The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  I dreamt I saw Paradise last night

  Where every man was free;

  Where workers sang, and toiled, and prayed

  At the feet of Gangaji,

  At the feet of Gangaji.

  And Gangaji said, ‘This bliss is yours

  ‘Cause you held out till the end;

  For you stood with courage in your hearts

  And stoutly refused to bend -

  And stoutly refused to bend.’

  Yes, we shall win, brothers and friends,

  We shall win by staying true

  To our cause, our faith, our firm belief

  That God will give us our due,

  That God will give us our due.

  Simple lyrics, Ganapathi, simply sung by the ragged band, with words they improvised each evening to reflect the most important theme of Gangaji’s latest speech. They were often out of tune, God knows, but never out of step with that inner harmony that comes when it is the heart that sings and not just the tongue. But few things can test the human spirit as sorely as the needs of the human flesh. When the employers threw open the gates of the factories and offered to take the starving workers back, the workers’ defiance trembled on the brink of collapse.

  Ganga understood clearly that if even a few of his charges went back to the factory his cause - their cause - would fail, and the weeks of obduracy that had kept their stomachs empty would be in vain. So he added a practical step to his exhortations: he moved the timing of his daily meeting under the peepul tree from 5 p.m. to 7.30 a.m., the precise moment when the factory whistle would blow and the gates swing open to welcome the workers reporting for duty.

  This was a bold gesture: the factory gates were situated directly across the road from the river bank upon which Ganga’s peepul stood. He was confronting his followers with the source of their own temptation and teaching them to reject it as evil.

  It worked the first day. The whistle blew, the immense gates clanged open; a florid foreman in khaki shorts came to the entrance and looked expectantly at the assembled workers. The temptation strained their faces, but Gangaji’s crowd held: no worker was going to walk in through those inviting gates in full view of his comrades. It was a sort of primitive picket-line, I suppose, but it was far from certain that, in those pre-union days, the picket would hold. Ganga represented the wise, disinterested leadership the workers had yearned for, but his disinterest was also its own disqualification. By asserting his moral principles, by upholding abstract canons of Truth and justice, he was laying nothing more than his beliefs on the line. While they were, if their starvation continued, laying down their lives.

  25

  Late that afternoon, after the first 7.30 meeting, one of Ganga’s volunteers all right, Ganapathi, you can see through my attempt at reportage, it was me - was visiting a bustee, a slum settlement, to help keep up the morale of the workers and their families. But their sullen looks, their half-mumbled responses from averted faces, made it clear that the workers had begun to lose faith in what Ganga was trying to do. And then suddenly one man, cradling his sick infant daughter on his lap, burst out in bitter recrimination: ‘It is all right for Gangaji to tell us not to give in. After all, what does it cost him? He eats fine food off Moore-memsahib’s plates and travels by a car that is worth many years’ wages.’

  The words struck home, Ganapathi. Secure in his own sincerity, Gangaji had not thought that the depth of his commitment would ever be questioned. I hastened back to Moore-memsahib’s house to tell Gangaji what one man had said and others undoubtedly thought.

  Even I did not know how he would react to the charge. You or I, Ganapathi, we might simply have ignored it, or sought, perhaps, to explain ourselves to the workers, and either course would have led ultimately to the loss of credibility that costs so many leaders their authority. A modern politician might have sought to address the source of the workers’ discontent and tried to find food for their families from wealthy donors; but Gangaji had already refused many offers of help from rich Indians, on the grounds that the workers had to fight their own battles. (‘If they win despite starving, it will be a far truer triumph than a victory built on the charity of strangers,’ he declared to me. Yes, Ganapathi, Gangaji could be tough, tough to the point of callousness.) And finally, there was, of course, the possibility - though from what I knew of Gangaji it was the slenderest of possibilities - that he might just abandon his entire crusade on the grounds that his followers were not worthy of him.

  Any of these responses would have been possible for another man. But Gangaji reacted in a way that reflected and defined his uniqueness.

