The Writer and the World: Essays Read online

  KISHANGARH was part of the neighbouring constituency. It is one of the lesser names of princely Rajasthan—the state, as it existed in 1947, was just over 650 square miles—but the Maharaja was linked by blood to the great houses. He was well known in Ajmer. He played badminton at the Ajmer Club and tennis on the Mayo College courts.

  That evening he and the Maharani were going to a wedding. They were about to leave when the telephone rang. Kishangarh took the call himself. Then he told the Maharani he had to go out for a little and would be back in ten minutes. When he left the palace, driving himself in a little Indian-made Fiat, he had a revolver and many rounds of ammunition; he also had about 1,500 rupees. A few miles from the palace, on a straight stretch of the Jaipur-Ajmer road, the car stopped or was made to stop; and Kishangarh was shot in the right ear. His revolver was taken; his money wasn’t touched.

  This was the story that broke the next morning. And it was strange, at eleven, in the bright desert light, neem trees and cactus beside the road, thorn trees scattered about the dug-out brown land, to see the little “champagne-green” Fiat, not princely or tragic, not a dent anywhere, not a window cracked, only a finger-wipe of blood on the driving door, at rest on the sandy verge with its front bumper against a tall clump of the ker shrub, by whose red flowers the strength of the monsoon can be foretold. The princely licence-plate, white on red, said: Kishangarh No. 11. A line of stones marked the course of the car as it had come off the road. On the other side of the road were the jeeps of the district police and a crowd of dhoti-clad, turbanned peasants.

  Some local politicians were also there, among them Mr. Makrana, small and fat and grim, with dusty trousers, a worn green pullover and a very white muslin turban the size and shape of a scooter tyre. “I am a Marwari,” he said, “and we Marwaris wear these turbans, white or khaki, at sad deaths, funerals.” Mr. Makrana was a member of the State Assembly and the whip of the party to which the Maharaja had belonged. “The Maharaja was having a very nice influence for us. Some big person is behind this killing.” Once Mr. Makrana had owned about 2,500 acres of land. “I lost my land when the jagir system went out.” Under this system his tenants used to give him a third or a half of what they made. “With that percentage we used to manage our establishment. Now I am in the marble business. I couldn’t survive if I had to depend on politics. I live from the marble. Politics is only my hobby.” And, leaving me, he began again to walk up and down the road before the still peasants, his plump face set and petulant, his white turban on his head, very visibly mourning a member of his party.

  The Ajmer District Magistrate, in a suit, and two senior police officers, in khaki, came in a black saloon which flew a blue police pennant. The peasants watched; Mr. Makrana himself stopped to watch. A smiling, green-bereted sub-inspector from the Jaipur Dog Squad arrived and reported. And then Mr. Kaul, the member of the Indian Upper House, turned up. He scrambled briskly out of his car—tight trousers stylishly creased, long brown coat—and hurried across the road to the officials, like a man used to being well received everywhere; and then gravely, as though looking at the corpse itself, he examined the Fiat.

  Mr. Kaul wasn’t a man for white turbans and country mourning. His manner was of New Delhi; and very soon he was to issue a statement, in English: “… dastardly murder … general atmosphere of lawlessness and violence … leaders of the Ruling Party from the Prime Minister downwards … using such derogatory epithets against the so-called capitalist, industrialist and feudal order … inciting the feelings and sentiments of the masses, particularly of the Youth of the lower rungs of Society …”

  In Kishangarh the shops were shut, but the streets were full of people, stunted, thin-limbed peasants from the interior who, as soon as the news had broken that morning, had begun to make their way on foot or cycle to the palace. It was a ramshackle Indian country town, the new concrete buildings all balconies and balustrades at the top, slum at road-level, with rough additional lean-tos roofed with canvas or thatch. The asphalt road was like an irregular black path through dust and dung, unpaved sidewalks, heaps of rubble and old gravel. Then, unexpectedly, there was a lake, and in the centre of the lake an old stone building, possibly a summer pavilion; and at the end of the lakeside road the high walls of Kishangarh fort and the old town.

