The Writer and the World: Essays

  Professor Mehta was a small fat clean-shaven man of sixty in trousers and shirt. He had the distant manner of an overworked physician who has heard everything. He was unwilling to speak. As soon as he understood what I wanted he began to write, very fast, on a foolscap sheet: Mrs. Indira will win her own election by more than 50,000 votes. But she won’t be able to get full majority in Centre …

  IFEEL that after the busyness of the headquarters, and after the excitement of the drive, the mood of Mr. Mukut’s men changed there, in the stuffy little room of the Beawar hotel, when Mr. Mukut’s face clouded at the thought of the sabotaged evening.

  On Sunday morning some of his supporters had premonitions of defeat. They came to me, as to an impartial witness, with stories that Mr. Bishweshwar’s men were distributing liquor in two wards of the city, and with the warning that the next day there would be leaflets, purporting to come from Mr. Mukut, saying that he had withdrawn, that he had all along been for Mrs. Gandhi.

  Premonitions of defeat. And in the morning the disaster was clear. Outside every polling booth on the road to Nasirabad there was a decorated Indira Congress tent, where young men sat with electoral rolls and waited to receive voters. At half past ten, the sun already blazing, some of Mr. Mukut’s tents were only just going up; and in some places there were no tents and sometimes not even tables. Mr. Mukut’s son, defeat on his face, spoke of sabotage. Outside one booth two of Mr. Mukut’s workers stood forlorn, separate from the crowd; one of them shrugged and said, “Harijan area.”

  In Nasirabad one young man was close to tears. The Congress had ruled in Rajasthan for as long as he could remember; it was rotten and corrupt and had at last seemed about to wither away; now Mrs. Gandhi had preserved it. “You’ve won, you’ve won,” he said to Mr. Kudal; and Mr. Kudal, sympathetic to the young man’s pain, blinked fast.

  The Congress had not withered away. Its organization had remained intact and was behind Mrs. Gandhi and Mr. Bishweshwar. The Congress hadn’t really split. There had only been defections, sufficient to provide acclamation and crowds (deceptive in a constituency with half a million voters) and what Mr. Kudal had called tamashas, excitements. In Ajmer the Opposition or Organization Congress, on whose behalf Mr. Mukut was standing, was a phantom party.

  But Mr. Mukut also had the Jan Sangh. The Jan Sangh was strong in Ajmer City, and a bonus was that the poll there was usually high, 70 per cent as against 50 per cent in the rural areas. With a good majority in Ajmer City—dependent on a good poll—Mr. Mukut might still be in the fight. But it was in the Jan Sangh areas of the city that Mr. Mukut’s disaster was most plain. In Naya Bazaar, the area of small traders, a Jan Sangh stronghold, the poll at one o’clock was under 40 per cent; and Mr. Mukut’s election tent, without a table (and the formality that imposes), only with a long bench, was overrun by small children and already looked abandoned.

  The Jan Sangh voters were abstaining. It was the possibility Mr. Mukut had always discounted. By allying itself with other parties, by supporting Mr. Mukut, its old enemy, by softening its racial-communal Hindu line, the Jan Sangh had compromised its right-wing purity. It had ceased to be a crusade; in the eyes of its supporters it had become as “political” and tricky as any other party. And later that afternoon, when the news everywhere was that Mr. Mukut was losing, some of those Jan Sangh abstainers were to go out and vote against him.

  At half past four, half an hour before the booths closed, there were three people in Mr. Mukut’s campaign headquarters: a wizened old secretary at a table with a telephone that was now idle, a thin black-capped accountant in a dhoti who sat with his legs drawn up on a straight-backed chair, and a boy. Someone came in with a bill. The black-capped accountant, without changing his posture, considered the bill and spiked it. I stretched out an inquisitive hand towards the spike. Wordlessly, the accountant spun the spike away from me to the boy, who put it in a corner of the paper-littered floor.

  Mr. Bishweshwar, surrounded by his workers, sat in a basket-chair on the open concrete porch of his villa headquarters. He was in a state of great, laughing excitement and he was shouting into a telephone. Most of his workers were in trousers, shirts and pullovers. But Mr. Bishweshwar was in his politician’s costume of homespun dhoti and koortah, the white panoply that spoke of Gandhian merit and, now, of its political rewards, all the things that went with being a member of parliament: the flat in New Delhi, the two free telephones, fifty-one rupees a day during parliamentary sittings, free first-class rail travel throughout India (with priority in reservations), and five hundred rupees a month.

