

  ‘And it is my duty,’ responds Ganga equably, ‘to tell you that I do not propose to comply with your notice. I have no intention of leaving the district until my inquiry is finished.’

  ‘Inquiry?’ asks the asto
nished policeman. ‘What inquiry?’

  ‘My inquiry into the social and economic conditions of the people of Motihari,’ replies Ganga, ‘which you have so inconveniently interrupted this morning.’

  Ah, Ganapathi, the glorious cheek of it! Ganga is committed to trial, and you cannot imagine the crowds outside the courthouse as he appears, bowing and smiling and waving folded hands at his public. He is a star - hairless, bony, enema-taking, toilet-cleaning Ganga, with his terrible vow of celibacy and his habit of arranging other people’s marriages, is a star!

  The trial opens, the crowd shouting slogans outside, the heat even more oppressive inside the courtroom than under the midday sun. The police, standing restlessly to attention outside the courthouse gate, some helmeted in the heat and mounted on riot-control horses, cannot take it any longer. Their commander, a red-faced young officer from the Cotswolds, orders them to charge the peaceful but noisy protestors. They wade in, iron-shod hooves and steel-tipped staves flailing. The crowd does not resist, does not stampede, does not flee. Ganga has told us how to behave, and there are volunteers amidst the crowd to ensure we maintain the discipline that he has taught us. So we stand, and the blows rain down upon us, on our shoulders, our bodies, our heads, but we take them unflinchingly; blood flows but we stand there; bones break but we stand there; lathis make the dull sound of wood pulping flesh and still we stand there, till the policemen and their young red-faced officer, red now on his hands and in his eyes as well, red flowing in his heart and down his conscience, realize that something is happening they have never faced before . . .