The Writer and the World: Essays Page 6

  Her revolution did not equip India for a twentieth-century independence. When that came, it existed within an assumption of a continuing dependence: an accommodating world, of magic, where Indian words had the power Indians attributed to them. The bluff had to be called; the disaster had to come.

  ONE BY ONE INDIA has had to shed ideas about herself and the world. Pain and bewilderment can no longer be resolved by the magical intervention of a Vivekananda, a Gandhi, a Nehru, a Vinoba Bhave. Fifteen years ago Bhave said, more or less, that his aim was the withering away of the state. He called it “the decentralized technique of God,” and even the pious dismissed him as a dreamer. The state has now withered away. Not through holiness; it is just that the politicians, homespun villagers in New Delhi, no longer have an idea between them. Magic can no longer simplify the world and make it safe. India responds now only to events; and since there can be no play of the mind each disagreeable event—the Chinese attack, the Pakistan war, devaluation, famine and the humiliating deals for food with the United States—comes as a punishing lesson in the ways of the real world. It is as if successive invasions, by the reaction they provoked, that special Indian psychology of dependence, preserved an old world which should have been allowed to decay centuries ago; and that now, with independence, the old world has at last begun to disintegrate.

  The crisis of India is not political: this is only the view from Delhi. Dictatorship or rule by the army will change nothing. Nor is the crisis only economic. These are only aspects of the larger crisis, which is that of a decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further swift decay. The present frenzy cannot be interpreted simply as a decline from stability. That was the stability of a country ruled by magic, by slogans, gestures and potent names. It was the stability of a deficient civilization that thought it had made its peace with the world and had to do no more. The present mood of rejection has dangers. But it alone holds the possibility of life. The rejection is not religious, even when its aims are avowedly the protection of a religion. It does not attempt reform through self-perfection. The mode is new, and of the new world.

  It may be that I exaggerate; that I forget the holy man putting his thumb in his mouth and pulling out a prick, to applause; that I forget the pious who, in a time of famine, pour hundreds of gallons of milk over a monumental idol while an Air Force helicopter drops flowers. But magic endures only when it appears to work. And it has been proved that man, even in India, can no longer walk on water.

  1967

  The Election in Ajmer

  I

  WHOM TO VOTE FOR? the English-language poster in New Delhi asked. And when, in mid-February, a fortnight before the first polling day, I went south to Ajmer in Rajasthan, it seemed that the half a million voters of this Indian parliamentary constituency, part urban, part rural, part desert, had a problem. The Congress had won freedom for India, and for more than twenty years, through four election victories, it had ruled. Now the Congress had split. The split had led to this mid-term election. But both sides continued to use the name. Kangrace ko wote do, the posters of both sides said: Vote Congress. And the same saffron, white and green flag flew from rival campaign jeeps: the jeep the favoured campaign vehicle, authoritative and urgent in the dusty streets of Ajmer, among the two-wheeled tonga carriages, the battered buses, bicycles by the hundred, handcarts and bullockcarts.

  Both sides would have liked to use the old election-winning Congress symbol of the pair of yoked bullocks. But the courts had decided that the yoked bullocks shouldn’t be used at all; and both sides had devised complicated and naturalistic symbols of their own. A cow licking a sucking calf: that was the Congress that was with Mrs. Gandhi, the Prime Minister. A full-breasted woman at a spinning-wheel (the fullness of the breasts always noticeable, even in stencilled reproductions): that was the old or Organization Congress, that had gone into opposition. Both symbols, in India, were of equal weight. The spinning-wheel was Gandhian, the cow was sacred. Both symbols proclaimed a correct, Congress ancestry.

  It was in some ways like a family quarrel, then. And, as it happened, for this Ajmer seat the candidates of the two Congresses were related. There were five candidates in all. Three were independents and of no great consequence. “They are only contesting by way of their hobby,” a man from the Election Department said. “They will put down their security of five hundred rupees. They will get a few thousand votes and forfeit their deposit and sit quietly, that is all. It is only their hobby.”

