The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (12 page)

Jinnah was quite clear about the role of Indian politicians. They must never mix religion with politics: one was a private matter, the other public service. Political differences should be settled by debate and not taken to the streets to create mob hysteria. The right to vote should be restricted to the educated tax payer and not be extended to the illiterate and those who do not contribute to the cost of administration. Primary education should be compulsory. What is truly amazing is that he found many takers for his ideas and was acceptable to the Indian National Congress as well as the Muslim League. For some years, he straddled both parties and was accepted by them as their spokesperson. He used his diplomatic skill to reconcile the Muslim League’s demands and persuaded the Congress to accept them: separate electorates with weightage for Muslims in states where they were in a minority, and Muslim hegemony in Sindh, Punjab, the NWFP and Bengal, where they formed a majority. He succeeded in bringing about political unity between Hindus and Muslims so that they could jointly pressurize their British rulers to hand over the governance of the country to Indians. In a speech at the Muslim League Conference in Lucknow in 1917, he urged Muslims not to look upon the Hindu majority as a bogey, saying: ‘This is a bogey which is put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from the cooperation with the Hindus which is essential for the establishment of self-government.’ Unlike most other Indian politicians, he was not overwhelmed by English governors and viceroys: he spoke his mind to them without mincing his words. He carried on verbal warfare with Lord Willingdon, Governor of Bombay and then Viceroy of India. In short, he was for a time India’s top political leader, till Mahatma Gandhi arrived on the scene. Gandhi not only infused religion into politics but also took politics to the streets through his call for non-cooperation and boycott of government-run institutions, including schools. Jinnah found this distasteful and difficult to digest. Besides these, Gandhi showed a marked preference for Jawaharlal Nehru as the future leader of the country. Gradually, Jinnah was pushed off the centre stage of Indian politics to become more and more a leader of the Muslims.

In any event, Jinnah was elected to the Legislative Council from a Muslim constituency. He was among the Muslim delegates at the Round Table Conference in London. He stayed on in England for a few years and toyed with the idea of fighting elections to the House of Commons. No party was willing to accept him as its candidate. It was not surprising. As
The Manchester Guardian
summed him up: ‘The Hindus thought he was a Muslim communalist, the Muslims took him to be pro-Hindu, the princes declared him to be too democratic, the British considered him a rabid extremist—with the result that he was everywhere but nowhere. None wanted him.’ Reluctantly, Jinnah returned to Bombay to resume his legal practice and his political career, now as a spokesperson of Muslim interests.

Mulk Raj Anand was one of the first three Indian writers of fiction in English to be published in England. It is common knowledge that both Mulk’s and R.K. Narayan’s first novels were turned down by a number of English publishers, till they found sugar daddies whom they could persuade to risk their money on them. And so, Graham Greene became a sponsor for R.K. Narayan; Mulk had the Bloomsbury group, which included T.S. Eliot, to back him. Only Raja Rao’s
Kanthapura
made it without any sifarish. Needless to say, all the three were lionized by their countrymen.

Mulk’s chief patrons were socialists and communists. They were English men and women who suffered from a sense of guilt over what the British Raj had done to India. Mulk was well aware of what India’s rich and powerful had done to the poor and powerless and the humiliations the lower castes had suffered at the hands of the privileged higher castes. These became the theme of many of his novels and short stories. He became the chief spokesperson of the progressive writers who wrote to serve social purposes and did not bother so much about style and turn of phrase. Over time, Mulk’s writing became progressively propagandist.

Mulk returned to India after the publication of his first two novels,
Untouchable
and
Coolie
. He was accorded a warm reception by literary groups across the country. The reception he got at Lahore was tepid. A literary circle comprising some judges of the high court, a couple of ICS officers, professors of English literature and lawyers invited him for tea. They had read his novels and felt they could write as well as he did. Mulk sensed the condescending attitude but kept his cool till someone blurted out: ‘We can write as well as you, but who will publish us?’ Mulk exploded: ‘First write, then talk.’ Then he walked away in a huff. Many in that circle wrote. Not one was able to break the apartheid of the publishing houses. There were hardly any Indian commercial publishers worth going to. Most of these aspiring writers published their books at their own cost.

