The Writer and the World: Essays

  “Gandhiji’s ideology was quite different from the ideology of Western politicians. The foundation of his political tactics is that means should be as fair as the end.” He didn’t think this could be said of Mrs. Gandhi. He was also concerned about nationalization. “It will ruin the country. All our state-owned enterprises are so badly run.” His support of private enterprise brought him close to the hard anti-Communist line of the Jan Sangh. But Mr. Mukut didn’t appear to be concerned either about efficiency or capitalism. His opposition to nationalization was embedded in an over-riding Gandhian doubt about the machine age. The machine had destroyed the West, as Mr. Mukut had heard; the machine would destroy India. “What I particularly admired about Gandhiji was that he went to Buckingham Palace in 1931 in a dhoti.”

  I asked why that was admirable.

  “Because he put the picture of poor India before the world.”

  “Mr. Nehru said that the danger in a country as poor as India was that poverty might be deified.”

  “Did he say that?” Mr. Mukut paused. The idea was new, “Western” and perhaps intellectually unmanageable. “I never heard him say that.” He opened and closed his mouth wordlessly; and again, head thrown back, eyes closed, he was like a gasping invalid.

  We passed the new Shiva temple, still with its bamboo scaffolding, that the peasants had built to celebrate the end of the eight-year drought. It stood white in a desolation of young thorn bushes. Once there had been woodland here; but towards the end of the drought, at a time of famine, the trees had been cut down for charcoal. And then we were in the military area: barracks old and new in the stripped land, soldiers with rifles on their shoulders running in groups of two or three on the asphalt road.

  The main street of Nasirabad was brilliant with stalls of fruit and vegetables. Here we stopped. Many reverential hands helped Mr. Mukut out of the jeep and led him, limp-shouldered, limp-armed, between the vegetable-stalls and across the narrow pavement to a dark little office, over the front door of which, on the outside, were dusty framed diplomas from Lucknow University and, on the inside, brightly coloured Hindu religious prints. It was a lawyer’s office, with a whole glass-cased wall of Indian law books covered in brown paper, the frame of the case painted yellow, with each section roughly labelled in red.

  Mr. Mukut said to me, “He’s one of my disciples.”

  The lawyer, a middle-aged man in a chocolate-purple sports shirt, said very loudly, as though addressing the street, “Everything I am I owe to Mr. Mukut.”

  They made Mr. Mukut sit on a basket-chair. They brought him tea and a large, fly-infested cachoree, a local fried delicacy.

  The lawyer said, “Mr. Mukut made me what I am. He has served many people here without payment. The people of Nasirabad remember these things.”

  And Mr. Mukut, leaning back, his slender legs drawn up onto the seat, his hands fumbling for the cachoree that had been broken for his convenience into little pieces, opened and closed his mouth, like a man about to sigh.

  But the lawyer had pointed out the weakness of Mr. Mukut’s campaign. Some of the people in the office were linked to Mr. Mukut by interest. The others were Jan Sangh and they for the most part were small shopkeepers. Even the forbidding, kohl-eyed young man in a cream-coloured suit and pointed black shoes, even he, who was a teacher, came from a shopkeeping family. The Jan Sangh was an urban party; it had no organization in the villages. The only party with a village organization was the Congress. It was that village organization that had to be captured; and Mr. Mukut’s only weapon was his influence. Mr. Bishweshwar’s strength was that he belonged to the ruling party; a ruling party had its ways of exerting pressure.

  “I will tell you how they won the last State Assembly by-election,” the lawyer said. “At that time this area was affected by famine. Rural people were jobless. The government machinery opened famine works in a number of places. And these famine-relief workers were given one slogan: ‘If you vote for the other side, famine-relief work will be closed down.’” And now the ruling party was again up to their old tricks, this time with the untouchables or Harijans, whom they were bribing in all sorts of ways and especially with loans from the nationalized banks.

  A prominent Christian in Ajmer had complained to me that as a result of all the political attention the Harijans were getting out of hand. They were being “brought up” too fast, before they had a proper “footing”; there had been strikes. “I am even afraid to speak harshly to some of them now,” the Christian said. I thought that the lawyer might be trying to say something like this in an indirect, un-Christian way. So I asked him, “They’re behaving badly then, these scheduled castes?”

