The Setting Sun (30 page)

Briha, Vilas and I jump in an auto-rickshaw after the class. It’s a tight fit with three in the back and the motor protests tinnily. As we weave in and out of the traffic, I wonder whether I’ve misjudged Indian drivers. Perhaps, despite the statistics, they’re the best in the world, rather than the worst. Maybe the endless horns function like bats’ radar, enabling drivers
to judge clearances to the millimetre. Soon we’re pulling up before a set of barracks in the same style as those in Satara. In the centre of the old parade ground women are making bricks, pungent-smelling patties mixed from piles cement, cow dung and sugarcane pith.

‘The revolt was instigated by the Rajah’s brother, Chimasaheb, and it began right here on the night of 31 July 1857, when the 27
^th
Native Infantry revolted.’

Step by step, Vilas takes us through the main stages of the uprising and the sites associated with them. Here’s a former mission building, where some British officers escaped to, now government printing presses.

‘Four fled down the Ratnagiri road, where they were eventually cut down.’

Now to the former Residency, a noble building running down to a river, where other officers and loyal troops retreated. From here a runner was dispatched through enemy lines to Satara to raise the alarm.

‘It was like the siege at Lucknow, though not so long. Still, it hung in the balance until Colonel Jacob’s relieving force arrived, a good week later.’

‘What happened then?’

We’re outside a rectangular stone enclosure with a small temple at the far end.

‘The most determined rebels retreated here, the stables in those days. Inch by inch they were driven inside the temple, then up into the stupa. Lieutenant Carr’s men killed them one by one. Nobody surrendered.’

I can almost see the red tunics, hear the musket-shots and the cries of the wounded. How much of the damage to the fabric dates from those days, and what do the current inhabitants know of the events? Each of the former horse-stalls now houses a whole family of squatters, according to Vilas; the communal yard a colourful jam of handcarts, bicycles, curious children, silky-haired goats, pots of herbs. Bright bouquets
are drawn in chalk on every threshold. For good luck, Briha explains.

Then it’s off to broad Shalini Lake, where we stop beside an ancient tree with thick branches. The base has been bricked round, distinguishing it from its neighbours. Pedalos idle on the water and on the far shore a funfair wheel turns slowly, shrieks carrying faintly to us. Over there’s a huge building with a Victorian, municipal air and a Big Ben clock, which I’m informed is one of the erstwhile ‘new’ palaces, now a luxury hotel. Vilas pats the trunk we’re standing beside.

‘This was the hanging tree. All through the second half of August 1857, rebel sepoys and those who allegedly helped them were hanged in batches. They were left for the crows to pick their flesh off.’

I have an awful vision of dozens of tar-black silhouettes against the blinding sky, hands tied behind their backs, rotating slowly in the putrid breeze.

‘What about the leaders?’

‘You’ll see.’

We jump into the auto-rickshaw and end up back at the college. But instead of going in, Vilas leads the way into the grand square where preparations for the wrestler’s wedding continue apace. We stop opposite a huge gate in the old palace walls.

‘Everyone above the rank of private was brought here. The British lined their artillery up, facing that opening. The whole town was forcibly assembled to watch the mutineers tied to the mouths of the cannons. Then they were blown away. According to eyewitnesses, the torsoes vaporised, but arms, legs and heads fell into the crowds.’

The public staging of these punishments seems to me as barbaric as the methods themselves. More what you’d expect from the medieval period, than from a colonial administration which was supposed to be in India to spread the humane ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet public punishment was a technique
used more recently by Bill and the Parallel Government, too, to inspire fear and to cow dissenters.

‘What about Chimasaheb?’

‘Exiled. But because his brother immediately disowned him, Kolhapur wasn’t taken over.’

‘How many did the British lose?’

‘One hundred and eleven. More than fifteen hundred rebels were killed or executed.’

Only a little less disproportionate than the figures coming in from Gaza. Chastening. Imperialism in the raw. Was it only because the Indian army was so tied up by the war that the British didn’t unleash this sort of terror on Satara during the 1940s, as they were soon to do in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus? My speculations are interrupted when Vilas turns to me.

‘Will you talk now to our Socrates Society?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Our weekly college debate. Last one this year, so there’ll be a good turnout. It’s designed to help them understand issues of the day and practise spoken English. Build confidence in public speaking.’

Although I’m tired, it seems churlish to refuse, especially since Vilas has taken such trouble over our tour. Briha’s caramel eyes beseech.

‘OK. What’s the topic?’

‘Terrorism.’

My heart sinks. ‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes. There’ll be other speakers.’

Over tea, I frantically try to think of what to say. Maharashtra has witnessed not only the recent terror attacks in Mumbai but, earlier in the year, the Malegaon bomb outrages, directed at Muslims. Dangerous ground. I could discuss the attempted repression of the Parallel Government. Or the methods of Bill’s opponents, which Bhosle’s thesis described as designed ‘to inspire terror in the hearts of the rulers’. All day I’ve been having flashbacks to Chafal. I’m not ready to
discuss such things just yet. Then there’s Modak’s account in his memoir of the terrible behaviour of the Indian security forces in Kashmir? Equally risky in the present climate. My mind churns, unable to find the right focus.

Here we are in the assembly hall and I’m still flailing. It looks like the entire college is crammed noisily into pews facing the platform, on which the chairman and several teachers are already seated. Once again boys and girls are segregated, the latter at the front, giggling and smiling. I’m given an inflated introduction, after which a couple of staff have their say. It’s shocking. The first speaker demands Pakistan be ‘wiped off the map’. The second calls more euphemistically ‘for the problem of Pakistan to be sorted out once and for all.’ However he then goes on to decry the elaborate and costly security precautions in place for politicians and celebrities, compared with the vulnerability of the general public. Both polemics are enthusiastically received, and there’s a buzz of anticipation when I stand up to speak.

