The Great Indian Novel (17 page)

That there was a rift became impossible to conceal. Pandu began to take positions at variance with Dhritarashtra’s. He constantly urged the adoption of a harder line against the British than the party - its strategy guided by Gangaji’s wisdom and Dhritarashtra’s cunning - was willing to adopt. When the Prince of Wales, an empty-headed lad with a winsome smile, paid a royal visit to examine the most prized jewel in the crown he was briefly to inherit, Pandu urged that he be boycotted. But Dhritarashtra instead persuaded the party to permit him to present the Prince a petition (don’t frown, Ganapathi, alliteration is my only vice - and after all, it is one thing you
can
do in Sanskrit). When the government in London then sent a commission of seven white men to determine whether the derisory ‘reforms’ of a few years earlier were helping Indians to progress to self-government (or whether, as Whitehall thought and wished to hear, the reforms had already ‘gone too far’ and needed reformulating), Pandu proposed a non-violent stir at the docks to prevent the unwelcome seven from alighting on to Indian soil. But this time Dhritarashtra wanted the party to content itself with - yes, Ganapathi, you’ve guessed it - a boycott; and once again, with Gangaji’s toothless smile of benediction behind him, Dhritarashtra had his way. It became apparent to Pandu that Dhritarashtra’s triumphs were basically of Gangaji’s making, and that a large number, perhaps a majority, of the Kaurava Party were backing his half-brother not because of any intrinsic faith in his ideas but because they came with the blessing of the man Sir Richard had taken unpleasantly to describing as Public Enema Number One.

I myself caught a whiff of Pandu’s bitterness at a Working Committee meeting of the party which I happened to attend. At one point I was talking to Dhritarashtra and the skeletal Gangaji when Pandu walked palely past. ‘The Kaurava Trinity,’ he muttered audibly for my benefit - ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.

Of course he was exaggerating my own importance, for I sought no active role in the Kaurava leadership. The mantle of elder statesman had fallen on me when I was scarcely old enough to merit the adjective, and I was content with the detachment it permitted. But even my habitual sense of distance from the quotidian cares of the party could not prevent a stirring of disquiet, which was instantly confirmed by Dhritarashtra’s next words. ‘I should have thought,’ he said lightly, but with his face set, ‘that my dear brother would have done better to refer to the Hindu Trinity - the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer. But then he would have had to include himself at the end, wouldn’t he?’

When rivals fling jokes at each other, Ganapathi, it means that there is no turning back. Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.

The disagreement came out into the open when the British convened what they called a Round Table Conference in London to discuss the future of India. It is not often that a major international event is named after a piece of furniture, but the round table in question was chosen quite deliberately (and after a great deal of diplomatic deliberation). It served two functions. One, unmentioned, was to hark back to the hosts’ glorious chivalric past under the legendary King Arthur (who, if he existed at all, was a superstitious cuckold, which is hardly my idea of a national hero). The second, openly cited at background briefings for the press, was to place all the participants on an equal footing: to have had a conventional table with a ‘head’ might have implied that the British had their preferences among Indian leaders, and the British, of course, were noble and disinterested Solons who would never want anyone to think such a thing.

Well, Ganapathi, before you begin to suggest that that is all fine and democratic, let me tell you that the lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious. In this case it meant reducing the Kaurava Party - the only nationwide nationalist movement, the only broad- based popular organization, the very party whose campaigns of mass awakening and civil disobedience had obliged the British at last, at least, to agree to talk with Indians - it meant reducing the Kauravas to a level of official equality with all the other self-appointed Indian spokesmen the British saw fit to recognize. And thus it was that Gangaji sat at his round table to parley with the British, surrounded by delegations of India’s Untouchables and its touch-me-nots, representatives of Indians with their foreskins cut off and Indians with their hair uncut, spokesmen for left-handed Indians, green-eyed Indians and Indians who believed the sun revolved round the moon. Mind you, the Kaurava Party included members of every one of these minorities, and could claim with justice to be able to speak for all their interests, in the larger sense of the term; but the British were not interested in the larger sense at all. They wanted to introduce as many divisive elements as possible in order to be able to say to the world: ‘You see these Indians can never agree amongst themselves, we really have no choice but to continue ruling them indefinitely
for
their
own
good.’

Now, all this was known before the conference even started, Ganapathi, that was the irony of it. What I am saying to you does not come with the benefit of hindsight (odd phrase, that: which of my readers will consider an old man’s fading recollections a benefit?). No, Ganapathi, it is there in the public record, it is there in Pandu’s impassioned entreaties to the Kaurava Working Committee. ‘Don’t go, don’t let us be a party to this charade,’ he pleaded. But the Working Committee, at Dhritarashtra’s glib urging, agreed not only to attend but to send Gangaji as the party’s sole representative to the conference. Pandu railed against ‘this madness’, as he called it. ‘If we must go, let us go in strength, let us send a delegation that reflects the numbers and diversity of our following,’ he argued. Once again he was disregarded; the Committee placed its faith in the man to whom many were already referring in open hagiology as Mahaguru, the Great Teacher.

