The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  Amba would have her revenge at last. But it would not be as Amba, the betrayed beauty of Bhumipur, that she would exact it.

  In a small disreputable clinic in the back-streets of Bombay, behind the quarter where the transvestites flaunt their gender at perspiring clients, beyond the dark betel-stained stairways ascended by pairs of swaying hermaphrodites, Amba stood naked before a sharp-toothed figure in a grimy white coat.

  She spoke to the surgeon in a voice hoarse with strain.

  ‘Take from me these milkless breasts, doctor, seal this unseeded womb. Make me a man, doctor. A man made unlike all other men.’

  61

  The war was over. The destruction, the fire-bombing, the rocket blitzes, the lingering deaths on the battlefields, all ended with a bullet in a Berlin bunker and a thousand suns exploding over Japan. But in India, Ganapathi, the violence was just about to begin.

  It was clear that this was one victory which would cost Britain as much as defeat. The old Empire had been brought to its knees by the effort of self- preservation, like a householder crippled in his successful resistance to a burglar. At the moment of victory, as he was sharing his triumph with his allies, the Prime Minister who symbolized John Bull’s indomitable will was unseated by an electorate that wanted eggs rather than empire and valued indoor gas over imperial glory. When Labour came to power it was evident even to the purblind members of the Society for the Preservation of the Imperial Connection (SPIC) and its marginally more progressive rival the Society for the Promotion of an Anglophile Nationalism (SPAN) that the days of the Raj were numbered. Wearied by war, Britain no longer had the stomach for colonial conflict. His Majesty’s grasp on the reins of his Indian Empire was now noticeably feeble.

  Freed from their disastrous incarceration, the leaders of the Kaurava Party blinked at the sunlight of a new reality. They discovered a nation whose nationalism had been left directionless too long, and a rival organization unrecognizably stronger than it had ever been, newly wise in the ways of power, tested by office and already flexing muscles developed while the Kauravas’ were atrophying in jail. Suddenly, the Independence stakes were a two-horse race, with the two horses aiming for different finishing-posts.

  Elections were called: the democratic way out of the dilemma. The Kauravas did well, but not as well as before. It was not possible to make up for six years away from the field in six weeks of energetic campaigning. The Mahaguru’s men still won a majority of the provinces, but the Muslim Group emphatically carried most of the Muslim seats. In all but one of the provinces where their co-religionists were in a majority, they triumphantly assumed the reins of office - and demanded separation.

  At the twilight hour, the Raj realized what it had done. Divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.

  In a gesture so counter-productive it might almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance of unity. It decided to prosecute Pandu’s traitors, the soldiers who had discarded their Britannic epaulettes for the swastikas of the OO’s Swatantra Sena. Pandu himself was gone, though there were still die-hards who insisted he had not died in the plane crash and was lurking underground on some tropical island waiting to re-emerge at the right time. In either case, the Supreme Leader was not available to be tried, and the Raj had to find scapegoats amongst his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed amongst the main communities, the British chose to place three Panduites on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh.

  The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the defects and the derelictions of Pandu’s unfortunate followers, they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Neither the Muslim Group nor the Kaurava Party had any choice but to rise to the trio’s defence. For the first time in their long careers Mohammed Ali Karna and Dhritarashtra accepted the same brief. The OO trials were the last issue on which the two parties took the same stand. Pandu brought them together in death as he could not have done in life.

  But the moment passed. The defence of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The rival lawyers for the same cause hardly spoke to each other. Karna began to lose interest when he discovered that his Muslim guinea-pig was no fan of Karnistan (indeed, Ganapathi, he was to stay on in India and die a minister). The ferment across the country made the result of the trial almost irrelevant. The men were convicted, but their sentences were never carried out, because by the time the trial was over it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under Labour, was determined to liquidate its Indian Empire.

