Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  At last Victor, already reduced to half his size by the humility which the Sardar’s grim silence imposed on him, began by saying, respectfully, in Hindustani:

  ‘Sir, you have called me.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Sardar said firmly. ‘I have called you to sign the papers for the accession of Sham Pur to the Indian Union.’

  Brief and to the point, the conclusion was put by the Sardar peremptorily, without stating the major and the minor premises. The logic of power does not really admit of argument.

  ‘Diwan Popatlal Shah did bring your message, Sardar Patel,’ Victor ventured.

  ‘And you ignored it!’ the Sardar snapped. And he looked at Victor hard, and, turning round, swept us all with a glance that seemed to say: ‘Fools, anti-social knaves, how dared you help this princeling to defy my orders!’

  ‘Sir, I want to . . . say . . . that. . . .’ Victor began, but could not go on.

  I guessed he wanted to say: ‘Before your light and your new order came, I held sway over my people, the descendant of a long line of potentates.’ But Victor had more than dimly recognized the force of Sardar Patel’s logic and had really no answer to give except to sign.

  The Sardar wheeled round with a sudden jerky movement. Victor, who was caught unawares, came to with a start and ran a step or two. He looked back and saw us following docilely, the silent witnesses of his humiliation. He signed to me with his dumb mouth to come forward; apparently he felt I could help him out.

  I quickened my steps, but there was a sinking feeling of doom within me and the terror of the Sardar had penetrated deep beneath this awareness of nemesis. I advanced only a step or two beyond Captain Partap Singh and Munshi Mithan Lal.

  ‘What have you to say about this—you ignored the new Diwan I sent you!’ Sardar Patel growled in a voice which was half hyaena-shriek, half wolf-growl.

  ‘The Diwan Sahib virtually demanded my abdication, Mr Patel!’ Victor said, nervous yet defiant.

  ‘Accession is not abdication,’ said the Sardar, stopping suddenly and breathing hard even as he inclined his torso to ease some spasm he seemed to have. There were a few knots of men ahead and the Sardar looked at them askance.

  ‘After all, Diwan Popatlal is only an ex-ICS officer,’ said Victor impudently. ‘And he openly insulted the dignity of the ruling house to which I—’

  ‘Diwan Popatlal was sent there by me, and he was under orders from the States Department to negotiate a peaceful settlement with you!’ He resumed his steps again and Victor touched my arm for support and we began to walk.

  ‘There was a man called Dhebar,’ the Sardar proceeded, ‘in Jamnagar State. He rented a house in the city of Jamnagar. He paid the rent of the house, put his luggage there and went away on business. In his absence the Jam Sahib’s government sent for the owner of the house and persuaded him to turn out Srijut Dhebar from the house. The owner did so. . . . Today . . . justice has been done. Srijut Dhebar is the Prime Minister of a state ten times larger than the little kingdom of the Jam Sahib, which turned him out of the house he had rented. In the Bible it is said that “the beasts of the field have their lairs, the birds of the air have their nests, but the son of Man hath no place where to lay his head”. Now, under the new conditions, it is becoming possible for any son of man to become the Prime Minister of the state which ignored his existence as a popular leader. . . . The old order has to go.’

  ‘But, sir, there are certain political advantages for the Indian Union if Sham Pur remains independent,’ ventured Victor. ‘It is nearly a buffer state. . . .’

  ‘So you think we don’t know what is good for the Indian Union?’ answered the States Minister, stiffening. And then he became silent.

  The procession walked grimly along. Sardar Patel’s steps were more determined now that he had got into his stride. He did not look right or left, up or down, but seemed to look straight ahead, his face clear and hard, as though stuffed up with righteousness, ignoring the outer world, the half-revealed shapes and sounds that make up nature in the hours which precede the coming of daylight. It is possible that I fancied all this about the Sardar, that I was making up the kind of pattern about him which I knew would fit his legend. But any such meeting with an historical personage becomes personal-impersonal and somewhat symbolic, like a landscape into which one can read any meaning one likes.

  The silence became oppressive. I could see Victor’s face swelling as though the poison of bitterness which he was grinding between his teeth was accumulating in his mouth. And he seemed to walk with effort as though he lacked all faith in this squalid, banal activity, the morning constitutional of the arbiter of his fate, Sardar Vallabhbhai ‘Wishmarck’ Patel.

  ‘I am not sure, sir, that India’s leaders,’ said Victor, ‘are aware of the danger of Communism!’

  The Sardar did not relax his set expression. Only, his narrow eyes swept the prince with a cunning elephant’s glance. For the rest there was silence again.

  A drove of parrots wheeled across the whitening sky and a few crows cawed.

  The stern Sardar had led us almost round his bungalow, though we had not realized this until a dark man, dressed in an English-style silk suit, came walking towards us from the States Minister’s residence. I recognized him to be Mr D.F. Verma, one of the assistants of the States Ministry.

