The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  ‘But it was not milk, Sir Richard, that was coming out. It was blood! And in my dream, I could do nothing. I woke shivering, with that cow’s cries ringing in my ears. From that moment I resolved never to drink milk again. The cow is our mother, Sir Richard.’ Gangaji suddenly and earnestly turned to him. ‘Yours and mine. It is written in our scriptures. She provides nourishment and sustenance for us all. Is it right that we should cause her pain?’

  Sir Richard remained speechless.

  ‘Of course it is not. There and then I decided I could not cause her any more suffering. I was determined not to drink milk ever again.’

  He stopped. Sir Richard slowly exhaled. ‘I see,’ he said, not knowing what he saw but relieved he would no longer have to hear.

  ‘But then I fell ill,’ Gangaji added abruptly. ‘The doctors came. They said I needed minerals and protein in an easily accessible form.’ He smiled. ‘Another fine British phrase. I asked them what that meant, and they said I should drink milk. But I told them I could not drink milk. I had taken a vow in my heart never to drink milk again.’

  Sir Richard looked toward the entrance of the room as if for deliverance. Gangaji went on.

  ‘I asked the doctors what would happen if I did not drink the milk they wanted me to.

  ‘”Why, then,” they said, “you will die.”

  ‘”But we will all die one day,” I replied. “What is wrong with that?”

  ‘”It is just that you will die much sooner than if you did drink the milk,” they said to me. “Next week, perhaps.’”

  Sir Richard looked wistfully gratified at the prospect.

  ‘It was then that Sarah-behn came to my rescue,’ the Mahaguru said. ‘I was agonized at the thought of dying with so much work undone, so much left to do. Yet I was determined not to break my vow. I did not know how to resolve this terrible dilemma inside my heart, my soul. Then Sarah-behn said to me, “You must drink goat’s milk.” There I saw I had my answer. Just as nourishing, just as rich in minerals and proteins, yet free of the pain of the sacred mother-cow in my dreams.’

  A footfall sounded faintly in the carpeted corridor, and a liveried khidmatgar entered, bearing a tea-tray. Gangaji accepted an empty cup, waved away the teapot, and allowed Sarah-behn to rise and pour him a cupful of goat’s milk from one of the compartments of the tiffin-carrier.

  A second bearer entered pushing a silver trolley, its filigreed top-rack all but obscured by lace doilies on which rested elegantly laden plates. ‘Some cucumber sandwiches, surely?’ Sir Richard asked in a weak voice. Rarely had his breeding and good manners been placed under such strain. ‘I am sure your . . . er . . . doctors would wish you to have something to eat.’

  An impish smile slowly spread across Gangaji’s face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Sir Richard,’ he said. ‘I have brought my own food.’ His hand disappeared into the voluminous folds swathing his torso and emerged holding a small, golden yellow, perfectly ripe mango. ‘To remind us of a more famous Tea Party,’ he announced. ‘In - Boston, was it not?’

  The Seventh Book:

  The Son Also Rises

  36

  Just look at that, Ganapathi. I begin a section vowing to stay clear of Gangaji, and what does the man do? He takes over the section. As long as he is around it will be impossible for us to concentrate on other people, to dwell on Pandu’s famous five or to pursue the darker destinies of Gandhari the Grim and the steatopygous Madri. In the olden days our epic narrators thought nothing of leaving a legendary hero stranded in mid-conquest while digressing into sub-plots, with stories, fables and anecdotes within each. But these, Ganapathi, are more demanding times. Leave Ganga to his devices and start telling fables about Devayani and Kacha, and your audience will walk away in droves. The only interruptions they will stand for these days are catchy numbers sung by gyrating starlets, and Kacha isn’t catchy enough, more’s the pity.

  So I suppose we may as well continue our tale, Ganapathi: give Gangaji a good run. But in order to do that we have to acknowledge that the Mahaguru was no longer the only runner.

