The Great Indian Novel

  The soldiers fired just 1600 bullets that day, Ganapathi. It was so mechanical, so precise; they used up only the rounds they were allocated, nothing was thrown away, no additional supplies sent for. Just 1600 bullets into the unarmed throng, and when they had finished, oh, perhaps ten minutes later, 379 people lay dead, Ganapathi, and 1,137 lay injured, many grotesquely maimed. When Rudyard was given the figures later he expressed satisfaction with his men. ‘Only 84 bullets wasted,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’

  Even those figures were, of course, British ones; in the eyes of many of us the real toll could never be known, for in the telling many more bled their lives into the ground than the British and the press and the official Commission of Inquiry ever acknowledged. Who knows, Ganapathi, perhaps each of Rudyard’s bullets sent more than one soul to another world, just as they did the Raj’s claims to justice and decency.

  21

  Gangaji came later, at the appointed hour of his address, and when he saw what had happened he doubled over in pain and was sick info an ornamental fountain. He stumbled among the bodies, hearing the cries of the injured and the moans of the dying, and he kept croaking to himself in Sanskrit. I was there, Ganapathi, and I caught the words, ‘ Vinasha kale, viparita buddhi’ - our equivalent of the Greek proverb: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad’.

  It was Gangaji’s strength to see meaning in the most mindless and perverse of human actions, and this time he was both wrong and right. He was wrong because the Massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will; yet he was right, because it was sheer folly on the part of the British to have allowed it to happen. It was not, Ganapathi, don’t get me wrong, it was not as if the British were going around every day of the week shooting Indians in enclosed gardens. Nor was Rudyard particularly evil in himself; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the cruelty of the literal-minded, the brutality of the direct. And because he was not evil in himself he came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was acting. It was not Rudyard who had to be condemned, not even his actions, but the system that permitted his actions to occur. In allowing Indians to realize this lay the true madness of the Hastinapur Massacre. It became a symbol of the worst of what colonialism could come to mean. And by letting it happen, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men, that point which, in any unequal relationship, a master and a subject learn equally to respect.

  At the time this was perhaps not so evident. The incident left the population in a state of shock; if you think it provoked a further violent reaction, you would be wrong, Ganapathi, for no father of a family willingly puts himself in the firing-line if he knows what bullets can do to him. After Bibigarh everyone knew, and the people subsided into subordination.

  Gangaji told me later that the Massacre confirmed for him the wisdom of the principles of non-violence he had preached and made us practise at Motihari. ‘There is no point,’ he said candidly, ‘in choosing a method at which your opponent is bound to be superior. We must fight with those weapons that are stronger than theirs - the weapons of morality and Truth.’ Put like that it might sound a little woolly-headed, I know, Ganapathi, but don’t forget it had worked at Motihari. The hope that it might work again elsewhere, and the knowledge that nothing else could defeat the might of the Empire on which the sun never set, were what made us flock to Gangaji. In a very real sense Hastinapur gave him the leadership of the national movement.

  And what of Colonel Rudyard, the great British hero of Bibigarh? His superiors in Whitehall were embarrassed by his effectiveness: there is such a thing, after all, as being too efficient. Rudyard was prematurely retired, though on a full pension. Not that he needed it; for across the length and breadth of the Raj, in planters’ clubs and Empire associations, at ladies’ tea parties and cantonment socials, funds were raised in tribute by patriotic pink-skins outraged by the slight to a man who had so magnificently done his duty and put the insolent natives in their place. The collections, put together and presented to the departing Colonel at a moving ceremony attended by the best and the whitest, amounted to a quarter of a million pounds, yes, Ganapathi, 250,000, two and a half lakhs of pounds sterling, which even at today’s depreciated exchange rate is forty lakhs of rupees, an amount it would take the President of India thirty-five years to earn. It took Rudyard less than thirty-five minutes, much less. The gift, which his government did not tax, brought him more than £160 per Indian dead or wounded; as one pillar of the Establishment was heard to murmur when the figures were announced, ‘I didn’t think a native was worth as much as that.’