  The main candidates were Mr. Mukut Bharvaga and Mr. Bishweshwar Bhargava. Mr. Mukut was standing for the old Congress and all its opposition associates. He was the uncle of Mr. Bishweshwar, who was defending his seat for the Indira Congress. And here—a local reflection of the national quarrel about legitimacy—was the first issue in Ajmer: who was morally in the wrong? The uncle, for fighting the nephew? Or the nephew, for fighting the uncle?

  Mr. Mukut, the uncle, was sixty-eight years old, a lawyer, and blind. He was famous in Rajasthan for his prodigious memory and his skill in matters of land revenue. His fees were said to be as high as one thousand rupees a day, about £50; his earnings were put at two lakhs a year, about £10,000. But Mr. Mukut was also known for his free services to peasants, who still came to Ajmer to look for “the lawyer without eyes.” Mr. Mukut was an old Congressman and freedom fighter and he had gone to jail in 1942. His political career since independence had been unspectacular, but steady and without blemish: he was perhaps best known for his campaign to have clarified butter easily distinguishable from its groundnut-based substitute. He had won the Ajmer seat for Congress in 1952, 1957 and 1962. In 1967, at the age of sixty-four, he had retired, handing over the Ajmer seat to his thirty-six-year-old nephew and protégé, Mr. Bishweshwar. Now, with the Congress split, Mr. Mukut wanted his seat back; and, to get it, he had allied himself with all his old political enemies. Was Mr. Mukut right? Was Mr. Bishweshwar wrong, for resisting?

  The answer, overwhelmingly, was that Mr. Bishweshwar was wrong. He should have withdrawn; he should not have fought his uncle, to whom he owed so much. It was what Mr. Mukut’s son, who was Mr. Mukut’s election agent, said; and it was what Mr. Bishweshwar’s agent said. Mr. Mukut himself always spoke of the contest with a sense of injury. “The State Congress chose the meanest weapon,” he said, “setting my own nephew to fight me. They know I’m a man of strong family feeling and they were hoping I would withdraw.” The Maharana of Udaipur, who was supporting Mr. Mukut, told an election meeting, “The Indira Congress is dividing the country, and not only ideologically. They are breaking up families.” And the Rajput village headman, loyal to his Maharana, agreed. “A nephew who cannot love the members of his own family, how can he love the public?”

  But wasn’t the uncle also wrong to try to pull down his nephew? “I didn’t want my father to fight this election,” Mr. Mukut’s son said. “I said, ‘Bapuji you are old now, you are disabled.’ But then I was overwhelmed by his answer. It brought tears to my eyes. He said, ‘This is a time for sacrifice.’”

  Sacrifice: it wasn’t a claim Mr. Bishweshwar could make, and for much of the campaign he looked harassed and uncertain and sometimes hunted. Unlike his uncle, who always spoke freely, even elaborately, Mr. Bishweshwar had little to say; and his manner discouraged conversation. He stared blankly through his glasses, like a man alerted not to say anything that might be used against him. Once he said, “I cannot understand how my uncle can go against all those principles I imbibed from him.” It was the only comment on his uncle I heard him make, and it was spoken very quickly, like a prepared line.

  Mr. Bishweshwar wasn’t a popular man. He suffered from all comparisons with his uncle. Mr. Mukut was small and lean and brown, an ascetic politician of the old school, with a jail-record. Mr. Bishweshwar was as tall and plump as a film star. He was a post-independence politician, an organization man. People in his own party said of him: “Politics is his profession.” And: “If politics were taken away from him he would hardly
be having two square meals a day.” And: “His uncle massacred hundreds of party workers for him.” But that wasn’t held against the uncle; that was held against Mr. Bishweshwar.

  “I’m not working for Bishweshwar,” his campaigners said. “I’m working for Indira.” And this was what they said even on polling day, waiting in the brightly coloured party tents for voters. “The people aren’t voting for Bishweshwar. They’re voting for Indira.”

