The Great Indian Novel (12 page)

The soldiers fired just 1600 bullets that day, Ganapathi. It was so mechanical, so precise; they used up only the rounds they were allocated, nothing was thrown away, no additional supplies sent for. Just 1600 bullets into the unarmed throng, and when they had finished, oh, perhaps ten minutes later, 379 people lay dead, Ganapathi, and 1,137 lay injured, many grotesquely maimed. When Rudyard was given the figures later he expressed satisfaction with his men. ‘Only 84 bullets wasted,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’

Even those figures were, of course, British ones; in the eyes of many of us the real toll could never be known, for in the telling many more bled their lives into the ground than the British and the press and the official Commission of Inquiry ever acknowledged. Who knows, Ganapathi, perhaps each of Rudyard’s bullets sent more than one soul to another world, just as they did the Raj’s claims to justice and decency.

Gangaji came later, at the appointed hour of his address, and when he saw what had happened he doubled over in pain and was sick info an ornamental fountain. He stumbled among the bodies, hearing the cries of the injured and the moans of the dying, and he kept croaking to himself in Sanskrit. I was there, Ganapathi, and I caught the words, ‘
Vinasha kale, viparita buddhi’ -
our equivalent of the Greek proverb: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad’.

It was Gangaji’s strength to see meaning in the most mindless and perverse of human actions, and this time he was both wrong and right. He was wrong because the Massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will; yet he was right, because it was sheer folly on the part of the British to have allowed it to happen. It was not, Ganapathi, don’t get me wrong, it was not as if the British were going around every day of the week shooting Indians in enclosed gardens. Nor was Rudyard particularly evil in himself; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the cruelty of the literal-minded, the brutality of the direct. And because he was not evil in himself he came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was acting. It was not Rudyard who had to be condemned, not even his actions, but the system that permitted his actions to occur. In allowing Indians to realize this lay the true madness of the Hastinapur Massacre. It became a symbol of the worst of what colonialism could come to mean. And by letting it happen, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men, that point which, in any unequal relationship, a master and a subject learn equally to respect.

At the time this was perhaps not so evident. The incident left the population in a state of shock; if you think it provoked a further violent reaction, you would be wrong, Ganapathi, for no father of a family willingly puts himself in the firing-line if he knows what bullets can do to him. After Bibigarh everyone knew, and the people subsided into subordination.

Gangaji told me later that the Massacre confirmed for him the wisdom of the principles of non-violence he had preached and made us practise at Motihari. ‘There is no point,’ he said candidly, ‘in choosing a method at which your opponent is bound to be superior. We must fight with those weapons that are stronger than theirs - the weapons of morality and Truth.’ Put like that it might sound a little woolly-headed, I know, Ganapathi, but don’t forget it had worked at Motihari. The hope that it might work again elsewhere, and the knowledge that nothing else could defeat the might of the Empire on which the sun never set, were what made us flock to Gangaji. In a very real sense Hastinapur gave him the leadership of the national movement.

And what of Colonel Rudyard, the great British hero of Bibigarh? His superiors in Whitehall were embarrassed by his effectiveness: there is such a thing, after all, as being too efficient. Rudyard was prematurely retired, though on a full pension. Not that he needed it; for across the length and breadth of the Raj, in planters’ clubs and Empire associations, at ladies’ tea parties and cantonment socials, funds were raised in tribute by patriotic pink-skins outraged by the slight to a man who had so magnificently done his duty and put the insolent natives in their place. The collections, put together and presented to the departing Colonel at a moving ceremony attended by the best and the whitest, amounted to a quarter of a million pounds, yes, Ganapathi, 250,000, two and a half lakhs of pounds sterling, which even at today’s depreciated exchange rate is forty lakhs of rupees, an amount it would take the President of India thirty-five years to earn. It took Rudyard less than thirty-five minutes, much less. The gift, which his government did not tax, brought him more than £160 per Indian dead or wounded; as one pillar of the Establishment was heard to murmur when the figures were announced, ‘I didn’t think a native was worth as much as that.’

In some ways this gesture did even more than the Massacre itself to make any prospect of Indian reconciliation to British rule impossible. It convinced Gangaji, who derived his morals as much from the teachings of Christianity as from any other source, that the Raj was not just evil, but satanic. The Massacre and its reward made Indians of us all, Ganapathi. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into revolutionaries, led a Nobel Prize- winning poet to return his knighthood - and achieved Gangaji’s absolute conversion to the cause of freedom. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth, and he never wavered again in his commitment to ridding India of the evil Empire. There was to be no compromise, no pussyfooting, no sellout on the way. He would think of the phrase only years later, but his message to the British from then on was clear: Quit India.

Rudyard retired to a country home in England. I wonder whether he was ever troubled by the knowledge of how much he was reviled and hated in the country he had just left. Or by the fact that so many hotheaded young men had sworn, at public meetings, in innumerable temples and mosques and
gurudwaras,
to exact revenge for his deed in blood. I like to think that Rudyard spent many a sleepless night agonizing if a stray shadow on the blind was of an assassin, starting at each unexpected sound in fear that it might be his personal messenger from Yama. But I am not sure he did, Ganapathi, because he knew, just as Ganga did, the limitations of our people in the domain of violence. The young men who swore undying revenge did not know how to go about exacting it, or even where. Only two of them finally had the intelligence and the resources to cross the seas in quest of their quarry. And when they got to Blighty, and made inquiries about an old India hand with an unsavoury Hastinapur connection, they found their man and, with great éclat and much gore, blew him to pieces.

