The Great Indian Novel (13 page)

His duties as the party’s chief organizer were indirectly responsible for his political differences with Dhritarashtra. The process of building up a party- structure and a cadre committed to run it in the teeth of colonial hostility convinced him that discipline and organization were far greater virtues than ideals and doctrines. It was the classic distortion, Ganapathi, to which our late Leader would herself one day fall prey, the elevation of means over ends, of methods over aspirations. As long as Gangaji was there he shrewdly harnessed the divergent skills of my two sons to the common cause. But when his grip began to slip . . .

But you see, I am getting ahead of my story again, Ganapathi. You mustn’t let me. I haven’t yet told you about Kunti, Pandu’s faithfully infidelious wife, and how she fulfilled her husband’s extraordinary request for progeny. For it was not only Gandhari the Grim who assured India’s next generation of leadership by her exertions in labour. After all, Ganapathi, as you well know, we were to develop a pluralist system, so a plurality of leaders had to be born to run it.

Stop looking so lascivious, young man. I have no intention of offering you a ringside seat by Kunti’s bed. Facts, that is all I intend to record, facts and names. This is history, do not forget, not pornography.

In fact, if you must know, Pandu helped choose the genetic mix his sons would inherit. Kunti’s first post-marital lover (yes, first, there were others, but I shall come to that in a moment) was the youngest Indian judge of the High Court; let us refer to him only as Dharma, so as not to wound certain sensibilities, though those who know who I am speaking about will be left in no doubt as to his real identity. Dharma was learned, distinguished, good-looking in the way that only men become when they start greying at the temples, and of a highly respectable family. A man of principle, he agonized over his adultery, but found himself agonizing even more when Kunti abandoned him abruptly - as soon, in fact (though he was not to know this) as her pregnancy was confirmed.

A son was born of their union, a weak-chinned, gentle boy with a broad forehead, whom they decided to name Yudhishtir. Pandu swears that, meditating while Kunti was in the final stages of labour, he heard a voice from the heavens proclaiming that the lad would grow up to be renowned for his truthfulness and virtue. But I have always suspected that Pandu had simply been reading a biography of George Washington too late into the night and dreamt the whole thing.

When Yudhishtir was born Hastinapur was still in the family’s hands and Pandu was persuaded of the need for more - what shall I call it? - offspring insurance’ to make the succession secure. But he did not want Kunti striking up too long an association with Dharma, and the lady herself was attracted by the idea of variety. (Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.) This time her privileged nocturnal companion was a military man, Major Vayu, of the soon- to-be-disbanded Hastinapur Palace Guard.

Vayu was a large, strong, blustery character, full of drive and energy but mercurial in temperament. He breezed into Kunti’s life and out of it, his ardour more gusty than gutsy, leaving in her the seed of Pandu’s second son, Bhim. Bhim the Brave, he came to be called in the servants’ quarters, but also, among the exhausted ayahs, Bhim the Heavy, for his was a muscular babyhood. His narrow forehead, close-set eyes and joined eyebrows made it clear that he would never share his older brother’s intellectual attainments nor inherit any part of his mother’s looks; but it was also clear that in strength he would have few equals. The doctor delivering him fractured a wrist before deciding upon a Caesarian; Kunti gave up nursing him when she found herself unable to rise after a minute’s suckling; a cot of iron had to be manufactured for him after he had demolished two wooden cribs with a lusty kick of his foot; and a succession of bruised ayahs had finally to be replaced by a male attendant, a former Hastinapur all-in wrestling champion. The last of the ayahs resigned after an incident she never ceased talking about; apparently she had accidentally dropped the unbearably heavy infant on to a rock in the garden and had watched in horror as the stone crumbled into dust. This time the voice from the heavens only said one word, Ganapathi: ‘Ouch.’

