The Great Indian Novel

The Sixth Book: Forbidden Fruit

28

To leave Gangaji aside for a moment — though that, as you can see, Ganapathi, is never easy; you see how he keeps taking over our story — let us return to his wards, the newly political, newly parental princelings of Hastinapur. They have not featured in the episodes I have recounted so far from Gangaji’s career, for the simple reason that they were not there at the time, though to say so would probably be considered heretical by the numerous devotees of each today. Our contemporary hagiographers would have us believe that Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and his white stick, was everywhere by Gangaji’s side in the struggle for Independence, and that — until he disagreed with his mentor — so was Pandu. Well, Ganapathi, you can take it from me that they were not, for most of the crucial events in Gangaji’s life and career were those in which he acted alone, resolving the dictates of his hyperactive conscience within, and by, himself.

Not that his followers, our later leaders, were entirely idle at the time. After all, Independence was not won by a series of isolated incidents but by the constant, unremitting actions of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of men and women across the land. We tend, Ganapathi, to look back on history as if it were a stage play, with scene building upon scene, our hero moving from one action to the next in his remorseless stride to the climax. Yet life is never like that. If life were a play the noises offstage, and for that matter the sounds of the audience, would drown out the lines of the principal actors. That, of course, would make for a rather poor tale; and so the recounting of history is only the order we artificially impose upon life to permit its lessons to be more clearly understood.

So it is, Ganapathi, that in this memoir we light up one corner of our collective past at a time, focus on one man’s actions, one village’s passion, one colonel’s duty, but all the while life is going on elsewhere, Ganapathi: as the shots ring out in the Bibigarh Gardens babies are being born, nationalists are being thrown into prison, husbands are quarrelling with wives, petitions are being filed in courtrooms, stones are being flung at policemen, and diligent young Indian students are sailing to London to sit for the examinations that will permit them to rule their own people in the name of an alien king. It is no different for the protagonists of our story, the little band of individuals and families selected from the swirling mists of an old man’s memory to represent a past in which others too have played a significant but unrecalled part. Time did not stand still for them as Ganga plodded through Motihari or starved to such good purpose in Budge Budge. No, Ganapathi, our friends too lived and breathed and thought and worked and prayed and (except for Pandu) copulated the while, their endeavours unrecorded in these words you have so laboriously transcribed. History marched on, leaving only a few footprints on our pages. Of its deep imprints on other sands, you do not know because I do not choose to wash in the waters that have swept them away.

In other words, Ganapathi, as our story unfolded on your notes and my little cassettes, Pandu and Dhritarashtra were working busily in Hastinapur, in Bombay, in Delhi, to organize and promote, respectively, the institution that would one day propel Gangaji’s vision into a tangible nationhood — the Kaurava Party.

At first their paths did not diverge. Indeed, were it not for Dhritarashtra’s unfortunate affliction, I might have said that they invariably saw eye to eye. Till my blue-blooded scions entered the fray in Gangaji’s wake, the Kaurava Party had been a distinguished but remarkably ineffective forum for the rhetorical articulation of Anglophile dissatisfaction with the English. Brown- skinned Victorian gentlemen, often in three-piece suits with watch-chains strung fashionably across their waistcoats (bad enough for cultural, climatic and aesthetic reasons, but to make matters worse, Ganapathi, this was decades before the advent of air-conditioning) declaimed in the language of that ignorant imperialist, Macaulay, and in the accents of that overrated oligopoly, Oxbridge, their aspirations to the rights of Englishmen. England listened, but paid little heed. The Kaurava Party was a useful outlet for the frustrations of the English-educated, but since these were always expressed with the restraint born of English education, they posed no threat. The party had, after all, been founded by a liberal Scot, who had named it in a fuzzy misreading of Indian mythology and dedicated it to the perpetuation of his monarch’s constitutional queenship over India, the radical idea being the adjective ‘constitutional’ When Gangaji turned to politics the Kaurava Party had been in existence for thirty years and the British had not taken thirty steps toward Indian self-rule. With the advent of my Hastinapuris all this changed.

Dhritarashtra, for one, as you already know, Ganapathi, had acquired in England traces of the right accent along with streaks of the wrong ideas. He had returned fired with Fabianism, which taught that equality and justice were everybody’s right, and which (with typical imprecision) omitted to exclude the heathen from the definition of ‘everybody’. The Fabians had drawn up an all-embracing philosophy in order basically to make the point that it was the state’s duty to provide gas and tap-water to the British working-man, and while the British working-man rapidly moved on to less elemental concerns, the philosophy travelled to distant peoples who had never heard of gas or tap-water. Dhritarashtra was one of its carriers. He heard speeches aimed at prodding Westminster to help the workers of Wigan Pier and drew from them the conclusion that it was also the duty of the government in India to serve the common Indian. Such a thought had not, of course, crossed the minds of those who had set up the government in India for the fun and profit of the indigenes of Ipswich, so that Dhritarashtra found himself drawing the corollary that the Indian government could only fulfil its duty if it were a government of India run by Indians for the welfare of Indians. This modest proposition, Ganapathi, took him far beyond the previous precepts of his party. It was a doctrine persuasively and passionately argued by the unseeing visionary. Within a short while he had captured the ideological heights of an institution low on ideas.

He did so, of course, because Gangaji’s spectacularly unorthodox successes had shaken up the sterile verities of the party’s past and opened it up for capture. In the old days the only — if sporadically — effective nationalist actions had been the bomb-throwings and the mob agitations from which the party elders had shrunk away. Now, in the actions I have described and innumerable others like them, Gangaji demonstrated that you did not have to be a hooligan to be effective. Non-violence, voluntary courting of arrest, even fasting — these were more acceptable to offspring of respectable families. Constitutionalists could hardly object to one who worked within the laws and willingly accepted the punishment for their violation. Gangaji’s methods stoked the fires of true nationalism among those who had recoiled from violence and lawlessness. It was this warmth that welcomed Dhritarashtra when he began to preach to them. He found them ripe for conversion, and the Hastinapur connection bathed him in the light reflected from Gangaji’s halo. If Dhritarashtra’s socialist beliefs went beyond anything Gangaji himself had ever expressed, there was never any question of the Great Teacher’s endorsement of his sightless protégé. The Kauravas were left in no doubt that Dhritarashtra was Gangaji’s man.