Do not rejoice, Ganapathi, for it was not Rudyard whose brains they spattered over High Street, Kensington. No, not Rudyard, but a simple case of mistaken identity; to a sturdy Punjabi one British name is much like another, the people they questioned were themselves easily confused, and it was not Rudyard, but Kipling they killed. Yes, Kipling, the same Professor Kipling who had been careless enough to allude to the canine qualities of the Indian people, and who, for that indiscretion, had already been struck by my pale, my rash son Pandu. It makes you wonder, does it not, Ganapathi, about the inscrutability of Providence, the sense of justice of our Divinity. Our two young men went proudly to the gallows, a nationalist slogan choking on their lips as the noose tightened, blissfully unaware that they had won their martyrdom for killing the wrong man. Or perhaps he was not the wrong man: perhaps Fate had intended all along that Kipling be punished for his contempt; perhaps the Great Magistrate had decreed that the sentence of death fall not on the man who had ordered his soldiers to fire on an unarmed assembly but on he who had so vilely insulted an entire nation. It does not matter, Ganapathi; in the eyes of history all that matters is that we finally had our revenge.

So that is how my family entered politics, Ganapathi. Gangaji was more or less already in it, of course, since his crusade for justice had brought him smack up against the injustice of foreign rule, but now Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and white cane, and Pandu, whom celibacy had driven to fat, joined the cause full-time.

Vidur, too, might have joined; indeed, he wished to. He came down from Delhi the day after the annexation and the Bibigarh Massacre, and informed Gangaji and his brothers that he had resigned from the Service.

‘What?’ exclaimed Dhritarashtra. ‘Resigned?’

‘Good thing,’ said Pandu. ‘Well done, Vidur. You shouldn’t have joined the bastards in the first place.’

‘Withdraw it at once,’ Gangaji said.

Vidur blinked in astonishment. ‘I beg your pardon, Uncle?’ he asked, for he was a polite young man.

‘Withdraw it,’ Gangaji said tersely. ‘At once.’

‘Withdraw my resignation? But I can’t possibly do that.’

‘Why not? Have they already accepted it?’

‘No,’ Vidur admitted, ‘they haven’t even seen it yet. I’ve put my letter of resignation in the Under-Secretary’s in-tray, and he’ll find it when he comes in on Monday morning.’

‘No, he won’t,’ said Dhritarashtra, who was quick on the uptake, ‘because you’ll go back to Delhi immediately and take it out of his in-tray before he sees it.’

‘But why?’ Vidur asked despairingly. ‘You can’t seriously want me to serve this alien government, a government that has done
this
to our people!’

‘Whether it is the government you will be serving or the people whom they have harmed is only a matter of opinion,’ said Ganga sententiously. ‘Explain it to him, Dhritarashtra.’

‘Don’t you see, Vidur?’ asked Dhritarashtra, who, despite his blindness (or perhaps because of it), revelled in optical allusions. ‘We need you there. If we’re going to fight the Raj effectively we shall need our own friends and allies within the structure. And if we win,’ he added, his voice acquiring that dreamy quality that women in Bloomsbury had found irresistible during his student days, ‘we shall still need able and experienced Indians to run India for us.’

And so Vidur reluctantly stayed on in the ICS and, because he had many of his father’s good qualities, rose with remarkable rapidity up the rungs of the States Department. His princely upbringing at Hastinapur had given him the knack of dealing with Indian royalty. He understood their whims and wants, indulged their eccentricities and interpreted them sympathetically to the British. In time he became a trusted intermediary between the pink masters and their increasingly assertive brown subjects.

But we must put Vidur aside for a moment, Ganapathi, to look more carefully at Gangaji and his two princely disciples as they, in turn, rose to the peak of the nationalist movement.

Dhritarashtra s disappointment with fatherhood and the failing health of his grim wife drove him wholeheartedly into politics. Here he surprised everyone with his flair for the task. He had the blind man’s gift of seeing the world not as it was, but as he wanted it to be. Even better, he was able to convince everyone around him that his vision was superior to theirs. In a short while he was, despite his handicap, a leading light of the Kaurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communications to the government, formulating its positions on foreign affairs, and establishing himself as the party’s most articulate and attractive spokesman on just about anything on which Cantabrigian Fabianism had given him an opinion.

Gangaji, the party’s political and spiritual mentor, made no secret of his preference for the slim and confident young man. Pandu, in the circumstances, took it all rather well. He saw the world very differently from his blind half- brother. His recent brush with the angels of death and his subsequent immersion in the scriptures had made him more of a traditionalist than the idealistic Dhritarashtra, and the solidity of his appearance testified to one whose feet were staunchly planted on terra firma. Not for Pandu the flights of fancy of his sightless sibling, nor, for that matter, the ideological flirtations, the passionate convictions, the grand sweeping gestures of principle that became the hallmarks of Dhritarashtra’s political style. Pandu believed in taking stock of reality, preferably with a clenched fist and eyes in the back of one’s head. He balanced an hour of meditation with an hour of martial arts. ‘Of course I believe in non-violence,’ he would explain. ‘But I want to be prepared just in case non-violence doesn’t believe in
me.