The Great Indian Novel (44 page)

‘The Foreign Ministry?’ Kanika asked hopefully. ‘Will you let me sink my teeth into the bloodless hounds of South Block?’

‘No,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘You know, Kanika, that is the one ministry I have always wanted to hold myself. Foreign affairs is the only subject where it doesn’t matter that I can’t see: everything else requires an empiricism of which I’m incapable. You understand?’

‘Of course.’ Kanika’s hawk-like features concealed his disappointment. ‘But then, whose place do you intend me to take?’

Dhritarashtra smiled wickedly. ‘Sardar Khushkismat Singh’s,’ he said.

Travelling southwards, guided by the stars and by their own instincts, the Pandavas sought security in constant movement. At each place, they performed some good deed, much like the itinerant cowboys of the more idealistic Western films, who rode into terrorized towns, guns blazing, demolished the good, the bad and the ugly, and rode off into the sunset, leaving the populace less miserable if more mystified.

The Five found themselves performing a different if not entirely dissimilar order of service in their peregrinations. They would enter a village in which the local priest, defying the new Constitution, was refusing to allow the Untouchables, Gangaji’s Children of God, to enter the temple; or another where a landlord had evicted a pathetic family of tenants because they had been less than fully cooperative with his exactions; or a third in which a corrupt village official, a policeman or a
patwari,
was exploiting the poor and the illiterate for his personal profit. In each case, Yudhishtir would intervene in the name of righteousness; should his appeal fail, Arjun would attempt the method of reason; and if even this did not work, Bhim would settle the issue decisively with his highly personal techniques of persuasion, with Nakul and Sahadev standing by to pick up the pieces afterwards (and Arjun, marvellous Arjun, returning to the scene to reconcile his brothers’ victims to the new dispensation). In each case the villagers were awed and grateful and anxious to offer a permanent home to the five strangers, but the Pandavas always picked up their few belongings and moved on before the villagers’ demands became irresistible. On buses, bullock-carts, passing lorries but mainly on foot, our five heroes and their mother disappeared unobtrusively into the horizon, leaving behind, in each locality, a lesson and a legend.

Yes, Ganapathi, in villages across the alluvial trans-Gangetic heartland of India, in the dusty squares where the poor congregate to forget their misfortunes, in the twilit housefronts where old women tell the stories that their daughters and nieces will cherish and repeat and pass on like precious oral heirlooms, the legends grew of the five wanderers who came and did their good deeds and went. The stories always developed in the telling, being modified and embellished by each teller, so that eventually the details differed so greatly from one village’s version to the next’s that they might have been tales of totally different people. In one the five princes of Hastinapur became mendicants and holy men; in others their education and confidence proclaimed them quite clearly as exiles from a distant city; in some it was said that their impossible combination of attributes could only have been divinely inspired, and so they had come from Heaven to ensure that the dictates of dharma were followed in dusty Adharmapur. The ever less elegant figure of Kunti in their midst became variously that of a mother, a sister, a cook and a goddess - Shakti - in person, with her five arms in human form bringing justice to an evil world. And the legends grew, Ganapathi, even though it was not long after the Pandavas’ passage that the reforms they had wrought quietly lapsed, and their erstwhile victims, convinced the wanderers would not return, returned to their old ways with a vengeance.

No, let me not be so categorical. Of every five good deeds they performed, four did not long outlast their departure, but in about one case out of five the Pandavas left behind a true convert, an unalterable new reality or a genuine change of heart. So it was in the country as a whole, Ganapathi. As the giant that was independent India lumbered into wakefulness and slowly purposeful motion, Parliament passed laws that a few implemented and many ignored, reforms were enacted that changed the lives of the minority and were subverted by the majority, idealistic policies were framed that uplifted some and were perverted to line the pockets of others, and everywhere it was five steps forward, four steps back. But the one step that was not retraced still made a difference. That was the only way that change would come to a changeless land.

In Delhi blind Dhritarashtra ruled with Priya Duryodhani by his side, and he pledged the nation not so much to the gas and hot water of his Fabian preceptors but to the smoke and steam of the modern industrial revolution their ancestors had denied his country. So factories sprang up amidst the mud and thatch of our people’s homes; gigantic chimneys raised themselves alongside the charcoal braziers of our outdoor kitchens; immense dams arose above the wells to which our women walked to draw their clay urns full of water, India was well on the way to becoming the seventh largest industrial power in the world, whatever that may mean, while 80 per cent of her people continued to lack electricity and clean drinking water.

It was the same for the people themselves. Institutions of higher learning, colleges of technology, schools of management mushroomed in the dark humid forests of our ignorance. The British had neglected village education in their efforts to produce a limited literate class of petty clerks to turn the lower wheels of their bureaucracy, so we too neglected the villages in our efforts to widen that literate class for their new places at the top. Within a short while we would have the world’s second largest pool of scientifically trained manpower, side by side with its largest lake of educated unemployed. Our medical schools produced the most gifted doctors in the hospitals of London, while whole districts ached without aspirin. Our institutes of technology were generously subsidized by our tax revenues to churn out brilliant graduates for the research laboratories of American corporations, while our emaciated women carried pans of stones on their head to the building-sites of new institutes. When, belatedly, our universities became ‘rurally conscious’ and offered specializations in plant pathology and modern agricultural methods, their graduates were to bid a rapid farewell to the wastelands of Avadh and Annamalai and earn immense salaries for making Arab deserts bloom.

