Thakur Das, in fact, 30 years or so later, bought the copyright of the Dictionary from Dr Fallon. His intention was to reissue the book. That was one reason why he bought a printing press in 1911 – the coronation year of the King-Emperor George V, as Vishwa Nath said: the year when the capital of British India was shifted from Calcutta, and the foundation was laid for New Delhi. But Thakur Das didn’t reissue the Dictionary. He died almost as soon as he had bought the press. Vishwa Nath’s grandfather had then to see to the setting up and commercial working of the press. The Dictionary would have been a very heavy labour; and it wouldn’t have paid its way. Vishwa Nath said, ‘Every single letter, in Hindi, English, and Urdu, would have had to be set by hand. So the press did other work to keep going.’ The Dictionary was set aside, surviving in the family only in that copy in the glass case in Vishwa Nath’s office.
Vishwa Nath said, ‘It’s now out of copyright, and there are stories that someone has brought out a photo-offset edition.’
Vishwa Nath’s grandfather died in the influenza epidemic of 1917. That was when his father and grand-uncle took over the press. They were an orthodox Hindu family. ‘A joint family, living together and working together.’ But there was friction. ‘There was a division in the family. By 1939 the press was almost finished. I wanted to work in the press, but I saw they were quarrelling. So I came out and qualified as a chartered accountant. I never practised, though. I started a new press, on my own, without the rest of the family. I was twenty-two.’
I asked him what Delhi was like then.
‘Easy-going, before the war. For six months the city slept. The Government of India used to go out to Simla from April to September – the summer exodus. New Delhi was almost completely deserted. Everybody took it easy, sleeping in the day, doing things leisurely.’
Politics? Gandhi?
‘I became interested in 1930.’ He was fourteen. ‘I wanted to go to prison, but I was a minor. They wouldn’t arrest me. That was during the time of the salt march. Gandhi was noted for his stunts. I call it a stunt. The salt march was a stunt, but it was necessary. We had no arms. He went out to the villages and roused the masses. The salt march actually electrified the whole country. I remember the day Gandhi reached Dandi on the sea, we in our street in Delhi prepared salt from a brackish well, and we said, “We have broken the salt laws.” From that day of the salt-making I started wearing the khadi, the homespun. And I still do.
‘The time of the salt march we had processions every day. It was the first time women came out of their houses, came out of purdah in Delhi and all over North India. Some of our relatives courted arrest. My uncle was imprisoned for six months; he later became a minister in Nehru’s government.’
It was at that time, too – ‘The whole country was in ferment’ – that the idea of publishing began to come to him. He liked reading; he spent all his pocket money on books and magazines.
‘I used to go to the press, and set type by hand – for play. My father loved printing, and I also loved printing. When I was in the eighth class, when I was eleven, I had decided that I would publish magazines.’
I felt he was speaking for me. In colonial Trinidad, at about the same age, I had developed – largely through my father, a journalist – a love for print, the shapes of letters, the variety of typefaces, a wonder at the way words were transformed when handwriting turned to type. Out of a love for that process I had decided to be a writer, with perhaps less idea of what I was going to write about than Vishwa Nath – in the ferment of India in the 1930s – had of the magazines he was going to publish.
We talked for a while about printing. I asked about Hindi typefaces. I liked them very much. They seemed strong and elegant and logical, and at the same time true to the written script. I asked Vishwa Nath if he knew who had designed the first Hindi typeface. I felt sure that the designer would have been someone from India. Apparently I was wrong.
‘Drawings were sent from India to England. The Devanagari script’ – the Hindi script, derived from the Sanskrit – ‘was cut over there. All the type we used – for Fallon’s Dictionary, for everything – was imported from England. We kept on importing Devanagari type from England until the 1920s, when type-foundries were set up in India. The paper we used was imported. The machinery was imported. The ink was imported. It was only when Gandhi started this swadeshi movement – the movement for using India-made goods – that there was a quest for producing things in India.’