  “Badly?” The lawyer didn’t understand my question. He was a Hindu; he didn’t have the Christian social sense; he couldn’t share the Christian’s resentment. Caste was not class. No one, however successful, denied his caste, however low, or sought to move out of it; no one tried to “pass”; no one’s caste-security was threatened by any other caste. So the lawyer floundered. “No,” he said at last, “they are not behaving badly. It’s just that they’re being fooled.”

  But what did Mr. Mukut have to offer? How was he going to balance this powerful appeal of the other side? Was he campaigning, for instance, for cow-protection? Mr. Mukut was astonished that I should ask. Everyone in Ajmer knew his record. During his time in parliament he hadn’t only campaigned for a ban on cow-slaughter and the punishment of cow-killers; he had also campaigned for free grazing for cows anywhere.

  “We are too Western-oriented,” Mr. Mukut said. He was sitting up now, small and neat and cross-legged in his basket-chair. “Go to the villages. Everybody in the village now wants to wear jacket and tie. Look at our own ayurveda medicine. It was only after a long fight that we managed to get it accepted, these remedies that are much cheaper than any modern drugs. And then there are the pipelines.”

  I said, “Pipelines, Mr. Mukut?”

  “Even in the villages. The pipelines in the villages is going too far. It’s all right in the cities. But in villages the healthy water from the well is good enough. But they are taking piped water now to many villages. For our womenfolk this going to the well and drawing water was one of the ways in which their health was maintained. They now have got no substitute exercise for the women. Similarly, we have our own indigenous chakki [a quern] for grinding grain on the floor. Now they have substituted these mills run by electric power or oil-fired machines. So now the whole village sends its grain to these mills, with the result that the women are missing this exercise as well. Previously even in cities this grinding with chakki was done by small families. But now everything is being Westernized. It is morally bad because it tells upon the health and habits of our womenfolk. And unless some alternative employment is found for them it naturally makes them sluggish.”

  In a famine area! From an election candidate! But Mr. Mukut could go into the villages to ask for votes because he was a Gandhian who knew that his own merit was high. He had achieved merit through service and sacrifice. Service for its own sake, sacrifice for its own sake. “Since Mr. Kaul and I left the Congress,” Mr. Mukut said, “there is no one there with a record of service. Mr. Kaul was in jail; I was in jail.” Democracy, the practice of the law, the concern with rights: one set of virtues had been absorbed into another, into a concept of dharma, the Hindu right way; and the distortion that resulted could sometimes be startling.

  KISHANGARH was murdered on Tuesday evening. On Friday evening All-India Radio announced that the police had “worked out” the case and arrested a student. On Saturday the details of the arrested man’s “confession” were all over Ajmer, and in the afternoon there were Hindi leaflets in the streets:

  LOVE STORY: A POLITICAL OPERA

  Bhim Jat, the killer of the Maharaja of Kishangarh, has confessed, and the whole affair is crystal clear. The Maharaja had a farm a few miles from Kishangarh. Bhim Jat and his beautiful sister worked for the Maharaja on this farm. The Maharaja took advanta
ge of the girl’s poverty and for a long time had illicit relations with her. Bhim Jat, a youth of nineteen, could not stand this looting of his sister’s honour. He took the law into his own hands and with his country-made pistol shot the Maharaja dead.

  But politics corrupts the truth and deals in lies. Some politicians immediately called a meeting to mourn the Maharaja’s death and with a great show of sorrow tried to tell the voter to take his revenge by defeating the Indira Congress.

  Would you vote for a party which plays with the honour of your daughter or sister? There should be rejoicing not tears at the death of these rajas-maharajas whose only princely habit is that they know how to take advantage of the poverty of young girls. Rise and utterly crush these debauched people so that never again will they come to you for votes with the name of Gandhi on their lips …

  Has Mr. Mukut no shame, to be sitting in the lap of the Jan Sangh, who were once his bitter enemies? The election should be fought on policies. Mr. Mukut shouldn’t be misleading the voters for his own selfish purposes. Mr. Mukut has used the Maharaja’s funeral-pyre to cook himself a meal of votes.

