Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  On the morning of the second day after our return from New Delhi, the din and noise of shouting multitudes outside the palace awoke us. Victor came rushing into my room in his pyjamas and insisted that we should go and see what was up. As we climbed up to the rooms of the main deohri overlooking the Victoria bazaar and peered from the jalousied windows, we could see a thick procession advancing towards the palace a hundred yards or so down the street.

  Victor shook as though the sight of the enormous populace advancing towards him seemed to constitute a threat to his physical presence. His face was pale, though he stared hard out of the apertures of the windows to try to see and understand what was happening. As he looked at me for a moment, I could see a strange horror in his dilated eyes, as though he felt that the universe was cracking and he was sinking into the caverns that were yawning beneath him. His breath began to come and go quickly as the slogans ‘Praja Mandal ki jai! Pandit Gobind Das ki jai!’ resounded back from the sky.

  ‘Will they storm the palace?’ he asked.

  ‘No, there is no question of that,’ I said. ‘You are still the constitutional head of Sham Pur. You have signed an Instrument of Accession, but not of abdication! Sardar Patel was very cordial to you immediately the document was signed. . . .’

  Victor lowered his eyes, as he was slightly abashed at his weakness. The romance and dignity of the hereditary prince seemed to have dissolved from his person and he sat, shrunken and dishevelled in his silk dressing-gown, as Louis XIV might have sat, witnessing the victory of the people over him.

  ‘I say, Pandit Gobind Das looks rather seedy,’ he commented bitterly.

  It was true that Pandit Gobind Das, the Praja Mandal leader, looked pale as he sat quietly like a god on the throne-like dais of the rath, drawn by ten pairs of bullocks, behind the advance guard of richly caparisoned elephants.

  ‘I suppose he is yellow with the fear of victory, or maybe it is his inverted vanity.’

  ‘He is dead! He seems dead! His five senses may be about him, but just look at his fat, flabby body. The ass! How can he rule? Brother-in-law, sprung up from nowhere!’

  The bitterness and abuse sprang, it seemed to me, from the death in him of the nobility which was once his. For, in fact, I could see now that Pandit Gobind Das was beaming with a smile as the vast throng converged around him, throwing flowers at him and garlanding him and the other leaders seated by him, even as the procession came forward, with the cymbals crashing ahead, drums beating and men shouting hoarsely, pushing their way ahead, clumsily, heavily and yet, as though they constituted one big colossus, advancing inexorably to power and privilege.

  ‘I could destroy them!’ Victor ground the words in his mouth. ‘If only Sardar Patel had not tied my hands, I could have reduced them to ashes!’

  ‘With what? With your two bare hands and your pride! Don’t give in to your weakness, Victor. You are a Rajput!’

  Beyond the rath on which the Praja Mandal leaders were riding was a stately palanquin, bearing Srijut Popatlal J. Shah and Mr Bool Chand.

  The very sight of the latter made Victor go mad. Frothing slightly in the mouth in an agony of helplessness, stupid and hollow, and with wild, puzzled eyes, he shouted:

  ‘The snakes! The vipers! I shall see to it that that worm Bool Chand is destroyed! Son of a swine!’

  And he peered hard through the holes of the tracery. I knew he was trying to make sure that Gangi was not there to complete his humiliation.

  The shouts and slogans rose with a deafening rhythm now, as the procession nearly came parallel to the palace gates. And to increase the confusion in Victor’s soul, the concourse slowed down until it came to a standstill, and a band, composed of clarinets, flutes, drums and saxophones, struck up an odd, noisy, syncopated rhythm.

  Fortunately, Gangi was not in the procession, but the drumming of Victor’s heart, which I could hear distinctly, continued. Apparently, his sense of coming disasters and insults was by now acute.

  ‘Bolo Sham Pur Praja Mandal ki jai!’ ‘Bolo Sri Gobind Das ki jai!’ ‘Bolo Sri Ram Chander ki jai!’ ‘Bolo Sri Krishnaji Maharaj ki jai! . . .’

  The slogans multiplied.

  The band became noisier.

  The drumbeats nearly tore the sky.

  The sun shone gloriously and splendidly on the Praja Mandal crowd. Out of the ecstatic confusion arose a long series of protracted tom-tom beats. And then a voice spoke hoarsely through a microphone:

  ‘Pandit Gobind Das will speak!’

  Victor got up from where he was crouching and made to go.

  ‘Let us listen to him,’ I said, and held him down.