At the beginning so, of course, was Pandu. In some ways he might have seemed a more natural heir to Gangaji, with his scriptural reading, his personal faddishness, his (albeit enforced) celibacy. Gangaji indulged Dhritar-ashtra and relied on Pandu. It was Pandu who took the party banners into the most remote villages, while Dhritarashtra toured the lecture-halls and the meeting-rooms of urban India. This was, perhaps, inevitable, given both Dhritar-ashtra’s strengths and his handicap. But it did mean that while Pandu trudged in his dhoti through the mud and grime of the countryside, while Pandu led the proletarian processions of stoic satyagrahis on defiant dharnas, while Pandu took the blows on the head from the lathis — the long wooden arms — of the law, Dhritarashtra endured little more than the hoarse barbs of bribed hecklers, the strain of long speeches at mass meetings, the long nights dictating pamphlets to adoring scribes. It was Gangaji who determined, who ratified, who sanctified this division of labour; as a result Dhritarashtra was before long the most famous Indian leader after Gangaji, while Pandu’s following was confined largely to the political activists who had toiled with him in the villages. When, years later, Duryodhani spoke darkly of the immense and unrivalled sacrifices her father and she had made for the nation, I would think of poor Pandu, by then long turned to ash and almost forgotten, poor, tough, scarred, calloused Pandu with the smell of sweat on his brow and the dust of India on his sandals. And I would muse, Ganapathi, on the injustices of Fate.

Of course Dhritarashtra too made sacrifices for the nation. His cause led as surely to prison as Pandu’s, and both spent years inside British jails. If anything, Dhritarashtra’s sentences as a convict of conscience amounted to longer than Pandu’s. But he turned his incarceration to profit, dictating books and letters (and letters that became books) throughout his stay as a guest of His Majesty, works that revealed again and again to the world his depth of learning and breadth of vision. Prison confined others, but in Dhritarashtra’s case it only confirmed his reputation as India’s leading nationalist after Gangaji. The regularity with which each of his spells in prison resulted in a book led one colonial cartoonist to depict him in the dock addressing a judge: ‘Why did I break the law? Well, Your Honour, my publishers were getting impatient. .’

Was it inevitable, Ganapathi, that Pandu should become disaffected? Your ponderous brow, your unblinking eyes, offer no answer. The inevitabilities of history are for ideologues and fatalists, and I suppose I have belonged, at one time or another, to each category. Yes, Ganapathi, it was inevitable. I watched them both, my flawed, gifted sons; I watched them from afar as a humble Kaurava Party worker in the plains; I watched them from nearer as a more distinguished ad hoc member of the party’s High Command; and I saw the inevitability of their separation. Pandu became impatient of Dhritarashtra’s oratorical certitudes, his lofty convictions and vaulting ambition. Dhritarashtra, in turn, had little time for Pandu’s atavistic traditionalism, his political earthi-ness, his pride in his wives’ five boys. (Those who have no sons rarely attach any importance to the priorities of those who do, but they resent them deeply.) If Gangaji saw any of this, he showed little sign. He carried on as oblivious as always to the dilemmas of others, doing nothing to heal the growing rift.

29

That there was a rift became impossible to conceal. Pandu began to take positions at variance with Dhritarashtra’s. He constantly urged the adoption of a harder line against the British than the party — its strategy guided by Gangaji’s wisdom and Dhritarashtra’s cunning — was willing to adopt. When the Prince of Wales, an empty-headed lad with a winsome smile, paid a royal visit to examine the most prized jewel in the crown he was briefly to inherit, Pandu urged that he be boycotted. But Dhritarashtra instead persuaded the party to permit him to present the Prince a petition (don’t frown, Ganapathi, alliteration is my only vice — and after all, it is one thing you can do in Sanskrit). When the government in London then sent a commission of seven white men to determine whether the derisory ‘reforms’ of a few years earlier were helping Indians to progress to self-government (or whether, as Whitehall thought and wished to hear, the reforms had already ‘gone too far’ and needed reformulating), Pandu proposed a non-violent stir at the docks to prevent the unwelcome seven from alighting on to Indian soil. But this time Dhritarashtra wanted the party to content itself with — yes, Ganapathi, you’ve guessed it — a boycott; and once again, with Gangaji’s toothless smile of benediction behind him, Dhritarashtra had his way. It became apparent to Pandu that Dhritarashtra’s triumphs were basically of Gangaji’s making, and that a large number, perhaps a majority, of the Kaurava Party were backing his half-brother not because of any intrinsic faith in his ideas but because they came with the blessing of the man Sir Richard had taken unpleasantly to describing as Public Enema Number One.

I myself caught a whiff of Pandu’s bitterness at a Working Committee meeting of the party which I happened to attend. At one point I was talking to Dhritarashtra and the skeletal Gangaji when Pandu walked palely past. ‘The Kaurava Trinity,’ he muttered audibly for my benefit — ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.

Of course he was exaggerating my own importance, for I sought no active role in the Kaurava leadership. The mantle of elder statesman had fallen on me when I was scarcely old enough to merit the adjective, and I was content with the detachment it permitted. But even my habitual sense of distance from the quotidian cares of the party could not prevent a stirring of disquiet, which was instantly confirmed by Dhritarashtra’s next words. ‘I should have thought,’ he said lightly, but with his face set, ‘that my dear brother would have done better to refer to the Hindu Trinity — the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer. But then he would have had to include himself at the end, wouldn’t he?’

When rivals fling jokes at each other, Ganapathi, it means that there is no turning back. Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.