  ‘From this moment onwards,’ he announced in a tone that reminded me of that other terrible vow he had taken, ‘I shall not eat or drink, or travel by any vehicle, until the workers’ just demands have been met.’

  Neither eat nor drink! We were thunderstruck. ‘Ganga,’ I protested, ‘you cannot do this to yourself. We all need you - the workers need you.’

  But Ganga refused to be moved by any entreaties. Sarah-behn, myself, other volunteers, all offered to substitute themselves for him; but not only did he turn us down, he refused even to let us join him in his fast. ‘This is my decision, taken by myself alone and for myself alone,’ he declared. ‘The workers have looked to me so far as their leader, and now that they are wavering it is I as their leader who must stand firm.’ And then, in that mild tone of voice by which he instantly disarmed his listeners, he added the famous words, the immortal words that now etch his place in every book of quotations: ‘Fasting,’ he said, ‘is my business.’

  Fasting is my business. How many ways those words can be read, Ganapathi. Fasting is my business; fasting is my business; fasting is my business; even (why not?) fasting is my business. And even those who actually heard him utter the words cannot agree on where the Great Man had placed his emphasis. It does not matter. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, he conveyed all four meanings, and many nuances beyond, in his delivery of that classic phrase. Today it has passed into history, a slogan, a caption, worn by over-use, cheapened by imitation. Yet, once the words were out of his mouth, Gangaji himself never used them again.

  The next morning he arose before dawn to walk the eight miles from Sarah-behn’s comfortable residence to the peepul tree by the factory. He needed a stick now, but it was a prop more in the theatrical sense than in the physical. Of course, we all accompanied him, and as the strange procession headed past the workers’ hutments, children ran out to find out what was happening and conveyed the news to their fathers. ‘Gangaji has taken a vow,’ the word passed from lip to sibilant lip, ‘Bhishma has taken a vow.’ By 7.25, when he reached the tree, a crowd had assembled around it larger than any that had greeted him so far in his daily meetings.

  ‘Brothers and sisters,’ Ganga said, joining his palms in a respectful namaste, ‘I know I have demanded great sacrifices from you. Some of you may have begun to feel that you cannot continue, that the battle is too unequal. Yet I have asked you to be strong, for he who gives in now not only admits his weakness but weakens the strength of the others. Some of you may ask why you should heed my advice when all I am offering is my words. To them, and to all of you, I swear this solemn oath: not to eat or drink again, or travel by any means other than my own feet, until you have returned to work with a 35 per cent increase in wages.’

  A great collective sigh escaped the lips of the crowd, like the first puff of a restive volcano; then a silence descended upon the throng as every man and woman near enough strained to catch Gangaji’s next words.

  ‘I have told you often in the past that our cause was worth dying for. Those were not just words, my friends; I believe in them. Today I declare to you all that if the Truth does not prevail, if justice is denied, I am prepared to die.’

  The volcano rumbled, Ganapathi. It burst forth in a warm, molten gush of human lava, as man after man rose to his feet to shout his gratitude and his reverence for the Great Teacher. Praise mingled with pra
yers, shouts with slogans, until Ganga, seated in his usual mild-mannered and bespectacled way under the tree, seemed borne aloft on a cloud of adulation. In the confusion a brocaded Muslim weaver in a brilliant red fez leapt up and pulled out a knife. It appeared that what he was saying was that he was prepared to die immediately for the cause, if need be; but some undoubtedly thought he was threatening to finish off the English exploiters, and a great clamour rose up in support of his gesture. Clearly, Ganga’s philosophy had not been fully understood, but he had achieved his objective.