  The Maharaja yielded supinely and sat back.

  The voice of Pandit Gobind Das came, metallic but raw, over the diminishing hubbub:

  ‘Brothers, today is an auspicious day, because all efforts of the Praja Mandal have been crowned with success. The Maharaja Sahib of Sham Pur has acceded to the main demand of the States Congress—accession to the Indian Union. The Maharaja Sahib is a strange and somewhat wayward youth. He is intelligent, gracious and has, in his own way, always kept the interests of the people at heart.’

  If the Maharaja was, as the Praja Mandal leader said, ‘strange and somewhat wayward’, then Pandit Gobind Das was no less ‘strange and wayward’. At least his words were ‘somewhat strange’ and ‘somewhat wayward’. For the compliments which he had showered on His Highness were in sharp contrast to the abuse and denigration which he and other Praja Mandal leaders had lavishly bestowed on the Maharaja and his administration up to a week ago. I began to see that the real significance of the ‘bloodless revolution’, as it was called, which Sardar Patel had wrought, was to bring about collaboration between the Indian Government and the princes on a new basis. I could see that Victor, too, was somewhat relieved at the tone of Pandit Gobind Das’s speech.

  ‘Not so bad as you thought it would be,’ I said. Victor nodded his head.

  But I had spoken too soon. Pandit Gobind Das had now begun to reprimand the Maharaja a little:

  ‘. . . but he is unstable, with no character, nothing to hold the various parts of his being together, heart, brain and body. There is only a lot of movement in the various parts and—’

  The next few words were lost in a flutter of laughter which arose at this description. But Pandit Gobind Das’s voice now resounded back from the towers on the top of the deohri of the palace, and the mass before him listened, rapt and still.

  ‘Soon after the acceptance of office by the Congress, the ruler, on the advice of his British advisers, acted on the theory that Paramountcy had lapsed. Now the holy ghost of Britain has gone, and wiser counsels have prevailed. And the Maharaja Sahib has become the Messiah who has brought salvation to his subjects by signing the Instrument of Accession. All the Praja Mandal prisoners have been released. A representative, popular government will soon be installed and Srijut Popatlal J. Shah will act as an adviser of the Government of India to the popular ministry. . . .’

  This bit about the new role of Srijut Popatlal J. Shah came as a surprise to us. Apparently, Sardar Patel had not enough confidence in the Praja Mandal leadership and had retained his own nominee in Sham Pur.

  ‘. . . the prince must be grateful that he has not yielded to the blandishments of the Satans, the Molochs around him, but has exhibited a triumph of his own spirit over the weaknesses of his flesh. Bolo His Highness Maharaja Sahib ki jai! . . .’

  Some part of the crowd took up the slogan in an indifferent voice, because the change of Gobind Das’s tone was too sudden for the people, whose hostility towards the Maharaja was do deep-seated and real.

  ‘Bolo Praja Mandal ki jai!’

  That shout was echoed back with greater fervour, being repeated ad nauseam, until the throats tore and the whole edifice of the palace deohri shook with the echo. It seemed that the hall in which we were would remember this occasion for centuries. For, if it was not actually stormed, its grandeur and majesty was demolished by the ran
corous shouts of the people.

  After the speech of Pandit Gobind Das, the procession began to move down the Victoria Bazaar.

  Victor got up, his face sullen and black, his eyes bloodshot, his lips tight and his whole body hard, as though it was stiffening before it would become cold.

  ‘Monsters!’ he shouted. ‘Monsters! Monsters!’

  I did not contradict him, but merely touched his arm embarrassedly to direct him towards the stairs.

  ‘They have taken everything from me,’ he said, going down the dark stairs. ‘But they might have left me my woman—I shall teach that snorting bania, Bool Chand, the lesson of his life!’

  During the next few days the actual pattern of the new set-up in Sham Pur emerged fairly clearly. A Praja Mandal Ministry was installed, with Pandit Gobind Das as Premier, and he gave the various portfolios to his chief lieutenants: one Ministry, that of Justice, being given to Raja Parduman Singh, the old cousin of His Highness. Brigadier-General Chaudhri Raghbir Singh, the Commander-in-Chief of the State Forces, was, contrary to current rumours, retained in his post. And, most important of all, the Ministry showed unusually tender solicitude for the Maharaja Sahib—the Ministers, as well as the ‘Adviser’, Srijut Popatlal J. Shah, having issued statements in the Press that, since His Highness had graciously and voluntarily acquiesced with the proposals of the Government of India in signing the Instrument of Accession, all old feuds should now be forgotten and due consideration and respect be paid to the benign and enlightened young constitutional ruler.

