A Division of the Spoils

by Paul Scott

  Unexpectedly, Ahmed flighted the hawk again, but not at prey, unless he himself were the prey. He cantered to and fro, round and round, gradually descending the hill, spiralling at ground level as the hawk had spiralled the sky, while the bird flew to and fro as well, sometimes swooping in mock attack.

  ‘I wish he wouldn’t do this,’ Sarah said. ‘But he trusts her utterly.’

  It was like a game of love. Sometimes Ahmed called out and when he did the hawk seemed to turn away, spurning him, only to meet him again at the end of another swerving course. About one hundred yards from the road, Ahmed reined in. The hawk planed above him for a while and then as if breathless too, ready to call it a day, came in and settled gently on his proffered arm. Perron saw that Ahmed was securing the jesses. Again he brought the bird close to his face, then he sat erect and came the rest of the way at a sedate walk. Some distance behind, the falconer was following slowly down. He had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The kill.

  ‘Hello,’ Ahmed called. He kicked his stirrups away, brought his right leg up and across the saddle and slid down. The bird stayed rock-still on his forearm. He tickled her stomach. She glared at him and then at the strangers. But what else, Perron wondered, could a hawk do but glare?

  ‘Her name’s Mumtaz,’ Sarah said. ‘Come and meet her. Incidentally, don’t offer to shake hands with Ahmed. She’s very jealous and protective. Aren’t you, Mumtaz? I’m not allowed to touch her at all, because she senses I’m female. But if Ahmed tells her it’s all right she’ll allow you to tickle her throat.’

  Ahmed said, in Urdu: Here is Perron Sahib, from across the black water. He is a friend. Say hello. He stroked her breast feathers, then said in English, ‘You can touch her now, Mr Perron.’

  Perron extended a finger. The head turned. A glaring eye observed the finger. Risking the loss, he placed the finger on her breast and smoothed downwards. When he withdrew the finger the hawk’s wing stirred slightly.

  ‘Ah,’ Sarah said. ‘She liked that. Ahmed, you’d better keep your eye on her. I think she’s a bit of a rover.’

  Ahmed laughed, then, noticing her skirt said, ‘Aren’t you going to ride?’

  ‘No, I thought not today.’

  ‘What about you, Mr Perron? You can have Begum here. She’s still quite fresh.’

  ‘I’m more than content to watch you hawk.’

  ‘Oh, no more of that. I’m glad you were just in time. We can have a run after breakfast if you like. Come, Mumtaz. You can go to sleep now.’ The falconer had come up and dismounted. Rather tetchily Mumtaz hopped from Ahmed’s arm to the falconer’s. The falconer took her down to the truck and Perron now noticed that there was an awning attached to the truck’s side and, under the awning, a table laid for breakfast. Nearby, in the shade of a tree, a portable perch had been set up, with a silver chain attached to its cross-pole. The falconer transferred Mumtaz to this, secured her and clapped a little scarlet velvet hood on her head.

  ‘Come,’ Ahmed said. ‘I hope everybody is hungry.’

  They went down to the table under the awning. Ahmed absented himself for a while. As Perron and Sarah sat she said, ‘Are you glad you came?’

  ‘Not glad. Enchanted.’

  ‘I meant back to India.’

  ‘The answer’s the same.’

  She smiled.

  *

  The convoy home was headed by the army truck. The soldiers sat in the back of it, the falconer up front, with Mumtaz. Behind, Ahmed drove the jeep with Sarah next to him and Perron in the back seat. Bringing up the rear was the horse-box which gradually got left behind. Perron, shouting against the noise of the engine and the currents of air asked what the bird thought of mechanical transport. Sarah leaned back and said: ‘Ahmed thinks it’s her favourite part of the proceedings. But she’s very blasé. She goes to sleep.’

  ‘What do the soldiers make of it all?’

  ‘I think they get a bit of a kick out of it. It’s still quite new to them.’