But Pandu, absentee landlord of his wife’s womb, was still not content; he wanted a son who would combine the brain of Yudhishtir with the brawn of Bhim. He went deeper and deeper into yoga and meditation, mastered the heaven-pleasing
asana
of standing motionless on one leg from dawn till dusk, asked Kunti to conserve her energies for an entire year (which, with Bhim on the premises, she was only too happy to do) and prayed for such a son. Finally, when he judged the moment to be right, he invited the revered Brahmin divine, Devendra Yogi, to partake of the pleasures of his wife’s bed. The godlike yogi’s expertise made the experience rewarding for Kunti in more ways than one. And thus, Ganapathi, was born Arjun, Arjun of lissom figure and sinewy muscle, Arjun of sharp mind and keen eye, Arjun of fine face and fleet foot. Oh, all right, I know I’m getting carried away again, but the boy deserves it, Ganapathi. The voice from the heavens proclaimed that Pandu’s third son would be beloved of both Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer. And this time Kunti heard the voice too, as she lay drained upon the delivery bed; the rishis on the Himalayan mountain-slopes heard it; the workers in the factories looked up from the clanging wheels of their machinery and heard it; and I, I paused in the midst of a stirring speech of sedition to a village panchayat and heard it. And Ganapathi, oh, Ganapathi, it filled us all with joy.

I think it was the startling discovery of celestial interest in her maternity that finally prompted Kunti to call a halt to her amatory experiments. Pandu, she was alarmed to note, was even prouder of his sons than he might have been had he personally fathered them, and he was speaking speculatively of a fourth candidate to cuckold him when Kunti put her pretty foot down. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said bluntly, ‘but you’re not the one who has to grow, and swell, and become heavy, and retch into the sink in the morning, and give up
biryanis
and wine and swings because they make you sick, and suffer the pain and the heaving and the agony of a thousand hot fingers pulling out your insides.’ Kunti shuddered. She had become an elegant woman of the world; as she spoke she inserted a Turkish cigarette into an ebony holder and waited, but Pandu disapprovingly refrained from lighting it for her. ‘I don’t think even your sages would demand more of me.’

Pandu was on the verge of drawing himself up self-righteously when Kunti drove home the clincher. ‘I’ve been doing some reading of the
shastras
myself,’ she said tellingly, ‘and I find that the views you quoted aren’t the only ones on the subject. As far as I can tell, the scriptures say a woman who gives herself to five men is unclean and one who has slept with six is a whore. You haven’t overlooked that, by any means, have you, my lord?’

Pandu opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it with a sigh. ‘All right, have it your way,’ he said.

He might have been a great deal more insistent had it not been that Madri, his inventive second wife, had already come to him with a gentle admonition. ‘I don’t mean to thound as if I’m complaining or anything,’ the large-hearted princess lisped, ‘but it does seem as if you think much more of Kunti, who was only an adopted daughter of a mahawaja, anyway. I mean I’m not comparing or anything, but I
am
a real pwinceth and I
do
think you might want to have an heir thwough me too.’

Pandu had initially fobbed her off with gentle words of love and protestations about his reluctance to sully her chastity (which were all quite true, for Pandu did not relish the prospect of being cuckolded by
both
his wives) but following Kunti’s rebellion he changed his mind. ‘All right, Madri,’ he told his heavy-breasted helpmeet. ‘But just one affair, that’s all, or my name will be the laughing-stock of Hastinapur.’

‘Oh,
thank
you, my poor dear Pandu,’ Madri gushed, her conspicuous cleavage wobbling in excitement. (Pandu felt a twinge and looked away.) ‘Just one affair, I pwomise.’

Madri did indeed confine herself to just one affair, as promised. But she was nothing if not imaginative: she seduced a pair of identical, and inseparable, twins. Since Ashvin and Ashwin did everything together, Madri had the double satisfaction of adhering to her promise and enjoying its violation. The result of her efforts was also doubly gratifying: not one, but two sons. Pandu, rejecting Lav and Kush, the names of the legendary Ramayana twins, as too predictable, called Madri’s boys Nakul and Sahadev.

‘Oh, aren’t you pleased, Pandu dear?’ Madri beamed over the twins’ cradle. ‘Twinth! Now the nasty Bwitish can’t do
anything
to the succession. Or do you think, Pandu, do you think,’ - and here her little round eyes gleamed at the pwospect - ‘that just to be safe, I should try once more? Just once?’

‘Don’t you dare let her,’ warned Kunti when she heard of the request. ‘She’ll produce triplets next, and then where will I be? Don’t forget that I
am
your first wife, after all. Ever since she came into the house this Madri has been trying to steal a march on me. Scheming woman.’

