The Writer and the World (11 page)

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.

B
UT THE
M
AHARANA
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.”

T
HE NEWSPAPERS
were being gloomy about Mrs. Gandhi’s chances, and the success of Udaipur’s tour disheartened many people on Mr. Bishweshwar’s side. They had no comparable glamour figure. The visit of Mr. Chavan, one of Mrs. Gandhi’s most able ministers, had been a failure; Mrs. Gandhi herself wasn’t coming. All that Mr. Bishweshwar’s people could look forward to was the visit, on Tuesday, of Mr. Bishweshwar’s political patron, the Rajasthan Chief Minister. He was hardly glamorous. He was very much the local party boss, and he was coming less to make speeches than to settle certain internal party disputes which had begun to threaten Mr. Bishweshwar’s campaign.

The Ajmer Congress was famous for its faction fights. In 1954, when Mrs. Bishweshwar’s father was politically active, the administration had virtually stalled; and Mr. Nehru had written a long and impatient “note” about the local party: “… giving us continuous headaches … The government cannot be considered to be an efficient government … The Community Project Scheme in Ajmer was one of the least successful. In fact, for a long time practically nothing was done there.” That was the tradition. And after all its further years in power the local party was full of people who thought they had been badly treated and were taking advantage of the election to sulk. Mr. Bishweshwar, aiming at independence, and trying to free himself of old intrigues by “creating” new men of his own, had made matters worse. One aggrieved man said, “Mr. Bishweshwar is in the position of a man who has stopped believing in the loyalty of his honest wife and has begun to believe the protestations of loose girls.”

So now I heard that Mrs. Gandhi hadn’t come to Ajmer because she disapproved of Mr. Bishweshwar, that she remembered how he had hesitated at the time of the party split, and that she was now letting him sweat it out. Other people, with memories of Mrs. Bishweshwar’s father, said that Mr. Bishweshwar’s heart wasn’t in the election and that he had only been pushed into it by his wife. Everybody agreed that Mr. Mukut’s workers were more selfless and less mercenary and less given to sabotage. There was a lot of talk of sabotage. One man high in the party told me that of all Mr. Bishweshwar’s workers, paid and unpaid, 30 per cent were saboteurs.

And it was only then that I heard about the Rawats. The Rawats were originally a caste of animal-skinners. They had been advancing for some time into agriculture, the army and the police. In Jodhpur the Maharaja had decreed twenty-five years before that they were to be considered a Rajput caste. But in Ajmer the Rawats were still low, almost untouchable. They should therefore have been solidly behind the Indira Congress and Mr. Bishweshwar. But there had been a crisis. Some weeks before a young Rawat wife in the Nasirabad area had been enticed away by a Rawat Christian convert. The community had been doubly dishonoured, by the adultery (in India an offence punishable with rigorous imprisonment), and by the fact that the enticer was a Christian. There had been complaints to the police, but nothing had been done; and some Rawats felt that Mr. Bishweshwar and some of his Christian supporters had connived at the inactivity of the police. A leaflet had been distributed in Rawat areas:

There were fifty thousand Rawat voters. Kishangarh, Udaipur, Rajputs, Rawats, and sabotage: Mr. Bishweshwar seemed to be in trouble all round that Monday. And this, very roughly, was the assessment of the Ajmer situation that appeared in the
Times of India.
A day or two later a large “human-interest” photograph of Mr. Mukut—a blind candidate—made the front page of the New Delhi
Hindustan Times.

•   •   •

I
T WAS FROM MR.
K
UDAL
that I heard about the Rawats. Mr. Kudal was a Congressman of fifty and he had a modest ambition: he wanted to be Mr. Bishweshwar’s Election Agent. The appointment was to be made on Tuesday, when the Chief Minister came; but when I saw Mr. Kudal, late on Monday evening, he had heard nothing at all and was in a state of some nerves. He said, “I very much fear that the intelligentsia is being cleverly weeded out all over India from political life.”

Mr. Kudal was a lawyer. He lived in a lavatorial lane off Highway 8, in a large three-storeyed house built in the Rajasthani style with galleries around a central court-yard, and with an iron grille at the top to keep out intruders. Narrow enclosed concrete steps took you up past his law offices and his servants’ rooms to the flat roof and his pink-and-red sitting-room. Upholstered chairs were pushed against three walls and there was a glass case with figures made from shells, plastic models of Hindu deities, and other knick-knacks. It was a little like a waiting-room, with all the chairs, but Mr. Kudal had many visitors. He kept in touch with the constituency; he had prepared himself for the job of Election Agent.

He was worried about the Rawats. He was less worried by Udaipur’s tour. “These public meetings are just
tamashas
, excitements. Nothing.” Elections were won with votes, and vote-getting required work. “By work I mean the direct approach to the voters. Taking them out of the houses and sending them to the booths. I will tell you as a zealous worker that all will depend on the work we put in in the last two or three days.” And in that lay Mr. Kudal’s promise and his threat.

He said, “I could swing the election in certain districts without leaving this room. It would take me a week. If I went out on the road it would take me two or three days.”

I asked him how.

“I am a man of the masses.” It was something he had worked at. He was a brahmin and a townsman and he said he had wasted a lot of time on bridge and chess before he had thought of service to the poor. He had gone out then “among the lowest sections of the community—the Harijans and the serpent-charmers.” Not many people had done that; and it was well known in Ajmer that Mr. Kudal had a lot of influence in certain low quarters. “That is why people get worried when they hear that Kudal has joined the fray.”

So on this last evening Mr. Kudal rehearsed his case, and his slightly
desperate attitude was that, ready as he was to serve, he was also perfectly prepared to let Mr. Bishweshwar stew in his own juice, that if the Chief Minister and Mr. Bishweshwar wanted his services, if they cared at all about things like the snake-charmer vote, they would have to seek him out the next day. Mr. Kudal himself intended to do absolutely nothing the next day. It was the festival of Shivratri; he was a devotee of Shiva; for him it was to be a day of temple, prayer and meditation.