  Yes, Ganapathi, as the story of our impending nationalist victory gathers momentum, so too does a cause which Gangaji had barely begun to take seriously. A cause led by a young man whose golden skin glowed like the sun and on whose forehead shone the bright little half-moon that became his party’s symbol. The cause of the Muslim Group.

  The Muslims of India were no more cohesive and monolithic a group than any other in the country. Until politics intervened Indians simply accepted that people were all sorts of different things - Brahmins and Thakurs and Marwaris and Nairs and Lingayats and Pariahs and countless other varieties of Hindu, as well as Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Indian Anglicans, Jains and Jews, Keshadhari Sikhs and Mazhabi Sikhs, tribal animists and neo-Buddhists, all of whom flourished on Indian soil along with hundreds and thousands of other castes and sub-castes. Indian Muslims themselves were not just Sunnis and Shias, but Moplahs and Bohras and Khojas, Ismailis and Qadianis and Ahmediyas and Kutchi Memons and Allah alone knew what else. These differences were simply a fact of Indian life, as incontestable and as innocuous as the different species of vegetation that sprout and flower across our land.

  We tend to label people easily, and in a country the size of ours that is perhaps inevitable, for labels are the only way out of the confusion of sheer numbers. To categorize people is to help identify them, and what could be more natural in a country as diverse and over-peopled as India than the desire to ‘place’ each Indian? There is nothing demeaning about that, Ganapathi, whatever our modern secular Westernized Indian gentlemen may say. On the contrary, the application of such labels uplifts each individual, for he knows that there is no danger of him being lost in the national morass, that there are distinctive aspects to his personal identity which he shares only with a small group, and that this specialness is advertised by the label others apply to him.

  So we Indians are open about our differences; we do not attempt to subsume ourselves in a homogeneous mass, we do not resort to the identity-disguising tricks of standardized names or uniform costumes or even of a common national language. We are all different; as the French, that most Indian of European peoples, like to put it, albeit in another context, vive la difference!

  And, yes, when there are such differences, we do discriminate. Each group discriminates against the others. Your lot were free to be themselves so long as this did not encroach on my lot’s right to do the same.

  Mutual exclusion did not necessarily mean hostility. This was the prevailing social credo of the time, but there was a high degree of constructive interaction among India’s various communities under these rules. It was, of course, Gangaji who taught us that the very rules were offensive. As with much else that he tried to teach the nation, we did not entirely learn to change our prejudices. But we became most adept at concealing them.

  At any rate - and this is the point of my little sociological lecture, so you can wipe that the-old-man’s-digressing-again look off your face, Ganapathi - we had never taken our social differences into the political arena. Maharajas and sultans had engaged their ministers and generals with scant regard for religion, creed or, for that matter, national origin. Aurangzeb, the most Islamic of the Mughals, relied on his Rajput military commanders to put down rival Muslim satraps; the Maratha Peshwas, the original Hindu chauvinists, employed Turkish captains of artillery. No, Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil serpent who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord.

  Divide et impera, they called it in the language of their own Roman conquerors - divide and rule. Stress, elevate, sanctify and exploit the differences amongst your subjects, and you can reign over them for ever - or for as near to ever as makes no difference. Imagine the horror of the British in 1857 when their paid Indian soldiers revolted, Hindus and Muslims rallying jointly to the standard of the faded Mughal Emperor, deposed princes and
disgruntled peasants making common cause against the alien oppressor. As soon as the national revolt - carefully disparaged by imperial historians as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ - was put down, British officials rediscovered their Latin lessons. Divide et impera was the subject of closely argued policy-minutes; everything had to be done to drive wedges between Indians in the interests of the whites and Whitehall. The British did not have far to look to place their wedges: they found the perfect opportunities in the religious distinctions which India, in its tolerance, had so long and so innocently preserved.

  The strategy was amoral, the tactics immoral. The obvious cleavage to strike upon was between ‘the Hindus’ and ‘the Muslims’. It mattered little that such terms themselves (concealing as they did so many complex divisions and identities) made little sense, nor that they covered groups which had never, in all of India’s political history, functioned as monoliths. It mattered little, because Indians proved only too willing to echo Britain’s political illiteracy and agree to be defined in terms imposed upon them by their conquerors.