The disagreement came out into the open when the British convened what they called a Round Table Conference in London to discuss the future of India. It is not often that a major international event is named after a piece of furniture, but the round table in question was chosen quite deliberately (and after a great deal of diplomatic deliberation). It served two functions. One, unmentioned, was to hark back to the hosts’ glorious chivalric past under the legendary King Arthur (who, if he existed at all, was a superstitious cuckold, which is hardly my idea of a national hero). The second, openly cited at background briefings for the press, was to place all the participants on an equal footing: to have had a conventional table with a ‘head’ might have implied that the British had their preferences among Indian leaders, and the British, of course, were noble and disinterested Solons who would never want anyone to think such a thing.

Well, Ganapathi, before you begin to suggest that that is all fine and democratic, let me tell you that the lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious. In this case it meant reducing the Kaurava Party — the only nationwide nationalist movement, the only broad- based popular organization, the very party whose campaigns of mass awakening and civil disobedience had obliged the British at last, at least, to agree to talk with Indians — it meant reducing the Kauravas to a level of official equality with all the other self-appointed Indian spokesmen the British saw fit to recognize. And thus it was that Gangaji sat at his round table to parley with the British, surrounded by delegations of India’s Untouchables and its touch-me-nots, representatives of Indians with their foreskins cut off and Indians with their hair uncut, spokesmen for left-handed Indians, green-eyed Indians and Indians who believed the sun revolved round the moon. Mind you, the Kaurava Party included members of every one of these minorities, and could claim with justice to be able to speak for all their interests, in the larger sense of the term; but the British were not interested in the larger sense at all. They wanted to introduce as many divisive elements as possible in order to be able to say to the world: ‘You see these Indians can never agree amongst themselves, we really have no choice but to continue ruling them indefinitely for their own good.’

Now, all this was known before the conference even started, Ganapathi, that was the irony of it. What I am saying to you does not come with the benefit of hindsight (odd phrase, that: which of my readers will consider an old man’s fading recollections a benefit?). No, Ganapathi, it is there in the public record, it is there in Pandu’s impassioned entreaties to the Kaurava Working Committee. ‘Don’t go, don’t let us be a party to this charade,’ he pleaded. But the Working Committee, at Dhritarashtra’s glib urging, agreed not only to attend but to send Gangaji as the party’s sole representative to the conference. Pandu railed against ‘this madness’, as he called it. ‘If we must go, let us go in strength, let us send a delegation that reflects the numbers and diversity of our following,’ he argued. Once again he was disregarded; the Committee placed its faith in the man to whom many were already referring in open hagiology as Mahaguru, the Great Teacher.

So Pandu stayed in India and fretted, while the man he admired, but could not bring himself to surrender everything to, crossed his legs on a cold wooden chair and awaited his turn to speak after the Monarchists and the Liberals and the Society for the Preservation of the Imperial Connection, which had each sent more representatives to the Round Table than the Kauravas. But Pandu, though now bitter in his denunciation of his sightless sibling, was still a loyal party man. He remained so even when Ganga returned, having bared his chest on the newsreels and taken tea in his loincloth with the King-Emperor (‘Your Majesty, you are wearing more than enough for the two of us,’ the Mahaguru had said disarmingly) but won no concessions from the circular and circumlocutious conferees. Pandu resisted the temptation to say, ‘I told you so’ and concentrated instead on building up his support within the party councils. For once, my pale-faced hot-headed son was going to wait until the time was ripe before striking.

Do I give you the impression, Ganapathi, that between my pale and purblind progeny my sympathies lie only with Pandu? Do not be misled, my friend. India does not choose amongst her sons, and nor do I. They are both mine, their flaws and foibles, their vanities and inanities, their pretensions and pride, all mine. I do not disown either of them, any more than I could deny half my own nature.

And besides, Pandu could be wrong as well. As was amply demonstrated in the affair of the Great Mango March.

30

Some of our more Manichaean historians tend to depict the British villains as supremely accomplished — the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent manipulators of the destiny of India. Stuff and nonsense, of course. For every brilliant Briton who came to India, there were at least five who were incapable of original thought and fifteen who were only capable of original sin. They went from mistake to victory and mistake again with a combination of luck, courage and the Gatling gun, but mistakes they made, all the time. Don’t forget that the British were the only people in history crass enough to make revolutionaries out of Americans. That took insensitivity and stupidity on quite a stupendous scale — qualities they could hardly keep out of their rule over our country.

The truth is that the average British colonial administrator was a pompous mediocrity whose nose was so often in the air that he tripped over his own feet. (It was just as well that so many of them had long noses, Ganapathi, for they could rarely see beyond them.) In the process, they made decisions that provoked visceral and lasting reactions. Don’t forget, Ganapathi, that it is to one British colonial policy-maker or another that we owe the Boxer Rebellion, the Mau Mau insurrection, the Boer War, and the Boston Tea Party.

It all began, as these things tend to do — for the British have never learned from history — with a tax. Why the pink blackguards bothered to tax Indians I will never understand, for they had successfully stolen everything they needed for centuries, from the jewelled inlays of the Taj Mahal to the Kohinoor on their queen’s crown, and one would have thought they could have done without the laborious extraction of the Indian working-man’s pittance. But there has always been something perversely precise about British oppression: the legal edifice of the Raj was built on the premise that anything resulting from the filling of forms in quadruplicate could not possibly be an injustice. So Robert Clive bought his rotten borough in England on the proceeds of his rapacity in India, while publicly marvelling at his own self-restraint in not misappropriating even more than he did. And the English had the gall to call him ‘Clive of India’ as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that much of the country belonged to him. Clive’s twentieth-century successors, who had taken the Hindustani word loot into their dictionaries instead of their habits, preferred to achieve the same results in more bureaucratic ways. They taxed property, and income, and harvests; they taxed our petrol, our patience and even our passing to the next world (through their gracelessly named ‘death duties’). As the expenditure on foreign wars mounted they taxed our rice, our cloth and our salt. We had thought they simply couldn’t go any further. Till the day they announced a tax on the one luxury still available to the Indian masses — the mango.

