The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  I do not know what saddened me more, the fact of the Prime Minister of free India arresting her political opponents, or the fact of their surprise at their own arrest. Drona’s astonishment at being taken away confirmed the extent to which he was living in the past. All he could bring himself to say was a Sanskrit phrase that had been coined two thousand years earlier, the same phrase that had sprung to Gangaji’s lips at the Bibigarh Gardens all those years ago: ‘Vinasha kale, viparita buddhi.’ You may remember from that occasion, Ganapathi, that the Greeks had an equivalent: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’ Questioning the sanity of the victor is the only course open to any civilization defeated by forces it cannot understand.

  I was not honoured with a pre-dawn knock on my door. Priya Duryodhani evidently considered me too old to be worth locking up. But that was not why I failed to join the chorus of condemnation that was raised in the Western press and in Indian drawing-rooms about what had happened. You see, Ganapathi, I was sensitive to the excessive formalism of some of the attacks on the Siege: the critics seemed to think that democracy had been overthrown, without paying much heed to the content of that democracy or the results of its abrogation. I could not, at that stage, think of the issue simply as one of freedom versus tyranny. Yes, Duryodhani’s motives in proclaiming a state of Siege, arresting a number of opponents and imposing censorship on the press were primarily cynical and self-serving: without these steps she would not have been able to contain the mounting pressures on her to resign. But I still believed that the political chaos in the country, fuelled by Drona’s idealistic but confused Uprising which a variety of political opportunists had joined and exploited, could have led the country nowhere but to anarchy.

  The Siege was accompanied by the declaration of a twenty-point socioeconomic programme which the government seemed determined to implement. With strikes and political demonstrations banned, there was a new sense of purpose where earlier there had been drift and uncertainty. In the slothful, yet oh-so-vital world of officialdom, the officialdom in whose hands rests the hope of progress for so many of our helpless poor, habitual absentees were reporting for work all over the country; in some government offices they suddenly discovered a shortage of chairs, so long had it been since they were last all occupied. I felt (and said openly to an anxious Arjun, whose very expression in those days betrayed the discomfort of his posture on the horns of this dilemma) that if the Siege, however base its basic motive, was going to permit the government to serve the common man far more effectively than before, then people like us, who had lost the freedoms we alone knew how to exercise, had no right to object. The purpose of democratic government was the greatest good of the greatest number, and I had no doubt that more Indians would benefit from the abolition of bonded labour and the implementation of land reforms than would suffer from the censorship of articles, however well Arjun could write them.

  And then, Ganapathi, I had the old politician’s regard for the wishes of the people. The declaration of the Siege, the arrests of the agitators, the silence in the streets, had been accepted by non-political India without a murmur. The only sound that replaced the months of clamour appeared to be the deflating hiss of a long public sigh of relief.

  ‘It’s strange, VVji, this silence,’ said Arjun. ‘Even as a journalist I had come to think that India without politics would be like Atlantis without water.’

  ‘Why “even”?’ I leaned back comfortably on my bolsters. ‘It’s precisely you journalists who’ve contributed to that feeling. Is there any limit in your newspapers to the amount of space you allocate to politics? Your news columns, and much of your editorial pages, are inundated with reports of speeches, clashes, accusations and counter-accusations, by-elections, resignations, defections, appointments, walkouts, rallies, padayatras, satyagrahas, fasts, demonstrations, attempts to court arrest, charges of breaching party discipline, show-cause notices, expulsions, party splits. Every other day there is at least one account of a provincial political “leader” with several hundred followers (it is always “several hundred”) crossing over to another party and swearing allegiance to his former rivals in the presence of one of its national netas. To someone like me, who can’t get out of this room as often as I used to and who must depend more and more on what the newspapers tell me about the world outside - though, thank God, they are not my only sources - it would seem from the newspapers that Indian life consists almost exclusively of a bewildering variety of forms of political behaviour.’

  ‘It’s what the readers want,’ Arjun said defensively. Defensiveness had become something of a second nature to him these days.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I barked cheerfully. ‘Most Indian readers have learned to skim through such accounts, though they provide considerable fodder for the likes of me The truth is that surfeit has bred cynicism: we have all read and heard too much for too long to take it very seriously.’

  ‘It wasn’t always like this, was it, VVji?’

  ‘Not in the nationalist movement. Then, everybody cared.’ I caught myself slipping into the righteousness of the terminally nostalgic, and changed my tone. ‘Of course, the issues were different then. But when we were fighting for independence we were fighting also for participation in the parliamentary democracy from which we felt excluded. When we won freedom it was almost axiomatic that we had won ourselves a parliamentary democracy too. For all Dhritarashtra’s sins and limitations that was one conviction he never betrayed. Even though - or perhaps because - he let no one else come near to being Prime Minister, he constantly reaffirmed and encouraged the institution of parliamentary democracy in the country. But the poor boy couldn’t see that behind the solid facade of the edifice, the rooms were empty.’ I shook my head. ‘We Indians, Arjun, are so good at respecting outward forms while ignoring the substance. We took the forms of parliamentary democracy, preserved them, put them on a pedestal and paid them due obeisance. But we ignored the basic fact that parliamentary democracy can only work if those who run it are constantly responsive to the needs of the people, and if the parliamentarians are qualified to legislate. Neither condition was fulfilled in India for long.’ I smiled a humourless and toothless smile. ‘Today most people are simply aware of their own irrelevance to the process. They see themselves standing hopelessly on the margins while the professional politicians and the unprofessional parliamentarians combine to run the country to the ground.’

  I paused, fatigued by my own dismay, and poured myself a tumbler of water from a pitcher beside me. Arjun got up to help me, but I waved him away and went on.

  ‘What we have done is to betray the challenge of modern democracy. You have to understand, Arjun, that the political and governmental process in our country has always been distant from the vast mass of the people. This has been sanctified by tradition and reinforced by colonialism. The picture of political power portrayed in the Arthashastra is that of a remote authority no more accessible to the common man than the institutions of later imperial rule. Two hundred years of the British Raj underscored the detachment of ordinary Indians from the processes of their own governance. Perhaps Gangaji’s greatest achievement was that he made the people at large feel they had a stake in the struggle for freedom. Under him the nationalist movement inspired a brief surge of enthusiasm which overcame the general apathy, but it has all faded away.’ I shrugged. ‘Indians learned to talk about politics like Englishmen about the weather, expressing concern without expecting to do anything about it.’

  ‘And now they accept the loss of their politics without demur,’ Arjun mused.

  ‘Exactly. Not so surprising after all, is it?’ I laughed, without either amusement or bitterness. ‘But Arjun, we Indians are notoriously good at being resigned to our lot. Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story - a marvellous fable from our Puranas that illustrates both our resilience and our self-absorption in the face of circumstance.’ I
sat up against my bolsters and assumed the knowingly expectant attitude of those who are about to tell stories or perform card tricks. ‘A man, someone very like you, Arjun - a symbol, shall we say, of the people of India - is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak, and bends dangerously. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it; before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape? Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry, and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. What is our hero to do? As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass growing on the wall of the well. On the top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What action does our Puranic man, our quintessential Indian, take in this situation? He bends with the branch, and licks up the honey.’

  I laughed at the strain, and the anxiety, on Arjun’s face. ‘What did you expect? Some neat solution to his problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachhan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly, Arjun. One strength of the Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved, and it learns to make the best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, Arjun, India as we know it could not survive.’

  But for all my certitudes, I knew, and I knew Arjun knew, that what I had said wasn’t really an answer to his dilemma. He looked at Priya Duryodhani’s Siege and felt the need to make a choice, while I could only explain how to avoid one.

  112

  And so we talked; and I can tell you, Ganapathi, that we were not the only ones. Duryodhani censored the press, stifled public debate, and placed restrictions even on the reporting of the speeches of the few Opposition stalwarts left in the House to criticize the new laws she was bulldozing through Parliament like the steel-rimmed chakras of an invincible juggernaut. (Yes, spell that the British way, Ganapathi. The juggernaut of their dictionaries has only a distant connection to the Jagannath of our devotees.) Yet everything that it was illegal to say in public was now said in private. Opinions flowed from Indian tongues like the Ganga through Benares: profuse, stimulating and muddied with other people’s waste matter. From village tea-shops to urban coffee houses, Indians gave whispered rein, sometimes punctuated by prophylactic glances over their shoulders, to their imaginations.

  Often these opinions, like the people who expressed them, had no visible means of support, but then Indian opinions are rarely founded on any sense of responsibility or any realistic expectation of action. For all her canny cynicism, Duryodhani had failed to make one simple discovery about the people she ruled: that you could let them say what they liked without feeling obliged to do something about it. There was no need for the censorship she had clamped upon the political commentaries of the élite. In India, the expression of private opinions was no proof of the existence of a viable and demanding public opinion.

  Yes, Ganapathi, that was one of the ironies of Duryodhani’s experiment with authoritarianism - it was more authoritarian than it needed to be. She could have let the newspapers write what they wanted, and it would have changed nothing. Instead, the very fact that they could no longer write what they wanted became a burning issue to those for whom conversation was now the only outlet.

  And as so often in Indian life, Ganapathi, indeed as so often in this story, the really important issues were worked out not in action but through discourse. That is how we seek to arrive at objective perceptions in a land whose every complex crisis clamours for subjectivity. If we were to try to find our ethics empirically, Ganapathi, we would for ever be trapped by the limitations of experience: for every tale I have told you, every perception I have conveyed, there are a hundred equally valid alternatives I have omitted and of which you are unaware. I make no apologies for this. This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine. But you cannot derive your cosmogony from a single birth, Ganapathi. Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.

