Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  She sent urgent wires to the Viceroy, the Governor of Punjab and to Mr Williamson of the Political Department. Mr Williamson wired back asking her to come to Simla at once, where he promised her full protection and medical advice.

  Accordingly, she proceeded there in the company of her mother, who had joined her at Dehra Dun. On arrival she was examined by two IMS surgeons, who advised her to rest in Simla and take it easy in her advanced state of pregnancy. But Mr Williamson communicated to her the wish of her Maharaja that she should return to Sham Pur, and this officer curtly advised her to obey her husband’s wishes. She was afraid of a miscarriage during the journey. But His Highness’s orders were imperative and she left.

  Indira was again consigned to the little palace in the fort and lived in constant terror of foul play, as she had had the bitter experience of losing her first son and knew that Ganga Dasi had contrived to have her brought back for no good reason. But fortunately, the presence of her own mother warded off the designs of the Maharaja’s mistress and one fine January morning Indira gave birth to a son.

  Again, there were no rejoicings in the kingdom of Sham Pur on the birth of the new Tika. And the Maharaja never even went to see his son and heir and refused to visit the fort palace for fear of Ganga Dasi.

  Some months after the birth of her son, when her mother was going back to Bengal, Indira moved to a small palace on the estate in the village of Garhi, which had been given to her in her dowry; and here she remained for the next three war years.

  The health of the child was very delicate. So, after much agitation, Mr Williamson got the Maharaja to provide a nurse for the Tika and regulated the grant of an adequate allowance of servants and a motor-car to Indira. And, when this officer came to visit Sham Pur two years later, in connection with further troubles in certain villages of the state, he made it a point to take the Maharaja to see the Tika, a visit which His Highness conceded with the greatest show of reluctance, owing to the consequence of such favouritism if it came to the notice of Ganga Dasi.

  In the confined life which Indira was living she heard that Ganga Dasi was preparing a plot to have the new Tika murdered. She could not get any proof of this. But there must have been sufficient grounds for suspicions. For a new order was passed by the Political Department for the banishment of Ganga Dasi. Needless to say, this was not carried out because of His Highness’s particular friendship with the Resident, Sir Hartley Withers, and Lady Withers.

  When the Tika was four years of age, the Tikyali Rani began to plead for his education in a small kindergarten school at Simla. This was conceded and she was herself allowed, after many frivolous objections from His Highness, to go and live in the annexe of Sham Pur Lodge to be near her son.

  Immediately after this there had been more trouble in the state and His Highness was forced to change his ministers, Chaudhri Raghbir Singh being made Commander-in-Chief and replaced by Rai Bahadur Pandit Shiv Nath, the Home Minister. But a change of horses in Sham Pur did not mean that one could cross the river of life any better. The affairs of the state did not improve to any extent.

  So far as the Tikyali Rani was concerned, things went from bad to worse. For Pandit Shiv Nath was himself a Brahmin. Naturally, therefore, he was partial to the Brahmin woman.

  Meanwhile, Indira began to feel the impact of the new regime very soon. It so happened that about a month after her arrival at Simla with her son, and the boy’s Anglo-Indian nurse, Mrs Burrows, the nurse came and told the Tikyali Rani one morning that she was going out shopping to the Mall with the Tika. Indira casually assented to the outing. But as the morning wore on, and Mrs Burrows did not return, and lunch-time came and there was no sign of the nurse, she was in a panic. She sent her servants in every direction, but no one knew about the nurse or the child. She rang up the police, wired to the Viceroy and the Governor of Punjab, but could not get any news of Mrs Burrows or her ward. That evening Indira received a letter from the Resident of Sham Pur State that if she wanted to say goodbye to her son at the bungalow, Abergaldia in Chotta Simla, she could do so, because Mrs Burrows had been ordered to remove the Tika there, so that he could reside there and be out of the orbit of his mother’s influence; and that she, the Tikyali Rani, should proceed to Sham Pur. The next morning Pandit Shiv Nath himself arrived to advise her to return to Sham Pur. His Highness had apparently been persuaded that the only way in which Indira would part with her son would be if the boy was kidnapped and the mother was presented with a fait accompli. The Tikyali Rani refused to leave Simla at the instance of the Diwan and told him that she would only go back under orders from the Political Department, with which she was in touch. The Diwan got the wind up on hearing that she had approached the Political Department and, after he had left, the child was brought back to her, of course without Mrs Burrows. Indira’s representations to the Government of India bore fruit and she was allowed to stay with the Tika at the small hill station of Kasauli and a new Scotch nurse, Miss McQueen, was appointed to look after the boy.

