India: A Million Mutinies Now

  ‘My father was a quiet, easygoing, peaceable sort of person. His family was ruled by the older women in it.’

  ‘Your grandfather was a distinguished man. How could he have married his daughter into that kind of family?’

  They were well thought of. They were an aristocratic family. They were considered to be philanthropists. They probably didn’t practise what they preached. Many of the women of the family were in social welfare organizations. They were far better formally educated than they permitted my mother to be. It all comes down to double standards, a lack of sensitivity, a touch of cruelty.’

  Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood: an early introduction to the ways of the world, and to the nature of cruelty. It had given me, as I suspected it had given Kala, a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less crowded life, where one had space around oneself.

  But I didn’t think that what Kala said about double standards was appropriate. Hindu family life was ritualized. Just as there were rituals for every new stage in a person’s life, so there were roles that people were required to fill as they progressed through their allotted years. Mothers-in-law were required to discipline the child brides of their sons, to train the unbroken and childish girls in their new duties as child-bearers and household workers, to teach them new habits of respect, to introduce them to the almost philosophical idea of the toil and tears of the real world: to introduce them, in this chain of tradition, to the kind of life and ideas they had been introduced to by their own mothers-in-law. Such a disciplining of a child bride would have been considered virtuous; the cruelty, however willed, however voluptuous, would have been seen as no more than the cruelty of life itself. The social work the women of the family did would have been directed to people several layers below, many times more abject. The very wish to do social work would have issued out of an idea of virtue and correctness at home. The concept of double standards came from another world, came from Kala’s world today.

  Kala said, ‘It was a total shock for my mother. She was the only daughter-in-law. She would be the last person considered for any kind of treat or outing. There wouldn’t be room in the car for her. And she was still so much a child herself. Everyone was so much older. She was hit sometimes.’ This was too painful for Kala to talk about. ‘Both her mother-in-law and her husband hit her. Somehow, suddenly, as soon as she was married she was expected to turn into an adult.’

  ‘Have you talked to your father’s family about this?’

  She hadn’t. ‘By the time I knew about it, everyone was so much older. There was no point in picking a quarrel. This life went on for five years.’

  ‘Your grandfather was a man of such dignity and honour. Didn’t he do anything for his daughter?’

  ‘Hindu parents were not supposed to question what was being done to their daughters after they had been married. It wasn’t that they didn’t know; they were not supposed to question. They would, nowadays.

  ‘In these five years my mother talked a lot to my father. She talked to him, and eventually they decided that they shouldn’t live in that house any longer. My father applied for a job in a tea plantation in the Nilgiris. He got the job, and they moved there.

  ‘That was where I grew up until I went to my boarding school. It was a nice colonial town. As I knew it, there were just the vestiges of colonialism – a Christian culture, parties. It didn’t matter what religion you practised. There were no visible British people living there; there were lots of Anglo-Indians. The houses were colonial in design – high ceilings, wooden floors, big gardens, porticoes, servants’ quarters some distance away from the house. It felt normal to live there.’

  To Kala’s mother it might also have been a version of, it might have echoed, the convent life from which she had been snatched five or six years before.

  ‘The happiness began for you in the Nilgiris?’

  ‘I think so. But the marks are still there. What might have been. It’s all been a tremendous waste, the waste of potential in a woman nobody considered important. I value freedom a great deal now. My mother has always taught me how important education and financial independence are.’

  ‘You aren’t married?’

  ‘I have nothing against the institution, but I don’t see it as a goal.’

  ‘Does your mother worry about that?’

  ‘She would like me to get married. But not with any specific time limit. She wants me to be happy. And I feel that, compared to what she went through, anything I go through would appear trifling.’

  She was still part of the story she had told me, over two or three meetings. She was full of the emotions of it, and unable to see in it the historical progression that I thought I saw.

  She said, on another day, ‘I do think about the individuals involved, all of them, and I sometimes wonder what they really felt at certain moments. I think all of them were very courageous people. Each of them displayed some kind of courage in making the changes that they did make. I wonder whether I would be able to display the same sort of courage, if I were put in a difficult or trying situation.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us can really know how our grandfathers and grandmothers thought or felt.’

  Kala said, ‘The world they lived in was very different.’

  Prakash, a minister in the non-Congress state government of Karnataka, invited me to breakfast one Sunday morning. The minister’s house was near the hotel, and Deviah came and walked there with me.

  We had to walk carefully, picking our way over broken or unmade footpaths. Level or fully made footpaths are not a general Indian need, and the Indian city road is often like a wavering, bumpy, much mended asphalt path between drifts of dust and dirt and the things that get dumped on Indian city roads and then stay there, things like sand, gravel, wet rubbish, dry rubbish: nothing ever looking finished, no kerbstone, no wall, everything in a half-and-half way, half-way to being or ceasing to be.

  Deviah and I would have liked to talk while we walked, but it was hard. We were being kippered all the time by the gritty smoke from cars and scooters. The dust these vehicles kicked up took a long time to settle down, so we walked in dust as well. By the time we reached the minister’s house we had become part of the Bangalore road scene, with dust and fumy grit on skin and clothes and shoes and hair and glasses.

