The Age of Kali (14 page)

‘Who is going and who is not?’ asked an aide.

‘I have no idea. I am going. That much I know,’ replied the Rajmata, looking at the helicopter with some misgiving.

‘Are you frightened of flying?’ I asked.

‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘Flying I am absolutely at home. But it has to be with wings.’

Then she smiled.

‘My Hanuman can fly too. He flew to Lanka to rescue Sita. But of course, he does not need a helicopter …’

The aides were waiting. Bending low beneath the rotor blades, the old lady scuttled in to the cockpit, ready for another bout of campaigning in some other district of her old kingdom.

As the crowd of villagers looked on, the blades turned quicker and quicker. There was a noise like a great wind, and clouds of dust blew over the podium where the Rajmata had been speaking just minutes before.

Some of the villagers, terrified, ran for cover; others prostrated themselves on the ground. When they raised their heads they saw that the Rajmata had risen like a Hindu goddess in to the heavens, carried, as it were, on the wings of Garuda, the great winged vehicle of the immortals.

Postscript

In 1997 the Rajmata suffered a major heart attack, but following bypass surgery she has returned undaunted to full-time politics at the age of eighty-four. In the 1998 general election she retained her seat, albeit by a slightly reduced margin.

Ever since the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya, the BJP has continued to grow in popularity and influence. In 1992 it took 113 seats in parliament, up from eighty-nine in the previous election. In 1996 the number rose to 161, making it the largest single party in the Lok Sabha (Indian parliament). It succeeded in forming a short-lived coalition government which survived only two weeks before losing a crucial vote of confidence. Finally, the BJP won the 1998 general election with a record 179 seats, but this still fell short of a majority, and its administration was forced to rely on a hotchpotch of minority parties, some of which were strongly opposed to its more extreme pro-Hindu policies.

Moreover, the BJP’s entry in to the political mainstream from the mid-nineties onwards was largely achieved by toning down much of its more inflammatory Hindu rhetoric. The party’s leading moderate, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was appointed as its leader, and many of its more extreme figures, including the Rajmata, were sidelined. It remains to be seen, however, if this new, relatively acceptable face of the BJP represents a fundamental change in the
party, or merely a disguise with which to woo the credulous voter. The decision to explode the ‘Hindu’ nuclear bomb, the hawkish anti-Pakistan rhetoric that followed it, and the call by some BJP activists to erect a temple at the site of the blast, would seem to indicate that the extremists and bigots in the party are still far from defeated.

LUCKNOW
,
1997

Just before dawn on 7 March 1997, two figures made their way to a small classical bungalow on the perimeter of La Martiniere College in Lucknow, India’s oldest and once its most distinguished public school.

Walking silently to the back of the building, they found a broken windowpane looking in to the bedroom of the school’s Anglo-Indian PT instructor, Frederick Gomes. The two took aim and, at a signal, fired at the sleeping figure with a .763 Mauser and .380 pistol. One shot missed, but the other hit Gomes in the leg. The schoolmaster immediately leaped out of bed and hobbled in to the corridor.

According to the police reconstruction, the two killers then ran round to the front of the building, kicked open the front door and took some more shots at the terrified man, wounding him in the back as he tried to run back to his bedroom. Bleeding heavily, Gomes succeeded in shutting the door and barricading it with a chair. But the killers returned to the back and fired a random hail of bullets in to the room through the window. When Gomes’ body was later discovered by another schoolmaster, the PT instructor was found to have sustained no fewer than eight hits: four in the chest, one in the leg, two in his back and the fatal one on his temple.

