The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  In fasting, in directing the strength of his convictions against himself, Gangaji taught us to resist injustice with arms that no one could take away from us. Gangaji’s use of the fast made our very weakness a weapon. It captured the imagination of India in a way that no speech, no prayer, no bomb had ever done. In time, Gangaji’s fasts slowed the heartbeat of the nation; hungry students pushed their plates away knowing the Great Teacher was not eating; entire villages refused to touch a flame to their wicks in order to share the darkness with him. On that first occasion interest was limited, and had to be won. Gangaji won it, and with it the attention - and the devotion - of the country. He had realized that the best way to bring his principles to life was, paradoxically, by being prepared to die for them.

  In that realization lay the ultimate strength of the national movement. Gangaji’s willingness to sacrifice his life set the tone for the other sacrifices that were, eventually, to make freedom possible - by making the price the British would have had to pay to stay on not worth paying.

  Fasts, Ganapathi, have never worked half as well anywhere else as they have in India. Only Indians could have devised a method of political bargaining based on the threat of harm to yourself rather than to your opponent. Inevitably, of course, like all our country’s other great innovations, fasts too have been shamefully abused. As a weapon, fasts are effective only when the target of your action values your life more than his convictions - or at least feels that society as a whole does. So they were ideally suited to a nonviolent, upright national leader like Gangaji. But when used by lesser mortals with considerably less claim to the moral high ground and no great record of devotion to principle, fasts are just another insidious form of blackmail, abused and over-used in our agitation-ridden land.

  It might have been worse, though. If more politicians, Ganapathi, had the courage to fast in the face of what they saw as transcendent wrong, Indian governments might have found it impossible to govern. But too many would-be fasters proclaim their self-denial and then retreat to surreptitious meals behind the curtain, which makes their demands easier to resist since there is no likelihood of their doing any real harm to themselves.

  But that is not the worst of it, Ganapathi. What more bathetic legacy could there be to Ganga, who risked his life for 27.5 per cent, than that fasts have suffered the ultimate Indian fate of being reduced to the symbolic? What could be more absurd than the widely practised ‘relay fast’ of today’s politicians, where different people take it in turns to miss their meals in public? Since no one starves for long enough to create any problems for himself or others, the entire point of Gangaji’s original idea is lost. All we are left with is the drama without the sacrifice - and isn’t that a metaphor for Indian politics today?

  The Sixth Book:

  Forbidden Fruit

  28

  To leave Gangaji aside for a moment - though that, as you can see, Ganapathi, is never easy; you see how he keeps taking over our story - let us return to his wards, the newly political, newly parental princelings of Hastinapur. They have not featured in the episodes I have recounted so far from Gangaji’s career, for the simple reason that they were not there at the time, though to say so would probably be considered heretical by the numerous devotees of each today. Our contemporary hagiographers would have us believe that Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and his white stick, was everywhere by Gangaji’s side in the struggle for Independence, and that - until he disagreed with his mentor - so was Pandu. Well, Ganapathi, you can take it from me that they were not, for most of the crucial events in Gangaji’s life and career were those in which he acted alone, resolving the dictates of his hyperactive conscience within, and by, himself.

  Not that his followers, our later leaders, were entirely idle at the time. After all, Independence was not won by a series of isolated incidents but by the constant, unremitting actions of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of men and women across the land. We tend, Ganapathi, to look back on history as if it were a stage play, with scene building upon scene, our hero moving from one action to the next in his remorseless stride to the climax. Yet life is never like that. If life were a play the noises offstage, and for that matter the sounds of the audience, would drown out the lines of the principal actors. That, of course, would make for a rather poor tale; and so the recounting of history is only the order we artificially impose upon life to permit its lessons to be more clearly understood.