  Other versions of the story were no less sad. Bhim Jat’s sister had left her husband to become Kishangarh’s mistress; and Bhim Jat had been ostracized by his caste for the dishonour his complaisance had brought on them all. Kishangarh had given Bhim a house on the farm; he was paying for Bhim’s education; he had promised Bhim the farm itself. But then a well on the farm gushed water. In the desert water was money; and Kishangarh, worried about his “de-recognition” and the possible loss of his privy purse, had sought to go back on his promise.

  Kishangarh was the name of an eighteenth-century school of painting. Now it was linked with a peasant woman, a farm, a well: a peasant drama, far removed from the princely pageantry of the prize-giving at Mayo College that afternoon. Kishangarh was remembered there, in the obituary section of the headmaster’s speech, as a distinguished and popular old boy, like the late Maharaja of Jaipur, “who died in the U.K., where he had gone to play polo, his favourite sport.”

  The boys were exquisite in tight white trousers, long black coats and pink long-tailed Rajput turbans. They sat on the steps of the Mogul-style Bikaner Pavilion, with a view of the cricket field, the blank score-board, the college grounds and, in the distance, the sunlit brown hills of Ajmer. The guest of honour was the Canadian High Commissioner. Prominent among the visitors on the lower steps of the pavilion were some of the princes of Rajasthan: the Maharaja of Kotah, a couple from the house of Jodhpur, and the Maharana of Udaipur, whose ancestor had been the first to respond to an appeal of the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, for funds for a princely public school and had, a hundred years ago, almost to the day, given a lakh of rupees, then worth about £10,000.

  In the open area at the foot of the pavilion were the parents, many of them box-wallahs, business executives, some from as far away as Calcutta. All week they had been gathering in Ajmer: India’s modest middle class, products of the new industrial society, as yet with no common traditions or rooted strength, still only with the vulnerability of the middle classes of all very poor countries. In the poverty of India their ambition was great, but their expectations were small; they were really very easily pleased. India always threatened to overwhelm them—those servants at the edge of the cricket field—as the desert and the peasants and the new politics had overwhelmed Kishangarh and his ancient name.

  BUT THE MAHARANA of Udaipur hadn’t come to Ajmer only for the prize-giving. He had been campaigning hard against Mrs. Gandhi and her party in a princely freelance way, offering his services wherever they were needed; and he was in Ajmer to give Mr. Mukut a hand. He had come in an open dark-green 1936 Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur, an Election Secretary and two bodyguards. He proved his worth almost at once. That very evening, while the Mayo College boys were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Udaipur addressed a meeting in the bazaar area. His name was like magic. Fifteen thousand people came to hear him.

  The next day, Sunday, was the big day. Udaipur was going with Mr. Mukut and Mr. Sharda on a tour of those districts of the constituency that had belonged to the former Udaipur State. The little convoy started from the red-brick King Edward VII Guest House on Highway 8, not far from the mock-Mogul Queen Victoria Golden Jubilee clock-tower.

  It was such an unlikely alliance. There was Mr. Sharda, “Western” and businesslike in his suit, but with his pastoral Jan Sangh dream of an untouched Hindu world; he was in a jeep, packed at the back with bedding and other supplies. Mr. Mukut, the Gandhian and old-time Congressman, but now formally dressed in tight white trousers and a long cream-coloured coat, was in a grey saloon. Udaipur was in his open Rolls, a man in his forties, of medium height and build, with a black beret, dark glasses and dark-blue nylon windcheater. The thirty-six-year-old Election Secretary, very tall, with a paunch, a corrugated beard and glinting black locks, was all in loose white cotton and looked like a holy man. At the back of the Rolls the two khaki-uniformed, orange-turbanned bodyguards sat up high with their rifles: it was like a proclamation of the danger in which, in Rajasthan, princes now lived.

  Udaipur was the star. That was accepted. And so briefly did Mr. Mukut speak at Nasirabad, our first stop, that by the time my own jeep, after a wrong turning, had got to the meeting-place, he had finished and was sitting cross-legged on the improvised platform, eyes closed, good and quiet and patient at Udaipur’s suede-shod feet, like a man accepting his own irrelevance. But Udaipur remembered him. “People ask me, ‘But isn’t Mr. Mukut a blind man?’ I say, ‘He is blind on the outside, not on the inside. When you go to a temple, mosque or church you close your eyes to pray. You can’t see, but you aren’t blind on the inside.’”

