The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  So India had a new Queen-Empress, anointed a hundred years after the last one. And for a year, maybe two, the Empress’s new clothes shone so brightly, so dazzled the eyes of her observers, that it was impossible to tell what they were made of or whether they were made of anything at all. But then, Ganapathi, they began to unravel.

  *

  And Draupadi Mokrasi was diagnosed as asthmatic, her breath coming sometimes in short gasps, the dead air trapped in her bronchia struggling to expel itself, her chest heaving with the effort to breathe freely . . .

  106

  But before then, before Duryodhani’s raiment, and the nation’s hopes, began to come apart at the seams, there was the brief moment of national glory that came to be known as the Gelabi Desh War.

  When Karnistan was hacked off India’s stooped shoulders by the departing Raj’s pencil-wielding butchers, it was carved like two pieces of prime human meat from the country’s two Muslim-majority areas, choice Islamic cuts for the carnivorous Mohammed Ali Karna. But even if the appropriate Koranic verses were chanted during the operation and the resultant bleeding mess was undoubtedly halal, in the matter of economic and political development - the seasoning, as it were, of Karna’s consecrated cuisine - the two halves were not treated the same way on the national cooking-range. They may both have had their steaks in the Islamic roast, but as far as development went, one was well-done and the other decidedly rare.

  The half that did well was - inevitably - West Karnistan, where Karna had settled during his brief life as a Karnistani. It boasted the best infrastructure, the most important roads, canals and factories. It even had the most vigorous people - the perpetrators and survivors, indeed, of the bloodiest carnage at the time of Partition. The other half of Karnistan, the half where economic bounty was rare, lay in the swampy, humid east, where paddy-fields ripened gradually under an ageless sun, where ancient boats ferried people across terrain so wet the roads had sunk, where art, and music, and song, and culture and - why not admit it? - sleep were valued more highly than energy and industry and killing. The land that became East Karnistan had, in fact, been the site of one of Gangaji’s few successful attempts at communal peace-making before Partition.

  For nearly two and a half decades the people of East Karnistan, who were all ethnically Gelabins (a name that happened to be an anagram, as the West Karnistanis ever hastened to point out, of those notoriously stupid and lazy people, the Belgians) had put up with being despised, neglected and exploited as a concomitant of their shared Islamic nationhood. They had seen the profits of their jute exports pay for luxury car factories in the western half of their country, the bulk of their taxes swell the coffers of western provincial governments, the bodies of their women fill the brothels of the western cities, and the boots of western soldiers tramp their fields and streets in defence of a legal and constitutional order imposed by West Karnistan. They had honoured their moral and economic share of the national loans taken to finance the increasing prosperity of that better half. They had accepted the marginalization of the Gelabin language (which no West Karnistani ever learned, but which several imitated by pouring half a glass of water into their mouths and making bubbling round-lipped sounds, like the fish on which the Gelabins thrived). They had even patiently resigned themselves to the jibes that the West Karnistani creators flung at the eastern procreators. (Sample: ‘When is the only productive period in East Karnistan? Night.’ ‘What is the difference between rabbits and Gelabins? Gelabins are browner.’ ‘Why should electricity never come to East Karnistan? Because if you could put the lights on after dark you would curtail the Gelabins’ principal activity.’ And so on.)

  But suddenly, indeed unexpectedly, after two decades of military rule - stripes and stars on starched uniforms having been the Karnistani equivalent of the electoral tallies that determined India’s political dispositions - the jaded general in power at the time of Duryodhani’s triumph in the battle of the hustings, Jarasandha Khan, decided to call elections. Not having been entirely sober at the moment the decision was made, Jarasandha had omitted to figure out that elections were inconveniently based on the computation of votes, and that therefore the leaders with the most followers came out on top. Since the one inequality in Karnistan that could not be denied was its population balance, and since there were inescapably more Gelabins in Karna’s bifurcated new country than any other group, the attempt at giving Karnistan electoral legitimacy meant that the biggest disadvantage of East Karnistan - its overpopulation - became suddenly its biggest asset. If its people played their electoral cards right, they could win a majority of seats in the new Karnistani Parliament, and they could rule all of Karnistan.

  They did, they did, and they couldn’t.

  They voted overwhelmingly for the Gelabin People’s Party, which won all but one seat in East Karnistan and thus, by sheer arithmetic, a numerical majority in the Karnistan Parliament. The prospect of being ruled by their chattering brown compatriots, however, so appalled the politicians of West Karnistan - and in particular the mercurial Zaleel Shah Jhoota, a procacious autocrat who had managed to convince a majority of West Karnistani voters that he was really a precocious socialist - that they persuaded Jarasandha Khan to declare the election results null and void, declare martial law in the East and lock up all the Gelabin politicians the Karnistani Army could lay their hands and batons on. The few who escaped incarceration promptly reacted by declaring the secession of Gelabi Desh from Karnistan.

  India had no choice but to be involved in the business from the start. For one thing, it separated the two halves of Karnistan the way a surfacing whale separates waves. For another, the repression of the Gelabins following the imposition of martial law sent a panic-stricken flood of brutalized humanity flooding across our borders to create, on Indian soil, the biggest refugee problem the world has ever known.