  So it is, Ganapathi, that in this memoir we light up one corner of our collective past at a time, focus on one man’s actions, one village’s passion, one colonel’s duty, but all the while life is going on elsewhere, Ganapathi: as the shots ring out in the Bibigarh Gardens babies are being born, nationalists are being thrown into prison, husbands are quarrelling with wives, petitions are being filed in courtrooms, stones are being flung at policemen, and diligent young Indian students are sailing to London to sit for the examinations that will permit them to rule their own people in the name of an alien king. It is no different for the protagonists of our story, the little band of individuals and families selected from the swirling mists of an old man’s memory to represent a past in which others too have played a significant but unrecalled part. Time did not stand still for them as Ganga plodded through Motihari or starved to such good purpose in Budge Budge. No, Ganapathi, our friends too lived and breathed and thought and worked and prayed and (except for Pandu) copulated the while, their endeavours unrecorded in these words you have so laboriously transcribed. History marched on, leaving only a few footprints on our pages. Of its deep imprints on other sands, you do not know because I do not choose to wash in the waters that have swept them away.

  In other words, Ganapathi, as our story unfolded on your notes and my little cassettes, Pandu and Dhritarashtra were working busily in Hastinapur, in Bombay, in Delhi, to organize and promote, respectively, the institution that would one day propel Gangaji’s vision into a tangible nationhood - the Kaurava Party.

  At first their paths did not diverge. Indeed, were it not for Dhritarashtra’s unfortunate affliction, I might have said that they invariably saw eye to eye. Till my blue-blooded scions entered the fray in Gangaji’s wake, the Kaurava Party had been a distinguished but remarkably ineffective forum for the rhetorical articulation of Anglophile dissatisfaction with the English. Brown- skinned Victorian gentlemen, often in three-piece suits with watch-chains strung fashionably across their waistcoats (bad enough for cultural, climatic and aesthetic reasons, but to make matters worse, Ganapathi, this was decades before the advent of air-conditioning) declaimed in the language of that ignorant imperialist, Macaulay, and in the accents of that overrated oligopoly, Oxbridge, their aspirations to the rights of Englishmen. England listened, but paid little heed. The Kaurava Party was a useful outlet for the frustrations of the English-educated, but since these were always expressed with the restraint born of English education, they posed no threat. The party had, after all, been founded by a liberal Scot, who had named it in a fuzzy misreading of Indian mythology and dedicated it to the perpetuation of his monarch’s constitutional queenship over India, the radical idea being the adjective ‘constitutional’ When Gangaji turned to politics the Kaurava Party had been in existence for thirty years and the British had not taken thirty steps toward Indian self-rule. With the advent of my Hastinapuris all this changed.

  Dhritarashtra, for one, as you already know, Ganapathi, had acquired in England traces of the right accent along with streaks of the wrong ideas. He had returned fired with Fabianism, which taught that equality and justice were everybody’s right, and which (with typical imprecision) omitted to exclude the heathen from the definition of ‘everybody’. The Fabians had drawn up an all-embracing philosophy in order basically to make the point that it was the state’s duty to provide gas and tap-water to the British working-man, and while the British working-man rapidly moved on to less elemental concerns, the philosophy travelled to distant peoples who had never heard of gas or tap-water.
Dhritarashtra was one of its carriers. He heard speeches aimed at prodding Westminster to help the workers of Wigan Pier and drew from them the conclusion that it was also the duty of the government in India to serve the common Indian. Such a thought had not, of course, crossed the minds of those who had set up the government in India for the fun and profit of the indigenes of Ipswich, so that Dhritarashtra found himself drawing the corollary that the Indian government could only fulfil its duty if it were a government of India run by Indians for the welfare of Indians. This modest proposition, Ganapathi, took him far beyond the previous precepts of his party. It was a doctrine persuasively and passionately argued by the unseeing visionary. Within a short while he had captured the ideological heights of an institution low on ideas.

