A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (72 page)

The next cartoon was one that Perron had also seen. Rowan had sent it to him as an enclosure with the only letter he had ever written. It illustrated a meeting of the Cabinet Mission of 1946 which had come out to India in the hot weather after the elections to seek an agreement on the major constitutional issue arising out of the continuing difficulty the British Government seemed to be having in establishing to whom to hand over when the time eventually came. The cartoon showed the three sweating members of the Mission: Cripps (merely President of the Board of Trade, but difficult to detach from Indian affairs), the Secretary of State (Pethick-Lawrence) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Alexander). They were sitting staring at a large map of India which showed the country’s provincial boundaries. A legend at one side of the map provided the clue to the different hatchings: perpendicular lines for Hindu majority provinces and horizontal lines for Muslim majority provinces (with a few areas of cross-hatching in the Punjab and Bengal). But nearly one-third of the map remained unhatched. The main caption was: ‘A Paramount Question’ and this was followed by a sub-caption in the form of a dialogue between the three ministers:

Rowan’s comment when sending this cartoon to Perron had been: ‘Confidentially, it’s said to be quite true, that three senior cabinet ministers between them had no idea that the self-ruling princely states, who have individual treaties with the paramount power (the Crown) respecting their rights to their own independence, cover so much of India.’

Another cartoon, which Perron hadn’t seen, dated June 29, 1946, showed the cabinet mission returning disconsolately to London, climbing aboard a plane labelled ‘Imperial Shuttle Service’. The Secretary of State was carrying the Imperial Crown and Cripps was surreptitiously handing him back a large diamond and saying, ‘You’d better stick it back in, already.’

Halki’s inventiveness here lay chiefly in the way he made the three British ministers look like three shady Jews from Amsterdam, and Nehru, Jinnah and Tara Singh look like three equally shady Arab merchants who had come to wave them off but were eyeing each other suspiciously, wondering if the jewel from the crown had been secretly handed over to whichever one of them had offered the highest number of piastres. Perron hadn’t seen the cartoon because the editor hadn’t dared publish it.

After this light-hearted cartoon came a series of tragic ones, every one of which the editor had published. They belonged to the period following Congress’s decision to accept Wavell’s invitation to join a new executive council which became known as the interim government, and to do this without the League. With governments formed in all the British-ruled provinces after the elections, some with League ministries but the majority with Congress ministries, the vital gap in government lay at the disputed and potentially federal centre. One of Halki’s cartoons portrayed this enigmatically. It was the one in which he first reintroduced a characteristic figure from his ‘Bhopa’ days – the struggling and emaciated figure of Indian freedom and unity, last seen clenched in Churchill’s two-fingered fist. Here he was now, the emaciated figure,
stretched on a pavement asleep, but in two sections. Nothing connected the trunk to the lower limbs. You could see pavement between them. The majority of its Congress admirers interpreted it as a criticism of the Muslim principle of partition, of a separate Muslim state as a
sine qua non
of independence. The editor told Perron that it was really Halki’s criticism of the men who had it in their power to join the two portions of the body together by at least attempting to work together at the centre.

‘And these,’ he said, leading Perron to another wall, ‘are what I call Halki’s Henry Moore cartoons, all inspired by those drawings your artist did of English people living like troglodytes in the underground railway stations during the Blitz. I published all these and became very unpopular with the proprietors. A cartoon should make people laugh, they said, even if it is only to laugh at themselves. But I said, What is there to laugh about now? Well – look at this!’

‘This’ was a sombre pen and ink drawing of Calcutta, captioned ‘Direct Action Day’, August 16, 1946 and celebrated the result of Jinnah’s decision to resort to violence in the belief that the Viceroy had betrayed him by allowing Congress to enter the central interim government without him. In this picture, though, it was difficult to distinguish Muslim dead from Hindu dead. Halki had just drawn a pile of bodies, such as might be seen on the streets of Calcutta on any night of the week, except that these were obviously dead, not sleeping; but ordered in rows, like sleepers, in diminishing perspective from a lit to an unlit area.