  By this stage, Ganapathi, the vultures had scented the dying emanations and were already beating their wings for pieces of the corpse. Karna made it clear he had no desire to content himself with a few provincial satrapies. He wanted a country: he wanted Karnistan. When it briefly seemed that the sentimental British were unwilling to contemplate the break-up of the dominion they had so assiduously built, he exhorted his followers to ‘Direct Action’. Several thousand cadavers, burning vehicles, gutted homes, looted shops and rivulets of blood later, everyone except the Mahaguru began thinking about the unthinkable: the division of the motherland.

  Gangaji refused to be reconciled to the new reality. He walked in vain from riot-spot to riot-spot, trying to put out the conflagration through expressions of reason and grief But the old magic was gone. Where he was effective it was in very specific areas for very limited periods of time; against the scale and magnitude of the carnage that was sweeping across the country, he was broadly ineffectual. It was almost as if the Mahaguru and his message had only touched a corner of the national consciousness, a corner reserved for the higher attributes of conscience and historical memory, but one unrelated to the dictates of reality or the needs and constraints of the present.

  History was catching up with itself, and it was running out of breath.

  62

  As the communal strife - the American news-magazines and the British tabloids were already calling it a ‘civil war’ - swept across the country, the British government decided to bring matters to a head. In fact, to a different head: they changed the Viceroy, appointing a new representative with a mandate to negotiate an orderly transfer of power.

  Viscount Drewpad was the right man to give away a kingdom. Tall, dapper, always elegantly dressed, he wore his lack of learning lightly, cultivating a casual patter that impressed anyone he spent less than five minutes with - which was almost everybody. It helped, of course, that in their ruling classes the British valued height more than depth. It helped even more that he was related in at least three ways to the royal family, whose patronymic (like his) had been changed from the German during the unpleasantness of 1914.

  ‘In-jyah! How exciting!’ exclaimed his wife Georgina when he straightened his collar before one of three bedroom mirrors and gave her the news. ‘Aren’t you rather young to be ruling a continent?’

  ‘I won’t be ruling it, dear, just giving it away,’ her husband replied, patting cologne on to his cheek. ‘And, besides, I think they’ve chosen me because I’m young. We’re the glamour brigade, you see, marching forth to the skirl of bagpipes. They can’t send an old dodderer who’d make it look as if we were only leaving India because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’

  ‘Why are we leaving India, then?’

  ‘Because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’ Lord Drewpad picked up a small pair of silver scissors and delicately trimmed the black moustache which, along with his tweezered eyebrows, framed an aquiline nose like the two bars of the capital letter ‘I’. ‘But there are ways and means of pulling out. We’re going to do it in style.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Georgina.
‘India,’ she said dreamily. ‘You took me there on our honeymoon.’

  Lord Drewpad adjusted a cuff and turned to give her an affectionate look. ‘And I wasn’t the only one to, ah, take you there either,’ he pointed out. ‘Now, that sort of thing won’t do, Georgina. You’ll have to remember we’ll be far more visible this time.’

  ‘Bertie, you’ve got a wicked mind!’ Georgina trilled girlishly. Over the years she had bounced on some of the best mattresses in England, with her husband’s amused consent. Now . . . ‘The beds i’ the East are soft,’ she quoted mischievously.

  ‘If you must think of Shakespeare, choose The Taming of the Shrew,’ her husband retorted, combing a recalcitrant curl back into place. ‘Look, Georgina, we have appearances to maintain. I mean, when we’re in India we won’t be just anybody. We’ll be there in a symbolic capacity.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Georgina gurgled. ‘And what will we be symbolizing?’

  ‘Surrender,’ replied Lord Drewpad, putting down the comb and squinting critically at the mirror.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind symbolizing that at all,’ said his wife, lying back languorously on her bed.

  ‘Now, Georgina, none of that,’ her husband warned her waggishly. ‘Remember, withdrawal is the larger theme of our presence.’ He lifted his chin so that the light fell more clearly on it. The shaved skin was still smooth, complementing the first-person-first emblem of the prominent I on the middle of his face. He nodded to himself in approval.

  ‘Tell me about it, dear,’ his wife went on. ‘What does it all mean?’