  In some ways this gesture did even more than the Massacre itself to make any prospect of Indian reconciliation to British rule impossible. It convinced Gangaji, who derived his morals as much from the teachings of Christianity as from any other source, that the Raj was not just evil, but satanic. The Massacre and its reward made Indians of us all, Ganapathi. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into revolutionaries, led a Nobel Prize- winning poet to return his knighthood - and achieved Gangaji’s absolute conversion to the cause of freedom. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth, and he never wavered again in his commitment to ridding India of the evil Empire. There was to be no compromise, no pussyfooting, no sellout on the way. He would think of the phrase only years later, but his message to the British from then on was clear: Quit India.

  Rudyard retired to a country home in England. I wonder whether he was ever troubled by the knowledge of how much he was reviled and hated in the country he had just left. Or by the fact that so many hotheaded young men had sworn, at public meetings, in innumerable temples and mosques and gurudwaras, to exact revenge for his deed in blood. I like to think that Rudyard spent many a sleepless night agonizing if a stray shadow on the blind was of an assassin, starting at each unexpected sound in fear that it might be his personal messenger from Yama. But I am not sure he did, Ganapathi, because he knew, just as Ganga did, the limitations of our people in the domain of violence. The young men who swore undying revenge did not know how to go about exacting it, or even where. Only two of them finally had the intelligence and the resources to cross the seas in quest of their quarry. And when they got to Blighty, and made inquiries about an old India hand with an unsavoury Hastinapur connection, they found their man and, with great éclat and much gore, blew him to pieces.

  Do not rejoice, Ganapathi, for it was not Rudyard whose brains they spattered over High Street, Kensington. No, not Rudyard, but a simple case of mistaken identity; to a sturdy Punjabi one British name is much like another, the people they questioned were themselves easily confused, and it was not Rudyard, but Kipling they killed. Yes, Kipling, the same Professor Kipling who had been careless enough to allude to the canine qualities of the Indian people, and who, for that indiscretion, had already been struck by my pale, my rash son Pandu. It makes you wonder, does it not, Ganapathi, about the inscrutability of Providence, the sense of justice of our Divinity. Our two young men went proudly to the gallows, a nationalist slogan choking on their lips as the noose tightened, blissfully unaware that they had won their martyrdom for killing the wrong man. Or perhaps he was not the wrong man: perhaps Fate had intended all along that Kipling be punished for his contempt; perhaps the Great Magistrate had decreed that the sentence of death fall not on the man who had ordered his soldiers to fire on an unarmed assembly but on he who had so vilely insulted an entire nation. It does not matter, Ganapathi; in the eyes of history all that matters is that we finally had our revenge.

  22

  So that is how my family entered politics, Ganapathi. Gangaji was more or less already in it, of course, since his crusade for justice had brought him smack up against the injustice of foreign rule, but now Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and white cane, and Pandu, whom celibacy had driven to fat, joined the cause full-time.

  Vidur, too, might have joined; indeed, he wished
to. He came down from Delhi the day after the annexation and the Bibigarh Massacre, and informed Gangaji and his brothers that he had resigned from the Service.

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Dhritarashtra. ‘Resigned?’

  ‘Good thing,’ said Pandu. ‘Well done, Vidur. You shouldn’t have joined the bastards in the first place.’

  ‘Withdraw it at once,’ Gangaji said.

  Vidur blinked in astonishment. ‘I beg your pardon, Uncle?’ he asked, for he was a polite young man.

  ‘Withdraw it,’ Gangaji said tersely. ‘At once.’

  ‘Withdraw my resignation? But I can’t possibly do that.’

  ‘Why not? Have they already accepted it?’

  ‘No,’ Vidur admitted, ‘they haven’t even seen it yet. I’ve put my letter of resignation in the Under-Secretary’s in-tray, and he’ll find it when he comes in on Monday morning.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ said Dhritarashtra, who was quick on the uptake, ‘because you’ll go back to Delhi immediately and take it out of his in-tray before he sees it.’