The thought suddenly occurs. What about Colonel Jacob’s behaviour in Kolhapur? That was surely state terrorism, designed to cow the civilian population by theatrically staged displays of retribution. But I begin by discussing the slipperiness of the term ‘terrorism’, citing the contradictory ways it was used in the SIB archives. I then propose that many nations suffer from terrorism today. Even Pakistan. I remind my listeners of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in 2007. Instinct tells me I’m rapidly losing sympathy. So I switch to Colonel Jacob and the ‘Mutiny’, after all and from there, increasingly struggling to maintain a coherent thread, to London and the July 2005 bombings. I speculate about potential lessons from that episode, suggesting that one must be as tough on the causes of terrorism as on terrorism itself. I jump to the IRA, explaining that through the 1970s, there were bombings on the British mainland. Things got worse under Thatcher, who
refused point-blank to talk to ‘terrorists’. Only when Major and Blair decided to negotiate did the ‘Troubles’ end, even if the ensuing peace has been uneasy. The first step, I conclude, is to stop calling people you don’t like terrorists, recognise them as political actors and then let politics do its business. If peace can succeed centuries of occupation and rebellion in Ireland, the same might be true in other trouble spots.

The applause is thin and lukewarm. Then it’s the students’ turn. Some are more nuanced than their teachers, but the mood of anger so soon after Mumbai is palpable. The debate over, teachers approach one by one to remonstrate.

‘You can’t call what Jacob did terrorism. It wasn’t random violence against civilians. There were military rules which clearly laid out penalties for mutiny.’

‘Did they include mass executions without due process, in front of civilians?’ I counter, startled that locals should want to defend Jacob.

‘State actors cannot be terrorists,’ another objects.

‘Not even when they’re utterly careless about civilian life?’

A woman lecturer joins in shrilly. ‘Your programme for Pakistan is not correct, sir. You cannot talk to madmen. No agreement would be credible.’

‘What are the consequences of becoming ever more entrenched?’

‘Mrs Thatcher was right. We have to be strong,’ another interposes. ‘No surrender to terrorists.’

‘How do you distinguish between terrorists and freedom fighters?’

It’s a relief when four girls from Briha’s class come forward. Each offers me an identical deep purple rose.

‘Thank you for coming to visit,’ they smile.

I’m deeply touched.

Back in the hotel, I try Bhosle’s number. It rings interminably. I then book the car for tomorrow’s trip, feeling
increasingly dispirited by my limp performance in the debate. With advance warning, I could have spoken coherently on any number of subjects for the time allotted. Why can’t state actors be terrorist? What about the merciless ongoing assault on Gaza? Perhaps, after all, I should have had the courage to address the way Bill and his colleagues undermined their cause by resorting to their opponents’ tactics. Or how the contemporary West’s similarly tainted by recourse to extraordinary rendition, the franchising of torture to client states, the widespread abuse and killing of civilians during its military adventures in the Muslim world. Waterboarding, sensory deprivation, the postmodern analogues of thumbscrews and the rack. Then there’s the multi-pronged assault on our own civil liberties in the wake of the ‘war on terror’, detention without trial, electronic surveillance, the proposals for secret courts, and so on. The more I think about it, the more such developments seem to have parallels with the dreadful Defence of India Rules imposed on wartime India in the name of protecting public ‘security’.

Above all, the failure to address the legitimate demands of moderates like Gandhi is what gave the Parallel Government its head and, to my mind, legitimacy – though this isn’t to excuse the excesses it was sometimes prone to. The same strategic mistake was made in the Amritsar massacre in the Punjab, the event in 1919 in which troops fired on a civilian protest, killing many hundreds. That, more than anything else, turned ordinary Indian opinion against the Raj and laid the foundations for its rapid demise. The British state seems to have learned little from such episodes in imperial history. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of peacefully protesting fellow-citizens by paratroopers in Derry in 1972 is a case in point. It led to a fourfold increase in the IRA within a matter of weeks, making a hitherto marginal organisation a central player in the latest phase of the ‘Troubles,’ which were thereby prolonged for three more bloody decades.

The West more broadly seems to have inherited this blindspot. For example, its refusal to support the reasonable demands of the secular PLO against unending Israeli occupation and the continuing seizure of Palestinian land since 1967 led directly to the rise of militant Hamas, democratically elected by a populace increasingly disillusioned at the impotence (and corruption) of the PLO – and hence to the current catastrophe in Gaza. But if violent repression and ‘terrorism’ are two sides of the same coin, and neither side escapes the mirroring effect of their close association, it’s
not
a question of chicken and egg. In India and Ireland, Kashmir and Palestine, repression clearly came first. I think back to Yeravda jail and Gandhi’s message of non-violence. Is his philosophy remotely tenable in a world of neo-cons and al-Qaeda?

Unable to find answers, I turn my attention to what reception I’m likely to get from the two nationalist leaders tomorrow. This is probably the last chance to gather material from people who knew Bill, and I need to think carefully about what to ask. Even though it’s New Year’s Eve, I’m too tired to think about going out. Better to sort out my questions and catch up on my sleep. I’ve only just got into bed when my mobile rings.

‘Rajeev here. How’s the intrepid traveller? Just wanted to wish you Happy New Year.’

‘Great to hear you, Rajeev,’ I reply, though I’d been praying it’d be Bhosle. ‘Feels like weeks.’ I fill him in briefly on what’s been happening since we last spoke. ‘Any news of Poel?’

‘Any day now.’

‘What are you doing this evening? Anything special?’

‘At my age? I’m having a quiet evening in with the King.’

‘I hope you’re wearing your blue suede shoes.’