  ‘Hello, Mr Verma,’ Victor greeted him as he too recognized the negotiator between the States Ministry and the princes.

  Mr D.F. Verma was as taciturn as his master and merely nodded.

  ‘Tell the other people I can’t give any more interviews this morning,’ said the Sardar to the plain-clothes men. Then he turned to Mr Verma. ‘We must finish this business and get the papers signed. Have you the documents ready?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ answered Mr Verma, calm and unruffled.

  I stepped back and yielded my place to Mr Verma.

  ‘Shall I have to sign the Instrument this morning?’ Victor asked, incredulous still about the doom that he knew was awaiting him in the bungalow.

  ‘Maharaja Sahib,’ said Verma, ‘the facts which have come into our possession about Sham Pur State are very bad. Mr Shah takes a very poor view of the hand you took in shooting at the members of the Praja Mandal. The ruthless suppression that your Highness has been carrying on has antagonized everyone. Your own cousins are in revolt against you. And, the grievances of your Maharani apart, the administration has been neglected. The story of illegal taxes and begar and slavery is confirmed by your own officers. Mr Shah has recommended that the Central Government should take over the administration. But we have decided to be lenient and treat you as we are treating the other princes. Your privy purse will be assured and—’

  ‘Mr Verma, I would like to put the real facts before you,’ Victor said.

  ‘We know the facts, Raja Sahib,’ said the Sardar, inclining towards him condescendingly.

  ‘Your Highness can rest assured,’ interpolated Verma, ‘that we have a full report on all that has been going on in Sham Pur State. It is a story of unbridled autocracy!’

  There was a finality about Mr Verma’s words which shut Victor up completely, cast a pallor on his face, as though he was smashed up. He walked along, accepting the whole thing coldly now. Stripped of all the illusions of regal vanity, he yet seemed calm. I knew that although he had sensed that he would have to accept the terms of the States Ministry, he had not known exactly how it would happen, and he had tried to see the hope of some formula in the very texture of his curiosity about the methods Sardar Patel would adopt to make him submit. Now he had gone through the much-dreaded interview, and the terror which the States Minister’s studied silences had driven into him seemed to have overpowered him. He looked numbed as though he was suffering from a shock, the real incidence of which would not make itself felt till much later, like the pain of a surgical operation which comes long after the actual cutting and bandaging.

  As we got to the gateway of Sardar Patel’s house, the vast grey darkness which w
heeled over New Delhi was yielding to a blood-stained white, and the shapes of trees were beginning to be limned clear and sharp against the percolating light. The sentry at the gate came to attention as the Minister entered the drive.

  Hard and righteous, impersonal like a demon, the Sardar cast the shadow of an oppressive silence on the landscape against which the impertinent cawing of the crows was the only violation.

  Victor too seemed to have hardened in the attempt to hold himself intact against the corrosions set up by defeat. Mr Verma was negative and dumb.

  ‘The papers are inside, Verma,’ said the Sardar. ‘Bring His Highness in to sign them.’

  We followed, docilely. Only the plain-clothes men fell away into positions like the demons who guard the lesser gods in the Hindu pantheon.

  Defeated, exhausted and disillusioned, Victor returned to Sham Pur with us, desperate but dumb. Inarticulate, like an automaton, he had moved about in the train, or lain inertly on the bunk, gloomy and spineless. And by the time we got to the palace he seemed dead beat, except that his eyes had lit up as he had said to me:

  ‘Now, I shall be more or less in the same position as Gangi, one of the disinherited! Maybe, this will bring us closer together.’

  On arrival in the palace, the first thing he did was to send Jai Singh to the zenana to fetch the ‘Maharani Sahiba’. And he lay down on the settee, breathless from the physical strain of the journey and yet with tremors of excitement in his body at the prospect of meeting Gangi.

  ‘Don’t go till she comes,’ he said to me.

  And then he seemed to lapse into a kind of stupor, staring at the ceiling vacantly, and lying limply, with his legs and arms outstretched, in the way in which one does while one is airing one’s body under a fan.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he said, turning round to me. ‘Tell me about yourself. You have never told me the story of your life.’

  ‘I have never thought myself important enough.’

  ‘What do you think of the whole thing?’

  I knew that by ‘the whole thing’ he referred to the happenings at Delhi. I was in a difficult position, because I felt at heart that the situation in which Victor had found himself was part of an historic transition that was by no means finished and would bring still more shocks and surprises to all in the next few years. I wanted to be as honest as I could be in explaining this to him. So I said rather abstractedly:

  ‘You see, Victor, the world, and India, as part of the world, is in a “state o’ chassis”.’

  ‘What is “chassis”?’ Victor asked, opening his eyes wide and then closing them.