  At last the rest of India began to sit up and take notice of what Ganga was doing in the obscure Bengal town of Budge Budge. Indian nationalism had generated its share of agitators, boycotters and bonfire-stokers; its leaders had resorted to legal texts, holy sacraments and bombs; but no one had ever before tried to starve himself to death. Curiosity was aroused on a national scale, and opinion was inevitably divided. Radical students signalled their support by setting fire to university mess-halls, though some may merely have taken this as a reflection on the cooking. The eminent Scotswoman who headed the Indo-Irish Home Rule League cabled Ganga urging him not to waste his life on so trivial a cause as low wages. The leading English newspaper of the Bengal Presidency devoted three inches to the affair on an inside page, just beneath its Nature Notebook. A pleasant American professor came by the peepul tree to ask Ganga whether he had always resented his father.

  The Scottish mill owners were apoplectic. ‘For God’s sake tell him not to be silly, Sarah,’ Montague pleaded with his estranged sister. ‘This is childish. Like a little girl denied a lollipop, threatening to hold her breath until she turns blue. And it’s not even any of his damn business! This is between us and our workers. What’s his bloody life got to do with it, anyway?’

  26

  ‘Blackmail,’ Sarah-behn said to Gangaji, stooped low over his books under the peepul tree. ‘That’s what they’re calling it at the Mill Owners’ Association. Blackmail.’

  ‘They are wrong, my sister.’ Ganga’s voice was hoarse with thirst, enfeebled by hunger, but it emerged, Ganapathi, with spirit. ‘My fast has nothing to do with their decision. I am not fasting to make them change their mind. That would be blackmail, and that would be wrong. Of what use would it be if the mill owners agreed to pay 35 per cent merely to save my life? They would not be acting in accordance with the Truth, or because they believe the workers’ cause is just. That would be a hollow victory. No, Sarah-behn, I am fasting to strengthen the workers’ resolve, to show them how firmly they must hold their beliefs if they expect them to triumph. My fast demonstrates my conviction, that is all. It is not meant to be a threat to anyone, certainly not to your brothers, the mill owners. Tell them so, Sarah-behn.’

  She tried to tell them so. Sarah understood Ganga intuitively. It was one of the odder mysteries of Indian history that the person who most quickly got on to Ganga’s instinctive wavelength was not one of us from Hastinapur, who had all found his eccentricities so difficult, but this English bourgeoise with the complexion of an under-ripe beetroot.

  She understood him partially because she had come to understand something of the Indian tradition as it was lived in the hovels and shacks of the Indian poor and the lower-middle class, that section of the people whom Indian nationalism had so completely ignored until Ganga came and gave them their place in the sun. In the homes of the lowly factory clerks, whose wives she had taken the trouble to visit at times of distress or celebration, Sarah had come to admire the Indian capacity for altruistic self-denial. You know, Ganapathi, how Indians starve on certain days of the week, deny themselves their favourite foods, eliminate essentials from their diets, all to accumulate moral rather than physical credit. Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one. (Her husband or son, of course, never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking.)

  Sarah saw Ganga’s act in this context, and understood it as an act of affirmation rather than of blackmail. But her brother and his friends in the Mill Owners’ Association were no more capable of thinking in those terms than of converting to Hinduism. And they did not want to listen to her.

  With each passing day Ganga weakened. His thinness, remarkable even in his later Hastinapur days, verged painfully on the ridiculous; his features sagged, until all that could be discerned under the stubble was the existence of skin beneath the staring, listless eyes. The visitors came in larger numbers, their concern for his health meriting larger and larger headlines in the papers. The crowds swelling outside his makeshift shelter were increasingly more angry than curious. The nervous jute-mill owners sent for a doctor, who took Gangaji’s feeble pulse and declared that his condition was seriously deteriorating. If something was not done soon, he would be beyond recall, and Indian nationalism would have its first non-violent martyr.

  We who maintained the unceasing vigil of those days and nights can never forget them, Ganapathi. We begged and pleaded with him to listen to us, to call off his suicidal action, to drink something, to accept a compromise. He was adamant: his fast would continue until the workers had their 35 per cent. After a while he simply stopped responding to our requests, turning his face away in silence if any of us ever raised the issue. I will admit, Ganapathi, that on the tenth day we had almost given up. I shall not forget an accidental glimpse of Sarah-behn leaving his side that evening, her strong face swollen, awash with tears.