  No one had explained the presence of the soldiers. If the hawking was quite new to them then presumably a military escort was a recent innovation. But how recent? And why was it necessary? Sarah turned round again and shouted, ‘We’re going to the palace if that’s all right. I’ve got to visit Shiraz, but Ahmed will take you round and show you the interesting bits.’

  Ahmed said something to her which he didn’t catch. She laughed.

  ‘Who is Shiraz?’ Perron shouted.

  ‘The Nawab’s daughter.’

  Perron nodded. He did not know the Nawab had a daughter. But he thought that between Ahmed and Sarah there was a special kind of empathy, the kind that two people betray in small gestures and in the way they have of dealing with one another in public. Well, if that was how the land lay he could only wish her good luck, slightly deflating though it was to his own ego.

  He looked at Ahmed’s back. He remembered him as a pleasant but rather unsociable young man, given apparently to whisky and women, a combination which might by now have begun to show signs of taking toll. Instead, young Kasim looked (as Uncle George would say) well set-up. Mounted, and flying his hawk, Perron appreciated that to Sarah he would even cut a heroic figure. And she was the kind of girl who would defy the convention that a white woman didn’t fall in love with an Indian.

  When they came close to the end of the unmetalled road Sarah called out, ‘Go in through the guest house entrance, Ahmed, and drop me there. I’ve got a few things to do. I’ll join you at the palace later.’

  Ahmed nodded and then hooted and drew ahead of the truck, paused at the T-junction and raised his arm to indicate that the truck should turn right. Turning left himself he came to a halt to make sure the driver had understood. Perron looked back. As the truck came into view he saw the falconer’s arm which was resting by the elbow on the open window frame, and upon the arm, Mumtaz, hooded, head slightly inclined –

  *

  (Extract From Perron’s diaries)

  (Tuesday August 5) – asleep, dreaming of what? The palace wall is backed by trees. You can see nothing from the road. We turned in at an unexpected culvert. Twin iron gates. Closed. A smart sepoy opened them at once and we went in, past two more who were armed and came to attention. The gates were closed again once we’d passed through. The path is bordered by rhododendron. Just where it forked (giving on the left a glimpse of the guest house) Sarah made Ahmed stop. She insisted on walking from there. We continued along the right-hand fork and came out after a hundred yards into a large formal park, with the extrordinary pink palace on the left. To the right, half-a-mile away, was the main entrance gate and frontage, facing on to the maidan. The park was laid out with avenues, terraces and fountains. As we got close to the palace you could see that parts of the pink stucco needed replastering. The palace bears some resemblance to the Wind Palace in Jaipur. We drove to a side entrance. Sentries again. Steps up. The smell of ancient damp masonry. A long terrace, a lot of servants and officials coming and going. Obviously the business side of the place. Then through a narrow Moghul arch into a dark stone corridor – the kind in which you feel the weight of India: a heavy darkness which is a protection from glare and heat but reminiscent of tombs and dungeons.

  But the inner courtyard was beautiful. At the far end, facing the paths and fountains was the old Hall of Public Audience, a deep terrace with a high roof supported by convoluted pink columns; and, with a marble canopy and dais centrally placed, the stone seat on which in the old days the Nawab was enthroned on cushions: the gaddi. Behind the Hall of Public Audience (Ahmed said) was a smaller courtyard overlooked by the present Nawab’s private apartments. Avoiding this other courtyard we crossed and went out through another series of dark passages to the other side of the palace. Lawns swept down to the lake and the little white mosque which was enclosed in its own railed courtyard. We went down to the lake shore. The glare was intense. Ahmed said they were fishing again this morning. Beyond the distant reeds you could just see a couple of boats and men
casting large shimmering nets. Ahmed took me back inside the palace to see what he called the modern rooms. These were at the front. The old Moghul passages gave way to corridors, Victorian in style (dark lincrusta, hundreds of pictures cluttering the walls, as thick as postage stamps in an album) and then – fascinating! – a kind of salon which reminded you of the public lounge of a Ritzy Edwardian hotel, all gilt and plush and potted palms in gilt wicker baskets, ornate draught screens and a circular padded bench around a central marble column. Dmitri Bronowsky’s influence, one would imagine.