  ‘It is an expression used by the Irish poet O’Casey to represent change. This change has come from the steady movement of mankind from the age of pre-history to our modern times. The vast knowledge accumulated by men through the European renaissance has led to it in a way. And it has been hastened by the French and the Russian Revolutions. Not to speak of the English Industrial Revolution. But, already at the end of the 19th century, the simpler, older world was going. The conventions of the past were breaking down. Our world has been like a volcano, slowly fuming away and erupting every five or ten years. One day it will burst finally and either destroy the earth with its lava or fertilize it for a long time to come. Meanwhile, the whole world is in a vigorous state of ferment. And, in spite of the criss-cross of ideas, the battle of concepts which arose from the enlightenment in Europe with the further ideas implicit in that enlightenment—I mean liberty and democracy and the rights of man, and man’s relation to religion and the new knowledge—there has been arising a man, a new kind of human being. This kind of man is everywhere. He is like a point of light in the surrounding darkness. He is a universalist in his vision. I know of a few such men. Therefore, you see, I feel that I can see a unity in the changes that are occurring before us. And I do not want to resist these changes. I realize that there is vitality in the urges of men to harness science and to use it to eat and drink well. If only the few who are frightened of change don’t use science to destroy mankind with an atomic war we should all come through to plenty. It is perhaps the contagion of this enthusiasm that enables me to steer clear of the schizophrenia which afflicts you, for instance. You are unable to give up your past and to accept the broadening of life, which is releasing the oppressed. And there are quite a few others like you. And their stubborn self-will makes them abnormal in our age. And hence the distraught atmosphere of our time. It is because some of us perceive the inner relations of the advance made by humanity, in spite of the many setbacks, that makes us hold on to some hope for a future. Of course, our far-sightedness in accepting change and even helping it to come about has to reckon with the fact that the owning interests are narrow-sighted and even blind, and they are on the offensive!’

  ‘Then you believe that the ignorant can rule the world without experience.’

  ‘I believe in men. They have a great vitality in spite of the humiliations they have suffered.’

  ‘So far they have only been capable of suffering humiliations. Hitler could crush them and win them over. France subdued them. And strong men everywhere can control them. Your masses represent only blind energy.’

  ‘I am afraid most of the strong men are really alienated from their own integral vision and sunk in the morass of darkness. Look at Hitler; he depended on mystical signs and symbols and on soothsayers and—’

  ‘You don’t believe in the soul, then?’

  ‘I don’t believe that there is a soul distinct from the body; the soul is body, the body is soul—and together they make a man.’

  ‘What about the mystics—Sri Aurobindo, for instance? I was hoping to go to him.’

  ‘Mysticism is the approach of a dying man. It is a blind alley, leading to God, from whom no traveller returns to tell what he saw at the other end.’

  ‘You seem very sure! I did not know that you were so cocksure. . . . One of my ancestors withdrew from life and became a sadhu and—’

  He was interrupted by the footfall of the chaprasi’s soft tread. He sat up.

  ‘Maharaj,’ said Jai Singh, ‘Maharani Sahiba is not there. She has gone away to her mother’s village.’

  ‘To her mother’s village?’ Victor shouted. ‘Why? When? To her mother’s village?’

  ‘I knew she was not in the zenana, Maharaj, because I put her luggage into the motor,’ the chaprasi said. ‘I only went to look, in case I had made a mistake.’

  Victor got up and stood facing the chaprasi.

  ‘Did she say anything? Any message?’

  ‘Ji Huzoor, she said that she would not be back for some time.’ And the old man fell at Victor’s feet and laid his head there over his joined hands, his body trembling and shaking.

  ‘Get out! Get away! Get out of my sight!’ Victor raved, eyes flashing like a madman’s.

  As Jai Singh began to crawl away, the Maharaja followed him and shouted:

  ‘What did she tell you? What exactly did she say?’

  ‘Maharaj, she said that I was not to tell you that she was taking all her luggage. And she gave me a 100 rupees.’ The chaprasi was weeping as he said this, because he too realized now, as Victor had realized, that Ganga Dasi had run away.

  ‘How much luggage has she taken?’ Victor asked desperately, looking for some ray of hope, some sign that it might not be the end.

  ‘All her luggage, Huzoor,’ answered the chaprasi. ‘Ten boxes and a hundred years’ luggage, Huzoor. Bool Chand Sahib was with her.’

  ‘Bool Chand! Hain! Didn’t you prevent her? Couldn’t you stop her?’ Victor shrieked, raising his hands towards the chaprasi. And now tears were streaming out of his eyes and he shouted: ‘Get out, good-for-nothing fool! Get out of my sight! . . . Why didn’t you stop her? Was it Bool Chand or Popatlal?’

  ‘Bool Chand, Huzoor.’