  Which, as everybody said, was what the election was about: Indira, Mrs. Gandhi, that formidable lady in New Delhi, who had done a de Gaulle on the Congress and taken over, who had abolished the old consensus politics of the Congress. She had declared war on privilege; her appeal was to the poor, the untouchables, the minorities. She had nationalized the banks; she had “de-recognized” the princes; and, to deprive the princes of their privy purses, she intended to change the constitution.

  Indiscipline, people like old Mr. Mukut said, grieving for all those old members of the party who had fallen. Indira Hatao, the opposition posters said: Remove Indira. And on the other side: Garibi Hatao, Remove Poverty. The rich, the poor: the wonder was that, in India, this basic division had taken such a long time to be politically formulated. The socialists and communists hadn’t done that: they offered theologies. And this was the first election in Ajmer in which the parties had issued manifestoes.

  RICH AND POOR. But there was a regional complication. Rajasthan is a land of princes. Ajmer itself, though in the centre of Rajasthan, hadn’t been a princely state and had no maharaja. But the Ajmer constituency was vast: two hundred miles, mainly of desert, rock and jagged brown hills, between Ajmer and Char Bazaar: more than six hours in a jeep. Two of its districts belonged to the former state of Udaipur; and the Maharana of Udaipur, who had supported Mr. Bishweshwar at the last election, had declared for Mr. Mukut in this. The princes of Rajasthan, “de-recognized” by the government, their privy purses threatened, were in their different ways up in arms against the government. And they could take their case to the people and get a hearing, because they were princes.

  For other people in the opposition, supporters of Mr. Mukut, it wasn’t so easy. Mr. Kaul, an old Congressman of Mr. Mukut’s age, was now a member of the Indian Upper House. Mr. Kaul ate only one meal a day and he said he had acquired the habit during his time in jail in 1932. But there was no jail-taint to him now; the post-independence years of power, honour and politicking had worn him smooth; and Mr. Kaul thought that personal canvassing should be banned.

  “We issue our manifestoes. Why should we go to the people personally? By canvassing the way is found for bribing them. Our people are poor; they don’t understand what we are fighting for. Their ignorance is being exploited. The Indira Congress is spending crores of rupees, spoiling them, the peasants, the villagers, the uneducated and the labour classes. Giving them slogans. All slogans. It’s our national character.”

  I asked him about the national character.

  “Our people don’t think in terms of country first.”

  “What do they think of?”

  “Nothing.” He laughed. “Haven’t you noticed? They’re indifferent.”

  AND ON THAT FIRST day in Ajmer the election seemed far away. The tongas carried advertisements for the Apollo Circus; walls everywhere were painted with family-planning slogans in Hindi. It was a Tuesday, the day of the weekly service at the Hanuman temple; and monkeys from the temple hopped from tree to tree on the nearby Circuit House hill. At the top of the hill there was a view of the clear lake beside which Ajmer is built, the water a surprise after the dust of the streets. On the black rocks at the lake-edge scores of washermen were beating the cotton clothes of the poor to death, swinging the twisted wet hanks with a steady circular motion and grunting competitively at every blow.

  The sun rose higher. The brown mist lifted over the brown hills. The washermen spread out their lengths of cotton, white and coloured, and went away. Hawks hovered over the lake, at whose margin clouds of midges swirled and thinned like cigarette smoke in a wind, and then re-formed. From the flat-roofed white-and-ochre town below there came the sound of a loudspeaker: cinemas announcing their attractions. In the late afternoon there was music: a wedding procession.