Though born in Peshawar, there was nothing Pathan-like about Mulk. He was short, with fuzzy hair, and, like the son of a Punjabi bania, dressed in khadi kurta-pyjamas. He had a strange way of speaking: a lot of lisping and sentences ending in squeaks. But he loved holding forth, and was warm and friendly. He liked living well and enjoyed the company of women. After his marriage to his English wife broke up, he had a Sri Lankan mistress, followed by a Parsi one. He lived in a ground-floor flat on Cuffe Parade, Bombay, facing the sea. I called on him one morning and saw him at work. He was perched on a high chair especially designed for him, with his feet resting below. He was bending over a writing pad.

Mulk had a setback in his later years. He was commissioned by the
Evergreen Review
of New York to do an article on the erotic in Indian art. It was very well-received till the magazine got a legal notice alleging that the article was a copy of one article translated from German to English. Mulk’s explanation was naïve beyond belief. Dosu Karaka, editor of the weekly
Current
, who hated the communists’ guts, had the news splashed in big headlines: ‘Commie Author Caught Plagiarising’. It took some months of retirement to his villa in Lonavala for Mulk to bounce back. But bounce back the man did, and resumed pontificating to audiences across the country. He never took notice of the topic under discussion nor the time set for speakers. He would go on and on about how his father used to beat his mother. He ignored the chairperson’s bell and taps on the back. He had his say and never ever repented it. One particular conversation between Mulk and Eliot relays much about the way he could carry on.

‘A piece of cake, Mr—?’ asked Eliot.

‘Anand,’ Mulk supplied.

‘Oh, like the Scotch Anand.’

‘No, it’s a derivation from Ananda, one of the names of the Hindu supreme God, meaning bliss. My full name is Mulk Raj Anand, which means “King of the country of happiness”—and I try to look it.’

Friends and admirers of Mulk Raj Anand noticed how Chacha Mulk mellowed with age and how the once acerbic-tongued critic had only the nicest things to say about everyone in the last decade of his life. A great one for dropping names, once upon a time he did not spare anyone. But in his saintlier anecdotage, his compassion turned him into a crashing bore.

Sometime in 1982, when I was the editor of the
Hindustan Times
, I got a call from the commissioner of police of Lucknow asking if I could send a reporter to cover the arrest of Phoolan Devi. Instead of sending a reporter I decided to go myself. I was able to reconstruct Phoolan Devi’s past from talking to her parents, sisters and one of her lovers, and cross-checking what they told me with the statement she made to the police on 6 January 1979, the first time she was arrested.

It was at Gurh Ka Purua village I that I got a whiff of the romantic life of Phoolan Devi. Recall that nostalgic film song ‘Nadi kinarey mera gaon’? Everything that the song evokes was there in Phoolan’s story. Young Phoolan—sixteen or seventeen—left her forty-five-year-old husband, who aroused her appetite for sex without fulfilling it. One afternoon, she spied a young mallah bathing in the river. She watched him for some time and then asked if she could borrow his cake of soap to bathe herself. He turned out to be a distant cousin, Kailash, married but willing to have an extramarital affair. They got talking. The bathing and soaping gave Phoolan excuses to show Kailash something of her form and figure, setting his passions aflame. They arranged to meet—as most lovers in the region did—in the arhar fields the next day. They had sex—surreptitious, hurried and unfulfilling. But it was enough to make them yearn for more. Kailash was thoroughly confused; he had a young and attractive wife, who had borne him four children—and here was Phoolan, who was giving him something he had never experienced with his wife. Phoolan agreed to let him have more on the condition that he married her. How could he? Meanwhile, the village gossip mill started grinding: Phoolan Devi had been discarded by an old husband and was available. The sarpanch’s son approached her. He entertained close friends with the same feast of flesh. Phoolan did not mind, but it was not doing her reputation any good.

When Kailash asked for more, she forced him to marry her. They went to Kanpur, where a lawyer wrote out something on a piece of paper, took fifty rupees from Kailash and told them they were man and wife. They spent two days and nights at the lawyer’s house; the days at the movies, the nights making love. Then they returned to Kailash’s village, Teonga. Kailash’s parents and wife gave Phoolan a sound thrashing and turned her out. She returned crestfallen to her village, Gurh Ka Purua. The sarpanch’s son got to hear of her escapade to Kanpur, sent for her and gave her a shoe-beating. At a fair in the neighbouring village, she ran into Kailash’s wife, Shanti Devi, and her children. Shanti Devi grabbed Phoolan by the hair, clawed her face and abused her in front of the crowd as a raand
,
bitch, home-breaker.

