The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  What happened in the end? The question drew me short. The end was not a concept that applied particularly to that story - which, as it happens, involved one of the characters embarking upon another story in which one of the characters tells another story and . . . you know the genre, Ganapathi. But even more important, ‘the end’ was an idea that I suddenly realized meant nothing to me. I did not begin the story in order to end it; the essence of the tale lay in the telling. ‘What happened next?’ I could answer, but ‘what happened in the end?’ I could not even understand.

  For what, Ganapathi, was the end? I know where our modern Indians have acquired the term. It is a contemporary conceit that life and art must be defined by conclusions, consummations devoutly to be wished and strived for. But ‘the end’ isn’t true even in the tawdry fictions that reified the phrase. You want one of those Hollywood films that conclude with the hero and heroine in a passionate clinch, you watch the titles on the screen announce ‘The End’, and you know perfectly well even before you have left the hall that it is not the end at all: there are going to be more clinches, and a wedding, and more clinches, and tiffs and arguments and quarrels and perhaps saucers flying against the wall; there will be the banalities of breakfast and laundry and house-cleaning, the thoughts of which have never crossed the starry-eyed heroine’s mind; there will be babies to bear and burp and birch, with flus and flatulence and phlebitis to follow; there are the thousand mundanities and trivialities that are sought to be concealed by the great lie, ‘they lived happily ever after’. No, Ganapathi, the story does not end when the screenwriter pretends it does.

  It does not even end with the great symbol of finality, death. For when the protagonist dies the story continues: his widow suffers bitterly or celebrates madly or throws herself on his pyre or knits herself into extinction; his son turns to drugs or becomes a man or seeks revenge or carries on as before; the world goes on. And - who knows? - perhaps our hero goes on too, in some other world, finer than the one Hollywood could create for him.

  There is, in short, Ganapathi, no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary invention of the teller, but there can be no finality about his choice. Today’s end is, after all, only tomorrow’s beginning.

  I was struggling inarticulately with these thoughts when the boy’s mother returned to drag him off to bed. Saved by the bed! ‘I shall tell you tomorrow,’ I promised the impatient child. But of course I never did, and I fear the boy thought me a very poor story-teller indeed.

  Or perhaps he grew to understand. Perhaps, Ganapathi, he came to manhood with the instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. That we are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is. Or, to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequels to history. All our books and stories and television shows should end not with the words ‘The End’ but with the more accurate ‘To Be Continued’. To be continued, but not necessarily here . . .

  Ah, Ganapathi, I see I disappoint you once more. The old man going off the point again, I see you think; how tiresome he can be when he gets philosophical. Do you know what ‘philosophical’ means, Ganapathi? It comes from the Greek words phileein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, Ganapathi. Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling defect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes. Whereas wisdom, true wisdom, is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

  I do not pretend to such wisdom, Ganapathi. I am no philosopher. I am a chronicler and a participant in the events I describe, but I cannot accord equal weight to my two functions. In life one must for ever choose between being one who tells stories and one about whom stories are told. My choice you know, and it was made for me.

  My choice you know, and it was made for me.

  Does the river ask why it flows to the sea?

  I share with you a fragment of experience -

  Embellished no doubt, a figment of existence;

  But it is true.

  It moves me, I do not control it.

  When the pantheon marches, can the police patrol it?

  It is a shard of ancient pottery -

  Awarded to a spade as if by lottery;

  But it is true.

  The song I sing is neither verse nor prose.

  Can the gardener ask why he is pricked by the rose?

  What I tell you is a slender filament,

  A rubbing from a colossal monument;

  But it is true.

  I claim no beginning, nor any end.

  Does a tree in the wind know why it must bend?

  The picture I show you has colour and cast

  A snip from a canvas impossibly vast;

  But it is true.

  I am not potter, nor sculptor, nor painter, my son.

  Do the victor or loser know why the race must be won?

  I am not even kiln, not hand, no, not brush;

  My tale is recalled, words plucked from the crush -

  But it is true.

  It is my truth, Ganapathi, just as the crusade to drive out the British reflected Gangaji’s truth, and the fight to be rid of both the British and the Hindu was Karna’s truth. Which philosopher would dare to establish a hierarchy among such verities?

  Question, Ganapathi. Is it permissible to modify truth with a possessive pronoun? Questions Two and Three. At what point in the recollection of truth does wisdom cease to transcend knowledge? How much may one select, interpret and arrange the facts of the living past before truth is jeopardized by inaccuracy?

  I see once again the furrow of incomprehension on your brow Ganapathi, wrinkled there by the frown of impatience. The old man is being wilfully obscure, your forehead grumbles.

  Do not seek to answer these questions, my friend. I shall not pose them again.

  Instead, Ganapathi, we shall return to the story.

  47

  But to which story shall we return?