  ‘But why?’ Vidur asked despairingly. ‘You can’t seriously want me to serve this alien government, a government that has done this to our people!’

  ‘Whether it is the government you will be serving or the people whom they have harmed is only a matter of opinion,’ said Ganga sententiously. ‘Explain it to him, Dhritarashtra.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Vidur?’ asked Dhritarashtra, who, despite his blindness (or perhaps because of it), revelled in optical allusions. ‘We need you there. If we’re going to fight the Raj effectively we shall need our own friends and allies within the structure. And if we win,’ he added, his voice acquiring that dreamy quality that women in Bloomsbury had found irresistible during his student days, ‘we shall still need able and experienced Indians to run India for us.’

  And so Vidur reluctantly stayed on in the ICS and, because he had many of his father’s good qualities, rose with remarkable rapidity up the rungs of the States Department. His princely upbringing at Hastinapur had given him the knack of dealing with Indian royalty. He understood their whims and wants, indulged their eccentricities and interpreted them sympathetically to the British. In time he became a trusted intermediary between the pink masters and their increasingly assertive brown subjects.

  But we must put Vidur aside for a moment, Ganapathi, to look more carefully at Gangaji and his two princely disciples as they, in turn, rose to the peak of the nationalist movement.

  Dhritarashtra s disappointment with fatherhood and the failing health of his grim wife drove him wholeheartedly into politics. Here he surprised everyone with his flair for the task. He had the blind man’s gift of seeing the world not as it was, but as he wanted it to be. Even better, he was able to convince everyone around him that his vision was superior to theirs. In a short while he was, despite his handicap, a leading light of the Kaurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communications to the government, formulating its positions on foreign affairs, and establishing himself as the party’s most articulate and attractive spokesman on just about anything on which Cantabrigian Fabianism had given him an opinion.

  Gangaji, the party’s political and spiritual mentor, made no secret of his preference for the slim and confident young man. Pandu, in the circumstances, took it all rather well. He saw the world very differently from his blind half- brother. His recent brush with the angels of death and his subsequent immersion in the scriptures had made him more of a traditionalist than the idealistic Dhritarashtra, and the solidity of his appearance testified to one whose feet were staunchly planted on terra firma. Not for Pandu the flights of fancy of his sightless sibling, nor, for that matter, the ideological flirtations, the passionate convictions, the grand sweeping gestures of principle that became the hallmarks of Dhritarashtra’s political style. Pandu believed in taking stock of reality, preferably with a clenched fist and eyes in the back of one’s head. He balanced an hour of meditation with an hour of martial arts. ‘Of course I believe in non-violence,’ he would explain. ‘But I want to be prepared just in case non-violence doesn’t believe in me.

  His duties as the party’s chief organizer were indirectly responsible for his political differences with Dhritarashtra. The process of building up a party- structure and a cadre committed to run it in the teeth of colonial hostility convinced him that discipline and organization were far greater virtues than ideals and doctrines. It was the classic distortion, Ganapathi, to which our late Leader would herself one day fall prey, the elevation of means over ends, of methods over aspirations. As long as Gangaji was there he shrewdly harnessed the divergent skills of my two sons to the common cause. But when his grip began to slip . . .

  But you see, I am getting ahead of my story again, Ganapathi. You mustn’t let me. I haven’t yet told you about Kunti, Pandu’s faithfully infidelious wife, and how she fulfilled her husband’s extraordinary request for progeny. For it was not only Gandhari the Grim who assured India’s next generation of leadership by her exertions in labour. After all, Ganapathi, as you well know, we were to develop a pluralist system, so a plurality of leaders had to be born to run it.

  Stop looking so lascivious, young man. I have no intention of offering you a ringside seat by Kunti’s bed. Facts, that is all I intend to record, facts and names. This is history, do not forget, not pornography.