  ‘Get out, you treacherous dog! Get out! . . .’ And he began to kick Jai Singh on his shins.

  As the chaprasi retreated, Victor swung round, beat
ing his head with his fists, in a mad, inchoate despair at being abandoned. Then he shook as though his legs were giving way under him and he fell back on the settee, weeping and sobbing, his face covered with his hands. It seemed to me that the pent-up clouds of misery of days had suddenly mounted to the peaks of his soul and crashed like a monsoon.

  In a moment, he sat up suddenly and, wringing his hands in violent gestures of defiance against the malevolence of the world, he began to talk aloud to himself, not without showing in his histrionics the awareness of the fact that he had an audience.

  ‘Where have you gone? Oh, where have you gone? . . . Why have you left me like this? . . . I want you! I am dying for you. . . . Why have you done this? Why? . . . Why do you want to destroy me . . .?’

  And again, after these protestations, he broke down and fell down weeping, his face buried in the cushions on the settee.

  A revulsion came over me, a kind of hatred against myself, that I could not help him. But I found myself sitting still while he cried. I felt suffocated and choked with the feeling that I could not enter the inner core of his pain, the place where it hurt him most.

  I went over to him and eased the strain of the necktie which was making the blood mount to his temples.

  ‘Leave me alone—leave me alone!’ he shouted. ‘Go away!

  Get away!’ But I knew that that was the last thing he wanted me to do.

  I decided to help him to get to bed and to keep a vigil by his side.

  There is an apophthegm that in the multitude lies wisdom. Certainly, the people have a second sense. They knew that negotiations had been going on, between the Sarkar at Delhi and the Maharaja, for Sham Pur to become a part of Hindustan, and that His Highness had been resisting this. When Srijut Popatlal J. Shah had come to the state, the populace had rejoiced, because, under the outer, joined-hand politeness, they harboured resentments from whole eras of oppression, which needed just the confirmation that the big Sarkar at Delhi was on their side, to become vocal. And the Praja Mandal leaders, mostly small men with big ideas, had come to surface on the crest of this enthusiasm, and hartals had been called and processions held, and loud words spoken, ending up in the attack on the Maharaja’s palace, which had been foiled by His Highness’s use of firearms, the arrest of the Praja Mandal leaders and the establishment of police rule, of which even I had been the innocent victim on my way to the polo ground. But if the atmosphere abounded with rumours of all kinds emanating from the inner meaning of the big hunt and from the details of the miasmatic revolution which spread in the towns and the villages through the activities of the rebellious cousins of the Maharaja, as well as the Socialists, and the Communist guerillas, the principle behind the widespread disturbances was not open to doubt: there seemed to be an open conspiracy to curb the autocratic powers of the Maharaja and to achieve full responsible government, with a democratically elected legislature representing the people. This basic aim was, of course, the reflection, by and large, of the struggle of the peoples of British India which had got a quarter of the way to freedom through the transfer of power from the British Crown to the representatives of the Indian National Congress. It had taken its inspiration from the phrase in the oft-quoted text of the Independence resolution: ‘We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to abolish it.’ And though they had never self-consciously announced this slogan, this pledge had also dominated the mind of the people of the states, even as it had obsessed the population of British India. By the light of this they had been guided, by this right they had stood, and to secure it to themselves they had begun to struggle. Only, because here in the states the 4th century BC was linked much more intimately with the 9th, the 19th and the 20th than in British India, the path of progress was cluttered up with all the hangovers of history—the conceptions of absolute monarchy, feudalism, open banditry, neglect, mystic veneration of the kind which regarded princes as the descendants of God, liberal doctrines and the ideals of the French and Russian Revolutions, and even the idealistic anarchism of Bakunin. And the confusion was made all the worse by the personal entanglements of the Maharaja. Somehow, in the workings of history, the spicy bits of good-humoured conversation about the loves of princes and princesses constitute, in the mouths of the people, a more potent weapon of struggle than politicians admit. For the gossip of the bazaar is always the froth on the surface of realities to which a humanity, living at low pressure, resorts as a safeguard against the intensity which might kill everyone. Laughter at the inordinate cruelties and injustices rampant in society is a necessary precaution against adversity. The ultimate, final and irrevocable struggle was, however, destined, through the irreconcilable aims of the various factions, to go to extreme solutions. For the swiftness of tempo necessary to clean up the debris of 2000 years, through the limited aims of Sardar Patel to take the princes into collaboration, through the opportunism of the cousins of the Maharaja, and of the Praja Mandal leaders to grab power for themselves, and the revolutionary aims of the Communists to destroy the whole set-up and create a Bolshevik state, made variously for timidity, muddle and violence. At the moment everyone’s attention was concentrated on the fact that the Maharaja had been forced to sign the Instrument of Accession. And, naturally, the joy of the populace knew no bounds.