The mango is, of course, the king of fruits, though in recent years our export policies have made it more the fruit of kings — or of Middle Eastern sheikhs, to be precise. And the wonder of it is that — again before foreign markets became more important to our rulers than domestic bazaars — the mango was available to the common man in abundance. It was as if the good Lord, having given the Indian peasant droughts, and floods, and floods after droughts, and heat, and dust, and low wages, and British rule, said to him, all right, your cup of woe runneth over, drink instead from the juice of a ripe Chausa, and it will make up for all the misery I have inflicted upon you. The best mangoes in the world grew wild across the Indian countryside, dropping off the branches of trees so hardy they did not need looking after. And we took them for granted, consuming them raw, or pickled, or ripe, as our fancy seized us, content in the knowledge that there would always be more mangoes on those branches, waiting to be picked.

Then came the stunning announcement: the colonial regime had decided that the mango too had to earn its keep. Mangoes were a cash crop; accordingly, a tax was to be levied on the fruit, calculated on the basis of each tree’s approximate annual yield. Trees in the vicinity of private property were to be attached to the nearest landlord’s holdings for tax purposes; trees growing wild would be treated as common property and the tax levied on the village as a whole. District officials were instructed to conduct a mango-tree- registration campaign to ensure that the tax records were brought up to date. Poor village panchayats and panicky landlords chopped down their suddenly expensive foliage or fenced it. The days of the free munch were over.

At first the people reacted in stunned disbelief. Then, as the implications of the decision sank in, they gave vent — for they were simple people, used to calling a spade a white man’s garden tool — to collective howls of outrage.

Gangaji heard the echoes and sensed a cause. He was at the ashram one day when a Kaurava Party member from Palghat, Mahadeva Menon, raised the matter over the Great Teacher’s habitual lunch of nuts and fruit.

‘Mahaguru,’ he said in his high-pitched voice, lips rounding the flattest of English syllables — for English was the only language he had in common with Gangaji, as indeed it is my own sole means of dictating this memoir to you — ‘there is something really terrible going on in our country these days.’ (He actually said ‘cundry’, but you can spell that as you have been taught to, young man.) ‘The peeble’ — spell that ‘people’, Ganapathi, you really are getting to be quite difficult — ‘in my nate-yew blace are zimbly so so misserable. .’ ‘Native place’, Ganapathi, ‘simply’. I shall have to stop quoting people if you go on like this. Mahadeva Menon’s English was as valid a language to him as its American or Strine variants are to their speakers, so there is no need to parody his accent in print. If every Australian novelist had to set down the speech of his characters to approximate the sounds they made rather than the words they spoke, do you think there would be a single readable Australian novel in the world? (As it is I am reliably informed there are two or even three.)

You are sorry? Good. You won’t do it again? Very well, let us go on. Now, where was I? Ah, yes, Mahadeva Menon speaking to Gangaji about the terrible effects of the mango tax. A small man with a neat, trim black moustache, dressed in spotless white, with a folded white cloth flung over his left shoulder. A landlord from Palghat, converted to the egalitarian nationalism of Mahaguru Gangaji, describing the effects of the invidious mango tax on the well-being, on the depressed morale, of the masses of his district. ‘You must do something about this, Mahaguruji,’ he said.

Gangaji remained silent for a full minute, contemplating the suggestion and his bowl of dried fruit. At last he spoke. ‘Yes, Mahadeva,’ he said slowly. ‘I think I must.’

31

Pandu was aghast that Gangaji intended to make the mango tax an issue. ‘There are so many other vital problems for the Kaurava Party to address,’ he declared. ‘If, at this time of increasing repression by the British, you devote your energies, your moral stature, to something as petty, as ridiculous, as mangoes, you will make yourself the laughing stock of the nation.’ He placed his palms together in supplication. ‘Please, Gangaji, please — do not trivialize our great cause like this.’

But the Mahaguru was not moved. ‘Trust me, my son,’ he responded, returning with due solemnity to the task Pandu had interrupted — the scrubbing of the ashram latrine.

Yes, Ganapathi, no endeavour was too trivial for our hero. And he prepared as assiduously for each, taking the same care to ensure his brushes and mops and soapy water and ammonia (he had a great faith in the cleansing properties of ammonia) were to hand as he did to ensure that the reasons for his national satyagrahas were widely known and well-understood.

Ganga’s first step was to write to the Viceroy. The letter was a characteristic combination of impertinence and ingenuity, fact and foible:

Dear Friend,

As you are aware, I hold the British rule to be a curse. Your presence as its representative makes you the chief symbol of the injustice and oppression that the British people have visited upon the Indian nation. Yet I write to you as a friend, conscious of the immense potential for good that your post holds.

I have found it necessary on several occasions in the past to call into question some of the unjust laws that have been pressed upon the brows of my people. Indeed, I have been obliged on one or two occasions to disobey them and to lead others in disobeying them, in full consciousness and complete acceptance of the penalties for such disobedience. I consider non-violent civil disobedience to be one of the few morally just measures open to my fellow Indians and myself. Our cause is to defend ourselves and our own interests. I do not intend harm to a single Englishman in India, even if he be here as an uninvited guest.

I explain these things because I seek your help in undoing a great injustice which has recently been committed by the government you represent. I speak, of course, of the Mango Tax. This dreadful exaction has already caused untold suffering to the Indian masses amongst whose few humble pleasures is the fruit of the mango tree. The tax and its consequences have already caused a severe reaction amongst the people at large. I plead with you on bended knee to repeal this law.

I believe it will do your own cause far more good than harm to heed my plea. The estimates of your administrators speak of a potential revenue of some five million pounds sterling from this tax, which must surely be of little consequence to a government which earns more than 800 million pounds sterling from its other tariffs and taxes in this country. In addition, the repeal of this iniquitous tax will win you personally and your government much popularity, whereas its persistence can only add to the odium in which the British rule is held. The people at large are already saying that the oppressive foreigners will tax the sunshine next.