  The other consequences of Indira’s representations were that Pandit Shiv Nath had to yield place to a Mr Horace, an ex-Director General of Police from the Punjab. Also a Mr Richards, a professor in the Government College, Lahore, was appointed Education Member, while a Major Nash was appointed to the Home and Finance Ministry. But the key to all power, Ganga Dasi, remained, though the question of her banishment became the subject of renewed negotiations.

  Under the directions of the Praja Mandal, much strengthened by the post-war feeling of revolt current everywhere, and especially by the struggle for fundamental rights in the states, the people of Sham Pur became more than ever vocal. And the suppression of civil and political liberty by the new ministers only added fuel to the fire that had been smouldering for years.

  Then came the transfer of power from Britain to India, and the attempt of His Highness Maharaja Ashok Kumar of Sham Pur to take advantage of the prevailing chaos, to strike out on his own and assert his independence by not signing the Instrument of Accession. This brought him into odium all over India.

  Ultimately, he was forced by the agitation of the people in his state, said to have been engineered by the Communists, to sack his English ministers and to promise certain reforms. And Srijut Popatlal J. Shah, an ex-ICS official from Central Province, was appointed Prime Minister by the new Government of India.

  It was after the appointment of the new Prime Minister that His Highness, not knowing the mind of the Government of India about him and about the action it would take either about Ganga Dasi or about his hesitation to accede, had come for a brief respite to Simla.

  The separation from Ganga Dasi had troubled his spirit. And he had sought comfort in a flirtation with Bunti Russell, of which the consequences had been the violent scene with Captain Russell and our sudden exodus from Simla. And now, neither His Highness nor anyone in his entourage knew what would happen to him. We only knew that we were going downhill into the valleys and the plains, where either the implications of the Maharaja’s rage would work themselves out immediately into a final debacle or he would get a chance to make a fresh start. Which of these two things would happen we did not know. But we knew that we were part of a destiny in which he had played very high stakes, higher than in any gambling house in the world, and that, with all the fates ranged against him, it was from now on a question of make or break.

  Part 2

  ALTHOUGH WE HAD TELEGRAPHED THE PRIME MINISTER, SRIJUT POPATLAL J. Shah, about our expected arrival, neither he nor anyone else turned up at Sham Pur railway station to meet us. And the usual salute of thirteen guns was not fired; not even the seven which had been fired at Simla. So His Highness got into another one of his passionate regal rages and everyone, from the station-master to the coolies, became reacquainted with certain unmentionable words in the Dogra hillman’s vocabulary which they had not heard since the Maharaja had been here some months ago.

  As always on such occasions, Munshi Mithan Lal showed his mastery of stat
ecraft by whispering into His Highness’s ears some kind of magic formula. I was so amazed at the calm which now suddenly possessed the Maharaja that I asked Munshiji how he had achieved the miracle. He told me that he had told His Highness that the mahurat for entering the palace had not yet been discovered. My amazement knew no bounds and became vulgar curiosity as I contemplated His Highness’s hypocritical face with a continuous stare while we were being negotiated into the hallway. He accepted the make-believe about observing this superstition as a practised master of playacting. We entered the special waiting-room, with its Mughal towers and minarets, which had been constructed on the railway station for the use of the Royal House and the distinguished incoming and outgoing guests of the state.