  This invitation to breakfast gave a touch of the specialist industrial fair, of drama and American rush, to the politician’s life. And, in fact, this early-morning time was when ministers and politicians of importance were very busy. Suppliants (with their own idea of the drama of the occasion), rising and getting ready in darkness, went at dawn to wait outside a great man’s house – just as, in ancient Rome, a client’s first duty in the morning was to run to the house of his patron, to add to the crowd there, for the sake of the great man’s dignity. As in old Rome, so in modern Bangalore: the more important the man, the greater the crowd at his door.

  Prakash wasn’t among the top crowd-pullers. He had a more sedate reputation as an educated and competent minister, a shrewd and serious politician, yet capable of detachment: someone a little out of the ordinary in state politics.

  He lived in one of the houses built by the Karnataka government for state ministers. These houses stood together in an area or park of their own. They were two-storey concrete houses, light-ochre in colour, and they were on biggish plots. There wasn’t a crowd outside Prakash’s house, such as I had seen at other people’s houses, but there was a fair enough press of suppliants – patient, almost idle – to establish the man’s importance. There were parked cars and security people in the yard. The parked cars suggested privilege: they looked as though they belonged to people with easy access to the minister.

/>   Deviah and I were in that category that Sunday morning. Nothing was said, but the fact seemed to be known; and, road-stained though we were, the suppliants yielded as we approached, and a path to Prakash’s front door opened between them. From the outside, the house had looked only like a house. It wasn’t so. We walked through a number of grimy, official-looking rooms that might have been the much used offices of some government department, and appeared to be staffed by government clerks. We came then to a more personal sitting room, more personal but still with an official feel, with many low armchairs around a low centre table. The day’s newspapers, flat and new and undisturbed, were neatly laid out on the table in two staggered rows, each paper showing only its masthead. Some of the mastheads were in English or Hindi; others were in regional scripts.

  Prakash, true to his character, didn’t keep us waiting. Almost as soon as he had been told we had arrived, and before I could pick up one of the papers, he came in from an inner room to greet us, a small, brisk, confident, humorous-looking man in his forties; and he immediately led us to the room adjoining, a dining-room – this part of the house now quite private and personal, quite different in its atmosphere even from the sitting room – where a big table was laid for a most serious kind of Indian breakfast. And almost as soon as we had sat down at the table, Mrs Prakash appeared, in a fresh blue sari, and began serving us: the ritualized duty of the conservative Hindu wife, personally to serve food to her husband: a duty, but also now, considering what her husband was, a high privilege. How many of the people waiting outside would have envied her that familiarity with the minister, that attending on him; to how many would she have appeared blessed.

  I asked about the men he had been seeing that morning, the men who had been waiting outside the front door, and had made way for us as people infinitely more privileged. The most important one among them, Prakash said, was a village accountant in government service. He had been charged with misappropriating 5000 rupees, about £200, from the land revenue which it was his duty to collect. This man had been suspended from his job, and he had travelled all night on a bus, making a journey of 200 miles, to see the minister that morning. Prakash had seen him for seven or eight minutes. The man said he had paid back the 5000 rupees, and he wanted Prakash to help him to be reinstated in his job. Prakash had told him that he could do nothing; the departmental inquiry would have to take its course. And that was it: after the 200-mile night journey, and the morning wait at the minister’s house, and the seven or eight-minute audience, the village accountant would just have to take the bus back to his village.

  Prakash’s wife kept on bringing little side dishes, and serving us from dishes that had already been placed on the table. She brought from time to time fresh hot puris, crisp and swollen.

  Prakash, eating away elegantly with his fingers, said, ‘Now that fellow will take the matter to the High Court – after the departmental inquiry.’

  I said, ‘So it will become like a career to him?’

  Prakash said, ‘If the High Court finds there has been a technical flaw in the departmental inquiry – ’

  ‘And most often there is,’ Deviah said, also eating, picking at this and that.

  Prakash said, ‘If there’s been that technical flaw, he will get his reinstatement, and his back wages. During his suspension – he has been suspended – he will be getting a subsistence allowance of 75 per cent of his salary.’

  I said, ‘What sort of background for that kind of man?’

  Prakash said, ‘Such a man will be the son of a farmer or a local artisan. In government service he will be getting about 1200 rupees a month.’ About £48. ‘That’s why everybody in a village tries for a government job – unless they have good land. If he loses his case, he will go back to nothing. He will have to depend on agriculture.’

  The man we were talking about was thirty-six. He had three children. He had come to see Prakash because he belonged to Prakash’s constituency. This was in the Bellary district, and agriculture there would have been very hard. Bellary was known in the state as a ‘hot area’, with summer temperatures of 105 degrees.

