The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  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

  23

  Right 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 d
escribe 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.

  24

  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’.

  ‘Very well,’ Gangaji said in that bookish way of his. ‘The first thing we shall do is to reformulate our demands. You, through Sarah-behn here’ - yes, Ganapathi, behn, for Ganga had already made her, in cheerful disregard of ethnicity, appearance and colonial history, his sister - ‘have asked for a 50 per cent increase in wages. Your employers offer 20 per cent. Since in pursuit of Truth we must seek no unfair advantage over our adversary, I have decided we shall now ask for 35 per cent. It is a just figure, the mill owners can afford to pay it, it is better than what you have - and it splits the difference.’

  This time the roar of approval from the crowd was somewhat more muted. But the workers, having accepted Gangaji’s leadership, accepted his reformulation of their demand. The struggle was on.

  And Ganga waged it in his own peculiar way. This time there were no depositions to take, no travels to undertake, no elephants to be overtaken. Instead he trudged through the slum dwellings every morning, holding a hand here, soothing a brow there. Then he rested, his shrinking frame lost under the covers of the enormous four-poster bed Sarah Moore had given him in a room at her home. Every afternoon, at precisely five o’clock, he arrived in Mrs Moore’s Overland roadster at the peepul tree. A crowd would already have gathered for this ritual, and the Englishwoman’s liveried chauffeur would have to toot-toot his way through the throng to the foot of the tree, his professional dead-pan expression betraying no hint of what he thought of his unusual errand. Ganga and his English ‘sister’ - a word that soon came to connote friend, hostess, protector and disciple all in one - would then alight. Ganga, a shawl sometimes draped over his bony shoulders to shield him from the Bengali winter, his glasses perched on his nose, would proceed to speak to the crowd.

  It almost did not matter what he said; for he rarely raised his voice to harangue them and the words never carried to the farthest ranks of his audience. It doubtful many would have understood him if they had. But it was as if, in simply being there and attempting to communicate with them, he was transmitting a message more powerful than words. His presence carried its own impulses to the people assembled before him, a wave of strength, and inspiration, and conviction, that sustained the workers in their hungry defiance.

  I see that furrow on your brow again, Ganapathi. You think that this is not at all like the Ganga we know and have spoken about, the Ganga of the third- class railway carriages and the experiments in self-denial. But what can I say, young man, except that it is the truth? You would have expected him to make his home amongst the squalor of the slum, but Ganga stayed amidst the comforts of colonial civilization; you would have expected him to walk to the peepul (spell that any way you like, Ganapathi, the idea’s the same), but instead he drove in a white woman’s car. And yet neither prevented him from preaching to the workers about the importance of holding out for their just demands, even if they had to starve in order to do so.

  This went on for days, Ganapathi, indeed for over two weeks, and Ganga made his speeches, and the workers got hungrier and more desperate, and the employers resolutely refused to heed the name of their town - they did not budge. God knows how long this might have gone on, and whether at the end of it all we might have had a worthwhile story to tell. But Fate has a habit of intervening at just the right moment
to resolve these crises, to drop an apple on a sleeping head, to turn an aimless drift into a surging tide. Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.

  It happened when the mill owners, deciding that their employees had now reached the point of least resistance, announced that they were ending the lock-out: the factory gates were now open to any worker who was willing to accept the 20 per cent. Ganga responded at his five o’clock meeting that if the owners’ lock-out was over, the workers’ strike had begun. They would not, he declared, return to their machines until the 35 per cent had been granted. His announcement was greeted by some straggling cheers, and large areas of silence. The rumbling in the workers’ stomachs had begun to drown out the defiance in their voices.

  It was not that they had been less than fully committed in their steadfastness. No, Ganapathi, they had held out, heeding Gangaji’s daily exhortations. And in the crude songs they had improvised after his speeches, in the chanting cadences of their processions back from the peepul tree to their hovels, they had given voice to their courage and their determination: