‘Yes. I was imprisoned during the non-cooperation movement. I was young then. It was harder then, too. I was charged with shouting out “Hail to the Motherland”.3 These days, political prisoners get fewer beatings.’
Shekhar looked at him from head to toe once again. No, there was no shame in confessing my ignorance to this serious young man. He said, ‘Are political prisoners different? I don’t really understand all this.’
Vidyabhushan smiled. ‘It’s no big thing—you’ll catch on soon enough. Prison is a good college. I was sentenced to caning so when I felt the rod I understood some things very quickly. You get a degree in character here, definitely. But many fail.’ His face became serious.
‘Hmm.’
Suddenly remembering something, Vidyabhushan said, ‘Right. We aren’t going to be kept together, but we are going to be allowed to meet during the day. That’s what they decided. That should be fine, too.’
‘And what about the trial?’
‘My brother came to see me today. A lawyer has been hired; he’ll meet all of us tomorrow. That’s when we can decide what to do next.’
He was suddenly overwhelmed by a hope that someone—not anyone, but Shashi!—might come to see him . . . His brother might come, but if Shashi came—could come . . .
The three other friends had arrived. They met, Shekhar learned their names, looked them over from top to bottom and determined that they didn’t measure up to Vidyabhushan; they may very well have been fine volunteers, but there was nothing special about them that would make them emerge from prison improved. And he found it very easy to go on talking while thinking about the possibility of Shashi coming . . . He wasn’t too worried about life in prison—the condition of daily life there wasn’t as bad as the one he had proposed as punishment for himself during adolescence . . . The days would pass—his body was tough enough; true, the Fates were not under his control and they were so unhappy that . . .
*
The charges began to be read out. The lawyer explained to Shekhar that it was unnecessary to worry, no charges would really hold up—except possibly for one, the one about interfering in the work of a government official; and that one not because of the evening incident, but because of the incident at the night arrest . . . The policemen could say that they had gone there for official business when he had stopped them and argued, et cetera. . . . But even without this reassurance, Shekhar’s interest in the court proceedings waned somewhat. Prison had opened up a new world of sorts and there were so many questions rearing up inside him that he couldn’t worry about the questions and answers asked in the courtroom . . . It seemed to him that he was looking at this prison world from inside a prism;4 the many forms and many colours of each scene would appear to him in multiple directions, and it became impossible to tell which was real, which was a lie . . . All of the gauges that he had relied upon until now were rendered useless; he was learning a new and terrible reality, that everything was real, everything was a lie, everything was good and everything was bad . . . And even now he could see that all determinations about aims and plans had to rely on idealism alone, but that idealism could not remain standing on a foundation of tired ideals—there needed to be a revolution in the soul within . . . Seeking out Vidyabhushan’s help became a necessity for him. But during the day Vidyabhushan was focused on the trial—Shekhar had entrusted his welfare to him—so Shekhar would spend the mornings confused, in knots, and the days thinking about this web of a dilemma and unravelling its threads.
It began on the day that Vidyabhushan was saying that in defending the honour of our nation we need to build an organization that could keep the arrogance of government officials and rulers in check, when Shekhar interrupted him to ask, ‘So tell me, did you beat that CID officer or did you just get locked up like me?’
‘I hit him. I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself my whole life if he had escaped untouched after such insulting behaviour.’
‘Why?’
‘What would you do if someone insulted your mother or sister while you were on a walk? Would you let him go even though he was a scoundrel just because he was also an agent of the government?’
‘But he was a part of the government—how could any government run? What if you were running the government? Then—’
‘A part of the government—so should we hit him if there was no fear of retaliation by the government? If you are talking about violence, isn’t it also a kind of violence to fail to defend one’s self-respect? Violence against the self is the worst kind of violence, because it breaks the spine of national pride—of the nation itself.’
‘So what you are saying is that whenever someone gets angry he should express it, never hold himself in check? That will cause a total breakdown in morality.’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. One kind of anger is a weakness, and another kind of anger is an obligation. If one’s nation is insulted, then getting angry about that is an obligation with respect to the nation and the community—that anger is something required of all of us by the nation. Otherwise it would be like being stuffed with rubbish on the inside instead of breath.’
‘If it’s justifiable to get angry over an insult to the nation, then it’s also justifiable to get angry over an insult to the province, the religious sect, the family and ultimately even one’s self. Why are those signs of weakness?’
‘All right. But the issue is not over the crude object that is the nation or the region or the self. The issue is intention. To say that our national soil is barren can be a plain fact, while saying “Our nation is impotent” is an insult. Anger for one’s principles is justified.’
‘Then is religious zealotry justified? Religion is an ideal, too.’
Vidyabhushan stammered, ‘N-no! You have to draw the line somewhere. But we understand that “devout” and “zealot” are different words with different meanings, which means that there are some elements in zealotry that are bad. What they are, we’ll have to find out. The anger of zealotry primarily arises from individual intolerance—I want to show that my religion is superior to your religion because I am better than you. This is obviously unjustifiable and the root arrogance in it has to be dug up.’