  He did so, of course, because Gangaji’s spectacularly unorthodox successes had shaken up the sterile verities of the party’s past and opened it up for capture. In the old days the only - if sporadically - effective nationalist actions had been the bomb-throwings and the mob agitations from which the party elders had shrunk away. Now, in the actions I have described and innumerable others like them, Gangaji demonstrated that you did not have to be a hooligan to be effective. Non-violence, voluntary courting of arrest, even fasting - these were more acceptable to offspring of respectable families. Constitutionalists could hardly object to one who worked within the laws and willingly accepted the punishment for their violation. Gangaji’s methods stoked the fires of true nationalism among those who had recoiled from violence and lawlessness. It was this warmth that welcomed Dhritarashtra when he began to preach to them. He found them ripe for conversion, and the Hastinapur connection bathed him in the light reflected from Gangaji’s halo. If Dhritarashtra’s socialist beliefs went beyond anything Gangaji himself had ever expressed, there was never any question of the Great Teacher’s endorsement of his sightless protégé. The Kauravas were left in no doubt that Dhritarashtra was Gangaji’s man.

  At the beginning so, of course, was Pandu. In some ways he might have seemed a more natural heir to Gangaji, with his scriptural reading, his personal faddishness, his (albeit enforced) celibacy. Gangaji indulged Dhritar-ashtra and relied on Pandu. It was Pandu who took the party banners into the most remote villages, while Dhritarashtra toured the lecture-halls and the meeting-rooms of urban India. This was, perhaps, inevitable, given both Dhritar-ashtra’s strengths and his handicap. But it did mean that while Pandu trudged in his dhoti through the mud and grime of the countryside, while Pandu led the proletarian processions of stoic satyagrahis on defiant dharnas, while Pandu took the blows on the head from the lathis - the long wooden arms - of the law, Dhritarashtra endured little more than the hoarse barbs of bribed hecklers, the strain of long speeches at mass meetings, the long nights dictating pamphlets to adoring scribes. It was Gangaji who determined, who ratified, who sanctified this division of labour; as a result Dhritarashtra was before long the most famous Indian leader after Gangaji, while Pandu’s following was confined largely to the political activists who had toiled with him in the villages. When, years later, Duryodhani spoke darkly of the immense and unrivalled sacrifices her father and she had made for the nation, I would think of poor Pandu, by then long turned to ash and almost forgotten, poor, tough, scarred, calloused Pandu with the smell of sweat on his brow and the dust of India on his sandals. And I would muse, Ganapathi, on the injustices of Fate.

  Of course Dhritarashtra too made sacrifices for the nation. His cause led as surely to prison as Pandu’s, and both spent years inside British jails. If anything, Dhritarashtra’s sentences as a convict of conscience amounted to longer than Pandu’s. But he turned his incarceration to profit, dictating books and letters (and letters that became books) throughout his stay as a guest of His Majesty, works that revealed again and again to the world his depth of learning and breadth of vision. Prison confined others, but in Dhritarashtra’s case it only confirmed his reputation as India’s leading nationalist after Gangaji. The regularity with which each of his spells in prison resulted in a book led one colonial cartoonist to depict him in the dock addressing a judge: ‘Why did I break the law? Well, Your Honour, my publishers were getting impatient . . .’

  Was it inevitable, Ganapathi, that Pandu should become disaffected? Your ponderous brow, your unblinking eyes, offer no answer. The inevitabilities of history are for ideologues and fatalists, and I suppose I have belonged, at one time or another, to each category. Yes, Ganapathi, it was inevitable. I watched them both, my flawed, gifted sons; I watched them from afar as a humble Kaurava Party worker in the plains; I watched them from nearer as a more distinguished ad hoc member of the party’s High Command; and I saw the inevitability of their separation. Pandu became impatient of Dhritarashtra’s oratorical certitudes, his lofty convictions and vaulting ambition. Dhritarashtra, in turn, had little time for Pandu’s atavistic traditionalism, his political earthi-ness, his pride in his wives’ five boys. (Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.) If Gangaji saw any of this, he showed little sign. He carried on as oblivious as always to the dilemmas of others, doing nothing to heal the growing rift.

