Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘What about declaring a strike, President?’ said Ratan, who was not very far from the dais.

  ‘Is he the person who wouldn’t see you the other day when you were discharged?’ asked Munoo, pulling at Ratan’s tunic.

  ‘Han,’ said Ratan, brushing Munoo’s hand away lightly. ‘Acha, President Sahib, what is the talk?’

  ‘Ratan, brother, sit down,’ said Muzaffar, rising from behind the dais. ‘Listen all, listen to the President sahib.’

  ‘Acha,’ said Ratan, and sat down.

  ‘Brothers,’ began Onkar Nath again. ‘In all ages labour, skilled and unskilled, organized or unorganized, has been a necessary agent for the production of wealth. In ancient India the part played by labour in national economy and the problems arising out of the relationship between employer and employee were recognized, and one finds wisdom in the old saying, “For the labourer a discerning master is rare, as for the employer a faithful, intelligent and truthful servant.” Mr Radha Kamal Mukerji—’

  ‘What is the Union going to do about the wage cut?’ asked Ratan, whose grievance against the insult he had suffered from the President made him extremely impatient.

  ‘Only a bad master would indulge in unreasonably overworking his men, raising their hopes without fulfilling them, withholding their wages or keeping them in arrears,’ continued the President, in the academic manner of his forefathers.

  ‘Only a bad workman would ask for wages in the course of his work, and it is only a bad master who will not pay his labourer wages due for work done.’

  ‘Bad workman,’ Ratan murmured.

  ‘What about the strike?’ someone shouted. ‘What is the Union going to do about the order for short work?’

  The President screwed up his sardonic lip a little more contemptuously. ‘The All India Trade Union Congress will enter into negotiations with the proper authorities,’ he said.

  ‘You did that at Jamshedpur with the Tatas last year, and nothing came of it!’ shouted Ratan, pushing his head high.

  ‘Sit down,’ commanded the President. ‘Don’t interrupt. The Bombay mill owners are different and open to reason. It is no use precipitating a hopeless situation by hasty action. I stand for negotiation. There are thousands of unemployed men roaming the streets of Bombay, and we cannot go on strike without the sanction of the Indian National Congress, without the advice of the Working Committee.’

  ‘Congress or no Congress, we will not go short on work,’ several voices broke out.

  ‘Silence!’ shouted the President. ‘I have known the methods of the labour people in Vilayat. What has made the English working class strong and solid, but organization? There was not a trade union in India till I arrived. No one had ever heard the name of such a thing. I have worked for you and I want you to take my advice and go the right way about it. The mill owners give you work. They are not your enemies. If they have declared you on short work, you must act in a sensible, organized way. The Union works in your interests. It also works for the common interest of the employer and labourer. You must have faith in the Union and the methods by which it brings about co-operation in industry between Labour and Capital. You must trust me and the executive committee.’

  ‘Brothers,’ shouted Sauda, suddenly ascending the platform and pushing the President aside. ‘The members of the Trade Union Executive Committee are here. I am one. We will decide the question forthwith. Lalla Onkar Nath has too much faith in the mill owners. He says that the mill owners are not your enemies. You know that they are not your best friends. In fact, there is a world of difference between the mill owners, the exploiters and you, the exploited.’

  ‘That is right! That is right talk!’ some voices shouted.

  ‘But in whose pay are you?’ another voice came.

  ‘They are the robbers, the thieves, the brigands, the brigands who live in palatial bungalows on the Malabar Hill, on the money you earn for them with your work,’ continued Sauda, deploying the methods of the demagogue. ‘They eat five meals a day and issue forth to take the air in large Rolls-Royces.

  ‘You are the roofless, you are the riceless, spinners of cotton, weavers of thread, sweepers of dust and dirt; you are the workers, the labourers, the millions of unknown who crawl in and out of factories every day. You are the coolies. You are the miserable creatures who live twenty a room, in broken straw huts and stinking tenements. Your bones have no flesh, your souls have no life, you are clothed in tattered rags. And yet my friend Onkar Nath says that your interests and the interests of mill owners are the same.’

  ‘Shabash! Shabash! Sauda Sahib!’ shouted Ratan.

  Munoo felt his blood stirring at the passion of Sauda’s speech.