  Mr. Mukut sat as still as a man meditating in a temple. But a packed day lay ahead. Suddenly—no speech from Mr. Sharda—the meeting was over and the mood of meditation and repose vanished. So quickly did Udaipur and Mr. Mukut scramble off the platform, so quickly did they bolt for their vehicles, that I lost them almost at once and didn’t catch up with them again until Beawar, thirty miles away.

  After Beawar it was desert; and it was desert after Bhim. No irrigated green patches, no trees, no peasants on bicycles; just rock and sometimes cactus, and the empty road. Sometimes a camel, sometimes a peasant in rags with patched leather sandals and a home-made gun: bandit country. But regularly in this wilderness little Rajput groups ran out into the road to stop the convoy and to look for the Maharana they had never seen (a Maharana of Udaipur had last been here in 1938). When Udaipur stood up in the Rolls drums beat and sometimes, unexpectedly, a trumpet sounded.

  They garlanded him and dabbed his forehead with sandalwood paste; they sprinkled him with red or purple water (he had dressed for this). Ceremoniously, as though he were a god in a temple (and his dark glasses gave him a suitable inscrutability), they circled his face with fire (a blazing lump of camphor in a brass plate). Once a woman fed him some substance with her hand. Here Udaipur was more than a prince. Here he was Hinduon ka suraj, the Hindu Sun, an ancient title of Rajput chivalry that had merged into religion. At one stop a man cried out, “You are our god!” And Udaipur was quick to reply, correctly, “The God that is, is the same for you and me.”

  Mr. Mukut wasn’t forgotten. When the Rolls moved on, the Rajputs surrounded the grey saloon. Mr. Sharda always waved me on then in his impatient way and so I couldn’t tell whether the men of the desert weren’t exacting some tribute from Mr. Mukut for their devotion to their Maharana.

  Early in the afternoon we reached the walled town of Deogarh. There was pandemonium at the main gate; in the middle of the crowd a white horse with a white sheet on its back was waiting for Udaipur. The loudspeaker-man in our convoy became frenzied. “Your Maharana has come. For fourteen hundred years you have known Maharanas. Now he has come, the Hindu Sun. You have longed for him as you have longed for clouds and rain. Now your Maharana has come.” But already, as in some spectacular film, the walled town was emptying; and men
and women in bright turbans and saris were hurrying across the desert to the temple of Karni Devi, goddess of the town, where Udaipur was to speak.

  Mr. Sharda, who was, I thought, a little buttoned-up in the company of his two old political enemies, whispered to me, “Jan Sangh. All organized by Jan Sangh.”

  And soon to his desert audience—bright turbans and smiling faces against a background of sand, the walled city and fort, the jagged hills faint in the haze—Udaipur was talking about Mrs. Gandhi’s threat to democracy and the constitution. Mr. Mukut sat cross-legged on the canopied platform. The bodyguards were dusting down the Rolls in the shade of a thorn tree.

  Udaipur had changed his beret for a Rajput turban. One man, so many roles. But Udaipur was a good speaker because he accepted all his roles—god, Rajput, democrat—and made them fit together. “I am not a god. I am just a sort of representative. We are all worshippers of Lord Shiva, Ek Ling Nath.” He was not a politician; he wanted no man’s vote. “I am not a supporter of the Jan Sangh. I am a supporter of freedom.” The Rajputs applauded that. “We have no policemen here and we need none. We are not like the Indira Congress. There is love between us, because we are one and the same.” They laughed at the political hit and applauded the definition of the basis of their Rajput loyalty.

  Afterwards, leaving Mr. Mukut to the electorate, we went to have lunch in the bare and run-down palace of Udaipur’s vassal. Here the election was as if forgotten. The vassal and his infant son glittered in Rajput court costume. A red carpet lay across the dusty courtyard. Drums beat; a smiling doorkeeper took the swords of guests; in an inner room women sang. A bright-eyed old retainer came and recited ancient verses about the duties of kings. Other smiling people—everyone was smiling—came to make obeisance and offer token tributes of one rupee and five rupees.

  “You see,” Udaipur said in English, his face still stained red and purple, “how unpopular we are.”