There was a side of imperialism that had nonetheless to be acknowledged. ‘Actually we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn’t want known outside their own coterie.’ That point about the brahmins was something Vishwa Nath wouldn’t let go; it still made him bleed, and still drove him on. But always, too, there was his professional side, and it was with a printer’s enthusiasm that he spoke of the Hindi type.
‘The Sanskrit script is essentially a script for handwriting. It has ascenders, descenders, the letters move right and left, and there are many contractions. It was really a marvellous job to make it – the typeface – in movable type. In English we have 26 letters and two cases, upper case and lower case. In printeries there were literally two cases, one with the capital letters, one with the small letters. When you are setting Hindi you have to have four cases.’ For the contractions, the half letters, the vowel indicators. He drew a plan on a sheet of paper, and said, ‘No. You will need five to six cases.’
Two rooms away from his office – empty rooms now, at this time of evening, the tables clear, the many chairs unoccupied – was where he kept the trays of old type. He pulled out a few trays and showed them: formes still set, the movable type worn at the edges, shiny. From a gallery on this top floor you could look down at the Heidelberg machines on the ground floor, and the stacks of printed sheets. There was a smell of ink and warm paper.
In his white homespun, walking briskly through the empty rooms, he was – even without the deference of employees to underline his status – the owner, the man who knew where it all was, because he had arranged for it to be as it was.
When we were back in his big office – the big desk, the swivel chair upholstered in brown velvet, the glass-doored bookcase rising to the ceiling, the books on the shelves, the file copies of his magazines, the black Shiva statue on the cupboard, an old copy of American Cosmopolitan: all the varied attributes of his personality – he talked of history and his anti-brahmin obsession.
‘When I was young the freedom movement was at its height. We had been slaves for centuries, and when the independence movement started we had to have some tonic – that we were not as bad as the British had called us. To gain our self-respect, we started thinking we had a very ancient civilization – and of course there’s some truth in that. But then it also had its weaknesses, and it was those weaknesses that made us slaves for a long time.
‘When I started my own press in 1939 – and soon after that began bringing out my own magazines – I started reading our old scriptures. I wanted to find out for myself how great or grand our civilization was. And when I looked into our ancient literature I found that we were lacking something very vital. The more I went into the scriptures the more my mind was turned – and then this thing started.’ The thing: the reformist slant of his magazines.
‘The Hindu religion is a conglomeration of faiths, 500 religions or faiths. We’ve had reformist movements from the very beginning. From the dawn of civilization we’ve had reformist movements against orthodoxy. What happens is that every reform movement degenerates into a sect – the Lingayats, the Arya Samajists, everybody. Buddha rebelled. Mahavir, the founder of the Jains, rebelled. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikhs, rebelled. It’s a long list. They rebelled and degenerated into sects, and became as orthodox as the previous orthodox people. So I didn’t put on those saffron robes and start going about to those conferences, or preaching in public. I published my magaz
ines.’
His first magazine, Caravan, in English, was started in 1941. In 1945 he started Sarita, for women, in Hindi. Both magazines had a circulation of about 15,000.
‘A substantial circulation for that time. There was a big uproar when I published an article that stray cows should be eliminated. They came out in procession. There were posters all over the city. This was in 1950 or thereabouts.’
But there wasn’t much rebellion in Woman’s Era. People even thought of it as a conservative magazine.
He said, ‘Rebellion isn’t in Woman’s Era. It’s in Sarita, our Hindi magazine, which sells three times what Woman’s Era sells. Woman’s Era is more for social affairs. It’s educative. Teaching women the simple things nobody bothers to tell them about.’
His idea of social affairs was different from Nandini’s. She had said that the magazine dealt in personal situations rather than social problems. Their differing uses of the word came from differing world-views, differing assumptions and levels of education. And Vishwa Nath had his own ideas of rebellion.