  I must explain at this juncture the reasons for the curiosity which will be aroused in the reader throughout this narrative about the many oddities of the Maharaja’s life and the quaintnesses in an Indian state. Even before I went to Europe to do my post-graduate studies in medicine, I was aware of the survival into our twentieth-century world of the dasturs, the customs and conventions, of all the past centuries in an extraordinarily acute state of preservation. But, after three years of the West, I became more intensely aware of the jostling of our old habits and ideas with the new fashions we had acquired under the impact of Europe. So that all the religious and social taboos, inhibitions, prohibitions, which I had more or less accepted, if under protest, in my youth, began for a time, after my return, to irritate me until I had to work up a deliberate cynicism in myself as the necessary measure of self-preservation, in order that the strange facts might lead to amusement in me rather than to a nervous breakdown. I did not think things strange because I am a silly modernist, for whom everything European is good and everything in our own heritage bad, but because I have begun to see that the confusion arising from the clash of all the centuries with our own, in India, is bound to become worse unless we seek a synthesis of Europe and India, unless we evolve a new sense of values to live by and generally know the direction in which we are going. Unfortunately, the Indo-European contradictions in the life of the Maharaja of Sham Pur were too glaring not to admit of rude stares on my part. For here was a prince who had been educated in the English public school tradition and yet whose home background encouraged the darkest superstitions and the most obscurantist ideas. The most barbaric impulses of both civilizations dominated him and he played fast and loose with life without asking himself any questions about himself.

  It seemed to me quite ridiculous that we should be waiting at the station for the discovery of the mahurat, or the auspicious moment, to enter the state. I knew, of course, that the discovery of the mahurat by the state astrologer was a necessary and inevitable part of the ritual of our prince’s life. But the convention seemed to me to be carried to excess, for not only the major comings and goings of His Highness, but sometimes even the shopping expeditions or visits to the club were preceded by the ostentatious reckoning by the state astrologer of the position of the stars vis-à-vis the day, the hour and the minute of His Highness’s toings and froings.

  Furthermore, it appeared to me even more ridiculous that we should be sitting on uncomfortable plush chairs, built in the best tradition of the Imperial Czarist style, watching the temperature rise in the barometer of each other’s faces to the highest points of Fahrenheit, while the messenger was on his way to fetch Pandit Dhanpat Rai and sort out the planets and the stars. It looked to me absolutely outrageous that, in spite of my awareness of all the absurdities, I should still be the willing slave of this pattern of behaviour without a protest.

  To complicate all this, Munshi Mithan Lal, Captain Partap Singh, Mr Bool Chand and myself were sitting with our backs to each other on the four-chairs-in-one which stood in the middle of the hall, while His Highness was walking up and down with a measured gait, as was his wont in moments of acute tension. And I felt a fool in having to be a quadruplet, so to speak, with my three colleagues.

  I bore it for nearly half an hour, cowed by the refulgent aura of His Highness’s prestige, which was always an omnipresent reality to us all. Then, for the first time in many days, I let the irritations of the courtier life express themselves in a comment which, though deliberately humorous, did not conceal the inner curve of bitterness beneath it:

  ‘Why are we waiting here, when we know that Pandit Dhanpat Rai can persuade the stars to get into an auspicious array any time he likes?’ I asked.

  His Highness, whose nerves were on edge, seemed to find confirmation for his own feelings in my suggestion, as he said:

  ‘I have two horoscopes, based on two different dates of birth. So the mahurat which may not be right according to one may be very auspicious according to the other. Let us go.’

  ‘Yes, there are two or three different alternatives anyhow in the position of the stars,’ said Mian Mithu gravely, realizing that His Highness was determined to leave.

  ‘Chalo.’ Captain Partap Singh beckoned to the coolies as though he was driving a herd of donkeys.

  And the exodus began.

  I was nervous that having initiated the movement homewards, I might get it in the neck if we went out of the waiting-room, found no cars outside and had to expose His Highness to the sharp rays of the late morning sun. I hurriedly stepped out and was relieved to find that the silver Rolls-Royce was just drawing up with three Buicks and a station wagon between rows of policemen, who were lining the compound at intervals of twenty yards from each other all the way towards the town. What was more, there emerged Pandit Dhanpat Rai from the last Buick, with his white-bearded visage looking more like Rabindra Nath Tagore than ever before, except that his homespun kurta and dhoti, and the saffron caste marks on his forehead, shattered the illusory comparison immediately. I joined my hands to him in obeisance, putting on the most hypocritically reverential look that I could command.