But, as usual, Ganapathi - you are not strict enough with me - I digress; my mind wanders across this vast expanse of our nation like the five heroes whose tale I am trying to relate. Yet we cannot tell it all; we must soar above the mountains and the valleys, the hillocks and the depressions of India’s geography and take the larger view of our cavalcade of characters as their wheels scratch the surface of our immense land. And occasionally we must swoop down to watch them at closer quarters, as they perform the acts and utter the words that give our geography its history.

Thus we spot our five in a village torn by the conflict between two landlords, Pinaka and Saranga. Pinaka, wealthy and powerful, always seen with an eagle on his shoulder, has immense holdings, farmed by battalions of tenants who are paid well for their services but have no title to the land. Saranga, an immense bear of a man, controls as big an area, but has signed over to his share-croppers the land they till, though he still exacts a tribute from them for this act of emancipation. Both landlords employ gangs of toughs armed to the teeth to protect those on their side of the divide and make menacing noises at their rivals. The Pandavas are the first people in the village who have no stake in the conflict; they arrive, they take up lodgings, they stay neutral. Both Pinaka and Saranga are suspicious, then solicitous; each assumes, the first because he is generous, the second because he is just, that the Pandavas will join
his
side. When they do not - for they see merit in aspects of both arguments, and are fully convinced by neither - they invite the opprobrium of both.

‘How could you refuse to condemn Saranga when his hired hoodlums beat up poor Hangari Das, molested his wife and abducted his children merely because he wanted to keep his own harvests for himself?’ Pinaka asked bitterly.

‘What good would it do to condemn him?’ Arjun replied. ‘Would it have restored his teeth, his wife’s pride or his children?’

‘How can you refuse to join me when Pinaka fails to give his tenants their land, earns so much profit and heartlessly replaces a tenant when he finds another who can produce more revenue by his work?’ Saranga was equally bitter.

‘What good would it do to join you?’ Yudhishtir replied. ‘Would it change Pinaka’s ways, give his tenants full title, and grant security to those among them who are ill or idle?’

They both went away, denouncing the Pandavas as hopeless and untrustworthy. At last, seeing that there was little they could do in this divided village, the Pandavas quietly left, abandoning both sides to their endless quarrel.

So too, Ganapathi, rising from our perch near the village of Pinaka and Saranga, we may flap our, wings above the concrete and asphalt of the nation’s capital. There, poised in the warm middle of a global cold war between the former colonizers and their allies on one side, and well-armed barbarians on the other, Dhritarashtra and Kanika evolved and elaborated the concept of ‘non-alignment’. In their articulate exegeses this emerged as a lofty refusal to take sides in an immoral and destructive competition that could enflame the world. Yes, Dhritarashtra and Kanika developed into a fine art the skill of speaking for the higher conscience of mankind. To the brash and moralistic money-makers with whom the former colonial powers were allied, India’s refusal to join the forces of God, light, and the almighty dollar was downright immoral, and Kanika Menon was portrayed on the covers of their international news-magazines - an honour even Gangaji had been denied - with his sharp face and hooded eyes drawn to resemble a poisonous cobra. To the bluff and amoral slavers and statists on the other side, India’s rhetoric was insincere, either a Brahminical ploy to conceal the brown Britishness of their language and education, or a canny camouflage for the capitalist course being pursued beneath India’s veneer of democratic socialism.

They were both right and they were both wrong, for Dhritarashtra was guilty only of the insincerity of the blind and Kanaka of the inaccuracy of the ivory-tower. Both - Dhritarashtra for idealistic reasons, Kanika for ideological ones - believed in the non-alignment they preached, but neither could control the convictions or even the conduct of those who were to implement their policies.

Nor could either control indefinitely his own desire to flex the nation’s muscles, which many outside thought to be atrophied by disuse and pacifism. Just as the loudest proponent of celibacy is most vulnerable to the temptation of easy sin - for restraint must always be ustained by lack of opportunity - so too non-violent India was being stirred into a frenzy by the provocations of a weak and wanton neighbour. This was the last remaining colonial enclave on the Indian coast, the picturesque Portuguese possession of Comea, a land of long beaches and cheap liquor, a haven for loose women and tight lipped spies from which its foreign masters obdurately refused to withdraw.

After years of gentle persuasion by Dhritarashtra and his smoothest diplomats had failed, the hawk-faced Defence Minister persuaded his Premier that it was time to embark on a new course. The armed forces of the Indian Republic would take over the defiant but ill-defended colony.

Under the two bachelor statesmen, India’s soldiers would at last enjoy their first foreign affair - and return home with a fair and fertile bride.