‘In Sarita we go full blast, preaching against gods and goddesses, even God itself. Last month we had an article in Woman’s Era, “Prayers Breed Selfishness and Sycophancy”.’
He took a file copy from the bookcase and showed the article. I thought that only Woman’s Era could have used so heavy a title. It was, though, a fair description of the article, which railed against the prayer practices of people of all faiths. The article was shot through with Vishwa Nath’s rage about Indian history. People who abased themselves before God, the article said, could also abase themselves before a despotic ruler. This touch of historical judgement, this mention of a despotic ruler, seemed to remove the contemporary scene, and gave an antique flavour to the article, which, for all its passion and boldness, and its contemporary photographs, came out as curiously inoffensive, a criticism not so much of religion as of foolish individuals trying to make a contract with God.
Was he a religious man? Only a religious man, I thought, could be so obsessed with religion. Only someone of true Hindu inclination could have spent so much time with difficult, speculative Hindu texts. I remembered Chidananda Das Gupta in Shantiniketan: not a theist, Chidananda had felt a ‘renewed inclination’ in his semi-retirement to read the Upanishads, and – only a few years younger than Vishwa Nath – had found in them the highest level of spirituality, and rewarding.
Vishwa Nath said, ‘I am not a religious man at all.’ The Upanishads? ‘Play of words. The Upanishads are just a play of words. Alman, Brahma – the whole exercise is to prove that atman is part of Brahma, and Brahma is atman. Some say yes, some say no, some say it’s half-and-half. The Hindu philosophers spend all their lives hair-splitting.’
The Dancing Shiva was in his office as a work of art, not as a living icon.
‘I think religion is the greatest curse of mankind. It has killed more people, destroyed more property, than any other thing. Even today – Northern Ireland, the Middle East. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, all fighting each other in India. The oldest profession is not prostitution. It is the priesthood.’
Yet, with this iconoclasm, there was in Vishwa Nath something that was like its opposite: a concern for the family. In India this concern was like a wish to preserve the old social order; and perhaps, like the iconoclasm, it came out of some personal need. This seeming contradiction was at the heart of Woman’s Era.
Vishwa Nath said, The family is the hinge of civilization. My stress is that the family should be strengthened, not destroyed. Woman’s Lib is responsible for quite a good deal of the disintegration of the family.’
He saw himself as a man made not only by Gandhi and the independence movement, but also by his family past. Perhaps, with his family past, the family stories of the siege and sacking of Delhi at the time of the Mutiny, and with his reading of Indian history, the invasions and the cruelties which could make him cry, the pillaging and destruction by the Muslim invaders of the great Hindu temples of North India – perhaps there was with him some dread of chaos which younger people – who saw him only as conservative – didn’t have.
One reason why he had started Woman’s Era – the very name a counter-blast to Woman’s Lib – was to fight for the sanctity of the family. It was important to do such a paper in English.
‘I had to reach women who don’t read Hindi. It is the English-reading, English-speaking people who control things in this country. All this feminist Woman’s Lib movement is conducted by English-speaking people. You don’t find it so much in Hindi or the Indian languages.’
Nandini had said of Woman’s Era, The editors know what they are doing.’ The words had suggested that, in India’s professional and competitive magazine business, the people who ran the magazine had done ‘research’ of some sort, like the research the people at Savvy were said to have done. But Vishwa Nath, I felt, moved by instinct; no amount of research could have led to his formula.
The Woman’s Era formula couldn’t be copied, because the personality of the editor couldn’t be copied, with its many ambiguities: the tears for the past, the iconoclasm, the fear of chaos coming again, the strong nationalist feeling, the homespun, with the over-riding love of print that had come down from the ancestor who, less than 20 years after the Mutiny, had worked on Dr Fallon’s Dictionary, applying a new kind of scholarship to the everyday India he knew.