‘Humph.’ Shekhar thought for a long time and said, ‘So what did we decide?’ He laughed at his own question.
‘The anger that is for your principles, that’s a religious obligation, we’ve agreed to that. What remains is determining what principles are, since simple definitions of it are tricky, but we can say that a principle is that feeling which attempts to end the enmity between man and man, that gradually attempts to expand their boundaries and bonds.’
‘But when it’s a question of man against man, then nationalism can also produce a barrier, no?’
‘Definitely! Europe is already facing an era where nationalism is a problem—there national organizations have become impediments to human liberty.’
‘Hmm.’
Shekhar’s ‘hmm’ was so pregnant with thoughts that he forgot to be curious any further. He wasn’t entirely convinced, but Vidyabhushan had certainly delivered a serious blow to his mind—he was shaken by the challenge posed by such great questions.
*
That pride or arrogance could be a social obligation was a new idea for Shekhar. He had never had any special interest in political matters, and it grieved him to see the pettiness of politics each time he read in the papers about political arguments or proportional electorates. ‘Why politics?’ The question wasn’t about politics but about life, and he could never ward off the magnetic pull of such questions. When his brain had become entangled in this knotty question derived from Vidyabhushan’s thesis, the push from this new perspective left him in a daze. He knew that he wasn’t completely convinced by Vidyabhushan’s words, and he also knew that no one could ever be convinced by explanations that someone else had thought up; arguments became valid when they emerged from one’s inner spirit. At most someone else can clear some of the weeds
from the fertile soil of the inner spirit.
He was at war with himself over this matter for three or four days. Was pride a social obligation? Three days later the giant demon of curiosity awoke inside him as though it had just overpowered one rival and was preparing for a new battle when its call of ‘Battle me!’ received a new, terrible question in response—what is government? Isn’t it an obstacle to freedom? Can’t we live without it? Can we also destroy it? How can we destroy it?
If it was good to move towards liberation—and how could that not be good?—then the existence of state power was bad—or if it wasn’t, then it could be. When? And in such moments, which of our principles become a religion for which we must become angry, go to war, become proud?
And rage . . . war . . . violence . . . Was violence justified? If Vidyabhushan’s argument was right, then violence was justified and could be a religion. But . . . he believed, wanted to believe, that man hated violence, had a natural aversion towards committing acts of violence . . . And he held that no natural drive could be wrong—if our ethics did not support those drives, then our ethics were wrong—not nature; he had total faith in a natural law grounded in nature. When he couldn’t give answers to ‘Why? What proof did he have?’ the only reply he would offer was that his instinctive desire to believe in it was the proof. Why should a man choose to believe in it? Because in his heart of hearts he was ethical. He wanted to accept as valid the criterion of the morality of creation. And if the main element in human nature was morality, then how could it not be foundational in nature, too?
Nature was moral. Then was violence also moral? If not always, then sometimes, in special circumstances, could it be? Was murder justified sometimes?
And then the practical question—could any good come from it?
Ah, Goddess Curiosity—she is so irrepressible that she seems a demoness.
The question of actions is always smaller than the question of principles, and so much more immediate; the practicality of violence was such a question for Shekhar.
He asked Vidyabhushan, ‘Is violence ever justified? Can any good come of it?’
Vidyabhushan smiled and said, ‘You’ve been thinking about it the whole time, haven’t you?’
Shekhar bristled, ‘Shouldn’t I?’
Vidyabhushan laughed. Then he turned serious and said, ‘Then listen. Sometimes violence is so extremely necessary that it becomes justified. Or you could say that it becomes so justified that it becomes necessary. In reality, it is then no longer violence. When you get a boil, the treatment is to lance it. If that causes you pain, is that violence? It’s not violence because it is for the good of the sufferer; there’s no benefit to the doctor. And if an untreated patient is writhing in agony, then it’s not violence even if you have to kill him to save him, even though he would lose his life. Or when violence comes in the form of a social obligation. All that remains is the question of its utility—in the examples I gave, the warrant was in its utility. Yes, one has to remember that the warrant cannot be personal gain, only social utility.’
‘It worries me to see you come to such conclusions. Do you really think that violence is forgivable if it’s social? Can one society commit injury against another society?’
‘Don’t misunderstand me. By social I don’t mean any one society; I am interested in that entire collectivity of which we—humankind—are one part. From the same point of view where murder is non-violent, plucking and throwing away a single shaft of wheat will be violence too because that action does no good for the global community, rather it destroys the possibility of a little bit of good.’
Still unconvinced, Shekhar spoke, ‘All right, we’ll leave that aside. Let’s go back to where we started. What good came or could have come from hitting the CID agent like you did?’
‘I’ve already given you one—it was necessary to defend one’s self-respect, and that was impossible without thrashing him. If you think that is too ephemeral a benefit, the second is that it will teach the CID agent a lesson, that insulting a man is not a laughing matter.’
Shekhar smiled and said, ‘That’s the lesson they wanted to teach you.’