  The Ajmer calendar was full. On Saturday there was the eighty-ninth prize-giving of Mayo College, one of India’s important English-style public schools, founded for the education of the sons of princes. Three days later came the Hindu festival of Shivratri and the opening of the Ajmer Flower Show. So, quickly, after the disorder of the main street—the mixed traffic, the cows, the rubble, the dust, the exposed food-stalls—Ajmer revealed itself as excessively ordered. There was the railway town with its great locomotive workshops and its severely graded housing. There was the medieval, narrow-laned town around the famous Muslim shrine, an object of pilgrimage. There were the newer residential areas; there was the bazaar, an extension of the disorder of the main street; and there were the ordered acres of Mayo College, where only the servants’ quarters spoke of India.

  Beyond the brown hills were the smaller towns and the thousand villages that made up the constituency, each village as fragmented and ordered as Ajmer itself: every man in his caste, his community, his clan: divisions not strictly racial and not strictly social: more as if, in an English village, where everyone more or less looked alike, spoke the same language and had the same religion, every man yet remembered that he was a Dane or Saxon or Jute and stuck to his kind. Cow-and-calf, spinning-wheel: poor and rich, left and right: how could these divisions apply?

  In the evening I went to the Honeydew, one of the three recognizable cafés that Ajmer, with a population of 300,000, just about supports. It was air-conditioned and dim and the waiters were in white. A young man I fell in with told me that the Honeydew was for the young and “modern” of Ajmer. He spoke sardonically but he too wanted it known that he was modern. “My father was a semi-literate. He joined the Railways in 1920 and retired thirty-seven years later. Then he died. At the end of his life he was making three hundred rupees a month. For my father it was his luck, his karma. What he had sown in a past life he was reaping in this. I am not like that. I am only making four hundred. But let people look at my suit and tie and see me spending in the Honeydew and think I’m rich.”

  A cup of Honeydew coffee cost about three pennies. You could ask the waiter for a cigarette; he would place an open packet on your table and you paid only for those you took. Luxuries were small in India and little gestures were fundamental acts of defiance. To wear a tie, when money was immemorially scarce, to have a coffee in the Honeydew: that was more than extravagance. That was to deny one’s karma, to challenge the basis of one’s father’s faith.

  And it was of defiance that Mr. Desai, once Mrs. Gandhi’s Deputy Prime Minister, now in the opposition and supporting Mr. Mukut, was speaking in Naya Bazaar that evening. In the bazaar lanes the narrow shops, raised on platforms, glittered with electric light, tempting custom. In the wide open area of Naya Bazaar itself, beyond the heads of the crowd, beyond the flags and bunting and posters strung across the street, and at the end of two little colonnades of fluorescent tubes, there was another platform, very clean and very bright, and there—with Mr. Mukut and Mr. Kaul and others no doubt sitting at his feet—Mr. Desai, not looking his seventy-four years, was talking about “the Indira psychosis,” nationalization and the danger to the constitution.

  At first it seemed, to use the Indian word, “sophisticated.” But an election address, in that street, before that crowd, without an analysis of the distress that was so visible, without a promise for the future! An election address, about economic and legal matters, cast in terms of personal injury! And when Mr. Desai was talking of nationalization he was talking of more than an economic issue. He was talking of an act of defiance, a threat to order and dharma, an impious shaking of the world. In the place of that defiance he was offering himself: his Gandhi-cap, his white homespun, his simple brown waistcoat, his well-known ascetici
sm, his Gandhian habit of spinning: all his personal merit built up through many years of service. Religion, dharma, the Hindu “right way” given a political expression: the crowd was in tune with what was being said. They listened respectfully; there was even some slight applause.

  Garibi Hatao, Remove Poverty: it was possible to understand why no one before Mrs. Gandhi had raised this simple political slogan. And it was also possible to understand why it was said in Ajmer that the issues of the election—Remove Poverty, Remove Indira—were too abstract and remote. There would have been more interest, people said, in elections for the State Assembly, when the politicians could play on the more immediate issues of caste and community and offer tangible rewards: a tarred road, a water-tank, electricity.

  But that evening, less than twenty miles away, on the Jaipur road, the forty-six-year-old Maharaja of Kishangarh, politically active on the opposition side, a member of the State Assembly, was murdered.