The Great Indian Novel (14 page)

‘Very well,’ Gangaji said in that bookish way of his. ‘The first thing we shall do is to reformulate our demands. You, through Sarah-behn here’ - yes, Ganapathi,
behn,
for Ganga had already made her, in cheerful disregard of ethnicity, appearance and colonial history, his sister - ‘have asked for a 50 per cent increase in wages. Your employers offer 20 per cent. Since in pursuit of Truth we must seek no unfair advantage over our adversary, I have decided we shall now ask for 35 per cent. It is a just figure, the mill owners can afford to pay it, it is better than what you have - and it splits the difference.’

This time the roar of approval from the crowd was somewhat more muted. But the workers, having accepted Gangaji’s leadership, accepted his reformulation of their demand. The struggle was on.

And Ganga waged it in his own peculiar way. This time there were no depositions to take, no travels to undertake, no elephants to be overtaken. Instead he trudged through the slum dwellings every morning, holding a hand here, soothing a brow there. Then he rested, his shrinking frame lost under the covers of the enormous four-poster bed Sarah Moore had given him in a room at her home. Every afternoon, at precisely five o’clock, he arrived in Mrs Moore’s Overland roadster at the peepul tree. A crowd would already have gathered for this ritual, and the Englishwoman’s liveried chauffeur would have to toot-toot his way through the throng to the foot of the tree, his professional dead-pan expression betraying no hint of what he thought of his unusual errand. Ganga and his English ‘sister’ - a word that soon came to connote friend, hostess, protector and disciple all in one - would then alight. Ganga, a shawl sometimes draped over his bony shoulders to shield him from the Bengali winter, his glasses perched on his nose, would proceed to speak to the crowd.

It almost did not matter what he said; for he rarely raised his voice to harangue them and the words never carried to the farthest ranks of his audience. It doubtful many would have understood him if they had. But it was as if, in simply being there and attempting to communicate with them, he was transmitting a message more powerful than words. His presence carried its own impulses to the people assembled before him, a wave of strength, and inspiration, and conviction, that sustained the workers in their hungry defiance.

I see that furrow on your brow again, Ganapathi. You think that this is not at all like the Ganga we know and have spoken about, the Ganga of the third- class railway carriages and the experiments in self-denial. But what can I say, young man, except that it is the truth? You would have expected him to make his home amongst the squalor of the slum, but Ganga stayed amidst the comforts of colonial civilization; you would have expected him to walk to the peepul (spell that any way you like, Ganapathi, the idea’s the same), but instead he drove in a white woman’s car. And yet neither prevented him from preaching to the workers about the importance of holding out for their just demands, even if they had to starve in order to do so.

This went on for days, Ganapathi, indeed for over two weeks, and Ganga made his speeches, and the workers got hungrier and more desperate, and the employers resolutely refused to heed the name of their town - they did not budge. God knows how long this might have gone on, and whether at the end of it all we might have had a worthwhile story to tell. But Fate has a habit of intervening at just the right moment to resolve these crises, to drop an apple on a sleeping head, to turn an aimless drift into a surging tide. Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time. Ask Columbus.

It happened when the mill owners, deciding that their employees had now reached the point of least resistance, announced that they were ending the lock-out: the factory gates were now open to any worker who was willing to accept the 20 per cent. Ganga responded at his five o’clock meeting that if the owners’ lock-out was over, the workers’ strike had begun. They would not, he declared, return to their machines until the 35 per cent had been granted. His announcement was greeted by some straggling cheers, and large areas of silence. The rumbling in the workers’ stomachs had begun to drown out the defiance in their voices.

It was not that they had been less than fully committed in their steadfastness. No, Ganapathi, they had held out, heeding Gangaji’s daily exhortations. And in the crude songs they had improvised after his speeches, in the chanting cadences of their processions back from the peepul tree to their hovels, they had given voice to their courage and their determination:

I dreamt I saw Paradise last night
Where every man was free;
Where workers sang, and toiled, and prayed
At the feet of Gangaji,
At the feet of Gangaji.

And Gangaji said, ‘This bliss is yours
‘Cause you held out till the end;
For you stood with courage in your hearts
And stoutly refused to bend -
And stoutly refused to bend.’

Yes, we shall win, brothers and friends,
We shall win by staying true
To our cause, our faith, our firm belief
That God will give us our due,
That God will give us our due.

Simple lyrics, Ganapathi, simply sung by the ragged band, with words they improvised each evening to reflect the most important theme of Gangaji’s latest speech. They were often out of tune, God knows, but never out of step with that inner harmony that comes when it is the heart that sings and not just the tongue. But few things can test the human spirit as sorely as the needs of the human flesh. When the employers threw open the gates of the factories and offered to take the starving workers back, the workers’ defiance trembled on the brink of collapse.

Ganga understood clearly that if even a few of his charges went back to the factory his cause - their cause - would fail, and the weeks of obduracy that had kept their stomachs empty would be in vain. So he added a practical step to his exhortations: he moved the timing of his daily meeting under the peepul tree from 5 p.m. to 7.30 a.m., the precise moment when the factory whistle would blow and the gates swing open to welcome the workers reporting for duty.

This was a bold gesture: the factory gates were situated directly across the road from the river bank upon which Ganga’s peepul stood. He was confronting his followers with the source of their own temptation and teaching them to reject it as evil.