There were several variations on this theme, but it was always night-time and the street was always the same street, the foreground lamp-post the same lamp-post. The most striking (Perron thought) was the one that showed the street all but empty. There were no bodies on the pavement, bloodstains adumbrated the shapes of bodies cleared away. In the background you could just see Bapu, with his staff, accompanied by Jinnah (hands behind back) walking down the road towards the lit area. This carried no caption and was the last of the pictorially sombre cartoons. Sombreness, though, continued in the jokey ones that followed.

A cartoon dated 3 September 1946 marked the occasion of
the swearing in of the interim central government headed by Nehru, ostracized by Jinnah and overshadowed by the assassination of one of the nominated non-League Muslims, Shafaat Ahmed Khan, which caused riots in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Another, in mid-October, celebrated Jinnah’s about-face, his decision to co-operate and enter the interim government to protect Muslim interests. To accommodate him three non-League Muslims had to resign. A third cartoon, dated in November, represented Halki’s satirical view of this armed collaborative truce, a drawing of Wavell presiding over a round-table conference of his brawling Indian ministers (whose briefcases, leaning against their chairs, were bulging with fused bombs). A window gave a view of a rioting mob. A doorway was marked as the way into the Constituent Assembly where the future constitution of free India would eventually have to be settled. The door was wide open but clearly no one was prepared to enter. In this cartoon Wavell was drawn in diminutive proportions, crouched in an overwhelming viceregal chair, and with two heads – or rather one head drawn twice, with connecting lines denoting its swift turning to and fro, as he listened first to one argument and then to another. The caption ran: ‘I see’ and only readers who knew that this brief sentence was said to be the Viceroy’s most frequent contribution to every conversation really appreciated the joke.

One of the unpublished Halki cartoons of the last phase of Wavell’s viceroyalty was drawn early in December when Wavell had persuaded the British Government to invite a delegation (headed by himself) of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders, to a consultation in London, which he hoped would break the deadlock. Once again there was the waiting aeroplane (‘Imperial Shuttle Service’). The pilot, looking out of his window, was Attlee and the co-pilot Cripps. Advancing across the tarmac were Nehru, Baldev Singh and Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan. At the head was Wavell, but whereas the four Indian leaders were depicted as free agents merely prodding each other forward with a peremptory finger digging into the back of the man in front, Wavell’s hands were manacled behind his back and the finger pressing into
him
was Nehru’s. It was captioned ‘The Invitation’. The editor
had not published it because he thought it a shade too sympathetic to the Viceroy and potentially troublesome. Later he regretted his decision.

He had missed the point of the leer Halki had drawn on Attlee’s face and only fully appreciated Halki’s interpretation when in the following February (1947) after a further couple of months’ variations on the theme of incompatibility (with the constituent assembly assembling without the League, and then the Congress threatening to withdraw from the interim government if the League insisted on remaining in it), Attlee announced his government’s intention of transferring power peacefully and responsibly by June 1948 and hinted that if the constitutional issue hadn’t been solved by then an award would have to be made and power transferred to whatever authority Britain felt would govern in India’s best interests. This (as the editor pointed out to Perron, who agreed) was exactly the kind of clear statement that Wavell had always tried to get. But it was accompanied by another, to the effect that Wavell’s ‘wartime appointment as Viceroy’ (which was the first anyone had heard about such a limitation to a traditional five-year term of office) would end in March and that his successor would be Louis Mountbatten, the victorious Supremo of South-East Asia Command in the recent war, a relation of the King’s, but patently a man of the new world.

Halki celebrated this news with a cartoon which the editor published against considerable internal opposition but with popular acclaim. Again, it was a two-frame cartoon, each frame showing a different aspect of one of those old-fashioned cottage style barometers: a little rustic house from which a male figure emerged in poor conditions and a female one in summery.