I therefore suggest that you rescind this decision as much in your own interest as in that of the people of India. Do not forget, dear friend, that your own salary is more than five thousand times that of the average Indian you tax, and that this colossal sum is paid for by the sweat of Indian brows. I would make so bold as to suggest that the action I urge upon you is nothing less than a moral obligation.

In concluding this plea, I must add that if you fail to heed it, I shall have no alternative but to launch a fresh campaign of civil disobedience against this unjust law. I would welcome this opportunity to educate the British people in the ethics of our cause. My ambition is no less than to convert the British people through nonviolence, and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India. I do not seek to harm your people. I want to serve them even as I want to serve my own.

To this Ganga received, three weeks later, the following reply:

Sir,

I am directed by the Private Secretary of His Excellency the Viceroy to acknowledge your communication of the ninth instant.

I am instructed to inform you that His Excellency regrets the tone and contents of your letter, and particularly the threat to violate the laws of His Majesty’s Government contained in its penultimate paragraph. His Excellency regards this as most unfortunate.

I am also directed to advise you that any breach of the regulations in force will be dealt with in accordance with the laws of the land.

The letter was signed by a Second Deputy Under-Secretary to the Private Secretary.

‘Very well,’ Ganga said, his lips pursing in that slight pout that legions of his female admirers continue to recall. ‘Sarah-behn, please arrange to send the entire text of this correspondence to the press — the Indian papers and the foreign wire-services. And do not forget that very pleasant young man from The New York Times who came to see us last week.’

Sarah-behn did not forget. And it was she, sitting behind him on a raised platform erected outside the ashram, who recorded in her large clear hand the immortal words of the speech he made inaugurating the Great Mango March: ‘My brothers and sisters,’ Ganga said to the crowd assembled at his feet, ‘I have called you here today to pray, as we usually do on this day each week. To pray for justice and Truth and the grace of God upon our benighted people. But today your prayers take on an additional meaning.

‘In all probability this will be my last speech to you for a long time to come. As you know, I have resolved to embark upon a satyagraha to resist the unjust mango tax. Even if the British government allows me to march tomorrow morning they will not allow me to return freely to this ashram and to you, my brothers and sisters. This may well be my last speech to you all, standing on the sacred soil of my beloved Hastinapur.’

(He was actually standing not on soil at all, whether sacred or profane, but on planks of wood erected to elevate him to the view of his audience. But the lumps were already forming in every throat in the audience, Ganapathi, and Ganga was poised to milk every tear-drop. I marvelled once more at how wrong Pandu could be. Trivialize the cause? Gangaji could dramatize and ennoble the most insignificant of causes when he chose to.)

‘I shall personally break the law by violating the terms of the Mango Act. My companions will do the same. We will undoubtedly be arrested. Despite our arrests, I expect and trust that the stream of our volunteer civil resisters will flow unbroken.

‘But whatever happens, let there not be the slightest breach of the peace, even if we are all arrested, even if we are all assaulted. We have resolved to utilize our resources in a purely non-violent struggle. Let no one raise his fist in anger. This is my hope and prayer, and I wish these words of mine to reach every corner of our country.

‘From this moment, let the call go forth, from this ashram where I have lived for Truth, to all our people across’ the length and breadth of India, to launch civil disobedience of the mango laws. These laws can be violated in many ways. It is an offence to pluck mangoes from any tree which has not been marked as having been duly registered and taxed. The possession, consumption or sale of contraband mangoes (which means any mango from any such tree) is also, in the eyes of our British rulers, an offence. The purchasers of such mangoes are equally guilty. I call on you all, then, to choose any or all of these methods to break the mango monopoly of the British government.’

A cheer rose up at these words, Ganapathi, but Ganga was still drawing tears:

‘Act, then, and act not for me but for yourselves and for India. I myself am of little importance, a humble servant of the people among whom I have been privileged to live. I am certain to be arrested, and I do not know when I shall return to you, my dear brothers and sisters. But do not assume that after I am gone there will be no one left to guide you. It is not I, but Dhritarashtra who is your guide. He is blind, but he sees far. He has the capacity to lead.’

And so Ganga soaked his listeners in their own emotions and anointed Dhritarashtra as his successor with their tears. It was at this point that Pandu, who had disdained the cause but come to the ashram out of loyalty to the Mahaguru, walked out, never to return to his teacher’s side.

32

The Great Mango March began the next morning. We all slept the night in the open air, in the grounds of the ashram, the reporters from the international press camping on the grass alongside sweepers and bazaar merchants and college students. Ganga awoke the next morning faintly surprised not to have been roused in his sleep by the clink of handcuffs. ‘The government is puzzled and perplexed,’ he triumphantly explained to the journalists, whom he had assured the previous day of his certain arrest. ‘But have no fear — the police will come.’

We set out, then, Ganapathi, seventy-eight of us, volunteers called from all over the country, on the Great Mango March. What a brilliant sense of the theatrical Ganga had. Mangoes could be found anywhere, but it was not enough for Ganga to march to the nearest tree and pluck its fruit: he knew that would not make good copy. He wanted to give the reporters with him something to report, and he wanted to inflate the issue to one of national importance by keeping it in the news for as long as possible. What better way to do that than by a 288-mile march from the ashram to the grove of a landlord with Kaurava Party sympathies who had refrained so far from registering his trees? Would not the impact of this padayatra exceed even that of his actual violation of the mango laws? And if the British arrested him en route, wouldn’t that be even better?

It was brilliant, Ganapathi, what your generation would call a low-risk strategy. Don’t ever forget, young man, that we were not led by a saint with his head in the clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.