By now, all the mallah villages had heard about Phoolan’s misadventures. Among them was Bikram Singh, a gangster friend of Kailash. Bikram Singh arrived in Gurh Ka Purua and gave Phoolan the choice of coming with him or having her only brother, Shivnarain Singh—who was only twelve—join his gang. Phoolan went with Bikram to become his mistress. And thus she was launched into her career of crime.

What did Phoolan Devi look like? There were no photographs available. But from my interviews I could construct her image in my mind. Phoolan’s younger sister Ramkali was said to resemble her. Ramkali was a sexy and saucy lass, who knew how to strike poses and used her large eyes like sidewinder missiles. She was thick-lipped, big-bosomed and altogether seductive—as they say in Punjabi, well worth a crime. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—nor could any of the men in the party accompanying me. In fact, our photographer, Premi, clicked an entire reel on her.

My friendship with Prem Kirpal lasted longer than any other—over sixty years. Circumstances threw us together in Lahore, Delhi, London, Paris and back again in Delhi. We happened to be in England at the same time, as students: he was in Oxford, I in London. We heard of each other from common friends but never met. It was in Lahore, where I settled down to practise law and he got a job as a lecturer in Dayal Singh College, that we got to know each other.

Prem’s father, Ishwar Das, was then deputy registrar, and later registrar, of Punjab University. They were Sahajdhati Sikhs. Prem’s mother came from a family of orthodox Khalsas. Ishwar Das was much influenced by leaders of the Singh Sabha movement, the poet Bhai Veer Singh, Dr Jodh Singh and the Attatiwala family. This was a common link between his family and my wife’s parents, who were ardent followers of Bhai Veer Singh. It did not take us long to start visiting each other’s homes.

Prem was very conscious of having been a student of Balliol College, Oxford, and always wore his college tie. In his scheme of things, Oxford was the best university in the world, Balliol the best college in Oxford, and he privileged to be the product of the best institution. An anecdote told about him was that when leaving Oxford to catch his boat to return to India, he happened to be having his breakfast in the dining car of the Oxford-London train. Sitting across the table was an Englishman also having breakfast. Over the din and rattle of the train, he asked Prem, ‘Would you mind passing me the salt?’ Prem promptly held up his college tie and replied, ‘Yes, this is a Balliol tie.’

Soon I found out other connections with the Kirpal family. All the sons had been to Government College: Amar Nath, Prem, Pritam and Prakash. Amar Nath was a lawyer and edited a law journal; his son Bhupinder (Cuckoo) also became a lawyer and, later, judge of the Delhi high court and chief justice of the Gujarat high court. Pritam, who played hockey for the college, retired from the army as a general. Prakash became a draughtsman in the Survey of India in Dehra Dun. There were also three or four sisters, of whom two, Sita and Leela, were then unmarried. Ishwar Das often used to boast of the virility of the Kirpals, when he rued that Prem had not found a wife and kept up the family tradition of fecundity.

Actually, Prem was very eager to find a mate. His first choice was his closest friend Mangat Rai’s elder sister. Priobala was then teaching in Kinnaird College. Prem started calling on her. He was not a man of many words—and when it came to women, even less vocal. He was not getting anywhere because in Kinnaird College there were always some women about. At my suggestion, he persuaded Priobala to come out with him for a drive. He did not have a car and could not afford a taxi. So he hired a tonga and the two went around Lawrence Gardens and other beauty spots of Lahore. He was still not getting anywhere. I told him that some women responded to action and that he should simply grab her in his arms and kiss her. He decided to give it a try. The next time he took Priobala for a tonga ride, he told her, ‘Prio, you know what Khushwant asked me to do? He said I should take you in my arms and kiss you.’ Priobala was incensed. ‘He is an absolute rascal. You can tell him that for me,’ she added. And that was to remain the pattern of many romances.