  I do not know if they moved Priya Duryodhani, those millions of ragged men, ravaged women and ragtag children who with tragic dignity suffered and trudged and struggled their way into the world’s consciences. I do not know if it made her sad or angry to see them huddled under trees, in tents, in enormous lengths of unused piping, wherever they could find shelter from the relentless monsoon and the unrelenting humanitarianism of Occidental zoom- lenses. I do not know if she raged as the world showered platitudes and offers of charity at her while the refugees kept flowing from the bleeding wounds inflicted by Karnistan’s Western Army. I do not know if it was with bitterness or contempt that she spurned these Band-Aids and tranquillizers the world proved more willing to give than the tourniquet she sought, the strong international pressure that alone might force Jarasandha Khan to withdraw his bayonets from the soft Gelabin flesh in which they were so grotesquely stuck. I do not know, Ganapathi, what she felt. But we all know what she decided to do.

  Priya Duryodhani may not have meant it when she declared that all she wanted was for Jarasandha Khan to restore to the Gelabins the basic human decencies that would, above all, prevent more of them fleeing their homes and, in due course, encourage those who had fled to India to return. Her enemies outside the country and her admirers within it suggest these were merely time-buying pieties meant to lull diplomatic opinion while the troops prepared for war. Whatever the truth of the matter, it soon became apparent that Jarasandha, with the menacing figure of Zaleel Shah Jhoota hissing behind him like an under-age Rasputin, had no intention of relaxing his grip on what the Americans so charmingly call the short and curlies of his eastern compatriots. If India wanted to resolve the deadlock, ease the refugee burden on her soil and in the process teach Karnistan the kind of lesson India itself had had to learn not so long ago from Chakra, it would have to march in.

  It did. Priya Duryodhani was no angel,’ but she ordered the Indian Army to strike in what was, in my view, one of only two wars in this century of carnage that can be morally justified. Seventeen days was all it took to sweep across the fields and rivers of East Karnistan and give the miserable millions the
ir Gelabi Desh. For a short while it was to make them less miserable, and for a slightly shorter while it made Priya Duryodhani a national heroine.

  Yes, Ganapathi, India accorded Duryodhani its ultimate accolade: she was not just deified, she was maternalized. This woman who had never married, and who looked incapable of producing or sustaining human life, became known as ‘Ma Duryodhani’ and ‘Duryodhani Amma’ to a people who saw in her the embodiment of the female principle of Shakti, the power and the strength of a national Mother Goddess.

  It was about this time that my dreams started. They were extraordinarily vivid dreams, in full costume and colour, with highly authentic dialogue delivered (for they were clearly set in the epic era of our national mythology) in Sanskrit. Yes, Ganapathi, I dreamt in Sanskrit, and I dreamt of our traditions. Yet my dreams were populated not by the Ramas and Sitas of your grandmother’s twilight tales but by contemporary characters transported incongruously through time to their oneiric mythological settings.

  I dreamt, for instance, of Karnistan’s Jarasandha coming into being like the son of our mythical king Brihadratha - the fruit, quite literally, of his twin wives. Brihadratha’s wives had conceived after years of childlessness by each eating half of a mango given as a boon to their husband by the sage Kaushik, and each had produced half a boy. The two halves had fused into the strong and independent Jarasandha, whose great physical prowess was limited by one fatal flaw - the fact that his body, being a fusion of two separate parts, could, one day, be broken into two again.

  And in my dream Duryodhani was a queen who resolved to conduct the Rajasuya sacrifice and crown herself Empress. She could not do so, however, as long as the wicked and powerful Jarasandha reigned in his twin kingdom; so she sent an expedition, consisting of Bhim the soldier, Arjun the spy and Krishna the thinker (no, Ganapathi, don’t pause, there is no thailor to follow) to destroy Jarasandha.

  Entering his kingdom in disguise, our trio, after the inevitable moments of deception and temporizing diplomacy to put Jarasandha at ease, finally confronted the tyrant. Bhim challenged him to a duel.

  Jarasandha fought bravely, but he was no match for the immense Bhim, who twice tore him apart in the middle and flung him in two to the ground, only to find the pieces fusing together again and Jarasandha returning refreshed to the fray. At last Krishna, the political advisor, caught the dismayed Bhim’s eye, picked up a straw, broke it in half and cast the two pieces in opposite directions. Bhim, catching on immediately, seized Jarasandha with a cry wrenched him apart and flung the two bits away on either side, making it impossible for the halves to reunite.

  Thus, Ganapathi, was Jarasandha slain in my dream, and thus, when I opened my eyes, was Karnistan, the Hacked-Off Land, itself hacked in two.

  *

  And Draupadi Mokrasi knew moments of good health, entire periods when her breath came sweet and clear into her lungs and the radiance of living reddened her cheeks . . .