  It was some time before I saw that Mrs. Bishweshwar was also there, still and withdrawn, standing on the open porch as on a stage, draped in a dark-green sari, her head bowed and modestly covered in the presence of so many men: like a sorrowing classical figure, a symbol of downtrodden Indian womanhood.

  TEN DAYS LATER, after the remoter districts had voted, the count took place. The weather had turned, the heat was beginning; and on Highway 8 there were handcarts with little conical heaps of green and red powder for the gaieties of the Festival of Spring on the following day. The counting was done in a marquee in the Collectorate yard. Neither Mr. Bishweshwar nor Mr. Mukut was there. “The commander-in-chief doesn’t have to be at the front,” a counter said.

  And Mr. Mukut was spending this, the longest day of his political career, in his flat. It was going to be worse for him than we had expected. In Ajmer City—the counting was done district by district—he had only got nineteen thousand votes; Mr. Bishweshwar had forty-three thousand.

  I said to Mr. Mukut’s son, “So Professor Mehta advised you wrongly?”

  “He didn’t advise us wrongly. His calculations were wrong.”

  Mr. Bishweshwar was at his campaign headquarters. He was used now to his victory; he was at peace, but tired. The election had been a strain; he didn’t share Mr. Kudal’s delight in the “sports” side. He had suffered at that moment when important people had seemed about to defect. He had been badly frightened by the Rawats, and he hadn’t forgiven that damaging leaflet. “I’m going to sue. Let them apologize and so on. There’s a lakh or two there.”

  But he had suffered mostly because of Mr. Mukut, in whose shadow he had lived for so long. I asked whether he thought they might now have broken for good. He said, “I don’t know. I went to see him yesterday. He didn’t talk to me.” And Mr. Bishweshwar was anxious to show that he too, though young, had a record of service and sacrifice. He hadn’t been to jail, like Mr. Mukut; but because of his social work he hadn’t found time to marry until he was thirty-two. “From the beginning I was interested in social service. I was scoutmaster in Government College. I don’t know why, the poorer sections always attracted me. Since 1952 I have devoted myself to the peasantry.”

  He made it sound like a hobby. He had modelled himself on his uncle; he too was half Gandhian, half politician, and claimed the right to exercise political power because he had earned religious merit. And Mr. Bishweshwar might so easily have been on the other side, against Mrs. Gandhi. “It was a testing time for me,” he said, speaking of the Congress split, “the choice between principle and personality.” In the end he had managed to combine both: Gandhian principle and Mrs. Gandhi’s personality.

  All afternoon his lead lengthened. At last it reached sixty-six thousand. Mr. Mukut, in the days of his glory, had never had such a majority. The caste issues had nowhere mattered. The Kishangarh affair hadn’t mattered; nor had the Rawat enticement. Only Udaipur’s tour had had some effect. In that remote district, where he was a god, Udaipur had cut Mr. Bishweshwar’s lead to just over three thousand. The electorate had everywhere voted for Mrs. Gandhi and Garibi Hatao; they had voted out of their common distress and need.

  At about half past three Mr. Bishweshwar and his wife came to the Collectorate. They were both in homespun, he in white, she in blue. He was smiling quite helplessly; she was abashed and delicate. As they walked up the middle of the marquee all of us at the Dis
trict Magistrate’s table rose. Someone ran up with a garland of gold and silver tinsel: it was for Mr. Kudal, the triumphant election agent. The second garland, of marigold and white champa flowers, was for Mr. Bishweshwar.

  Outside, the crowd grew. And when, just before the results were announced, Mr. and Mrs. Bishweshwar left, going out the way they had come, the counters, who hadn’t saluted their arrival, stood up with palms joined in the gesture of greeting and respect. The brass band, waiting outside, struck up Colonel Bogey. There was a float with the cow and calf in white. Men in a packed jeep scattered coloured powder on the crowd: the Festival of Spring, occurring one day early. And copies were being distributed of a one-sheet “extra” of the Hindi Rajasthan Patrika:

  BISHWESHWAR GETS HUGE MAJORITY

  Nephew Crushes Uncle

  I thought I would go to Mr. Mukut.

  “I will come with you,” Mr. Kudal said. And when we were in the car he said, “I must come with you. Terrible. A man who has controlled the destinies of this district for two decades, to be defeated now by his nephew, his own creature.”