And there, Ganapathi, as you can well imagine, we had the makings of a first-rate family drama, with steamy romance and hot flushing jealousy. But it was all cut short by the one event that made the entire issue of heir- conditioning redundant: the annexation of Hastinapur.

The Fifth Book:
The Powers of Silence

R
ight Ganapathi, so have I caught up with myself? Filled you in on the rapidly expanding cast of characters? I don’t imagine this is particularly easy for you, is it, with so many dramatis personae to keep abreast of, so many destinies to pursue. But then what we’re talking about is the story of an entire nation, Ganapathi, a nation of 800 million people (and God knows how many more it has gone up by while I have been talking to you). It could have been a lot worse.

Let me see now. There is still so much to say about Gangaji. There is
always
so much to say about Gangaji. Even if I am, God knows, no hagiographer, I mustn’t fail him entirely in this memoir. I have no intention of tracing every detail of his career here, you can take my word for it. Too many others have done that already, in print, ether and celluloid, for me to want to join the queue. But I did promise, didn’t I, days ago, to tell you how Gangaji directed his non-violence against himself, how he first startled us by demonstrating the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defence of what he considered right. I shall now proceed, to your undoubted dismay, Ganapathi, to keep that promise.

It happened during an agitation Gangaji supported, not long after Motihari. But this time, instead of rural indigo-growing peasants, he was helping suburban jute-factory workers at Budge Budge, outside Calcutta. Jute, the fibre of the
Corchorus capsularis
(and, lest anyone accuse me of painting an incomplete picture, also of the
Corchorus olitorus)
plants of Bengal, was perhaps India’s greatest contribution to the prosperity of Scotland. It was grown in the swamps of East Bengal and shipped off in vast quantities to Dundee, where it was turned into sacks, mats and bags and shipped right back to be sold at a vast profit to, among others, the Bengalis who had picked the plant in the first place. This pleasant little arrangement - fields in Bengal, factories in Scotland - might have gone on indefinitely were it not for Kaiser Wilhelm II, to whom all Bengalis owe a major debt of gratitude. He marched into Belgium and started World War I; the war quintupled the demand for jute because Europeans needed it to make sandbags with, to buffer their trenches and barricade their streets; and since it was quicker, and cheaper, and safer to process the jute near where it was grown, Bengal acquired a jute industry. The factories were built at last on Indian soil, and the area round Dundee finally began giving way to the environs of Dum Dum.

But if geography ensured an Indian triumph, history and economics kept the spoils in British hands. The factories were owned and managed by the sons of Scotland rather than the brethren of Bengal. And as Gangaji found; the indigenes who pulled the levers and moved the mechanical looms were paid the proverbial pittance
(their
proverb, Ganapathi,
our
pittance) which barely permitted them to eke out a living amidst the filth and stench of their slum dwellings.

It is a long story, Ganapathi, and I do not intend to recount it all here, so you can stop yawning that cavernous yawn of yours and concentrate on what I am telling you. Briefly, then, simplifying the issues at the risk of offending the historians and the jute-wallahs and the processional trade unionists and the professional apologists, what happened was this. Somebody else - an enlightened woman, an Englishwoman, in fact, indeed the sister of one of the jute-mill owners - had won a remarkable benefit for the workers during an epidemic that had swept through the slums after a particularly heavy monsoon. Sarah Moore, for this was her name, had persuaded her brother and his fellow employers to offer the workers a bonus for coming to work during the epidemic; and the bonus was a significant one, amounting to nearly 80 per cent of their normal salaries. It took the plague to earn them a decent wage, but when they got it the workers braved death and disease to work for it.

When the epidemic passed, the mill owners decided to withdraw the bonus, arguing that it had served its purpose. But the workers, led by their widowed English spokeswoman, claimed they could not continue to live without the bonus, and asked for a wage rise, if not of 80 per cent, then of 50 per cent. The employers refused, and declared a lock-out.