The murder, which remains unsolved, created a sensation in India, particularly when several guns (though not the murder weapons) were found to be circulating among the school’s pupils. For La Martiniere is an institution of legendary propriety and distinction, as
pukka
as Kipling himself, who appropriately sent his
fictional hero Kim to a Lucknow school – St Xavier’s – clearly modelled on La Martiniere. During the Raj, the school produced generations of District Magistrates, Imperial civil servants and Indian Army officers, and the names of many of these Victorian pupils – Carlisle, Lyons, Binns, Charleston, Raymond – are still carved on the front steps of the school. Since then La Martiniere has educated several members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, as well as producing great numbers of cabinet ministers, industrialists and newspaper editors. If India’s increasingly endemic violence and corruption could creep in to such an institution, it was asked, what was the hope for the rest of India? ‘The killing is a metaphor of our times,’ I was told by Saeed Naqvi, one of the country’s most highly regarded political commentators and an old boy of the school. ‘For such a level of violence to reach the groves of academe and the sacred precincts of La Martiniere is symbolic of the way the country of Mahatma Gandhi has completely ceased to be what it once was.’

In Britain there may have been widespread celebrations marking fifty years of Indian Independence, but in India there has been much less rejoicing. As
The Times of India
acknowledged in an editorial to mark the 1997 Republic Day, ‘in this landmark year not much remains of the hope, idealism and expectations that our founding fathers poured in to the creation of the Republic. In their place we now have a sense of abject resignation, an increasing sense of drift. We are ostensibly on the verge of a global breakthrough; yet the truth is that the deprived India is eating voraciously in to the margins of the prosperous India.’

If decay and corruption have set in to many of the old institutions of the Raj, the public schools that the English left dotted around the subcontinent have always vigorously resisted any accommodation with the post-colonial world outside their walls: however much India and Britain may both have moved on since 1947, India’s public schools have, for better or worse, maintained intact the ways and attitudes of early-twentieth-century England. ‘Independence changed nothing at La Martiniere,’ I was told by one old boy. ‘The
curriculum didn’t change, the boys didn’t change, the games didn’t change, the discipline didn’t change. They kept the Union Jack flying from the roof well in to the mid-sixties. [The Hindu festival of] Diwali continued to be celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day. Even today they teach the history of the First War of Independence [the Indian Mutiny] from the British point of view.’

‘The literature, poetry and music are still English,’ I was told by another old La Martinian. ‘The manners, tastes and customs are English, even the sports are English. In my day there was very little about the history or culture of Continental Europe, and nothing at all about the history and culture of India. In fact we were encouraged to forget all the Urdu culture we had learned at home. Instead, we were always taught about all the brilliant things that British civilisation was about, and how we
paan-
chewing Indians were basically degenerate and we’d never get anywhere. Look how far the British had come, they told us; the sun never sets on the British Empire. We were indoctrinated in to believing that talking in Hindi, reciting Urdu poetry, wearing
khadi
, chewing
paan
and spitting in to spittoons – all this was vulgar and obscene, and after a while it really did seem like that to us. Still does sometimes.’

La Martiniere was founded in 1845 by Major General Claude Martin, an enigmatic Frenchman in the service of both the East India Company and the Nawabs of Lucknow, the last Muslim dynasty to rule India. In life Martin lived like a Moghul; in death he adopted the Moghul practice of building a tomb to commemorate his achievements. But in his will he broke with tradition by leaving the somewhat bizarre instruction that a school for children of all religions should be established in his vast mausoleum.

So it was that within this strange Indo-baroque necropolis complex, India’s first English public school opened in 1845. Here, everything that might be expected in a school on the banks of the Thames was exactly reproduced on the banks of the Gomti, right down to the statutory inedible food and the oddball cast of eccentric schoolmasters. Of these, according to Saeed Naqvi, none was more memorable than Mr Harrison.

‘Harrison had a huge moustache which he used to wax,’ remembers Saeed, ‘and he also had a talking parrot which used to say things like, “Rise and shine, rise and shine” – you know, the usual public school nonsense. Chaufin, a friend of mine in school who hated Waxy for a variety of very valid reasons, used to get up in the morning at five o’clock and tried teaching the parrot to say, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

‘He did this with such an absolute sense of dedication and purpose that in a year’s time the parrot picked up the line, and every time Waxy walked past he’d squawk, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

‘Now, Waxy thought this was a joke, but then one day he was taking Doutre, the headmaster, on a tour of all the wonderful things he was doing to the dormitories, and as he walked past the parrot recited the famous line. So the story had a very macabre ending, because Waxy in his temper twisted the neck of the parrot; and that was the end of Waxy’s parrot.’