  ‘Lalla Onkar Nath,’ began Sauda again, ‘is a very rich man. And he has never seen the wily demon of poverty drag you through the murky waters of that hell where the scorpions of hunger bite you, where the leeches suck your blood away, where the big sharks devour you. How many of you are not in the grip of the foreman of your factory? Against how many of you have not the hirelings of capitalism wreaked their vengeance? Brother Ratan there, an excellent workman, and others, have recently been discharged without any fault on their part, except that they refused to pay their foreman a commission. How many of you have not been pounced upon by the Pathan warder and moneylender outside the mill gates, and even inside, on pay day? The moneylender does not want his capital back, you tell me, and is kind enough to let you pay interest. Don’t you see that he records defaults so that the borrowing of a small sum leads in a few months to a permanent and heavy load of debt, till some of you have to pay him the whole of your wages, and have nothing left over for your subsistence? And when the time comes that you can’t pay either the capital or the interest because you have no pay, you go home to die of misery and hunger. Oh, when will you realize, when will you learn that for centuries you have been the victims of graft and extortion!’

  Munoo stared hard at Sauda and pricked up his ears to listen to every word.

  ‘There are only two kinds of people in the world: the rich and the poor,’ Sauda continued, ‘and between the two there is no connection. The rich and the powerful, the magnificent and the glorious, whose opulence is built on robbery and theft and open warfare, are honoured and admired by the whole world, and by themselves. You, the poor and the humble, you, the meek and the gentle, wretches that you are, swindled out of your rights, and broken in body and soul, you are respected by no one, and you do not respect yourselves.’

  Munoo felt that long ago, at Sham Nagar, he too had had similar thoughts about the rich and the poor. But he could not say them like the Sauda Sahib.

  ‘Stand up then, stand up for your rights, you roofless wretches, stand up for justice! Stand up, you frightened fools. Stand up and fight. Stand up and be the men that you were meant to be and don’t crawl back to the factories like the worms that you are! Stand up for life, or they will crush you and destroy you altogether. Stand up and follow me! From tomorrow you go on strike and we will pay you to fight your battle with the employers. Now stand up and recite with me the charter of your demands.’

  He paused for a moment. The whole throng rose to its feet, tense and excited. He continued:

  ‘We are human beings and not soulless machines.’

  The crowd recited after him.

  ‘We want the right to work without having to pay bribes.’

  ‘We want clean houses to live in.’

  ‘We want schools for our children and crèches for our babies.’

  ‘We want to be skilled workers.’

  ‘We want to be saved from the clutches of the moneylenders.’

  ‘We want a good wage and no mere subsistence allowance if we must go on short work.’

  ‘We want shorter hours.’

  ‘We want security so that the foreman cannot dismiss us suddenly.’

  ‘We want our organizations to be recognized by law.’

  The words of the charter rose across the horizon. At first t
hey were simple, crude words, rising with difficulty like the jagged, broken, singsong of children in a classroom. Then the hoarse throats of the throng strained to reverberate the rhythm of Sauda’s gong notes, till the uncouth accents mingled in passionate cries assassinating the sun on the margin of the sky.

  There was a shuffling of forms, the extended sound of black gaping mouths taking breath, even a reflection of half-selfconscious, half-happy smiles through the deep waters of the coolies’ eyes, and for a moment one could hear the soft, moist rustle of the sea breeze stirring the blades of grass across the fields and in the marshes.

  Then a screaming crescendo of pain shot into the air through the edge of the crowd. The broken accents of a voice defined the word ‘Kidnapped, kidnapped. Oh, my son has been kidnapped. What shall I do? This man tells me that my son has been kidnapped.’

  ‘Kidnapped! kidnapped!’ an undercurrent of voices surged through the tense crowd. ‘Kidnapped by the Pathans!’ a whisper arose. ‘Kidnapped! These bullying, swaggering Muslims are kidnapping Hindu children.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘What is this?’ shouted Sauda. ‘What is the matter there?’

  Only the moaning of a coolie could be heard, a queer, broken moaning like the howling of a she-hyena.

  ‘Kidnapped! Kidnapped! A Hindu child has been kidnapped by the Muhammadans!’ some of the coolies reported.