When Gangaji arrived in Budge Budge he found a situation verging on the desperate. The locked-out workers were, of course, being paid nothing at all. Their families were starving. I need not describe to you, Ganapathi, child of an Indian city as you undoubtedly are, the sights which met Ganga’s eyes: the foetid slums; the dirt and the despair and the disrepair; the children playing in rancid drains; the little hovels without electricity or water in which human beings lived several to a square yard. This is now the classic picture of India, is it not, and French cinematographers take time off from filming the unclad forms of their women in order to focus with loving pity on the unclad forms of our children. They could have done this earlier too, they and their pen-wielding equivalents of an earlier day, but somehow all the foreign observers then could only bring themselves to write about the glories of the British Empire. Not of the Indian weavers whose thumbs the British had cut off in order to protect the machines of Lancashire; not of the Indian peasants whose lands had been signed over to zamindars who would guarantee the colonists the social peace they needed to run the country; and not of the destitution and hunger to which these policies reduced Indians. Indulge an old man’s rage, Ganapathi, and write this down: the British killed the Indian artisan, they created the Indian ‘landless labourer’, they exported our full-employment and they invented our poverty.

It is difficult for you, living now with the evidence of that poverty around you, taking it for granted as a fact of life, to conceive of an India that was not poor, not unjust, not wretched. But that was how India was before the British came, or why would they have come? Do you think the merchants and adventurers and traders of the East India Company would have first sailed to a land of poverty and misery? No, Ganapathi, they came to an India that was fabulously rich and prosperous, they came in search of wealth and profit, and they took what they could take, leaving Indians to wallow in their leavings. Ganga knew, when he trod through the slush and the shit of the factory- workers’ slums, that this had not existed before the British came, and that its existence was a negation of the idea of Truth in which he so passionately believed.

There is something particularly soul-destroying about urban squalor. The poverty of Motihari was set, after all, against the lush splendour of the sub- Himalayan countryside, the sun-dappled greens and golds isolating the misery as something temporal, something separate, something apart. But Budge Budge was different: in a city-slum Nature provides no soothing contrast to offset the man-made horror. In those narrow, airless alleys it is impossible to escape from the pervasive wretchedness. Gangaji, master of Hastinapur, veteran of Motihari, saw this for the first time, and for hours afterwards he could not. speak.

Yet what touched him the most was not the abject poverty, Ganapathi, no, not even the near-empty tin plates at which the children scratched at supper- time, but the look of utter hopelessness on the faces of the locked-out workers. That was the closest to nothingness Ganga had seen: no money, no food, no clothes, no work, no salary, no future - no reason, in short, to live - and it moved and frightened him as nothing else had.

Ganga went with the idealistic Mrs Moore to speak to her brother and the other mill owners, or those among them who consented to meet him. They made an odd pair: the determined, strong-jawed, big-boned Englishwoman and the slight, balding, frail Indian sage, striding out to bargain for a cause that need not have been either’s. It was a pairing that would raise eyebrows and hackles for years to come.

‘I don’t see what you have to do with the problem, Mr Datta,’ Montague Rowlatt said heavily when they accosted him in his cool, high-ceilinged office. ‘It involves a dispute between my employees and myself in which I have no need for a third party, not even one who may happen to be related to me.’ He cast a meaningful look at his sister, who remained determinedly unperturbed. ‘However, since you ask, I don’t mind telling you that my partner, Morley, and I have been discussing the matter. We have jointly decided, together with our fellow mill owners, to make a fair offer to the workers. Not their ridiculous 80 per cent, of course, and certainly not 50 per cent, but the considerably generous figure of 20 per cent.’

‘Twenty per cent!’ It was Sarah Moore who had risen to her feet, eyes blazing. ‘That’s no sort of offer, Montague, and you know it. Come, Mr Datta. It seems we shall have to take this matter further.’

Ganga, bemused, gathered up the folds of his loincloth and walked out behind the Englishwoman. And he resolved to take up the workers’ cause.

But first, Gangaji had to make the cause his own. He called a meeting of the workers under a peepul tree on the banks of the Hooghly, where the river wends its brackish way past Budge Budge to the bay. And when he asked them whether they would be willing to follow his guidance in their struggle, to seek justice through his methods and never to deviate from the path of Truth, they responded with a full-throated ‘yes’.