Look at the newsreels of that time, Ganapathi. The black-and-white film is grainy, even scratched, the people in it move with unnaturally rapid jerkiness, and the commentator sounds like an announcer at a school sports meet, but despite it all you can capture some of the magic of the march. There is Gangaji himself at the head of the procession, bald, more or less toothless, holding a stave taller than himself, his bony legs and shoulders barely covered by his habitual undress, looking far too old and frail for this kind of thing, yet marching with a firm and confident stride accentuated by the erratic speed of the celluloid. There is Sarah-behn by his side in her white, thin-bordered sari, looking prim and determined, and Mahadeva Menon, for all the world like a Kerala karanavar on an inspection-tour of his paddy-fields; and behind them the rest of us, in homespun khadi and cheap leather chappals, showing no sign of fear or fatigue. Indeed, there is nothing grim about our procession, none of the earnest tragedy that marks the efforts of doomed idealists. Instead, Gangaji’s grinning waves of benediction, the banners of welcome strung across the roads at every village through which we pass, the scenes of smiling women in gaily coloured saris emerging in the blazing heat to sprinkle water on our dusty paths, the cameos of little children shyly thrusting bunches of marigolds into our hands, the waves of fresh volunteers joining us at every stop to swell our tide of marchers into a flood, all this speaks of the joyousness of our spirit as we march on.

Twelve miles a day, Ganapathi, for twenty-four days, and yet there was no sign of weariness, neither in Ganga, nor in the women, nor in my own ageless legs. Nor was there any sign of the police, though Gangaji confidently asserted to the journalists at each halt for refreshment that he expected to be arrested any day. It was, of course, another clever ploy from the master tactician. The very prediction of imminent arrest kept the police away and simultaneously encouraged, indeed obliged, the journalists to stay on. But Gangaji knew perfectly well that he would not be arrested, indeed could not be arrested, for he had as yet broken no law.

At last we arrived at the mango grove, still unescorted by police, but with notebooks and cameras much in evidence. The landlord came forth to greet us; ladies of his household stepped forward with little brass pitchers to wash our feet. Gangaji walked on, towards the oldest and biggest tree in the grove. For a moment I feared that we would lose him in the crush of humanity, that the sheer numbers around him would swallow up the dramatic impact of what he was about to do.

But once again artifice came to the aid of Truth. The landlord’s workers had erected a little platform for Gangaji, to be ascended by seven simple wooden steps. As silence settled expectantly around him, the Mahaguru, his little rimless spectacles firmly on his nose, his staff in his right hand, slowly, deliberately, mounted each step. At the top of the rough-hewn ladder, standing squarely on the little platform, he paused. Then, with a decisive gesture, he reached out a bony hand toward a ripe, luscious Langda mango dangling from the branch nearest him and wrenched it from its stalk. As the crowd erupted in a crescendo of cheering, he turned to them, his hand upraised, the golden-red symbol of his defiance blazing its message of triumph.

What poetry there was in that moment, Ganapathi! In that fruit, Ganga seemed to be holding the forces of nature in his hands, recalling the fertile strength of the Indian soil from which had sprung the Indian soul, reaffirming the fullness of the nation’s past and the seed of the people’s future. The cameras clicked, and whirred, and flashed, and Ganga stood alone, the sun glinting off his glasses, his hand raised for freedom.

From then on it was chaos, Ganapathi. The crowd cheered, and yelled, and swarmed around Gangaji as he stepped off the platform. The mango he had plucked, that first fruit of India’s liberation, was instantly auctioned to enthusiastic acclaim, for the princely sum of sixteen hundred rupees. A hundred hands reached for the remaining fruit on that landlord’s branches, plucking, tearing, pulling and inevitably, biting and sucking; before long the spotless white of the satyagrahis’ khadi was stained with the rich yellow of their greed. Stones were flung to bring down less accessible fruit; some fell on stray volunteers, mingling bloodstains with the juice on their tunics. Thus it is, Ganapathi, that the sublime degenerates into the sub-slime; and there too, while I am sounding portentous, lies another metaphor for us, for our nationalist struggle, make of it what you will.

33

But such metaphors come too easily to me, Ganapathi, for I was there then, and here I am now. Gangaji, fortunately, saw little of the immediate aftermath of his triumph, for he disappeared into the landlord’s home to rest and refresh himself before the police came.

At last, as expected, they did; and the next day’s newspapers were able to carry, alongside a front-page picture of Gangaji on the platform with his seditious mango held aloft, the news of his arrest and incarceration, along with the offending landlord and scores of volunteers. But Gangaji’s action was the signal for a nationwide defiance of the Mango Act. Kaurava protestors across the country took to emulating their leader; wave after wave of khadi-clad satyagrahis plucked and planted the contraband fruit, openly bought and sold it, and non-violently prevented the government’s mango inspectors from continuing with their work of enumeration and registration. The government’s only response was to arrest the offenders, a course of action that cost them more in trouble, jail-space and unfavourable publicity than the mango revenues were probably worth. The protestors mocked the authorities by organizing elaborate ceremonies to consume the forbidden fruit. (Since the mangoes were plucked rather indiscriminately, this was not always a pleasure for the volunteers. ‘Pretty awful stuff’, Dhritarashtra confided to the policeman who arrested him.) As the mango agitation spread, the British found themselves having to make room for no fewer than 50,000 new political prisoners, jailed for offences even Western journalists found absurd. Ganga had not only made his point, he had held the imperialists up to ridicule. And colonialism, as the poet said, cannot bear very much hilarity.

Even Pandu, who had held himself conspicuously aloof from the agitation, was placed on the defensive: for once it seemed that he had been indisputably wrong in gauging the potential of one of Ganga’s ideas. But then suddenly everything came unstuck.