  In the top floor flat the unlined curtains were drawn in the front room and Mr. Mukut sat cross-legged and still on his narrow bed. His eyes were closed and his head was held to one side. He was in clean white cotton, and the white was momentarily shocking, like the colour of death and grief. Half a dozen men, among them the black-capped accountant, were sitting silent on a spread on the terrazzo floor. Mr. Kudal didn’t speak; he went and sat on the floor with the others.

  Mr. Mukut’s son came out and offered me a chair. He bent over his father, said, “Bapuji,” and gave Mr. Kudal’s name and mine. At first Mr. Mukut didn’t move. Then, abruptly, he turned his head to face the room and, in a terrible gesture of grief, beat the back of his open hand hard on the bed.

  No one spoke.

  Mr. Mukut’s son brought out tea. He pulled the curtain open a little way: the barred, wire-netted window, the sunlight on the white wall of the terrace, the brown hills. He hung a brown waistcoat on his father’s shoulders and the effect of the white was softened.

  “They were canvassing votes for Indira,” Mr. Mukut said, “not for the candidate. Nowhere was the candidate in the picture.” He hadn’t yet accepted his defeat; he still dealt in the politics of personal merit. I asked whether he and Mr. Bishweshwar might be friends again. He said, “I don’t know. He came here yesterday. But he didn’t say a word to me.” He turned on the transistor and the six o’clock English news from Delhi was of Mrs. Gandhi’s landslide victory all over the country, of the defeat everywhere of old Congressmen who had miscalculated like Mr. Mukut.

  “There are no morals now,” Mr. Mukut said. “The Machiavellian politics of Europe have begun to touch our own politics and we will go down.”

  Mr. Kudal stood up.

  “As election agent I have to make an appearance in the procession,” Mr. Kudal said, when we were outside. “Otherwise my absence will be misinterpreted.”

  We caught up with the procession in the bazaar. Men in open lorries were pelting everybody with little balls of coloured powder. “Give me seven minutes,” Mr. Kudal said, and disappeared into the crowd. When he came back his clothes and hair and face were satisfactorily stained with red. Red the colour of spring and triumph, and sacrifice.

  1971

  AFRICA

  AND THE

  DIASPORA

  Papa and the Power Set

  AFTER more than twenty years as a folk leader, one of the Negro shepherd-kings of the Caribbean, Robert Bradshaw of St. Kitts—“Papa” to his followers—is in trouble. Two years ago he became the first Premier of the three-island state of St. Kitts–Nevis–Anguilla. The state had a total area of 153 square miles and a population of 57,000. It has since become smaller. Anguilla has seceded and apparently gone for good, with its own islet dependencies of Scrub Island, Dog Island and Anguillita: a loss of 35 square miles and 6,000 people. There is discontent in Nevis, 50 square miles. In St. Kitts itself, Papa Bradshaw’s base, there is a dangerous opposition.

  The opposition union is called WAM, the opposition political party PAM. WAM and PAM: it is part of the deadly comic-strip humour of Negro politics. These are still only the politics of kingship, in which there are as yet no rules for succession. It is only when leaders like Papa Bradshaw are in trouble, when they are threatened and fight back, that they become known outside their islands; and it is an irony of their kingship that they are then presented as dangerous clowns. Once Papa Bradshaw’s yellow Rolls-Royce was thought to be a suitable emblem of his kingship and courage, a token of Negro redemption. Few people outside knew about the Rolls-Royce; now it is famous and half a joke.

  The folk leader who has been challenged cannot afford to lose. To lose is to be without a role, to be altogether ridiculous.

  “Papa Bradsha’ started something,” a supporter says. “As long as he lives he will have to continue it.”

  Bradshaw prepares to continue. The opposition are not allowed to broadcast; their supporters say they do not find it easy to get jobs. Men are recruited from the other Caribbean islands for the police. The St. Kitts army, called the Defence Force, is said to have been increased to 120; Papa Bradshaw is the Colonel. There are reports of a helicopter ready to police the island’s sixty-eight square miles.

  It has been played out in other countries, this drama of the folk leader who rules where he once securely agitated and finds that power has brought insecurity. In St. Kitts the scale is small, and in the simplicity of the setting the situation appears staged.