  Inside, the procession had started to the cremation ground and the waiting pyre, prepared with sandalwood and other scents. The road and the city walls were packed, ablaze with the colours of peasant Rajasthan, red and orange and saffron. The open jeep with the body came out of the palace gate. The relations of the dead Maharaja were in white. White here the terrible colour of mourning.

  In the middle of the afternoon the Fiat was still where it had been, against the ker bush. Some of the marker stones had been scattered. No one watched now. Some distance away two or three peasants sat in the shade of a thorn tree. The brown hills were pale in the glare. The private tragedy was over. Mr. Mukut and Mr. Kaul had already addressed a condolence meeting.

  THE KISHANGARH affair had upset Mr. Bishweshwar’s schedule, and when I went to his house only his wife was there. The house was in an open area at the end of a dirt lane where Mr. Mukut also had his law office. The ambiguous Congress flag hung limp in the little garden where flowers and shrubs grew out of bald earth.

  I had been told that Mr. Bishweshwar lived simply. The trellis-enclosed veranda where I sat first of all had a dark, tarnished, homely air, with rough-and-ready furniture and a strip of dirty matting. The small terrace upstairs was even less formal, with a plain concrete floor, and local five-rupee basket-chairs brought out as required. A servant squatted on the floor in a small room near the steps and scoured dishes. A Hindu country interior: there was nothing, except perhaps the telephone, to suggest that this was one of the rising political households of Rajasthan and that Mrs. Bishweshwar’s father had been in his time a famous politician, so fierce in faction fights against Mr. Kaul that Mr. Nehru had had to intervene.

  Mrs. Bishweshwar was a pretty woman of thirty-three, pale and slightly pinched, with her head covered modestly with a dark-red sari. At first she spoke only in Hindi. She said she couldn’t speak English well; but later she relented, and it turned out that she spoke English impeccably. She had been educated in a pastoral institution that her father had founded. There she had studied Indian classical music and had learned to spin. Later she took her B.A. in music and English and Hindi literature. She still spun. “I believe in Gandhiji’s teachings.” But she had let the literature go. “I don’t like modern literature. I can’t understand it. I don’t like Hindi modern literature either. I like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley.”

  She didn’t like political life. “My husband is not a politician. He is a worker.” It was the Gandhian word: a doer of good works. “I too am an ardent believer in improving the lot of the downtrodden. But I want to work silently. I don’t want publicity for myself. But I would like a lot more for my husband. People should recognize his ability. If he is a sincere and hardworking man, people should know.”

  Mr. Bishweshwar arrived, tall and plump, in trousers and a brown sports shirt. He looked harassed and winded and had clearly been rattled by the Kishangarh affair. He had also missed a meeting at a village called Saradhna; and it was for Saradhna that we immediately started, accompanied—perhaps for luck on this unlucky day, perhaps for reasons of piety—by a small, energetic sadhu clad from top to toe in saffron. The sadhu seemed about to chatter with cold; it was the effect of his saffron head-dress, which was cunningly tied from one piece of cotton and looked like a cross between a mitre and a jester’s cap, with flaps over the ears.

  The Rajasthan village huddles together, a solid built-up mass where space is suddenly scarce. Saradhna was like this. We stopped near the two tea-shacks, their fires glowing in the dark. There was no one to receive us and we walked around to the other side of the village. Then, at a great pace, Mr. Bishweshwar began to walk through the village, kicking up dust, the rubber-sandalled sadhu
running at his heels, ear-flaps sticking out. We raced past stripped trees, over piles of rubble, past broken courtyards, over runnels of filth. The narrow lane twisted and turned and opened abruptly into miniature squares. We passed a group of smokers sitting peaceably in the thick warm dust around a brass plate with their smoking things; and then we were out of the village and near the tea-shacks again.

  Some men came to Mr. Bishweshwar then and whispered. Unanimous, unanimous: the English word was quite clear in all the Hindi. Not far away a man squatted in the dust, cooking some mess in a tiny black pot over an enormous straw blaze.

  Mr. Bishweshwar said, “They held their own meeting. The whole village has decided to support me.”

  “Unanimous,” a black-capped villager said, shaking his head from side to side.

  It was hard to push the matter any further; and our business was therefore, quite unexpectedly, over.

