The Great Indian Novel (15 page)

At last the rest of India began to sit up and take notice of what Ganga was doing in the obscure Bengal town of Budge Budge. Indian nationalism had generated its share of agitators, boycotters and bonfire-stokers; its leaders had resorted to legal texts, holy sacraments and bombs; but no one had ever before tried to starve himself to death. Curiosity was aroused on a national scale, and opinion was inevitably divided. Radical students signalled their support by setting fire to university mess-halls, though some may merely have taken this as a reflection on the cooking. The eminent Scotswoman who headed the Indo-Irish Home Rule League cabled Ganga urging him not to waste his life on so trivial a cause as low wages. The leading English newspaper of the Bengal Presidency devoted three inches to the affair on an inside page, just beneath its Nature Notebook. A pleasant American professor came by the peepul tree to ask Ganga whether he had always resented his father.

The Scottish mill owners were apoplectic. ‘For God’s sake tell him not to be silly, Sarah,’ Montague pleaded with his estranged sister. ‘This is childish. Like a little girl denied a lollipop, threatening to hold her breath until she turns blue. And it’s not even any of his damn business! This is between us and our workers. What’s
his
bloody life got to do with it, anyway?’

‘Blackmail,’ Sarah-behn said to Gangaji, stooped low over his books under the peepul tree. ‘That’s what they’re calling it at the Mill Owners’ Association. Blackmail.’

‘They are wrong, my sister.’ Ganga’s voice was hoarse with thirst, enfeebled by hunger, but it emerged, Ganapathi, with spirit. ‘My fast has nothing to do with their decision. I am not fasting to make them change their mind.
That
would be blackmail, and that would be wrong. Of what use would it be if the mill owners agreed to pay 35 per cent merely to save my life? They would not be acting in accordance with the Truth, or because they believe the workers’ cause is just. That would be a hollow victory. No, Sarah-behn, I am fasting to strengthen the workers’ resolve, to show them how firmly they must hold their beliefs if they expect them to triumph. My fast demonstrates my conviction, that is all. It is not meant to be a threat to anyone, certainly not to your brothers, the mill owners. Tell them so, Sarah-behn.’

She tried to tell them so. Sarah understood Ganga intuitively. It was one of the odder mysteries of Indian history that the person who most quickly got on to Ganga’s instinctive wavelength was not one of us from Hastinapur, who had all found his eccentricities so difficult, but this English bourgeoise with the complexion of an under-ripe beetroot.

She understood him partially because she had come to understand something of the Indian tradition as it was lived in the hovels and shacks of the Indian poor and the lower-middle class, that section of the people whom Indian nationalism had so completely ignored until Ganga came and gave them their place in the sun. In the homes of the lowly factory clerks, whose wives she had taken the trouble to visit at times of distress or celebration, Sarah had come to admire the Indian capacity for altruistic self-denial. You know, Ganapathi, how Indians starve on certain days of the week, deny themselves their favourite foods, eliminate essentials from their diets, all to accumulate moral rather than physical credit. Where a Western woman misses a meal in the interest of her figure, her Indian sister dedicates her starvation to a cause, usually a male one. (Her husband or son, of course, never responds in kind: he manifests his appreciation of her sacrifice by enjoying a larger helping of her cooking.)

Sarah saw Ganga’s act in this context, and understood it as an act of affirmation rather than of blackmail. But her brother and his friends in the Mill Owners’ Association were no more capable of thinking in those terms than of converting to Hinduism. And they did not want to listen to her.

With each passing day Ganga weakened. His thinness, remarkable even in his later Hastinapur days, verged painfully on the ridiculous; his features sagged, until all that could be discerned under the stubble was the existence of skin beneath the staring, listless eyes. The visitors came in larger numbers, their concern for his health meriting larger and larger headlines in the papers. The crowds swelling outside his makeshift shelter were increasingly more angry than curious. The nervous jute-mill owners sent for a doctor, who took Gangaji’s feeble pulse and declared that his condition was seriously deteriorating. If something was not done soon, he would be beyond recall, and Indian nationalism would have its first non-violent martyr.

We who maintained the unceasing vigil of those days and nights can never forget them, Ganapathi. We begged and pleaded with him to listen to us, to call off his suicidal action, to drink something, to accept a compromise. He was adamant: his fast would continue until the workers had their 35 per cent. After a while he simply stopped responding to our requests, turning his face away in silence if any of us ever raised the issue. I will admit, Ganapathi, that on the tenth day we had almost given up. I shall not forget an accidental glimpse of Sarah-behn leaving his side that evening, her strong face swollen, awash with tears.

At last the British authorities decided to take matters into their own hands. The consequences of inaction were too awful to contemplate. A terse message went to the Mill Owners’ Association of Budge Budge from the Governor of Bengal: ‘Give in.’

‘Thirty-five per cent!’ Sarah-behn yelled, her pale cheeks reddening in excitement as she brandished a piece of paper, a paper of peace, in Ganga’s face. ‘You’ve won!’

‘No, my dear sister,’ the weak voice croaked in response, as a faint smile battled through his exhaustion. Gangaji’s hands spread out in a gesture that took in the delirious, screaming throng which had held out with him.
‘They
have won.’