  Prakash said, ‘He might have misappropriated this sum of 5000 rupees over one or two years. People come to pay their land revenue, and he takes their money. Small sums, 25 rupees or so at a time. He gives bogus receipts. And then one day a superior officer asks why farmers here and there are not paying their land revenue. He makes some simple inquiries; he sees the bogus receipts; and the foolish fellow is caught.’

  Deviah said, ‘He might even think it’s unfair, when so many bigger people all around him are taking and getting away.’

  I asked Prakash, ‘Did the man cry? Did he drop to the ground and hold your legs?’

  Prakash, with his witty way of talking, said, ‘He might have cried the first night, after he’d been caught. But after a year he’s become hardened.’

  I liked that ‘hardened’. Prakash, in real life or civilian life, the life before politics, had been a country lawyer, and he knew his people.

  ‘But now he’s grown fatalistic. He talks of karma, fate. It is the Hindu way.’

  ‘Would people in his village look down on him or ostracize him now?’

  ‘At his level people wouldn’t bother with that kind of theft. I don’t think they would even know about it. The upper class in India take theft for granted. It’s only the middle class who are still maintaining these values, and worrying about theft and corruption. It’s in the social fibre. It’s everywhere. At an appointments board someone will jump up and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t interview the next candidate. He’s my brother-in-law. You must excuse me.” Perfectly nice and correct, but it is also an indication to the panel that the candidate in question is the man’s brother-in-law.’

  He broke off and, lifting a side dish, said, ‘Everything in this house has been provided by the government. Every cup, every plate. How can a man give up this life?’ He was referring not to himself, but to others. ‘It’s in the social fibre, as I say. In the old days the maharajas used to get their land revenue. But in addition to that people would go and offer them gifts – gold, ornaments, fruits, coconuts. They would offer it on a plate, and the plate would be of brass or silver, according to your status. The present-day maharajas are the ministers. Indira Gandhi was a maharani.

  ‘Buying religious favours is another equivalent. There again you have different levels of gifts. Some people might give only a coconut. Do you know the story about the temple at Tirupati?’

  It was the story I had heard from Kala.

  Prakash said, ‘You give money there to help Lord Venkateshwara to repay his loan from Kubera. He borrowed the money to get married.’

  Kala had left out the last detail. Perhaps it was so, detail added to detail, that difficult mythological stories grew in the minds of people here.

  We got up from the breakfast table then, to go to the State Guest House. Prakash had thought we would have more privacy there, and not be troubled by suppliants.

  A fresh batch was waiting outside the front door. One small, smiling fellow, in sandals, was neatly dressed in tight brown trousers and a clean beige-and-yellow Polyester shirt in a check pattern. He was a driver. He was pining for a job with the government. He wasn’t unemployed, but he was working for a private firm, and the pay there wasn’t as good as it would have been with the government. Prakash had given the man a recommendation some months before, but the man hadn’t got a government job; so he had made this morning trip to Prakash again, to complain and plead.

  And as royalty, moving among a welcoming crowd, finds a word or two for a selected few, so Prakash, moving among his breakfast suppliants – but not strictly like royalty, more like a medical professor in the ward of a teaching hospital – found words to say to a few, but the words apparently spoken to the suppliant were really words spoken to Deviah and me about the suppliant, and were spoken as though the suppliant wasn’t absolutely with us, as though Deviah and I were medical students mak
ing the round of a hospital ward, and Prakash, our professor, was talking about people prostrate on their beds or with bandaged limbs in slings and pulleys.

  One man did look like a hospital case, and he was showing a very dirty, very creased official form in the local Kannada script which seemed to say – Prakash knew about this man, had met him earlier that morning – that his wife was a cancer patient in a Bangalore hospital. The man’s story was that he had come to Bangalore to put his wife in the hospital; he wanted now to go back to his village, but he didn’t have any money; he wanted 42 rupees for the bus fare.

  The fellow looked quite spectacularly broken down. He was thin and half-starved, with a worn tunic made from some kind of commercial hessian sack, with the commercial lettering on the sacking only half washed out. The top of his nose was skinned, down to the red flesh, and he was carrying a baby and a feeding bottle.

  As soon as we came within prostrating distance, this fellow, holding the baby in one arm, made a dive with his other hand for Prakash’s feet, in an exaggerated gesture of respect – taking care, during his downward sweep, first to set the feeding bottle upright on the concrete surround of Prakash’s house. Prakash made a gesture to the wretched man to get up. The man got up, bent down again to pick up the feeding bottle, dandled the shaken-up baby a little, put the bottle in the baby’s mouth, and fixed wild eyes on Prakash. Prakash looked at the man, not really returning the gaze, looking more with something like social or academic distance, and – seeming to assess the man while he spoke – gave Deviah and me a little lecture about the man’s condition.

  People who were taken into the hospital could have their spouses stay with them, Prakash said. It was a legal provision. If this fellow said he wanted the fare to go back to his village, it was because he chose not to take advantage of that facility. The fellow was probably making the rounds of ministers and other people that morning. Prakash himself had already that morning issued instructions to someone on his staff to give the fellow a couple of rupees, though he wasn’t sure that the fellow was genuine.