  And then there was an undertone of fear and hate.

  ‘Go home! Go home! It is only a base rumour spread by our enemies,’ Sauda shouted. ‘Don’t go to work tomorrow. The Trade Union will pay you an allowance. And meet here tomorrow for a procession.’

  ‘But a Hindu child has been kidnapped, Sahib—a Hindu child!’ a voice arose again.

  ‘Not only one, but several Hindu children have been kidnapped!’ another voice declared.

  ‘Kidnapped! Kidnapped! These circumcised Muhammadans have raised their heads to the sky! It is an insult to our religion! The sons of pigs! The illegally begotten! We will teach them a lesson!’ The rumours had now become defined.

  ‘Go away, go away, you fools!’ shouted Sauda. ‘We will look into the matter.’

  ‘No, we will revenge ourselves on them. They take our money and they take our children! We will revenge ourselves on them!’

  ‘Shut up, fools!’ shouted Ratan, jumping on to the dais.

  ‘I will fight for you if your children have been kidnapped, but first go home and see if it is true!’

  ‘You black lentil-eaters! You Hindus! We will teach you what it is to insult our religion!’ the shouts of some Muhammadans arose from a congested corner, far away from the dais, where several hands had become engaged in pulling turbans off and striking blows.

  Munoo rushed up to Ratan and clung to his tunic, trembling. As he looked back he saw that the crowd was swirling in tides upon tides of faces, to and fro, in an utter panic of abandonment. He stood terrified and still watching the rubbings of the hundreds of bodies, the pushings of the panting swarm that now pressed all around, crying loud and bitter oaths and abuses. It was sheer bedlam, only illuminated by the word ‘kidnapped’. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten the invigorating air of that song of the charter and felt engulfed in an uncertain atmosphere of destruction, which the flourishing of arms, the glistening of eyes, the sharp hysteria of the voices had created. His soul swung back from the touching temper of Sauda’s speech to face the pale monster of fear that the word ‘kidnapped’ had suddenly conjured up. In the sentient, quivering centres of his mind this conflict summoned the uncertainty of that moment when Prabha had been arrested. And the two occasions seemed similar as he saw blue-uniformed policemen flourishing their batons on the outskirts of the crowd.

  ‘Kidnapped! Kidnapped! Hai! Heathen! Take this one!’ the cries came.

  ‘You go home,’ said Ratan to Munoo, and wresting his tunic from the boy’s grasp, plunged headlong into the fray.

  ‘Oh, Ratan! Ratan!’ Munoo called. But his voice was lost in the pandemonium.

  He stood on the dais still shouting for Ratan. Then he stared into the fast-gathering darkness to distinguish the copper-coloured faces with glistening white teeth to see if he could find Hari.

  ‘Who are you, a Hindu or a Muhammadan?’ a burly Pathan grunted, towering over him and flourishing a stave.

  Munoo was dumb for a moment, livid with the fear of impending death. He wanted to shout, but his mouth opened and he could not say anything. His eyes closed and then opened. He hesitated for the briefest second, then jumped to his right and heard the Pathan’s stave crash on the dais.

  He tore through the crowd of rushing men, dodging his way until he was one of the many streams of coolies, hurrying away from the maidan.

  ‘These Pathans have been kidnapping the children of the poor people for months,’ Munoo heard one coolie say to another as they hurried along.

  ‘The mill owners set them on, and the sarkar connives at all this,’ commented a third.

  ‘Han, han,’ another remarked. ‘The Pathans have been kidnapping children and taking them away in motor-cars, and the sarkar is taking no measures to stop it. How can we leave our children about?’

  ‘But,’ said a Trade Union official, ‘the Pathans are your enemies. Two hundred Pathans were used by the mill owners to break the strike of the oil mills last year. They have been undercutting the workers who go on strike. They should be taught a lesson.’

  ‘Let us go and demand an explanation from Sadi Khan, the moneylender on Albert Road,’ said a young coolie. ‘He preens himself!’

  Munoo was half inclined to offer to go with this coolie, but remembered the time when he had seen Hari beaten by the Pathan moneylender. He passed by the men, who cursed or cast sporadic comment on the kidnapping.