  ‘In a nutshell, headlines in the papers, footage in the newsreels, tea with the holy Mahaguru in Delhi, a cavalry escort in turbans and braid, and an army of servants,’ Lord Drewpad replied, practising a toothy grin into the mirror. Dissatisfied the first time, he bared his teeth again, more successfully. ‘Jolly good, what?’

  ‘And the work?’ Lady Drewpad asked. ‘Will there be a lot?’

  ‘Good God, they’re not sending me out there to work, Georgina,’ the Viceroy-designate grimaced. ‘There are plenty of civil servants to do that. They re sending me there to give the Raj a great big grand farewell-party. With colour, and music, and lights and costume, and enough pomp and circumstance for the natives to remember us by for a long, long time.’

  ‘Is that what the Labour government wants you to do, Bertie?’ Georgina could not keep the astonishment from her voice.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ Lord Drewpad admitted, critically examining his fingernails. ‘I have an idea they’d probably prefer me to set an example in self- restraint for the ration-ridden populace at home. But once I’m in India, there’s not much they can do about it. You see, the Viceroy doesn’t live off the British taxpayer. Indian revenues are considerable, and I intend us to enjoy them considerably.’

  Lady Drewpad sighed in anticipatory wistfulness. It all sounds delightful,’ she murmured.

  ‘Hmm,’ her husband agreed, busying himself with an emery-board. ‘And the thing is, we’ll be making everybody happy at the same time. The government here, because they want the problem off their hands. The British in India, because after a long time they’ll have a Viceroy - and Vicereine - who will dazzle the natives with an unstinting display of imperial glory. And the Indians, because they know they’ll be getting their country back at the end of it all.’

  ‘Are you sure the Indians won’t mind? All the pomp and ceremony, I mean.’

  ‘Mind? Don’t be silly.’ Lord Drewpad put his fingers out, nodded approbation, and put away the nail-file. ‘Do you know,’ he said in the tone of erudition he habitually used to convey his nuggets of half-knowledge, ‘that the very word “ceremony” comes from India, from the Sanskrit karman, a religious action or rite? What we shall be performing in India is nothing more, and nothing less, than the last rites of our Indian Empire.’ He swivelled on a slippered heel, flashing a dazzling smile: three mirrors smiled back at him. ‘Let this be my epitaph: “Alone amongst his peers, he did not hesitate to stand on ceremony”.’

  ‘Sounds marvellous.’ Georgina purred contentedly. ‘But for now, are you finished, dear? Will you put out the light?’

  Her husband took one last self-satisfied look at his reflection. ‘Yes, I think I’ve done my exercises for the day,’ he said, allowing himself a yawn. ‘Time for bed. Good night, dear.’

  He switched off the lamp with a fragrant hand, plunging the room into darkness, while five thousand miles away in the country he was to rule, the flames of communal frenzy burned brightly across the land.

  63

  The Drewpad viceroyalty was conducted just as Georgina had been promised - in the light of chandeliers and flashbulbs, beneath the glitter of diamond tiaras and shimmering gold braid, and to the tune of the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. The last representatives of His Majesty the King-Emperor were not lacking in company: 913 servants in cummerbunds and scarlet livery attended to their individual needs, from perfumed bathwater to choice chicken breasts for their dogs; 500 horsemen guarded their corporeal persons; 368 gardeners trimmed and watered their manicured lawns (assisted by 50 youths whose sole job was to run about scaring away the crows). On the first day in his new palace Drewpad, in silk sash and gold aiguillettes, his beribboned breast awash with medals and orders he had not had to fire a shot in order to obtain, ambulated in stately fashion down miles of red-carpeted corridor, his satin-gowned consort on his arm, to be sworn in as Viceroy in a ceremony only marginally less elaborate than a coronation. Within hours he embarked with Indian leaders on the negotiations whose breathtaking pace was to characterize his in-candescently brief tenure.