  ‘Asirvad, may you live long,’ said the old man, casting the benediction with raised hands.

  ‘Is the mahurat fixed?’ I asked.

  ‘Son, the auspicious stars in the horoscope always tally for His Highness.’

  ‘Bravo!’ I shouted, unable to restrain myself from bursting into English. And I ran towards the waiting-room, but stopped short to see His Highness appear.

  The astrologer joined hands to the Maharaja, a courtesy to which His Highness responded with compound interest, bending low in spite of his stiff trousers and touching the toes of the priest and taking the imaginary dust off the astrologer’s feet to his forehead.

  ‘Maharaj, you are blessed,’ said Pandit Dhanpat Rai. ‘The hour and the moment is ever auspicious for you. And your path is strewn with flowers all the way.’

  I could not suppress an inner smile at the flattery of this unctuous ass. And, as I negotiated His Highness towards the door of the car, I whispered to him:

  ‘Please look out for the few thorns that might have got mixed up with the roses.’

  His Highness smiled good-humouredly and entered the limousine.

  The State of Sham Pur can boast of beautiful street signs, even though the roads which they decorate are rather the worse for wear, being broad stretches of dusty, rutted highways, flanked by narrow byways and gulleys, along which travel the few motor-cars of the nobility and the many horse-driven carriages familiar in North India, the tongas and the yekkas, the bullock carts and man-driven rickshaws. The main street, stretching from the railway station to the principal bazaar, is called Victoria Street after Her Gracious Majesty the first English Queen Empress of India, in whose reign the special treaty was made with His Highness’s great-grandfather, and the other roads are named after the various maharajas and viceroys. The supreme touch of Victorian grandeur, which puts the running sores of the capital into relief, are the white-globed double lamps, specially made in London, which reflect the sun’s rays off their marble sheen during the day and burn like the echoes of Czarist splendour in the night.

  The traffic came to a standstill as the police van in fro
nt of the entourage proceeded through the Victoria Bazaar, the carriages and pedestrians fluttering away like hens as if at the approach of a mad dog. The sentries on point duty came to automatic attention, while the shopkeepers emerged on to the doorsteps of their narrow, confined rabbit-warrens and bent their heads over their joined hands. And our awe-inspiring presences passed half-way up the mile-and-a-half stretch of the road. Then we turned sharp left through the wooden gates of the splendid arched hallway, which led into the main palace of Sham Pur, past two mounted cavalry sepoys, who always stood like stone statues in full uniform on their magnificent chargers, even like the Horse Guards with busbies on their heads in Whitehall. The pigeons fluttered in the alcoves of the ochre-coloured air houses on top of the inner gateways and woke up the Rajput retainers, their lion beards shining whiter than their tunics, decorated with red cummerbund and ancient sword scabbards. And there was a great bustle of shuffling feet in the marble-paved corridors of the red sandstone palace.

  Our cars stopped under the porch of the lovely ancient-style building with its magnificently carved pillars and cornices and network. And while we were alighting I felt a queer elation in my being. I always felt this under the shadow of the discreet grandeur which the palace reflected, a feeling heightened by the beautifully laid-out garden in the courtyard, where the many-coloured flowers stood in marble-cased beds, drawing life, against the sheen of the torrid glare of the cruel summer sun, from the huge fountain which played in the middle of the courtyard.

  The palace formed a rectangular structure, in the wings of which we, the personal staff of His Highness, had our suites of rooms, flanking the main English-style living-rooms of the Maharaja Sahib himself. Beyond an interior courtyard, paved with marble, stood a file of three-storeyed terraced buildings, which were the vigilantly guarded inner sanctums, occupied by Ganga Dasi and her female attendants.