Gangaji was still in prison when reports came in of what had happened in Chaurasta. In this small provincial town the mango agitation had, quite simply, got out of hand. The business of plucking and consuming forbidden fruit undoubtedly contains elements that appeal to the hooligan fringe that lurks at the edge of any mass movement. In Chaurasta the local Kaurava organizers had chosen their volunteers carelessly, or allowed too many outsiders to join them; whatever the reason, their civil disobedience became very uncivil indeed. Stones were being flung at fruit on the highest branches when the police, arrived on the spot to make their routine arrests. The protestors, instead of submitting quietly to the guardians of the law, aimed their stones at the uniformed targets instead. The police — all Indians, mind you — turned their lathis on the satyagrahis; in the ensuing unequal battle a number of ribs and skulls were cracked and several bones and noses broken before the demonstrators were hauled off to prison. Word of the ‘outrage’ spread quickly, and by nightfall a howling mob had gathered outside the police thana, shouting, ‘Khoon ka badla khoon’ — blood for blood, a slogan we were to hear later, in your own days, Ganapathi, from much the same sort of people and with equally tragic results.

It was late, and the thana was occupied by just two young policemen — Indians, Hindi-speakers. One of them, foolishly enough, stepped out to ask the crowd to disperse. Those were his last words; he was dragged into the mob and beaten and kicked to death. His terrified colleague inside was desperately trying to summon reinforcements when the screaming horde burst in and tore him literally to pieces. As they left, their bloodlust slaked, the mob set fire to the thana, with the dead or dying policemen still inside it.

The next day the Deputy Governor of Ganga’s prison came into his cell with a newspaper: the headlines were bigger than any other so far devoted to the mango agitation. The official, a pugnacious Ulsterman, threw the paper on to a table in front of his prisoner. ‘Is this the non-violent lesson you are trying to teach the British, Mr Datta?’ he asked heavily.

Ganga read the article without a word, passing over a photograph of himself with the caption: ‘”Mahaguru” Ganga Datta: instigator?’ At the end, he let the paper drop from his hand, and the prison official was surprised to see that the Great Teacher’s eyes were brimming with sorrow.

‘I shall suspend the agitation,’ he announced dully.

‘You’ll what?’ asked the incredulous Irishman.

‘I shall suspend the mango agitation forthwith,’ Gangaji said. ‘If you will provide me with the facilities to make a public announcement, I shall do so immediately.’ He saw the expression on his jailor’s face and half-smiled. ‘My people,’ he explained sorrowfully, almost to himself, ‘have not understood me.’

34

Nor did they when the announcement came. Gangaji, in a British prison, calling off the most successful movement of mass civil disobedience the country had ever seen, all because of one incident? It was bewildering. To some, it was a betrayal.

‘He has cracked under pressure,’ Pandu concluded, addressing a meeting of those members of the High Command who were still outside prison. ‘The British have got to him at last. Either that, or he has simply become a weak old man and lost the stomach to continue the fight.’

‘Whichever it is,’ someone interjected, ‘he has let us down.’

‘Now, wait a minute,’ I said mildly (yes, Ganapathi, I had, with my usual slipperiness, evaded the clutches of the police myself). ‘What’s all this talk about letting you down? I didn’t see any of you amongst the massed ranks of the mango marchers. You, for instance, Pandu — I thought you were against the whole business.’

‘I was,’ Pandu acknowledged without shame. ‘But I don’t mind admitting I misjudged the impact the agitation would have. The Mango March did fire the people’s imagination; it stirred them up as few things before have ever done. In every corner of the country, in every little village, people who had never been political came out in support of the cause. Gangaji had struck a chord that I’m not even sure he expected to strike. Which Indian does not love mangoes? We had found an issue around which the whole country was rallying, and which was seriously embarrassing the British. And then what does he go and do? He personally, unilaterally, calls the whole thing off. Without even consulting any of us.’

‘He didn’t need to consult any of us to start the agitation,’ I pointed out.

‘That’s what’s wrong with our entire way of running this party,’ Pandu declaimed bitterly. ‘Is this a Kaurava movement, or a one-man show?’

There was, of course, no answer to the question, and no one ventured any, least of all me. But it had planted a doubt in the minds of the Kaurava High Command that would, Pandu knew, sprout richly for him one day.

‘If you admit his judgement was right in starting the agitation,’ I said in my best elder-statesman voice, ‘admit that he may be right in calling it off too. Perhaps in time we will recognize that the principle of non-violence is more important than any single agitation.’

‘Two lives,’ Pandu said with uncharacteristic callousness. ‘Two miserable policemen. Do you know how many Indian lives the British have taken in the last two centuries?’

‘I believe I have an idea,’ I replied quietly, ‘and I also believe that is not the point. What Gangaji is showing the world through non-violence is a new weapon — one which can only be blunted if we go back to the old weapons. We cannot point to the injustice of British rule if our opposition to it takes equally unjust forms. That is why Gangaji has decided to call off the agitation. I should not have thought it would be necessary to explain this to leading members of the Kaurava Party.’

Dissent, Ganapathi, is like a Gurkha’s kukri: once it emerges from its sheath it must draw blood before it can be put away again. I knew that blood would inevitably have to be drawn, and I felt the pain of the knife already, knowing that it was my blood that coursed through the veins of both potential victims: my blind son and my pale son, condemned to fight on history’s battlefield.

35

With the agitation suspended, the British, immensely relieved, dropped all charges and released the prisoners. In a gesture interpreted variously as one of appreciation, of consolation and of contempt, depending on who was analysing its implications, the Viceroy (‘Dear Friend’) invited Gangaji to tea.

To everyone’s surprise but my own, Gangaji accepted the invitation. He entered the cavernous living-room of the viceregal palace swaddled in his habitual white, and found himself being greeted by our old friend Sir Richard, now Principal Private Secretary to His Majesty’s representative in India.

‘His Excellency will be with us shortly,’ Sir Richard said, ushering him to a chair without the trace of a welcome on his lips.

Gangaji sat comfortably, his long spindly legs resisting the temptation to cross themselves on the Viceroy’s brocade cushions. Sarah-behn, who accompanied him to most of his meetings, stood a few paces away behind a sofa. Sir Richard, regarding her with distaste, and standing himself, found it more convenient not to offer her a seat.

‘While we are waiting, Mr Datta, may I offer you some tea?’ he asked his patron’s guest.