  107

  My dreams continued, while in the real world around me, Duryodhani dissipated her goodwill, her adulation, her position by revealing she did not know what to do with any of it. Nothing changed in the daily lives of ordinary Indians, who still tilled and toiled to scratch an existence from the country’s exhausted soil or sought pitiable betterment in the foetid city slums. The majority of our people remained illiterate; an overlapping majority remained below a poverty-line drawn lower and lower by Duryodhani’s experts; and an overwhelming majority resigned themselves to being overwhelmed - by their fate, by disease and malnourishment and exploitation, and by the heartless ineptness of the one in whom they had placed their trust.

  It angered me then, as it angers me now, to read Western accounts of Indians ‘starving to death’. If they starved to death, Ganapathi, there wouldn’t be a problem, for they wouldn’t survive to constitute one. They didn’t starve to death, because they slaved and swept and sowed and stood and served and scratched in order to slake the hunger in their bellies, and found just enough to keep alive - underfed, undernourished, undergrown, underweight, un-derclad, undereducated, underactive, underemployed, undervalued and underfoot, but alive. Yet how sympathetically their underdevelopment was understood by Duryodhani’s underlings! Her speech-writers peppered her rhetoric with dutiful obeisance to the wretched of the Indian earth, she proclaimed her democratic pedigree and socialist convictions from every lectern and platform - and she acquired more and more power in their name.

  Ah, Ganapathi, the causes the poor of India lent themselves to in her hands! She squeezed the newsprint supplies of the press because they were ‘out of touch’ with the masses (you see how she remembered Kanika’s conversation with her father), she fettered the judiciary by demanding they be ‘committed’ to the people (whose true needs she, of course, and she alone, represented), she emasculated her party by appointing its state leaders rather than allowing them to be elected (for she alone could judge who best would serve the people). And all this, Ganapathi, while the poor remained as poor as they had ever been, while striking trade unionists were beaten and arrested, while peasant demonstrations were assaulted and broken, all this while more and more laws went on to the statute books empowering Priya Duryodhani to prohibit, proscribe, profane, prolate, prosecute or prostitute all the freedoms the national movement had fought to attain during all those years of my Kaurava life.

  And I dreamt then, Ganapathi, of the great forest fire of our epic. Of Arjun and Krishna, seated by the banks of the Jamuna, being approached by a resplendent figure taller than a coconut tree, his golden skin glowing like a sacrificial flame, his eyes flashing sparks. ‘I am Agni, God of Fire,’ he announces in a portentous voice. ‘Help me consume this forest.’ And our two heroes, the one dark like the night sky, the other fair like the stars, stand at each end of the wood as Agni rages within, preventing the Fire God’s victims from fleeing, slaughtering those who stumble their agonized way towards them, their weapons swinging, scudding, scything through their victims in a blur of light and motion, as Agni burns and crackles and devours each branch, each tree, each jungle creature, and the smoke rises and the trunks fall and the jungle streams boil, and the animals wail as homes become pyres, mynah birds shriek as their singed wings strangulate their song, tigers roar as the flames lacerate their stripes, deer close their gentle eyes and leap in graceful thanatop-sis into the swelling furnace, and Arjun and Krishna, Krishna and Arjun, doing their duty to divinity, refuse to permit escape, turn back the snakes slithering away from the sizzling grass, bar the way to the bears whose charred tails propel them screaming from the cinders of their lairs, kill the howling jackals who try to bound out of the searing circle of heat that engulfs them. And at last, at the end, when Agni is satisfied, and all that remains of the forest is a pile of faintly smoking ashes smouldering blackly amidst the devastation, the Fire God turns to our heroes and thanks them for their faithful defence of his slaughter.

  ‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, ‘ask me for a boon, and you shall have it.’

  It was Arjun who spoke, but Krishna, I believe, who inspired the thought.

  ‘Give us, Agni, the power to create as we have the strength to destroy,’ he said.

  ‘You shall have it,’ Agni responded, ‘but not yet.’

  And then the shining figure of the Fire God shimmered away from them, and my dream was over.

  The Seventeenth Book:

  The Drop of Honey - A Parable

  108

  At last the people rose. Or, as always in India, some of the people rose, led by an unlikely figure who had stepped from the pages - so it almost seemed - of the history books. Jayaprakash Drona emerged from his retreat and called for a People’s Uprising against Priya Duryodhani.

  It was a shock, not least because JD’s son Ashwathaman was still in the Kaurava camp, though increasingly on the margin of it. And for the Prime Minister it was a particularly rude shock, since Priya Duryodhani had done nothing to prevent Drona’s name and image from being kept quietly alive,
like a musty heirloom on a darkened mantelpiece. Drona had even been allowed a brief recent return to the headlines when he was pressed into service by the government to persuade the fiercely moustachioed dacoits of the wild Chambal ravines to give up their violent ways, just as he had renounced his. Drona’s sincerity was so transparent, his own example so transcendent, that many of the dacoits, men with twenty and thirty murders, rapes and abductions each to their name, had actually listened and been converted. Drona had brought them out from their underground hideouts in mind-boggling ceremonies where they had dropped their rifles and gun-belts at his feet before an applauding audience of their victims’ families - and in exchange for nothing more than the promise of a fair trial.