  At last the British authorities decided to take matters into their own hands. The consequences of inaction were too awful to contemplate. A terse message went to the Mill Owners’ Association of Budge Budge from the Governor of Bengal: ‘Give in.’

  ‘Thirty-five per cent!’ Sarah-behn yelled, her pale cheeks reddening in excitement as she brandished a piece of paper, a paper of peace, in Ganga’s face. ‘You’ve won!’

  ‘No, my dear sister,’ the weak voice croaked in response, as a faint smile battled through his exhaustion. Gangaji’s hands spread out in a gesture that took in the delirious, screaming throng which had held out with him. ‘They have won.’

  A glass of orange juice was brought to him, and he bowed his head while Sarah-behn held it out for him to sip. As the lukewarm droplets soaked into his parched gullet, the crowd burst into an ecstatic roar, as if the bobbing of his Adam’s apple was the first sight of a lifebuoy to a dangerously listing raft. The oranges that season were sour, Ganapathi, but the taste of victory, and survival, was deliciously sweet.

  27

  You can imagine the relief we all felt that day, Ganapathi, and the sense of triumph. Years later, in that candid autobiography of his, Ganga wrote that the moment of his sudden decision to embark on a fast was a ‘holy’ one for him. The inspiration, he says, came in a blinding flash; he just knew that this was what he had to do to pass his personal ordeal by fire. The workers had sworn to follow and be guided by him; he had to fast to prevent them from breaking their promise. And when he announced it, Ganga writes, it changed the course of his struggle immediately and for ever. ‘The meeting, which had been hitherto unresponsive, came to life as if by a miracle,’ was, I think, the way he put it. It was he who brought it to life, of course, and he who brought life to it. His life.

  And yet, Ganapathi, what a small triumph this momentous first fast achieved. Thirty-five per cent? Yes, but 35 per cent for just one day. For that was the formula the wily British government had worked out for the mill owners. Ganga had said he would fast until the workers could go back to work with a 35 per cent increase; ergo, under the settlement, the workers could go back to work with a 35 per cent increase - but they could not keep that increase beyond the first day. For Day Two, it was 20 per cent, and for every subsequent day until the government’s arbitrator announced his verdict: 27.5 per cent. You have to admire the ingeniousness of that formula, Ganapathi. The 35 per cent ended Ganga’s fast and the workers’ strike; the 20 per
cent ensured that the mill owners did not have to concede defeat, which might have encouraged other workers to contemplate strikes; and the 27.5 per cent appeared to be fair to both sides while giving the arbitrator the most obvious figure for his solution. The workers of Budge Budge; who had started off wanting 80 per cent, had come down to 50 per cent and then reconciled themselves to claiming 35 per cent, finally had to settle for 27.5 per cent. Ganga’s sense of justice, which had led him to ‘split the difference’ between the two original positions, served only to reduce the ultimate settlement when the arbitrator split the new difference as well. Moral politics, Ganapathi, is not always good mathematics.

  But the fine print did not seem to bother the workers as they sang and danced in celebration of their victory. Ganga was thanked, prostrated to and garlanded profusely. His humble volunteers were feted with coconut milk and river fish. Somebody produced a special gift for Sarah-behn, a cream-coloured Shantipuri cotton sari with a narrow black border. She accepted it with tears flowing down her strong face: it meant that she was now one of us. She wore it that very evening, and was never again seen in the skirts of her Caucasian past.

  How do I explain to you, Ganapathi, what that first fast meant to Gangaji, to all of us? It was such a spontaneous, unplanned event, with minimal organization and - as we must, in the light of the 27.5 per cent, admit - marginal results. But it shone for us as a beacon of hope and strength in the darkness of our subjugation. It was an affirmation of purpose, of spirit, of faith. What happened at Budge Budge confirmed the force of the non-violent revolution that Gangaji had launched.