Halki’s rustic house was a simplified version of the main entrance to Viceregal House. Frame one showed Wavell outside the first of the twin doors. The sky above was black. Bulging monsoon clouds were pierced by a fork of lightning coming from the mouth of a heraldic, rather ancient, winged lion, labelled ‘Imperialism, circa 1857’. In the second frame the sky was bland, lit by a sparkling little sun held aloft by a frisky airborne lamb (with Attlee’s face) labelled ‘Imperialism, circa 1947’. Below this bland sky the gaunt figure of
Wavell had retired into the gloom of Viceregal House and out of the other door had come the fine-weather figure of a smart toy-soldier (Mountbatten), magnificently uniformed, taking the salute, smiling excessively and exuding sweetness and light.

Subsequently, Halki had found his cottage-barometer theme a useful one to hark bark to during the first month or so of Mountbatten’s appointment, weeks spent in seemingly inexhaustible rounds of conferences and counter-conferences. These later cartoons portrayed the various problems the new Viceroy had had to contend with and (perhaps) his growing exasperation at his inability to solve them to his own satisfaction. Political intransigence (from whichsoever party) was portrayed in the shape of the stormy figure (for example, Jinnah, but not invariably; there was once even Gandhi) emerging from the dark door while the toy-soldier retreated into his, and the bland sky was threatened by clouds that never quite covered the frisky lamb (although the smile on the lamb’s face tended to get more and more strained).

‘But that first barometer cartoon,’ the editor said, referring back to the Wavell/Mountbatten version, ‘is the prime example of Halki’s gift for foreseeing the inner nature of events before they have actually taken place.’

‘When will Mr Shankar Lal be back in Bombay?’ Perron asked. The editor shrugged. ‘He went almost without notice. He came to see me just two weeks ago and said he must go to the Punjab to try to persuade his parents to come down here, because otherwise they would find themselves living in bloody Pakistan. He said he had been working two or three days on a cartoon for publication on August 15, in case he isn’t back by then.’

‘But there’s still a fortnight to go.’

‘I know. But he said his parents are very stubborn people. Anyway, I have the cartoon. It is terrible. I may not dare publish it. It is in the safe at home so I cannot show it to you. But you saw his June 3 cartoon? People say it is his masterpiece.’

‘No, I haven’t seen that.’

‘Oh you must, Mr Perron. It is very funny. I have the original at home because even my wife laughed. Everybody
laughed. They rang me from Delhi and told me Mountbatten had laughed.’ The editor banged his desk bell. ‘I will get a copy of the relevant issue.’

*

For the June 5 issue, commemorating Mountbatten’s announcement that Pakistan was now inevitable, and that the British would withdraw ‘probably by August 15’ Halki had worked throughout June 4 and drawn a picture of an immense Gothic building, or rather a structure which the architect had planned as one only to be frustrated (one had to imagine) over certain details of land acquisition. The attempt to create an illusion of a single façade, although admirably conceived and executed, hadn’t quite worked, although it took several moments of close study of Halki’s exemplary drawing to discern this. The cartoon occupied a whole page.

The main building, one such as citizens of Bombay were especially familiar with, was a huge emporium bearing some basic resemblance to the local army and navy shop. Across the façade the name ran:
Imperial Stores.
Between the word
Imperial
and the word
Stores
were the royal coat of arms and the announcement:
By Self-Appointment.
The building was several storeys high and drawn so as to show the main street frontage and one side-street elevation. The main entrance, curiously, was on the side street. Above this side street entrance there was another sign:
Proprietor.
Albert George Windsor;
Manager:
Clem Attlee.

At ground level, front and side, there were display windows crammed with goods but across each banners had been pasted proclaiming:
Grand Closing Down Sale. Expiry of Lease. Starts June 3. Bargains in Every Department. All Stock must be Sold by August 15.
Above this building the lamb held the sparkling sun aloft.

Outside the main entrance on the side street stood a tall, splendidly uniformed commissionaire who was looking at his watch, awaiting the moment to open the doors. Halki had caught Mountbatten’s expression of detachment and self-confidence perfectly. All round the building there were queues of eager bargain hunters, mostly civilians but also soldiers and police. Each queue was separated from the others
by its own ‘Queue Here’ sign – and these were variously inscribed, Congress, League, Sikhs, Hindu Mahasabah, Liberals, Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Tribes, Scheduled Castes; and at the head of each queue was a clearly identifiable leader who was consulting his shopping list.