  So much for the strategy; but then look at the tactics. The British jettisoned or distorted many of their basic democratic precepts before applying them to India. Take elections, for instance. For a long time, there weren’t any. Indians couldn’t be trusted with the vote. Then, when the first set of ‘reforms’ introduced elections (to inconsequential bodies with absurdly limited powers, elected on the basis of a limited franchise, but still elections) a property qualification was required before you could vote. (The stipulation disenfranchised 90 per cent of Indians, and had been abolished decades earlier in the mother country.) When even the affluent voters showed a distressing tendency to vote for the moderate nationalism of the Kaurava Party, the Raj created ‘separate electorates’ for Muslims to vote for Muslim candidates. That was an example of the enlightened administration of the Raj. In their own benighted Britain they would never have thought of making the Jews of Golders Green queue separately to put a kosher koihai into the House of Commons - but such ideas were too good for the primitive, backward natives they were schooling in democracy. If you want to know why democracy is held in such scant respect by our present elite, Ganapathi, you need only look at the way it was dispensed to us by those who claimed to be its guardians.

  So we had separate electorates, and inevitably the British encouraged separate political parties as well for each divisible minority interest. It did not take much to put up a few puppets to start a political association of, and for, Muslims. Every one of them was the recipient of a British title, a British subsidy, or (as in the case of their first figurehead, an overweight sybarite called the Gaga Shah) both. The Gaga’s Muslim Group could easily have amounted to something. But the only problem was that he and his gigolous grandees were so embarrassingly grateful to their paymasters that they tripped over themselves to protest their undying loyalty to the British Raj, which didn’t exactly help them win the popular esteem of the Muslim masses. The Gaga and his gang made speeches to each other, presented petitions to the British (to ask for the retention of separate electorates) and sailed off every ‘hot weather’ to spend their privy purses on the race-courses of Europe. Meanwhile, most serious Muslim politicians - and, for that matter, many Parsi and Christian notables - joined, supported and led the Kaurava Party.

  So, too, did the man who was one day to lead the Muslim Group to its destiny. Karna emerged on the Kaurava political scene literally out of nowhere. Few things were known about this strange young man whose words glowed like his skin, who maintained a most un-Indian reticence about his origins, his family, his ‘native place’. It was as if he had dawned on the present to shine in the future, while his past existed only in other people’s imagination. But of his brilliance - and ‘brilliant’ was a word universally applied to his appearance, his intellect, his scholastic performance and his speech - there was no doubt.

  He first came to national attention as a flourishing lawyer in Bombay, sharp, suave and self-assured, with a bungalow on Malabar Hill and an accent to match the cut of his Savile Row suits. Who he was, and what had made him, no one precisely knew. Mystery continued to swirl about him like mist at a Himalayan sunrise. He lived alone, seemingly without parents, friends, a background such as all Indians take for granted.

  Inevitably the guessing-games were played, speculative stories floated, rumour-mills ground, till it became impossible to separate confirmed fact from culpable fantasy. For all one knew he was born into his present position, or rode into it on a white charger with nothing behind him but the sun silhouetted on the horizon.

  Ah, the legends that built up around that young man, Ganapathi! Women gushed that he glowed like the sun from the heavens, and his imperviousness to them only made him more refulgent in their eyes. The matronly housewife in the adjoining bungalow swore that the sun emerged each morning from his window, and that on a grey afternoon he had only to appear on the verandah for the clouds to be dispelled. When he walked, crowds parted naturally, and people kept a reverential distance from him as if afraid to be singed by his warmth. The servants whispered that he used no soap or ointment to maintain that golden lustre, which shone untended by human hand. It was said he had all the skills of a classical warrior: some claimed he practised archery in the garden, and could shoot a single mango from a cluster without disturbing the others in the bunch; others spoke of his prowess at riding, recounting how one look from those blazing eyes could quell the most insubordinate of horses at the Mahalakshmi stables. If anyone, in the hushed discussions about him that animated every social gathering so much as breathed curiosity about his unknown origins, someone was bound to retort that there was no point in trying to judge a mighty river by its source. In any case, Karna’s was clearly no common pedigree, and his radiance was only the brighter for being encircled by the lambent touch of the unknown.