  In fact, if you must know, Pandu helped choose the genetic mix his sons would inherit. Kunti’s first post-marital lover (yes, first, there were others, but I shall come to that in a moment) was the youngest Indian judge of the High Court; let us refer to him only as Dharma, so as not to wound certain sensibilities, though those who know who I am speaking about will be left in no doubt as to his real identity. Dharma was learned, distinguished, good-looking in the way that only men become when they start greying at the temples, and of a highly respectable family. A man of principle, he agonized over his adultery, but found himself agonizing even more when Kunti abandoned him abruptly - as soon, in fact (though he was not to know this) as her pregnancy was confirmed.

  A son was born of their union, a weak-chinned, gentle boy with a broad forehead, whom they decided to name Yudhishtir. Pandu swears that, meditating while Kunti was in the final stages of labour, he heard a voice from the heavens proclaiming that the lad would grow up to be renowned for his truthfulness and virtue. But I have always suspected that Pandu had simply been reading a biography of George Washington too late into the night and dreamt the whole thing.

  When Yudhishtir was born Hastinapur was still in the family’s hands and Pandu was persuaded of the need for more - what shall I call it? - offspring insurance’ to make the succession secure. But he did not want Kunti striking up too long an association with Dharma, and the lady herself was attracted by the idea of variety. (Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.) This time her privileged nocturnal companion was a military man, Major Vayu, of the soon- to-be-disbanded Hastinapur Palace Guard.

  Vayu was a large, strong, blustery character, full of drive and energy but mercurial in temperament. He breezed into Kunti’s life and out of it, his ardour more gusty than gutsy, leaving in her the seed of Pandu’s second son, Bhim. Bhim the Brave, he came to be called in the servants’ quarters, but also, among the exhausted ayahs, Bhim the Heavy, for his was a muscular babyhood. His narrow forehead, close-set eyes and joined eyebrows made it clear that he would never share his older brother’s intellectual attainments nor inherit any part of his mother’s looks; but it was also clear that in strength he would have few equals. The doctor delivering him fractured a wrist before deciding upon a Caesarian; Kunti gave up nursing him when she found herself unable to rise after a minute’s suckling; a cot of iron had to be manufactured for him after he had demolished two wooden cribs with a lusty
kick of his foot; and a succession of bruised ayahs had finally to be replaced by a male attendant, a former Hastinapur all-in wrestling champion. The last of the ayahs resigned after an incident she never ceased talking about; apparently she had accidentally dropped the unbearably heavy infant on to a rock in the garden and had watched in horror as the stone crumbled into dust. This time the voice from the heavens only said one word, Ganapathi: ‘Ouch.’

  But Pandu, absentee landlord of his wife’s womb, was still not content; he wanted a son who would combine the brain of Yudhishtir with the brawn of Bhim. He went deeper and deeper into yoga and meditation, mastered the heaven-pleasing asana of standing motionless on one leg from dawn till dusk, asked Kunti to conserve her energies for an entire year (which, with Bhim on the premises, she was only too happy to do) and prayed for such a son. Finally, when he judged the moment to be right, he invited the revered Brahmin divine, Devendra Yogi, to partake of the pleasures of his wife’s bed. The godlike yogi’s expertise made the experience rewarding for Kunti in more ways than one. And thus, Ganapathi, was born Arjun, Arjun of lissom figure and sinewy muscle, Arjun of sharp mind and keen eye, Arjun of fine face and fleet foot. Oh, all right, I know I’m getting carried away again, but the boy deserves it, Ganapathi. The voice from the heavens proclaimed that Pandu’s third son would be beloved of both Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer. And this time Kunti heard the voice too, as she lay drained upon the delivery bed; the rishis on the Himalayan mountain-slopes heard it; the workers in the factories looked up from the clanging wheels of their machinery and heard it; and I, I paused in the midst of a stirring speech of sedition to a village panchayat and heard it. And Ganapathi, oh, Ganapathi, it filled us all with joy.