‘Thank you,’ Gangaji replied equably, ‘but I have brought my own.’ He moved his head in the direction of Sarah-behn, who held a stainless steel tiffin-carrier in her hand. ‘Goat’s milk,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘That is what I drink at this time.’

Sir Richard opened his mouth as if to speak, then — defeated by the occasion — shut it again. The ormolu clock on the wall ticked loudly in the silence.

‘I hope I have not come too early,’ Gangaji said at last.

‘No, not at all,’ Sir Richard found himself forced to reply. ‘His Excellency has. . er. . been unavoidably detained.’

‘Unavoidably detained,’ Gangaji repeated. ‘Unavoidably detained.’ He savoured the words, seeming to taste each syllable as he uttered it. ‘Another one of your fine British phrases, suitable for so many occasions, is it not? I wish I knew some of these myself. I always listen carefully to my English friends, like His Excellency or indeed you, Sir Richard’ — Sir Richard coughed unaccountably — ‘and I always intend to use these phrases myself, but somehow they never come out of my mouth at the right time.’ He laughed, shaking his head, as Sir Richard reddened dangerously. ‘I often say to Sarah- behn, we Indians will never learn this English language properly.’

Sir Richard did not know if his leg was being pulled, but he did know that he did not care too much for the trend of the conversation. He took a deep breath, as much to control himself as to punctuate his next utterance: ‘I trust you are not greatly inconvenienced, Mr Datta. I am confident that His Excellency will be with us shortly.’

Gangaji laughed. ‘Me? No, no, oh dear, not at all inconvenienced,’ he chortled. ‘I am sitting in this comfortable chair, in this comfortable room, large enough to accommodate a small train, with an eminent representative of His Majesty’s government — you, Sir Richard — offering me tea. Why should I be inconvenienced?’ He paused, waving a casual hand at his companion. ‘Now she, Sarah-behn, she is not sitting in a comfortable chair. Perhaps if you asked her she might give you a different answer.’

It was, of course, Ganapathi, simply brilliant: it left the hapless Sir Richard no choice but to turn hastily and proffer a seat to the renegade Englishwoman. This, Sarah-behn, her expression unchanged, calmly took, smoothing down the folds of her sari and placing the tiffin-carrier with an audible clink at her feel.

‘My goat’s milk,’ Gangaji said unnecessarily. ‘She takes good care of it for me. It was all her idea, you know.’

‘Indeed.’ Sir Richard’s tone was distant. He could not bring himself to feign interest in the dietary predilections of this oddly matched pair.

‘Oh, yes.’ Gangaji warmed to his theme. ‘You see, I had this terrible dream one night.’

‘A dream,’ Sir Richard echoed dully.

‘That’s right. I dreamt a cow spoke to me.’

‘A cow?’

‘A large, sad-eyed white cow, with a long downturned mouth. “Don’t let them do this to me, Mahaguru!” she was crying. And then I saw she was standing and swaying terribly, and there were all sorts of people crouching on the floor beneath her, boys and girls and children and adults and peasants and clerks, all tugging and pulling at her udders, milking her as she cried piteously to me.’

A choking sound emerged from Sir Richard.

‘But it was not milk, Sir Richard, that was coming out. It was blood! And in my dream, I could do nothing. I woke shivering, with that cow’s cries ringing in my ears. From that moment I resolved never to drink milk again. The cow is our mother, Sir Richard.’ Gangaji suddenly and earnestly turned to him. ‘Yours and mine. It is written in our scriptures. She provides nourishment and sustenance for us all. Is it right that we should cause her pain?’

Sir Richard remained speechless.

‘Of course it is not. There and then I decided I could not cause her any more suffering. I was determined not to drink milk ever again.’

He stopped. Sir Richard slowly exhaled. ‘I see,’ he said, not knowing what he saw but relieved he would no longer have to hear.

‘But then I fell ill,’ Gangaji added abruptly. ‘The doctors came. They said I needed minerals and protein in an easily accessible form.’ He smiled. ‘Another fine British phrase. I asked them what that meant, and they said I should drink milk. But I told them I could not drink milk. I had taken a vow in my heart never to drink milk again.’

Sir Richard looked toward the entrance of the room as if for deliverance. Gangaji went on.

‘I asked the doctors what would happen if I did not drink the milk they wanted me to.

‘”Why, then,” they said, “you will die.”

‘”But we will all die one day,” I replied. “What is wrong with that?”

‘”It is just that you will die much sooner than if you did drink the milk,” they said to me. “Next week, perhaps.’”

Sir Richard looked wistfully gratified at the prospect.

‘It was then that Sarah-behn came to my rescue,’ the Mahaguru said. ‘I was agonized at the thought of dying with so much work undone, so much left to do. Yet I was determined not to break my vow. I did not know how to resolve this terrible dilemma inside my heart, my soul. Then Sarah-behn said to me, “You must drink goat’s milk.” There I saw I had my answer. Just as nourishing, just as rich in minerals and proteins, yet free of the pain of the sacred mother-cow in my dreams.’

A footfall sounded faintly in the carpeted corridor, and a liveried khidmatgar entered, bearing a tea-tray. Gangaji accepted an empty cup, waved away the teapot, and allowed Sarah-behn to rise and pour him a cupful of goat’s milk from one of the compartments of the tiffin-carrier.

A second bearer entered pushing a silver trolley, its filigreed top-rack all but obscured by lace doilies on which rested elegantly laden plates. ‘Some cucumber sandwiches, surely?’ Sir Richard asked in a weak voice. Rarely had his breeding and good manners been placed under such strain. ‘I am sure your. . er. . doctors would wish you to have something to eat.’

An impish smile slowly spread across Gangaji’s face. ‘Don’t worry about me, Sir Richard,’ he said. ‘I have brought my own food.’ His hand disappeared into the voluminous folds swathing his torso and emerged holding a small, golden yellow, perfectly ripe mango. ‘To remind us of a more famous Tea Party,’ he announced. ‘In — Boston, was it not?’