  The young man himself did nothing to dispel the myths. The mystery of his past served him well, and as he rose dizzyingly to the pinnacle of Bombay’s legal profession it was his future that attracted more attention.

  Karna’s poise and confidence were matched by his forensic skill. Few dared debate with him and those who did emerged shorn and shredded by his razor- edged tongue. His success in the courtroom brought him wealthier and more influential clients, invitations to speak at public meetings, and seats on major committees. Before long it began to be said that if there was an Indian of his generation born to shine and to lead, it was clearly the illustrious Mohammed Ali Karna.

  Karna had joined the Kaurava Party upon his return from London to set up practice in Bombay as a barrister. He excelled upon its rostrums and soon represented it on various Raj committees and councils. But his view of the nationalist cause was, of course, quite different from Gangaji’s.

  Karna’s concerns were those of the Inner Temple lawyer: Indians had a legal right to be consulted in their governance and he intended to obtain and assert those rights through legal means. It was as a skilled advocate of a constitutional brief that Karna approached his politics. Not for him the sweaty trudges through the mofussil districts, the mass rallies that Gangaji addressed in one or another vernacular; Karna, always elegant and well-groomed, was comfortable only in the language of his education and in the kind of surroundings in which he had acquired it.

  These factors already pointed to a likely divergence from the path the party would take under Gangaji, but the actual incident that prompted Karna’s exit ignited something more visceral in him.

  Something that was destined to set our country ablaze.

  37

  It was a major meeting of the party’s Working Committee, where Kaurava policy and tactics were being discussed. The Gangaji group, already well on its way to dominance of the organization (these were the days, Ganapathi, when Dhritarashtra and Pandu were still comrades-in-arms) was being prevented from carrying the day only by the defiance of Karna, whose scathing sarcasm about the other side was proving, as always, effective. This party is not go
ing to overthrow the British by leading rabble through the streets,’ he was saying. ‘The mightiest Empire in the world, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms, is not going to be brought down by the great unwashed. There is no Bastille to break open, no feeble king to overrun, but a sophisticated, highly trained, deeply entrenched system of government which we must deal with on its own terms. Those terms, gentlemen’ - and here Karna fixed his audience with that steely gaze above which the half-moon on his forehead seemed to throb with a light all its own - ‘are the terms of the law, of familiarity with British constitutional jurisprudence, of parliamentary practice. We must develop and use these skills to wrest power from rulers who cannot deny it to us under their own rules.’

  Karna looked around the table, confirming that every pair of eyes, even the tilt of Dhritarashtra’s unseeing profile, was turned toward him. ‘We cannot hope to rule ourselves by leading mobs of people who are ignorant of the desideratum of self-rule. Populism and demagoguery do not move parliaments, my friends. Breaking the law will not help us to make the law one day. I do not subscribe to the current fashion for the masses so opportunistically advanced by a family of disinherited princes. In no country in the world do the ‘masses’ rule: every nation is run by its leaders, whose learning and intelligence are the best guarantee of its success. I say to my distinguished friends: leave the masses to themselves. Let us not abdicate our responsibility to the party and the cause by placing at our head those unfit to lead us.’

  Of course it was arrogant stuff, Ganapathi, but Karna’s was the kind of arrogance that inspires respect rather than resentment. God knows how far he might have gone, and which direction the Kauravas might have taken, were it not for the knock on the door that interrupted him in full flow.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Karna, sir,’ coughed an embarrassed durwan, ‘but there is a man in a driver’s uniform outside who says he must see you. I explained to him that you were busy and could not be interrupted, but he insisted it was very important. I . . . I . . . er . . . asked him who he was, sir, and he said . . . he said . . he was your father.’