  Shall I tell of Karna’s dramatic rise to national importance through his dominance of the Muslim Group? Of the mass meetings he began to address, in impeccable English, with robed and bearded mullahs by his side, speaking to Muslim peasants to whom he seemed as foreign as the Viceroy, and who yet - another Indian inconsistency - hailed him as their supreme leader? Shall I speak instead of Gangaji, unwithered by increasing age, but often resting one arm on his sturdy Scottish sister as he walked to his prayer-meetings, Gangaji whose message turned increasingly to love and peace and brotherhood, even as foreign journalists and photographers clustered round him in droves to make him a global legend? Or of Dhritarashtra, the man to whom the Mahaguru left the political leadership of the Kaurava Party while he devoted his own time to the moral and spiritual values that informed his cause? Dhritarashtra, who derived his ultimate authority from a man whose basic beliefs he did not share, but whose benediction had made him the unquestioned heir-apparent to the Kaurava crown? Or should I turn instead to Pandu, my disenchanted son, and tell you of the rebellion of the man whose victory, unlikely though it always seemed, might have changed the course of our history?

  He was no smooth politician, my pale son; he had no head for the philosophical niceties of his trade, the intellectual arguments over right and left and right and wrong. Pandu was in the Kaurava movement to overthrow the British, and he was not convinced that Gangaji’s methods - endorsed, as he saw it, opportunistically by Dhritarashtra - were working, or working quickly enough. As we have seen, the anointment of his blind half-brother as Crown Prince rankled deeply; but it was the abandonment of the mango agitation just when it seemed to be achieving results that led Pandu to break ranks. He announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Kaura
va Party at its next annual session.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Dhritarashtra, leaning heavily on his cane, his voice laden with anxiety, asked the Mahaguru. ‘I had thought my re-election was assured.’ He sucked in his sallow cheeks in an expression of dismayed petulance. ‘Unopposed,’ he added.

  ‘So had I, my son,’ Gangaji replied, untroubled. ‘This is most unfortunate. But do not worry about it.’

  ‘Do not worry?’ Dhritarashtra almost choked on the words. ‘Do you know the kind of support he can muster on his rabble-rousing platform? I could even - lose.’ He spoke the unmentionable word with a shudder: it expressed an unthinkable thought.

  ‘A possibility that has occurred to me,’ the Mahaguru responded equably.

  ‘We can’t allow it to happen,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘You must speak to him.’

  ‘I have already done so.’ The Mahaguru’s response was casual.

  ‘And?’ Dhritarashtra could not keep the eagerness out of his voice.

  ‘He will not be moved.’ The Mahaguru held himself very still when he spoke these words. ‘He assured me of his complete respect and devotion - that is always a very bad sign, V.V., is it not? - but told me very gently and firmly that his candidacy was irrevocable.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  This time it was I who answered. ‘Time for a change. Need for renewal in the party. New ideas about the direction of the movement. His slogan is “A Time for Action”. People are listening to him.’

  Dhritarashtra let out a long and bitter sigh. ‘The bastard,’ he breathed.

  ‘So are you, don’t forget,’ Gangaji retorted, allowing himself an idiosyncratic chuckle. ‘Eh, V.V.? And the legitimacy of his aspirations is not in doubt. But do not worry, my son. I have no intention of risking your humiliation at the election.’

  I imagined Dhritarashtra’s eyes lighting up behind those dark glasses. ‘So you will speak to some leaders - make it clear you support me for the post?’

  ‘I have no intention of risking my own humiliation either,’ Gangaji replied briskly. ‘No, that is not what I had in mind.’

  ‘Then what, Gangaji?’ the note of despair was back in his tone.

  ‘You will step down,’ the Mahaguru said. ‘Gracefully.’

  Dhritarashtra looked as if he had been struck by his own cane.

  ‘You will behave as if you never had any intention of seeking re-election,’ the Mahaguru went on. ‘You will explain that you do not believe it is healthy for the party that one man hold the presidency for too long. A single one- year term, for instance, would be preferable. Perhaps two. Of course, you have had three, but that was wrong and you do not want to see the mistake repeated. You welcome other candidacies.’

  ‘You just want me to give in,’ Dhritarashtra breathed.

  Gangaji ignored the remark. ‘There will, of course, be another candidate. Not you. Not, in fact, anyone particularly well-known in the country. Perhaps an Untouchable - I mean a Child of God. He will be a more appropriate symbol for the party than another former princeling. And I shall let it be known that that is my view.’

  A glimmer of understanding lightened my sightless son’s features. ‘So you’re not going to let Pandu get away with this.’

  ‘I think this would be the most judicious way of meeting this challenge to the authority of the party leadership,’ Gangaji said. ‘I do not know whether my discreet support for the other candidate will prevent an undesirable result. But should it fail, it will not be my closest follower and - what is the word they use? - protégé who will have been defeated.’

  ‘And should it succeed?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, we shall have just the sort of president we need,’ Gangaji said. ‘A symbol. What, after all, is the presidency? It is a title that confers a degree of presumed authority on the holder. The British King, too, has such a title. But he is not the most powerful man in England.’

  ‘Of course’, said Dhritarashtra. The colour was returning to his cheek.