A glass of orange juice was brought to him, and he bowed his head while Sarah-behn held it out for him to sip. As the lukewarm droplets soaked into his parched gullet, the crowd burst into an ecstatic roar, as if the bobbing of his Adam’s apple was the first sight of a lifebuoy to a dangerously listing raft. The oranges that season were sour, Ganapathi, but the taste of victory, and survival, was deliciously sweet.

You can imagine the relief we all felt that day, Ganapathi, and the sense of triumph. Years later, in that candid autobiography of his, Ganga wrote that the moment of his sudden decision to embark on a fast was a ‘holy’ one for him. The inspiration, he says, came in a blinding flash; he just
knew
that this was what he had to do to pass his personal ordeal by fire. The workers had sworn to follow and be guided by him; he had to fast to prevent them from breaking their promise. And when he announced it, Ganga writes, it changed the course of his struggle immediately and for ever. ‘The meeting, which had been hitherto unresponsive, came to life as if by a miracle,’ was, I think, the way he put it. It was he who brought it to life, of course, and he who brought life to it.
His
life.

And yet, Ganapathi, what a small triumph this momentous first fast achieved. Thirty-five per cent? Yes, but 35 per cent for just
one day.
For that was the formula the wily British government had worked out for the mill owners. Ganga had said he would fast until the workers could go back to work with a 35 per cent increase; ergo, under the settlement, the workers could go back to work with a 35 per cent increase - but they could not
keep
that increase beyond the first day. For Day Two, it was 20 per cent, and for every subsequent day until the government’s arbitrator announced his verdict: 27.5 per cent. You have to admire the ingeniousness of that formula, Ganapathi. The 35 per cent ended Ganga’s fast and the workers’ strike; the 20 per cent ensured that the mill owners did not have to concede defeat, which might have encouraged other workers to contemplate strikes; and the 27.5 per cent appeared to be fair to both sides while giving the arbitrator the most obvious figure for his solution. The workers of Budge Budge; who had started off wanting 80 per cent, had come down to 50 per cent and then reconciled themselves to claiming 35 per cent, finally had to settle for 27.5 per cent. Ganga’s sense of justice, which had led him to ‘split the difference’ between the two original positions, served only to reduce the ultimate settlement when the arbitrator split the new difference as well. Moral politics, Ganapathi, is not always good mathematics.

But the fine print did not seem to bother the workers as they sang and danced in celebration of their victory. Ganga was thanked, prostrated to and garlanded profusely. His humble volunteers were feted with coconut milk and river fish. Somebody produced a special gift for Sarah-behn, a cream-coloured Shantipuri cotton sari with a narrow black border. She accepted it with tears flowing down her strong face: it meant that she was now one of us. She wore it that very evening, and was never again seen in the skirts of her Caucasian past.

How do I explain to you, Ganapathi, what that first fast meant to Gangaji, to all of us? It was such a spontaneous, unplanned event, with minimal organization and - as we must, in the light of the 27.5 per cent, admit - marginal results. But it shone for us as a beacon of hope and strength in the darkness of our subjugation. It was an affirmation of purpose, of spirit, of faith. What happened at Budge Budge confirmed the force of the non-violent revolution that Gangaji had launched.

In fasting, in directing the strength of his convictions against himself, Gangaji taught us to resist injustice with arms that no one could take away from us. Gangaji’s use of the fast made our very weakness a weapon. It captured the imagination of India in a way that no speech, no prayer, no bomb had ever done. In time, Gangaji’s fasts slowed the heartbeat of the nation; hungry students pushed their plates away knowing the Great Teacher was not eating; entire villages refused to touch a flame to their wicks in order to share the darkness with him. On that first occasion interest was limited, and had to be won. Gangaji won it, and with it the attention - and the devotion - of the country. He had realized that the best way to bring his principles to life was, paradoxically, by being prepared to die for them.

In that realization lay the ultimate strength of the national movement. Gangaji’s willingness to sacrifice his life set the tone for the other sacrifices that were, eventually, to make freedom possible - by making the price the British would have had to pay to stay on not worth paying.

Fasts, Ganapathi, have never worked half as well anywhere else as they have in India. Only Indians could have devised a method of political bargaining based on the threat of harm to yourself rather than to your opponent. Inevitably, of course, like all our country’s other great innovations, fasts too have been shamefully abused. As a weapon, fasts are effective only when the target of your action values your life more than his convictions - or at least feels that society as a whole does. So they were ideally suited to a nonviolent, upright national leader like Gangaji. But when used by lesser mortals with considerably less claim to the moral high ground and no great record of devotion to principle, fasts are just another insidious form of blackmail, abused and over-used in our agitation-ridden land.

It might have been worse, though. If more politicians, Ganapathi, had the courage to fast in the face of what they saw as transcendent wrong, Indian governments might have found it impossible to govern. But too many would-be fasters proclaim their self-denial and then retreat to surreptitious meals behind the curtain, which makes their demands easier to resist since there is no likelihood of their doing any real harm to themselves.

But that is not the worst of it, Ganapathi. What more bathetic legacy could there be to Ganga, who risked his life for 27.5 per cent, than that fasts have suffered the ultimate Indian fate of being reduced to the symbolic? What could be more absurd than the widely practised ‘relay fast’ of today’s politicians, where different people take it in turns to miss their meals in public? Since no one starves for long enough to create any problems for himself or others, the entire point of Gangaji’s original idea is lost. All we are left with is the drama without the sacrifice - and isn’t that a metaphor for Indian politics today?