  *

  It was in this fin-de-siècle foyer that Ahmed left him, to change out of his riding gear. He promised to be back shortly. He said, ‘Would you like a swim later? There’s an outdoor pool. We can provide towels and costumes.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that very much.’

  ‘It can’t be for about an hour, though. Sarah usually gives Shiraz her swimming lesson between eleven and twelve. I’ll tell them to send you coffee and the papers.’

  The coffee and papers came. Today’s Times of India and The Statesman (which obviously reached the palace earlier than they reached the club), the Mirat Courier and The Ranpur Gazette. This morning in the national newspapers some play was being made with the latest difficulties Jinnah was said to be raising: questions about the precise status Mountbatten would have in Karachi when he made his last appearance there as Viceroy on August 13. Two days later Jinnah would become Governor-General of the new dominion of Pakistan (moth-eaten Pakistan as he had called it, when he found he wasn’t getting either the whole of the Punjab or the whole of Bengal – least of all Kashmir or a corridor connecting the west with the east).

  It seemed that Jinnah had been gently reminded that the Viceroy would still be Viceroy on August 13 and he himself only Governor-General designate, just as Mountbatten was also Governor-General designate of the new Dominion of India. There was no question of Jinnah taking precedence before the date of independence, and Mountbatten couldn’t be in both Karachi and Delhi on August Fifteen.

  There were depressingly familiar reports from Lahore, Amritsar and Calcutta of troubles with the Sikhs and of murders and arson, and equally depressing commentaries on the harrowing experiences of some of the refugees already making their way from what would be Pakistan to what would be India, and vice versa. But the photographs in the papers were only of smiling statesmen’s faces.

  The Mirat Courier, predictably, published similar photographs and gave up its front page to preliminary details of the official programme for independence day celebrations. A Muslim firm in the cantonment called Mir Khan Military Tailors and Outfitters had taken half a page to announce a grand cut-price sale of all items of uniform and sporting equipment. At the rear pages were brief details of a number of farewell parties held the previous week.

  He turned more expectantly to the waspish Ranpur Gazette, and was not unrewarded. The editorial – a long one – was headed: Pandora’s Box. It read:

  ‘The pocket-kingdom of Mirat was, until 1937, except for a brief period in the early ’twenties, in direct relationship with the Crown through the agency of the Governor in Ranpur, which suited all parties and conformed with the geographical and political facts of life. Geographically and politically, Mirat has always existed and can only exist in future as part of the geographical and political territory by which it is surrounded.

  ‘That it exists at all as a separate political unit is due to the pure luck and chance of the fall of the dice of history. Long drawn-out though the battle for power was between the European merchants and the ruling Indian powers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there came a point when the dominant European power, the British, made a settlement with what was left of the scattered remnants of Moghul India. That point was reached in 1857.

  ‘Dare one say that as a result of the Mutiny the Crown feared it had gone far enough with its policies of expansion or that it simply decided that the status quo, then existing, would prove the most profitable, if maintained? Be that as it may, with two-thirds of the sub-continent now under the direct rule of Whitehall and the real power of the remnants of Princely India reduced virtually to impotence, a declaration was made of “no further territorial ambitions” (what a sinister ring that phrase has nowadays!) – and treaties were made with the rulers of the nearly 600 remaining states, widely scattered and varying in size from mere estates to provinces the size of Ireland, treaties which secured to the rulers and to their successors their princely rights, revenues, privileges and territories, assured them of autonomy in all but the major subjects of external affairs and national defence, treaties which undertook to protect the princes from each other, from attack both internal and external.