So Pandu stayed in India and fretted, while the man he admired, but could not bring himself to surrender everything to, crossed his legs on a cold wooden chair and awaited his turn to speak after the Monarchists and the Liberals and the Society for the Preservation of the Imperial Connection, which had each sent more representatives to the Round Table than the Kauravas. But Pandu, though now bitter in his denunciation of his sightless sibling, was still a loyal party man. He remained so even when Ganga returned, having bared his chest on the newsreels and taken tea in his loincloth with the King-Emperor (‘Your Majesty, you are wearing more than enough for the two of us,’ the Mahaguru had said disarmingly) but won no concessions from the circular and circumlocutious conferees. Pandu resisted the temptation to say, ‘I told you so’ and concentrated instead on building up his support within the party councils. For once, my pale-faced hot-headed son was going to wait until the time was ripe before striking.

Do I give you the impression, Ganapathi, that between my pale and purblind progeny my sympathies lie only with Pandu? Do not be misled, my friend. India does not choose amongst her sons, and nor do I. They are both mine, their flaws and foibles, their vanities and inanities, their pretensions and pride, all mine. I do not disown either of them, any more than I could deny half my own nature.

And besides, Pandu could be wrong as well. As was amply demonstrated in the affair of the Great Mango March.

Some of our more Manichaean historians tend to depict the British villains as supremely accomplished - the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent manipulators of the destiny of India. Stuff and nonsense, of course. For every brilliant Briton who came to India, there were at least five who were incapable of original thought and fifteen who were only capable of original sin. They went from mistake to victory and mistake again with a combination of luck, courage and the Gatling gun, but mistakes they made, all the time. Don’t forget that the British were the only people in history crass enough to make revolutionaries out of Americans. That took insensitivity and stupidity on quite a stupendous scale - qualities they could hardly keep out of their rule over our country.

The truth is that the average British colonial administrator was a pompous mediocrity whose nose was so often in the air that he tripped over his own feet. (It was just as well that so many of them had long noses, Ganapathi, for they could rarely see beyond them.) In the process, they made decisions that provoked visceral and lasting reactions. Don’t forget, Ganapathi, that it is to one British colonial policy-maker or another that we owe the Boxer Rebellion, the Mau Mau insurrection, the Boer War, and the Boston Tea Party.

It all began, as these things tend to do - for the British have never learned from history - with a tax. Why the pink blackguards bothered to tax Indians I will never understand, for they had successfully stolen everything they needed for centuries, from the jewelled inlays of the Taj Mahal to the Kohinoor on their queen’s crown, and one would have thought they could have done without the laborious extraction of the Indian working-man’s pittance. But there has always been something perversely precise about British oppression: the legal edifice of the Raj was built on the premise that anything resulting from the filling of forms in quadruplicate could not possibly be an injustice. So Robert Clive bought his rotten borough in England on the proceeds of his rapacity in India, while publicly marvelling at his own self-restraint in not misappropriating even more than he did. And the English had the gall to call him ‘Clive of India’ as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him. Clive’s twentieth-century successors, who had taken the Hindustani word
loot
into their dictionaries instead of their habits, preferred to achieve the same results in more bureaucratic ways. They taxed property, and income, and harvests; they taxed our petrol, our patience and even our passing to the next world (through their gracelessly named ‘death duties’). As the expenditure on foreign wars mounted they taxed our rice, our cloth and our salt. We had thought they simply couldn’t go any further. Till the day they announced a tax on the one luxury still available to the Indian masses - the mango.

The mango is, of course, the king of fruits, though in recent years our export policies have made it more the fruit of kings - or of Middle Eastern sheikhs, to be precise. And the wonder of it is that - again before foreign markets became more important to our rulers than domestic bazaars - the mango was available to the common man in abundance. It was as if the good Lord, having given the Indian peasant droughts, and floods, and floods after droughts, and heat, and dust, and low wages, and British rule, said to him, all right, your cup of woe runneth over, drink instead from the juice of a ripe Chausa, and it will make up for all the misery I have inflicted upon you. The best mangoes in the world grew wild across the Indian countryside, dropping off the branches of trees so hardy they did not need looking after. And we took them for granted, consuming them raw, or pickled, or ripe, as our fancy seized us, content in the knowledge that there would always be more mangoes on those branches, waiting to be picked.

Then came the stunning announcement: the colonial regime had decided that the mango too had to earn its keep. Mangoes were a cash crop; accordingly, a tax was to be levied on the fruit, calculated on the basis of each tree’s approximate annual yield. Trees in the vicinity of private property were to be attached to the nearest landlord’s holdings for tax purposes; trees growing wild would be treated as common property and the tax levied on the village as a whole. District officials were instructed to conduct a mango-tree- registration campaign to ensure that the tax records were brought up to date. Poor village panchayats and panicky landlords chopped down their suddenly expensive foliage or fenced it. The days of the free munch were over.

At first the people reacted in stunned disbelief. Then, as the implications of the decision sank in, they gave vent - for they were simple people, used to calling a spade a white man’s garden tool - to collective howls of outrage.