‘Yes, but not every CID agent can teach this lesson to everyone all the time. It costs the government 1000 rupees to conduct a single trial. If they had 100 such incidents to deal with, the government would have to find another remedy.’
‘In other words, you want the government to be afraid, to tell them that these are men deserving of respect. If I’m not mistaken—I don’t know much about these things, after all—then this is the same argument made by people who are called terrorists.’
‘Umm—yes. And no one is treated as unjustly as they are. First of all, it’s unfair to call them terrorists, although they don’t make a point of removing terror from their programme. In this day and age, a person whose political development gets to the question of terrorism and stops is only as mentally developed as a seven-year-old child. The plain truth is that he cannot have the same moral force that everyone knows several so-called terrorists possess.’
‘You are testifying as if you were a terrorist yourself!’ Seeing Vidyabhushan shake his head, Shekhar said, ‘But to me it seems that this is all wrong. Nothing can come from violence. It is destructive. It is pure ruin; it cannot be creative. Take that same example of the lance: the cure for an illness is medicine—that’s what makes someone healthy. The lance is a trivial object; one becomes healthy after a month of nursing and recuperation. Similarly, any improvement in our social conditions will only come through natural developments.’
‘I can accept that. I accept that the lance is trivial and secondary, but it is still necessary, right? There is also a social medicine that is given to society after acts of violence—you can think of that as more important if you like. But it doesn’t eliminate the importance of the first thing.’
This was another large morsel for Shekhar—it would take him a long time to chew it. Shekhar wasn’t comforted. He felt, ‘There was definitely a mistake in the logic.’ Extraordinary circumstances—unavoidable evil—he had heard these arguments before. He had heard the story of Vishwamitra having had to eat dog meat a long time ago—but he felt as though there was a weakness in the principle that was hiding behind sophistry. If one justified even some violent acts, it meant justifying everything; it meant accepting all violence. Even if a person saves himself with recourse to violence, he finds himself living in the shadow of sin for the rest of his life. It was a straightforward matter—violence was either justified or it wasn’t, it was completely defensible or completely indefensible. But in either case, the way forward was unclear . . .
*
Shashi came to see him along with his older brother Ishwardutt.
Shekhar had wanted her to but Shashi hadn’t come before. He didn’t know that there could have been a reason for his hope. No . . . had Shashi been there in the city, then he could have hoped, but she was in a distant village, and alone . . .
But she came. Shekhar was so overwhelmed with emotion that he couldn’t even talk to her, and visiting hours were drawing to a close . . . As he was talking to Ishwardutt, he’d stare at her for an instant and then go on talking to his brother . . .
When visiting hours were almost over, Shashi finally asked, ‘Shekhar, were you really involved?’
Shekhar looked at her searchingly. He wanted to know what she was thinking—fear, concern, admiration—what . . . He couldn’t detect anything. He said with a plain gravity, ‘No.’
Shashi didn’t say anything. It seemed to Shekhar that she had no further curiosity or demands. So he distanced himself from the storm of his emotions and asked, ‘Why, Shashi? Did it give you some comfort?’
‘What do you mean, comfort?’
‘That I am innocent.’
‘Oh . . . Yes, it gave me some.’
‘Why? And what if I had been guilty?’
‘That would have given me comfort, too. I wanted to know. Just knowing your side of the
story gives me solace. It doesn’t scare me.’
Shekhar had wanted so much to ask, ‘Why, Shashi? Do you have so much faith in me . . .’ but the presence of his brother drained his courage. He wasn’t sure if he would have been able to ask such a personal question even if they had been alone, but she had deciphered his secret query, which is why as she was leaving she looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘Heroes are never guilty . . .’ And she kept walking. Shekhar quivered from the look of affection in her eyes and saluted the pioneering sister who had first coined the word ‘hero’ for her brother . . . How important it was to receive affection in jail! Love—love was ultimately a passion, and jail was the playground of passions, but affection . . .
The court case became exceedingly boring. Day after day after day after day—listening to the same stories each day from ever-new voices in ever-new tellings, and the tricks and acrobatics the lawyers used to present the real truth in an upside-down manner . . . One day, after much turmoil, Shekhar came up with a way to entertain himself—he wrote a satire about his lawyer’s arguments, showed it first to his friends, then sealed it in an envelope and put it in front of the magistrate. At the time the magistrate5 was paying attention to what the lawyer was saying. Disinterestedly, he asked, ‘What is this, an appeal?’ and kept listening. But after the afternoon recess when the court reconvened, he looked at Shekhar intensely, with a little bit of mercy and a little bit of irritation, and the faintest of smiles appeared on his lips . . . Shekhar couldn’t be certain that he had understood his state of mind, but then he remembered his satire and smiled, too . . . ‘My Lord, the witness says a certain thing was above, another thing below . . . But if you were to stand on your head and look—and it’s clear that justice cannot be served without looking from this vantage—then the thing that was described as being above is really below, and the thing which was on the right is now indisputably on the left . . . The person who gives such an incorrect answer and false testimony can only be corrupt. I ask you not to give his testimony any weight and ask your permission to cross-examine him.’
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