  At the head of his lane he saw an exchange of slaps and blows.

  He darted toward the dusty town road, getting under cover of anything that cast a shadow in the clear, pellucid night which descended from the heavens like a woman, her apron ornamented by the stars, her deep, sea-green skirt spread protectively about the cruel, hot earth.

  He knew a short cut to Dhobi Tallao leading through a colony of outcastes. He turned off the road into its decline, slipping in the mud and slush of its drains, tired and forlorn. He groped through the darkness, and hoped he would be able to find somewhere to sleep.

  The moonless sky was silent as Munoo entered the town, but the earth, the earth of Bombay, was congested by narrow gullies and thoroughfares, rugged houses and temples, minarets and mausoleums and tall offices. Bombay, land of cruel contrasts, where the hybrid pomp of the rich mingled with the smell of sizzling grease in black frying-pans; Bombay, land of luxury and lazzaroni, where all the pretences of decency ended in dirt and drudgery, where the lies of benevolent patrons were shown up in the sores and deformities of the poor; the earth of Bombay was, that evening, engulfed in chaos.

  What had happened? Munoo did not know. He had hurried away from the disturbance outside the factories, imagining that he had left all the sounds of the mill land behind. But here was the same shouting, only more intense, because it was echoed back by the tall walls from somewhere afar.

  He emerged from the gullies, in which anxious groups of men stood whispering at the footways, into Bhendi Bazaar, where wave upon wave of humanity flowed up to a square. He joined the throng, keeping a little apart from it, feeling strangely unmoved by the emotions which stirred the men, though he was curious as to the reason why they were converging.

  A small fat man appeared on the boards of a platform and harangued:

  ‘Oh! Hindu brethren, awake, do not sleep if you have any regard for your mothers and sisters. Come out of your houses armed with sticks, because our benign Government does not take any notice, although the wives and children of our brothers are massacred and dishonoured by Muslims. They have, moreover, issued orders to shoot if more than five persons collect together. We must therefore prepare ourselves for our own protection, because our benign Gove
rnment takes away our own sticks, but does not seize their sticks and knives. What is the meaning of this? The meaning of this is that we should show our Maratha courage to these circumcised Muhammadans. Down with Muhammadans! Down—’

  Munoo climbed up the boards of a closed shop to get a full view of the man. He saw a heavy stave swirl in the air and fall on the hoarse voice.

  There were cries of: ‘Hai! Hai! Killed! Murdered!’

  The crowd seemed to grind its teeth for a second. A confused chatter of hard voices ensued.

  Then there were cries of: ‘Murder the Mussulmans! take your revenge! Loot! Pillage! Burn!’

  The crowd now began to struggle away, pressing towards the square, and beyond into Abdul Rahman Street.

  A young English officer in khaki, followed by ten Indian policemen, led a baton charge.

  Munoo climbed down from the boards of the empty shop at the sight of the officer. He slipped in his eagerness to keep under cover of the dark. Feeling that he would be safe if he went in the direction opposite to that of the crowd, he drifted towards Sandhurst Road. His being was seething with excitement. His temples drummed. The image of the stave swirling in the air flashed across his mind. The sudden disappearance of the man from the platform meant death. And the grim, tense silence of death cast its shadow before the boy’s eyes. He murmured something to himself, in a sort of whimpering, self-pitying voice which smothered the dazed expression on his face. He walked along unconscious, in a sort of delirium. ‘What has happened? What happened?’ he asked himself. And he looked into the street to find an answer. But the street just stared back at him, filling his mind with its tall fantastic houses leaning like hard rocks on the narrow length of the roadway, their insides gaping with the eyes of gigantic monsters through the deep shadows of balconied verandas. He thought of the Kangra hills in whose pathways the overhanging cliffs had beaten back his mind with the same brutal answer when once he went to search for a lost goat. There was the same eerie silence here in the deep pits of closed shops and bulging arches as in the blackest shadows of the mountains, heightened by its contrast with the echoes of thunderous noises above, away and beyond. And death stalked the earth in the illusory forms of masses of darkness, as in a nightmare, now low, sinuous and soft, now sudden, like panting hordes rushing through time and space, convulsed, hysterical and fierce, like the hundred forms of Yama which hounded men to death.