  29

  That there was a rift became impossible to conceal. Pandu began to take positions at variance with Dhritarashtra’s. He constantly urged the adoption of a harder line against the British than the party - its strategy guided by Gangaji’s wisdom and Dhritarashtra’s cunning - was willing to adopt. When the Prince of Wales, an empty-headed lad with a winsome smile, paid a royal visit to examine the most prized jewel in the crown he was briefly to inherit, Pandu urged that he be boycotted. But Dhritarashtra instead persuaded the party to permit him to present the Prince a petition (don’t frown, Ganapathi, alliteration is my only vice - and after all, it is one thing you can do in Sanskrit). When the government in London then sent a commission of seven white men to determine whether the derisory ‘reforms’ of a few years earlier were helping Indians to progress to self-government (or whether, as Whitehall thought and wished to hear, the reforms had already ‘gone too far’ and needed reformulating), Pandu proposed a non-violent stir at the docks to prevent the unwelcome seven from alighting on to Indian soil. But this time Dhritarashtra wanted the party to content itself with - yes, Ganapathi, you’ve guessed it - a boycott; and once again, with Gangaji’s toothless smile of benediction behind him, Dhritarashtra had his way. It became apparent to Pandu that Dhritarashtra’s triumphs were basically of Gangaji’s making, and that a large number, perhaps a majority, of the Kaurava Party were backing his half-brother not because of any intrinsic faith in his ideas but because they came with the blessing of the man Sir Richard had taken unpleasantly to describing as Public Enema Number One.

  I myself caught a whiff of Pandu’s bitterness at a Working Committee meeting of the party which I happened to attend. At one point I was talking to Dhritarashtra and the skeletal Gangaji when Pandu walked palely past. ‘The Kaurava Trinity,’ he muttered audibly for my benefit - ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.

  Of course he was exaggerating my own importance, for I sought no active role in the Kaurava leadership. The mantle of elder statesman had fallen on me when I was scarcely old enough to merit the adjective, and I was content with the detachment it permitted. But even my habitual sense of distance from the quotidian cares of the party could not prevent a stirring of disquiet, which was instantly confirmed by Dhritarashtra’s next words. ‘I should have thought,’ he said lightly, but with his face set, ‘that my dear brother would have done better to refer to the Hindu Trinity - the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer. But then he would have had to include himself at the end, wouldn’t he?’

  When rivals fling jokes at each other, Ganapathi, it means that there is no turning back. Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.

  The disagreement came out into the open when the British convened what they called a Round Table Conference in London to d
iscuss the future of India. It is not often that a major international event is named after a piece of furniture, but the round table in question was chosen quite deliberately (and after a great deal of diplomatic deliberation). It served two functions. One, unmentioned, was to hark back to the hosts’ glorious chivalric past under the legendary King Arthur (who, if he existed at all, was a superstitious cuckold, which is hardly my idea of a national hero). The second, openly cited at background briefings for the press, was to place all the participants on an equal footing: to have had a conventional table with a ‘head’ might have implied that the British had their preferences among Indian leaders, and the British, of course, were noble and disinterested Solons who would never want anyone to think such a thing.

  Well, Ganapathi, before you begin to suggest that that is all fine and democratic, let me tell you that the lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious. In this case it meant reducing the Kaurava Party - the only nationwide nationalist movement, the only broad- based popular organization, the very party whose campaigns of mass awakening and civil disobedience had obliged the British at last, at least, to agree to talk with Indians - it meant reducing the Kauravas to a level of official equality with all the other self-appointed Indian spokesmen the British saw fit to recognize. And thus it was that Gangaji sat at his round table to parley with the British, surrounded by delegations of India’s Untouchables and its touch-me-nots, representatives of Indians with their foreskins cut off and Indians with their hair uncut, spokesmen for left-handed Indians, green-eyed Indians and Indians who believed the sun revolved round the moon. Mind you, the Kaurava Party included members of every one of these minorities, and could claim with justice to be able to speak for all their interests, in the larger sense of the term; but the British were not interested in the larger sense at all. They wanted to introduce as many divisive elements as possible in order to be able to say to the world: ‘You see these Indians can never agree amongst themselves, we really have no choice but to continue ruling them indefinitely for their own good.’