  ‘Separate though these treaties were – a series of private formal individual contracts between rulers and crown, they have nevertheless always been part of a larger unwritten treaty – or doctrine: the doctrine of the paramountcy of the British Crown over all the rulers; the paramountcy of the King-Emperor or Queen-Empress who, through the Crown Representative, could depose an unruly prince, withhold recognition from a prince’s heir, and generally take steps to ensure the peace, prosperity and well-being of a prince’s subjects.

  ‘But none of the doctrinal powers of “paramountcy” could abrogate the treaty made with a state. From time to time the Crown has taken over a state’s administration, but only in trust. The declaration of “no further territorial ambitions” has been, one may feel, upheld.

  ‘Unfortunately, the doctrine of paramountcy has run counter to the doctrine of eventual self-government for those provinces ruled directly by the British parliament, through the Government of India. Paramountcy has always been illogical in the long run, and this illogicality is best exemplified by the dual rôle assigned to the Viceroy. In his rôle as Governor-General it has been his duty to govern and guide and encourage the British-Indian provinces towards democratic parliamentary self-rule. As Crown Representative, it has been his duty to uphold, secure, oversee and defend the autocratic rule of several hundred princes.

  ‘Many princes have therefore assumed, or pretended to assume, or felt entitled to assume, that the demission by the Governor-General of power into Indian hands in provinces directly ruled by the British, could not absolve the British from treaty obligations to uphold, secure and defend the integrity of the territories the princes have ruled, for better or worse, and which they believe they have every right to continue to rule, irrespective of who rules the rest of India.

  ‘It is fair to say that until quite recently they have been encouraged in this assumption by statements from Whitehall and New Delhi, and by the behaviour and attitude of senior members of the Political Department. Their chief fear was that “paramountcy” would be transferred by the Crown to the Crown’s successors in British India (in this case, the Congress Party, which for years has made it clear that the survival of autocratic states, some quite feudal in their administration, could not be tolerated). But they were reassured. Paramountcy was a doctrine. You could not transfer a doctrine.

  ‘But if you can’t transfer it what can you do with it? The answer is, nothing. It simply lapses when the paramount “power” disappears. But what about the treaties? Can treaties lapse unless both parties agree to the lapse? Indeed they can. They lapse when one party no longer has the power (or the presence) to perform its part of the bargain. By abdicating in British-India, the British Crown no longer has the power to protect and secure and uphold the territorial integrity of Princely India, without running the risk of going to war with the new Dominion. One prince is rumoured to be consulting his lawyers in Switzerland with a view to suing the British Government in London for non-performance of contract. Another is rumoured to have gone to Delhi armed with a revolver. Other princes, of course, see the lapsing of paramountcy and of treaty obligations as the opportunity to declare their complete independence.

  ‘What the British Crown has really done for the past hundred years is advance t
he territories it ruled directly to full democratic and parliamentary self-government, and maintain the territories it did not rule directly, but was paramount over, in forms of autocratic government alien in nature to the form of government itself advocates and which the British people themselves enjoy at home and seem convinced is everyone’s birthright. You can hardly wonder that this left-hand/right-hand policy was entrusted to one man, the Viceroy, in order to create the illusion that there was a unity of purpose.

  ‘Our new Viceroy has been, as ever, quick to grasp the irreconcilable details and see the immense political vacuum that technically follows the removal of British power in British-India. The new States Department is his efficient answer to nature’s abhorrence of such a vacuum. You could say that Whitehall foresaw the situation in 1935. You could say that the princes themselves are largely to blame for refusing at that time to co-operate in the Federal Scheme for a united and self-governing India (but they were not the only people who were suspicious of the scheme and refused to co-operate). You could blame the princes for many things, including their haughty distrust of one another, or of anybody. You cannot in principle blame them for standing by their treaties, for acting out the Ruritanian farce currently playing up and down India (and Pakistan); a farce all too frequently encouraged by senior members of the Political Deparment who have served in India for years and have been brought up to take the treaties as serious and sacrosanct documents.