  ‘Whoever wins the presidency, the party must prepare itself for the future,’ the Mahaguru went on. ‘There are changes in the offing, constitutional changes, for which the party must be ready. My last talk with the Viceroy has paved the way for the establishment of a new political system. Partial democracy, it is true. But our friends in the civil service have helped advocate our cause. Vidur has done his work well. Indians will hold elected office in the provinces, even if with limited powers. All our efforts have come to some good. The British know they cannot continue to arrest us, to lathi-charge us. They have to give us a share in their system. The passage of the Government of India Act by the British Parliament now seems assured.’

  We knew all this already, but Gangaji undoubtedly had a good reason for reminding us of what we knew. ‘Our sights must now be set on the governments to be formed in the provinces. They are a stepping stone to a central government one day, a dominion government for all of India, a government of Indians. The Indians who will make up that national government of the future are the ones the British will want to talk to. It will not matter what title they hold - certainly not that of a rotational party presidency. The British, my dear Dhritarashtra, will be less interested in who is president today than in who might be prime minister tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course, Gangaji,’ my blind son replied humbly.

  Of course. For the Mahaguru was right, as always. Dhritarashtra could afford to step aside from the presidential fray, and aim higher.

  The Ninth Book:

  Him – Or, The Far Power-Villain

  48

  Pandu did not merely stand for the presidency in the traditional idiom - he ran for it. He waged an energetic and aggressive campaign amongst the delegates to the All-India Kaurava Committee. Those who had trudged with him through the villages, those who had stood in his orderly phalanxes of protestors to bear the bamboo blows of the British, those who had marched and sweated and suffered outside the range of the cine-cameras, at last found in him one of their own kind to vote for. The visible leadership of the party had always come from the highly educated, highly articulate stratum of lawyers and men of property, who had had themselves elected by the rest. Even Gangaji, who had broadened the party’s support and given it a mass base, had done little to change the pattern at the top, where a handful reigned, derided as ‘party bosses’ by the British and hailed as ‘people’s leaders’ by the Kauravas. (Observe, Ganapathi, how the cynic’s élite is the revolutionary’s vanguard. Your tyrant is my inspiring leader; one man’s slave is another’s disciplined adherent to the cause. So it is that democracy produces oligarchs, and mass is always ruled by class.) In the first election featuring candidates from the ranks, Gangaji’s handpicked Godchild was too obviously a stalking- horse to be convincing. The Mahaguru dropped some hints, but did not allow himself to venture too far out on a limb. As the campaign progressed the way of my pale son, Gangaji’s ‘days of silence’ increased. So Pandu, the former princeling, became the first President of the plebeians.

  For a brief moment we all inhaled the whiff of revolution. Pandu made a stirring speech of acceptance, promising action in place of inaction. He was careful not to say the slightest word against the Mahaguru; indeed, he expressed his unbounded reverence for the party’s mentor and spiritual guide. But the very phrasing of his praise implied that his respect for Gangaji did not extend to his political methods. And his constant exhortations to break new ground were couched in terms that the Mahaguru’s (and Dhritarashtra’s) admirers could never accept, even if they brought sections of the crowd to their feet, clapping and whistling.

  It was exhilarating, Ganapathi, but it could not last. However right Gangaji had been in the strategic sense when he implied that the presidency did not matter, he could not wish away the prominence that the position gave Pandu. The excitement of his supporters at Pandu’s election posed a threat that could not be allowed to grow. From the expressions on the faces of the others it was clear to me that Pandu’s presidency would destro
y either the party or him.

  The Mahaguru was never one to tolerate divisiveness. And he said as much, in one of his characteristically long and complex letters, to the new President of the Kaurava Party, who saw the text in the newspapers a day before the letter reached him.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Pandu said when he read it. ‘Which is why I would appreciate it, Gangaji, if you would urge the recalcitrant elements of the party to rally around their elected President, instead of making such divisive noises.’ He wrote that down in more diplomatic terms, posted it to the Mahaguru’s ashram and released it to the press a day later.

  Gangaji didn’t particularly care for this reply. ‘The roots of division must be traced deep in the soil,’ he declared in an editorial in his weekly newspaper. ‘It will not do merely to cut off its branches.’

  ‘Divisiveness and disloyalty do not flourish in the bright heat of the sun,’ Pandu said sententiously to a peasant rally the following week. ‘They grow in the shade afforded them by the leafy boughs of an old banyan tree.’

  The first moves had been made in an elaborate game of chess. But if chess is so much more civilized than boxing - one sport to which Indians have never taken - its attraction for us lies in the careful unfolding of calibrated stratagems, the open warnings to be on guard, the ever-present possibility of an honourable draw: the very things pugilism does not permit. The contest between Gangaji and Pandu, however, admitted of no defensive moves, no side-steps toward stalemate; from the moment it began, a knockout punch was the only objective. It was a match in which, for either side, no draw was possible.

  ‘There is an old Indian proverb,’ Gangaji told a blond photographer from Life magazine who was taking notes as well as snapshots of the great man. ‘It says, “United we stand, divided we fall.”’

  ‘But that’s an old American proverb,’ the blonde blinked.