On the surface, little appears to have changed at La Martiniere since Saeed left thirty years ago. Now, as then, boys of all religions still attend chapel every day, listening to a choir made up of Muslims and Hindus dressed in white surplices sing the ‘Te Deum’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. The masters still wear black academic gowns, the curriculum and uniform remain firmly those of the English public school of the 1930s, and khaki drill, cricket, the works of John Buchan and furtive schoolboy homosexuality are apparently all still very much
de rigueur
. Urdu or Hindi literature is never taught; instead pupils still learn by heart great swathes of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Byron.

One morning, after the boarders had attended chapel and the whole school had massed at assembly to sing the school hymn, ‘Bright Renown’, I talked to some of the boys who were doing their prep in the spectacular Moghul-Gothic school library. At the rear of the room, the form mistress, Mrs Faridi (who earlier in the morning had doubled up as organist on the old manually-pumped organ in the chapel), was looking around her, scowling through
her hornrims and shouting out: ‘Settle down now, boys! Settle down!’

Obediently, I sat at a table next to three seventeen-year-olds: Samir, Pradeep and Tony, a Muslim, a Hindu and an Anglo-Indian Christian respectively. I asked them whether they knew about La Martiniere being the model for St Xavier’s, the boarding school in
Kim
.

‘We all know,’ said Samir. ‘But I’ve never read the book myself.’

‘I saw the film on Star TV,’ said Pradeep, referring to Murdoch’s satellite venture in India. ‘It was good. I mean, I was very proud when I saw it had been filmed at La Martiniere.’

‘What other British books have you come across?’ I asked.

‘
All
the books we are taught are British,’ said Tony.

‘It’s true,’ said Samir. ‘We still have Shakespeare,
Great Expectations
, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë – all those novels.’

‘Can you recite any British poetry?’

‘Of course,’ said Pradeep. ‘ “The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusted trees, the moon was a ribbon of moonlight tossed among cloudy seas …” We know all that stuff.’

‘And what about the great Urdu poets of Lucknow and Delhi: Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Dagh and so on. Are you taught those?’

‘No,’ said Pradeep. ‘We haven’t been taught about the culture of Lucknow at all. Or about the culture of India. We only study British poets and novelists.’

‘Does that seem odd?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Samir uncertainly. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘What about 1857 – the Indian Mutiny?’ I asked. ‘How is that taught?’

There was an anxious pause.

‘Well, you know fifty La Martiniere boys fought in the defence of the British residency?’ said Samir. ‘So as far as the school is concerned, we are with the British. We feel very proud of the boys when we go to the residency and see La Martiniere’s name on the wall.’

‘But in other parts of India,’ added Pradeep, ‘we support the Indians, of course. Don’t we?’ The three boys looked at each other and giggled nervously.

‘But if you’d been there,’ I persisted, ‘which side would you have been on: with your school or with your countrymen?’

‘Um …’ said Samir.

‘I don’t know,’ said Pradeep.

‘It’s a difficult question,’ said Tony.

Despite the extraordinary survival of such Anglophile sympathies, the recent murder at La Martiniere has shattered the notion that the subcontinent’s public schools can forever remain an archipelago of Englishness floating untroubled in an increasingly choppy Indian sea. Although they remain wholly English in outlook and style, schools like La Martiniere are beginning to realise quite how fragile is the bubble in which they exist.

Lucknow is the capital of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (or UP), which with its 120 million inhabitants forms the very heart of the country, but is also a symbol of much that is most worrying about modern India. The terrifying speed of the corruption and decay of the state’s politics over the last decade can perhaps be best measured by charting the number of criminals among members of the State Assembly. In 1985, there were thirty-five MLAs with criminal cases registered against them. By 1989 the number had grown to fifty. In 1991, only two years later, that total more than doubled to 103. In the 1993 elections, a grand total of 150 Uttar Pradesh MLAs had criminal records.