  ‘Five minutes?’ protested a bewildered Dhritarashtra, his stick tripping over the threshold, as he was ushered out of his first meeting with the new Viceroy. ‘Is that all he’s prepared to listen?’

  ‘That’s about as far as his attention-span seems to stretch,’ confirmed Mohammed Rafi, Gangaji’s latest choice as President of the Kaurava Party. ‘Something tells me we’re not going to have an easy time with this man - or indeed much time at all.’

  ‘I have no intention of giving them room to argue,’ the new Viceroy explained to his Vicereine in the relative privacy of her capacious dressing- room, while she divested herself gradually of several lakhs of rupees’ worth of antique jewellery. (He had himself earlier been meticulously undressed, from epaulette to silver boot-buckle, by a winsome aide-de-camp. In the course of a meteoric cavalry career Drewpad had become, in the American phrase, somewhat AC/DC, a proclivity reflected in his choice of A D Cs - and in his indulgence of his wife’s extra-curricular romps.) ‘That’s one mistake my predecessors made - to talk endlessly with these Indian politicians in the hope of arriving at some sort of conclusion. Absolutely hopeless business, of course.’

  ‘But if you don’t talk to them, how will you ever solve the problem?’ asked Lady Drewpad, tilting her head to remove a heavy earring.

  ‘Oh, I’ll talk to them all right,’ her husband responded airily. ‘But I won’t listen to them. All I want to hear from you lot, I’ll tell them, is a yes or a no. We’ve had enough of reconciling different plans for the transfer of power with both groups haggling over each clause.’

  ‘But what if you can’t get the different sides to agree?’

  ‘Not important.’ Lord Drewpad shrugged. ‘We’ll try and charm the blighters into being reasonable, but if they persist in their bloody-mindedness we’ll tell them where to get off. Darling, put that on again, will you?’ He inclined his head towards the diamond tiara which had crowned her golden curls. ‘I want to look at you like that for a moment.’

  She smiled, flattered, and turned to face him. On a sudden impulse, she slipped her blue silk peignoir off her shoulders. There she stood, Ganapathi, as Britannia had first come to us: naked, with outstretched hands, about to place our crown on her head.

  Drewpad took her elegant fingers in his own. ‘How I wish I could present you to all India like this,’ he said. ‘My jewel, in a
crown.’

  She laughed, and tossed her coiffeured head. ‘It might stop them talking, for a while.’

  ‘And then their next words might just be, “Yes”. Several times.’ Drewpad bent to kiss her hands. ‘You’re an essential part of my plans, darling. We’ve got to charm these humourless fellows into being more accommodating. You’re my secret weapon.’

  64

  In another high-ceilinged but considerably darker room in distant Hastinapur, with a small kerosene lantern flickering yellowly in a distant corner, Gandhari the Grim lay dying.

  ‘Has he come?’ The voice was strained and feeble, and Priya Duryodhani, hunched near her mother at the head of the bed, had to lean closer to hear it.

  ‘Not yet, Mother.’ She looked towards the curtained doorway without hope, knowing she would have heard the tap of her father’s stick long before he appeared at the entrance to their room. ‘Word has been sent. He will be coming soon.’

  The faded face seemed to sink deeper into the pillow. I was reminded then of that other night, so many years ago, when Dhritarashtra’s daughter had fought her way into the world.

  ‘Don’t strain yourself, Gandhari,’ I said gently. ‘He must have been detained. You know how things are these days.’

  ‘These days?’ The pale dry lips, highlighted by the bandage that still concealed her eyes, parted slightly in a bitter smile.

  I said nothing. It had been no different in earlier days. The light from the lantern flitted briefly across the shadows.

  ‘Water.’ There was a sudden urgency in the voice. Duryodhani reached for the brass pitcher on a bedside table and poured the lukewarm liquid into a tumbler. Gandhari tried to raise herself, then gave up the effort. Her daughter’s hand quickly interposed itself, half-raising Gandhari’s head, while the other tilted the tumbler towards her mother’s parched mouth. A little water dribbled down Gandhari’s chin.