  How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! This is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarian. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. This is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.

  Yet one day, at the end of another intense conversation with an increasingly troubled Arjun, I found it impossible to sustain my comfortable ambivalence.

  I was in full flow about the state of Indian politics, trying to convince myself as much as Arjun that what had been lost was not worth keeping - that Indian democracy had become so atrophied and the people so divorced from it that Priya Duryodhani’s Siege didn’t really deserve to be condemned. (It was, Ganapathi, a typical case of mind over matter - if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.) Then, suddenly, Arjun spoke in a tone of greater conviction than he had ever used in the preceding months of one-woman rule. You’ve got to be wrong, VVji,’ he said with infinite sadness. You’ve got to be wrong, or the whole world wouldn’t make sense any more.’

  113

  The whole world wouldn’t make sense any more. I think it was those words, spoken in soft sincerity by the purest of the Pandavas, that penetrated my conscience so deeply that they shattered the careful equilibrium I had constructed there, fragmented my complacency like a breaking mirror. Did my world, I found myself silently asking, make sense any more? Had I, in my Brahminical ambivalence, twisted and turned so cleverly that I had failed to stay in the same place, slipping unnoticed to a different mooring? Had I not seen, or worse, pretended not to see, that the sun and the moon and the stars of my world were no longer shining where they had always shone before?

  Oh, Ganapathi, there was no escaping from these questions! I tried to tell myself that the answers were irrelevant, that the questions simply had to be asked differently. But I knew, as you too may well have guessed, that however flexibly I had sought to define the truth, however safely I had delimited my world, I had spent too long avoiding all thought of one facet of my world, one shining visage, one person. Yes, Ganapathi, you are right, you have caught me in my self-deception: for too many hours now, and too many pages, I have failed to make any reference to Draupadi.

  What can I tell you, Ganapathi? Can I look into the hurt in her eyes and claim it didn’t matter? Can I acknowledge the little cuts and bruises and burns I had spotted on her arms and hands and face at each visit to her home and dismiss them, as Kunti did, as minor kitchen mishaps? Can I admit the terrible suspicion that her own husbands were ill-treating her, exploiting her, neglecting her, even ignoring her, and still excuse myself for having done nothing about it? Can I recall the sagging flesh that had begun to mask her inner beauty, the lines of pain that had begun to radiate from those crystal-clear eyes, the tiredness in the normally firm voice, and allow myself to pretend that I had noticed none of it, that none of these things, perhaps not even Draupadi herself, was real?

  I cannot, Ganapathi, and yet I must turn away from reality. Because when Arjun’s gentle words smashed my mental equipoise and forced me to think of Draupadi, I began again to dream.

  114

  I dreamt once more of legends past, of shimmering palaces and moustachioed men in shining brass armour and princesses glowing with gold
bangles and scented garlands; of glorious Hastinapur, home of my ancestors. I dreamt of long-dead Dhritarashtra, restored to unseeing life, on a kingly throne; of sharp-faced Duryodhani, his crowned heiress; of righteous Yudhishtir and the Pandava brothers; and of the beautiful, fresh-faced Draupadi, their common wife.

  I dreamt, too, of Karna, the Hacker-Off, strong and proud; of his unacknowledged mother, the widowed Kunti; of the brilliant smile of Krishna, still distant in Gokarnam, but with his far-seeing eye never straying from the events in Hastinapur. And I dreamt of the sinister slimy Shakuni, rubbing hands from which a profusion of rings gleamed, as he approached the Princess Duryodhani in a sibilant whisper.

  ‘I have a plan,’ he breathed. ‘A plan that will trap the Pandava brothers like five fish in a net.’

  ‘Oh, tell me, Shakuni,’ Duryodhani responded eagerly.

  ‘You want to defeat Yudhishtir, but he cannot so easily be beaten on the battlefield. For this reason we have been searching for another stratagem. I believe I have found it.’

  ‘Yes?’ Duryodhani could have been a maiden waiting for the announcement of a suitor’s name, so excited did she sound.

  ‘Yudhishtir likes to play dice.’ Shakuni saw the blank look on the princess’ face and spelt the word for her. ‘Dee - eye - she - eee, dice. You know, the little ivory cubes with dots on them.’

  ‘Ah, yes. But what has his playing dice got to do with . . .?’

  ‘Everything. As a noble of Hastinapur, he cannot in all honour refuse to accept a challenge from me to play dice. For stakes. Very high stakes.’ Shakuni’s eyes rolled heavenwards.

  ‘I think I’m beginning to understand.’ Duryodhani’s voice took on a girlish tremor. ‘I suppose you play dice rather well, Shakuni.’