In the beginning, at independence, women’s magazines (as Nandini had said) had been a borrowed idea, appealing to a few at the top. Woman’s Era was an expression now of a purely Indian social order much lower down, offering instruction and reassurance, and a subtle transformation of the hard real world, to women just emerging, women whose lives were a tissue of ritual and given relationships, and didn’t want to rebel or dream.
The formula couldn’t be copied, or transferred. Vishwa Nath himself had tried to apply the Woman’s Era formula to a general magazine, Alive. Alive hadn’t found a public. What made sense in the shut-in woman’s world came out in the general magazine as quirky and insubstantial.
8
The Shadow of the Guru
To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.
Every day the newspapers carried plain official accounts of events in the Punjab: so many killed by Sikh terrorists; so many people arrested for harbouring terrorists; so many terrorists killed by police; so many ‘intruders’ from across the Pakistan border killed.
In the wide streets and roundabouts of New Delhi there were reminders of the trouble in the north. At night there were roadblocks. At places below the trees there were sandbags, guns, and policemen. In some areas there was a policeman every 100 yards or so. In the city which Vishwa Nath remembered as being empty and sleepy when he was a child (and where the trees would have been little more than saplings: still only a dream of a new Delhi) terrorism had led to the creation of this new and effective police apparatus.
The British forces the correspondent William Howard Russell had seen at the siege of Lucknow had been made up principally of Scottish Highlanders and Sikhs. Less than 10 years before, the Sikhs had been defeated by the sepoy army of the British. Now, during the Mutiny, the Sikhs – still living as instinctively as other Indians, still fighting the internal wars of India, with almost no idea of the foreign imperial order they were serving – were on the British side.
During the assault on Lucknow an incident took place that sickened Russell, who was a tough man, and a hardened relisher of war. One of the Lucknow palaces – the ‘yellow house’ on the racecourse – was being attacked by Sikh soldiers. The defenders fought back with spirit; at one stage they shot and killed one of the Sikhs’
British officers. When it was clear that the defenders intended to fight to the end, the attacking soldiers were withdrawn, artillery was brought up, and the yellow house was blasted with shot and shell. The defenders were brave men, Russell said; they should have been sung in ballads. But no mercy was shown them in Lucknow. Those who had survived the shelling were bayoneted by the Sikhs and quickly killed – all but one man. For some reason this man was dragged out by the feet, bayoneted about the face and chest, and then placed on a fire. The tormented man struggled; half burnt, he managed to get up and tried to get away; but the Sikhs held him down in the fire with their bayonets until he was dead. Russell, in a footnote, said – a characteristic touch – that he saw the charred bones on the ground a few days later.
Russell was told that during the Punjab war the Sikhs mutilated all the prisoners they took. So this bayoneting and burning of the man who – possibly – had killed their officer might have been no more than their practice. Perhaps it was part of the barbarity of the country; or simply the barbarity of war. Russell loved war, but he had no illusions about it. ‘Conduct warfare on the most chivalrous principles,’ he wrote, ‘there must ever be a touch of murder about it.’
In the Sikh fierceness at the battle of Lucknow there would have been a wish to get even with the ‘Pandies’ who had helped to defeat them less than 10 years before. There would have been a more general wish as well to get even with the Muslims. And it was historically fitting that the Sikhs should have helped to bring about the extinction of Muslim power in Lucknow and Delhi, because it was out of the anguish caused by Muslim persecution of Hindus that the Sikh religion had arisen, in 1500 – at about the time of Columbus’s last voyage to the New World.
People within the Hindu fold had always been rebelling against brahmin orthodoxy, Vishwa Nath had said; and everyone who had rebelled had started a sect with its own rigidities. Buddha had rebelled; Guru Nanak, the first Guru of the Sikhs, had rebelled. Two thousand years separated the rebellions, and they had different causes. Buddha’s rebellion had been prompted by his meditation on the frailty of flesh. Guru Nanak’s rebellion or breaking away had been prompted by the horrors of the Muslim invasions – the horrors to which at that time no one could see an end.