It worked the first day. The whistle blew, the immense gates clanged open; a florid foreman in khaki shorts came to the entrance and looked expectantly at the assembled workers. The temptation strained their faces, but Gangaji’s crowd held: no worker was going to walk in through those inviting gates in full view of his comrades. It was a sort of primitive picket-line, I suppose, but it was far from certain that, in those pre-union days, the picket would hold. Ganga represented the wise, disinterested leadership the workers had yearned for, but his disinterest was also its own disqualification. By asserting his moral principles, by upholding abstract canons of Truth and justice, he was laying nothing more than his beliefs on the line. While they were, if their starvation continued, laying down their lives.

Late that afternoon, after the first 7.30 meeting, one of Ganga’s volunteers all right, Ganapathi, you can see through my attempt at reportage, it was me - was visiting a bustee, a slum settlement, to help keep up the morale of the workers and their families. But their sullen looks, their half-mumbled responses from averted faces, made it clear that the workers had begun to lose faith in what Ganga was trying to do. And then suddenly one man, cradling his sick infant daughter on his lap, burst out in bitter recrimination: ‘It is all right for Gangaji to tell us not to give in. After all, what does it cost him? He eats fine food off Moore-memsahib’s plates and travels by a car that is worth many years’ wages.’

The words struck home, Ganapathi. Secure in his own sincerity, Gangaji had not thought that the depth of his commitment would ever be questioned. I hastened back to Moore-memsahib’s house to tell Gangaji what one man had said and others undoubtedly thought.

Even I did not know how he would react to the charge. You or I, Ganapathi, we might simply have ignored it, or sought, perhaps, to explain ourselves to the workers, and either course would have led ultimately to the loss of credibility that costs so many leaders their authority. A modern politician might have sought to address the source of the workers’ discontent and tried to find food for their families from wealthy donors; but Gangaji had already refused many offers of help from rich Indians, on the grounds that the workers had to fight their own battles. (‘If they win despite starving, it will be a far truer triumph than a victory built on the charity of strangers,’ he declared to me. Yes, Ganapathi, Gangaji could be tough, tough to the point of callousness.) And finally, there was, of course, the possibility - though from what I knew of Gangaji it was the slenderest of possibilities - that he might just abandon his entire crusade on the grounds that his followers were not worthy of him.

Any of these responses would have been possible for another man. But Gangaji reacted in a way that reflected and defined his uniqueness.

‘From this moment onwards,’ he announced in a tone that reminded me of that other terrible vow he had taken, ‘I shall not eat or drink, or travel by any vehicle, until the workers’ just demands have been met.’

Neither eat nor drink! We were thunderstruck. ‘Ganga,’ I protested, ‘you cannot do this to yourself. We all need you - the workers need you.’

But Ganga refused to be moved by any entreaties. Sarah-behn, myself, other volunteers, all offered to substitute themselves for him; but not only did he turn us down, he refused even to let us join him in his fast. ‘This is my decision, taken by myself alone and for myself alone,’ he declared. ‘The workers have looked to me so far as their leader, and now that they are wavering it is I as their leader who must stand firm.’ And then, in that mild tone of voice by which he instantly disarmed his listeners, he added the famous words, the immortal words that now etch his place in every book of quotations: ‘Fasting,’ he said, ‘is my business.’

Fasting is my business.
How many ways those words can be read, Ganapathi.
Fasting
is my business; fasting is
my
business; fasting is my
business;
even (why not?) fasting is my business. And even those who actually heard him utter the words cannot agree on where the Great Man had placed his emphasis. It does not matter. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, he conveyed all four meanings, and many nuances beyond, in his delivery of that classic phrase. Today it has passed into history, a slogan, a caption, worn by over-use, cheapened by imitation. Yet, once the words were out of his mouth, Gangaji himself never used them again.

The next morning he arose before dawn to walk the eight miles from Sarah-behn’s comfortable residence to the peepul tree by the factory. He needed a stick now, but it was a prop more in the theatrical sense than in the physical. Of course, we all accompanied him, and as the strange procession headed past the workers’ hutments, children ran out to find out what was happening and conveyed the news to their fathers. ‘Gangaji has taken a vow,’ the word passed from lip to sibilant lip, ‘Bhishma has taken a vow.’ By 7.25, when he reached the tree, a crowd had assembled around it larger than any that had greeted him so far in his daily meetings.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ Ganga said, joining his palms in a respectful
namaste,
‘I know I have demanded great sacrifices from you. Some of you may have begun to feel that you cannot continue, that the battle is too unequal. Yet I have asked you to be strong, for he who gives in now not only admits his weakness but weakens the strength of the others. Some of you may ask why you should heed my advice when all I am offering is my words. To them, and to all of you, I swear this solemn oath: not to eat or drink again, or travel by any means other than my own feet, until you have returned to work with a 35 per cent increase in wages.’

A great collective sigh escaped the lips of the crowd, like the first puff of a restive volcano; then a silence descended upon the throng as every man and woman near enough strained to catch Gangaji’s next words.

‘I have told you often in the past that our cause was worth dying for. Those were not just words, my friends; I believe in them. Today I declare to you all that if the Truth does not prevail, if justice is denied, I am prepared to die.’

The volcano rumbled, Ganapathi. It burst forth in a warm, molten gush of human lava, as man after man rose to his feet to shout his gratitude and his reverence for the Great Teacher. Praise mingled with prayers, shouts with slogans, until Ganga, seated in his usual mild-mannered and bespectacled way under the tree, seemed borne aloft on a cloud of adulation. In the confusion a brocaded Muslim weaver in a brilliant red fez leapt up and pulled out a knife. It appeared that what he was saying was that he was prepared to die immediately for the cause, if need be; but some undoubtedly thought he was threatening to finish off the English exploiters, and a great clamour rose up in support of his gesture. Clearly, Ganga’s philosophy had not been fully understood, but he had achieved his objective.