  All this conduced to the acceptance by His Highness of the new order, especially because the States Ministry at Delhi gave him a privy purse of twenty-five lakhs a year and, in principle, allowed him rights over his personal lands and properties, though the exact details were left to be settled later.

  Nevertheless, Victor could not really accept the changed circumstances in his heart, particularly because the ‘bloodless revolution’ coincided with his domestic disaster. And it offended his susceptibilities terribly to learn that Bool Chand, his ex-lackey, who had run away with Gangi, had been appointed secretary to the new Prime Minister.

  The nervous tension from which Victor had suffered in the previous months now became a kind of collapse, and his habitual lying down flat on his bed spinelessly became a permanent condition of his being. There was nothing physically wrong with him; that is to say, his blood pressure was normal, his inside clear and his body intact, but he complained that he could not sleep and that his heart beat like a drum. It seemed to me that a deep malaise was eating him away slowly, and he looked thinner, shrinking visibly, and his pale face, screwed up into a knot of misery, darkened with shadows around the eyes and became set in a mould that was grim and inscrutable. Something in him was dying, the intrinsic, intimate life that he had had with Gangi, and he would not come alive again, never quite in the way in which he had throbbed and vibrated before. But the torment of this death was terrible to behold, because it was a long process in which his lucid insight into the character and temperament of Gangi, and the inevitability of the break with her, were vitiated by the return of nostalgic regrets, mainly brought about by the hold which the habits of years of living together with her had on him. And he blubbered repeatedly, bitterly, and in a strange, mad anguish, about what had been between him and her and how wantonly and stupidly she had destroyed it.

  The tragedy of the onlooker in witnessing the break-up of another man’s life is that the outsider cannot easily enter into the fierce, storm-tossed passions of the victim’s heart. And yet the misery of the broken heart spreads like a weight on the environment, settling upon everything and bearing down the companions of the lover, steadily, into the bottomless pit of his suffering. The only thing that saved me from the boredom of the constant iterations were the memories of the anguish I had myself suffered in England when, after the hectic blaze of a three-month passionate affair I had had with a woman medical student, the question of race and colour had intervened and the college authorities had dictated that we break it off. I knew that, though my own experience was rather different, it is not possible to love, and lose that love, without being torn to shreds when the break comes. For, apart from the habits that living together engenders, there arises, in the course of the physical passion, a catharsis of emotion which grows either into a bright creative aura, if the relationship is maintained, or matures into a cancer of regrets if it breaks up. And this cancer goes on growing and paining even after the death of love, almost like some people’s hearts, which are said to become harder and not to burn when the body is cremated.

  Victor’s will strained, with all its tension, to get Ganga Dasi back. He sent messengers all round Sham Pur to look for her. But, not being able to locate her, he wrote to her care of Bool Chand, shrieking out to her, asking why she had left him and telling her that he was desolate and lonely, and begging her to return. And when he did not hear from her, he humbled himself and wrote to Bool Chand, asking him to give her back to him. There was no answer, however, and he seemed to go through the movements of a drowning man in a rough sea, struggling to keep afloat. And I became a kind of slippery raft which he had got hold of and to which he tried to hang on for survival.

  ‘If only she will come back to me, there will be no recriminations,’ he kept saying. ‘If you see her please tell her this.’

  And he talked in his sleep, and even when he talked to me he seemed to be talking aloud to himself, complaining that he had been caught completely innocent and defenceless.

  And all the time Ganga Dasi was silent somewhere, cold and hard and brittle, so it seemed to him, beyond his reach and unbending, relentless, in spite of the abject pleas of his letters.

  I had heard of poets dying for love and read the sagas and legends where heroic princes gave up whole kingdoms for women. But I had never actually seen the spectacle with my own eyes, of the disintegration of a man through the pangs of thwarted love.

  As he was free with his confessions to his staff, each person tried to soothe him with advice and help, according to the bent of his own temperament.

  ‘There are three kinds of natures according to our ancient Hindu lore: Sattvas, Rajas, Tamas,’ said Munshi Mithan Lal. ‘The first is pure and truthful, the second is noble and the third is the mixed lower, carnal nature. Ganga Dasi belongs to the third group. So, Maharaj, try and forget her. . . .’