  THINK of a Caribbean island roughly oval in shape. Indent the coastline: beaches here, low cliffs there. Below the sharp and bare 4,000-foot peak of a central mountain chain there is a forest. Then the land slopes green and trimmed with sugar-cane, uncluttered with houses or peasant allotments, all the way down to the sea. A narrow coast road encircles the island; it is impossible to get lost. The plantation workers live beside this road, squeezed between sugar-cane and sea. Their timber houses are among the tiniest in the world.

  All the history of St. Kitts is on this road. There, among those houses on low stilts, whose dirt yards run down through tangled greenery to the sea, Sir Thomas Warner landed in 1623, to found the first British colony in the West Indies. Here, in the barest opening in the sugar-cane, are two rocks crudely carved by the aboriginal Caribs, whom the English and French united to exterminate just there, at Bloody River, now a dip in the road. Sir Thomas Warner is buried in that churchyard. Not far away are the massive eighteenth-century fortifications of Brimstone Hill, once guarding the sugar-rich slave islands and the convoys that assembled in the calm water here for the run to England. The cannons still point; the site has been restored.

  In the south-east the flat coastal strip broadens out into a little plain. Here, still set in the level green of sugar-cane, are the air-strip and the capital, Basseterre. There is one vertical in this plain: the tall white chimney of the island’s single sugar factory.

  The neatness and order is still like the order of the past. It speaks of Papa Bradshaw’s failure. He hasn’t changed much. His fame came early, as an organizer of the sugar workers; a thirteen-week strike in 1948 is part of the island’s folk-lore. But Bradshaw’s plantation victories mean less today to the young. They do not wish to work on the plantations. They look for “development”—and they mean tourism—on their own island. The air over nearby Antigua rocks with “Sunjets” and “Fiesta Jets.” St. Kitts only has brochures and plans; the airfield can only take Viscounts. It is unspoiled; the tourists do not come. The feeling among the young is that Papa Bradshaw has sold out to the sugar interests and wants no change.

  And Bradshaw’s victories were only of St. Kitts. They meant little to the peasant farmers of Nevis, and nothing to the long-independent farmers and fishermen of Anguilla, seventy miles away. The Nevisians and Anguillans never voted for Bradshaw. Bradshaw didn’t need their votes, but he was irritated. He said he would put pepper in the sou
p of the Nevisians and bones in their rice; he would turn Anguilla into a desert and make the Anguillans suck salt. That was eleven years ago.

  “Gahd bless Papa Bradsha’ for wa’ he do.” It is only the old and the devout among the plantation Negroes in St. Kitts who say that now. They remember the ola or trash houses, the cruel contract system, the barefoot children and the disease. Bradshaw himself worked as a young man in the Basseterre sugar factory; he carries a damaged hand as a mark of that service. Like many folk leaders, he never moved far beyond his first inspiration. It is also true that, like many folk leaders, he is responsible for the hope and the restlessness by which he is now, at the age of fifty-one, rejected.

  THE WEATHERBEATEN little town of Basseterre also has a stage-set simplicity. There is a church at the end of the main street. PAM hangs its home-made board in the veranda of a rickety little house. Directly opposite is a building as rickety, but larger; this is labelled “Masses House” and is the headquarters of the Bradshaw union. At times of tension this section of the main street is known as the Gaza Strip.

  Masses House has a printery which every day runs off 1,200 copies of a ragged miniature newspaper called The Labour Spokesman. Even with large headlines there isn’t always enough news to fill the front page; sometimes a joke, headlined “Humour,” has to be added. Sport is good for a page or two or three. A cricketer like Sobers can make the local sportswriter ambitious. “The shy boy of seventeen, not yet lost his Mother’s features on his debut against England in the West Indies in 1954, has probably rose to the pinnacle of being the greatest cricketer both of our time and the medieval age. If W. G. Grace were to twitch in his grave at the comment he would only turn over on the other side to nod his approval.”

  A few doors away from Masses House is Government Headquarters, a modernistic building of three storeys. Grey air conditioners project from its façade; a pool in the patio is visible through the glass wall. The hotel is opposite, a converted old timber house. The manager is a gentle second-generation Lebanese whose nerves have been worn fine by the harassments of his large family, his staff, untrained or temperamental, the occasional assertive Negro group, and the political situation. “Have you seen our Premier, sir?” He supports Bradshaw but avoids controversy; he knows now he will never see Beirut.