  As we were driving back to Ajmer it occurred to me that Mr. Bishweshwar’s trousers and shirt were unusual for a campaigning Congress politician. I said, “So you don’t wear homespun?”

  He thought I was criticizing. He plucked at the sleeve of his brown sports shirt and said, “This is homespun. Sometimes I wear trousers for the convenience. But I often wear the dhoti. I like the dhoti.”

  So he was only out of uniform. He wasn’t, as I had thought, the new-style politician, matching Mrs. Gandhi’s new-style campaign. He was a Congressman, aspiring after the old style; he had, as he had said, imbibed his principles from his uncle. When the Congress had split, leaving Mrs. Gandhi at the head of a minority government, the leaders of the local State Congress had hesitated about which side to join; and Mr. Bishweshwar, as he admitted, had hesitated with them. When they had declared for Mrs. Gandhi, he had gone along with them. The new-style politics was Mrs. Gandhi’s, and Mrs. Gandhi’s alone. In Rajasthan the Congress organization, the whole structure of Congress control, remained what it was. It was Mrs. Gandhi who had appeared to turn this party, ruling since independence, into the party of protest.

  But for Mr. Bishweshwar it remained a gamble. In 1967 he had got 145,000 votes; his main opponent, from the party known as the Jan Sangh (The National Party) had got 108,000. But in 1967 Mr. Bishweshwar had had the support of Mr. Mukut and the Maharana of Udaipur. Now Udaipur and the Jan Sangh were supporting Mr. Mukut. Udaipur could take away Rajput votes from Mr. Bishweshwar; the Kishangarh affair could have the same effect.

  Mr. Bishweshwar was going that evening on a two-day country tour. In his campaign headquarters—the ground floor of a villa: a stripped central room with an empty fireplace, high blue walls with little oblong windows just below the ceiling, worn rugs on the cracked concrete floor, small side rooms enclosed by latticework and wire netting—among his workers, some paid (forty rupees a month, £2, for two hours a day), some minor politicians in their own right, whose rustic manner belied the revolutionary promises of the posters sent out from New Delhi, among the barefoot boys sitting on the floor and pasting Vote Bishweshwar posters on cardboard, he looked very harassed indeed.

  BUT MR. MUKUT had his problems too. Officially he was the candidate of the opposition or Organization Congress. But the Organization Congress had no organization in Ajmer. Mr. Mukut was depending on the organization of the Jan Sangh; and Mr. Mukut and the Jan Sangh had until recently been enemies. The central executives of the opposition parties had formed an alliance; they had agreed on a division of seats; and Ajmer had gone to the Organization Congress and Mr. Mukut.

  The Jan Sangh in Ajmer had been planning to put up their own man. Now they had to support Mr. Mukut; and Mr. Sharda, the president of the local Jan Sangh, who had contested the seat in 1967, didn’t like it. He said, “This is a Jan Sangh seat and some Jan Sangh man should have contested. I would have been a better candidate than the man they chose. Have you seen him? He’s an old man of sixty-eight, blind, can’t see. All the time our people come to me asking why Jan Sangh is not contesting, why I am helping this blind old man.”

  And it was an unusual alliance. The Jan Sangh, founded in 1951, had grown in strength, Mr. Sharda said, because the Congress was corrupt; but for most of this time Mr. Mukut was the ruler of the Congress in Ajmer. It wasn’t only for its opposition to Congress corruption that the Jan Sangh was known, though. The Congress was non-sectarian; Mr. Mukut had a good record as a defender of Muslim rights. The Jan Sangh had come into prominence in North India as the militant Hindu party of the right, rallying Hindus against Muslims, and, within the Hindus, the Aryan, Hindi-speaking north against the Dravidian south. It spoke of the pampering of minorities; its slogan was “Indianization.” Latterly, scenting parliamentary power, the Jan Sangh had softened its communal, Aryan line; it had decided that the enemy was Communism; but its communal reputation remained its strength.

  “We don’t want to take ideas from Russia and Kosygin,” Mr. Sharda said. “We have a heritage, a culture. We have the Vedas, the first book of the human race. With the Vedas’ light other people have developed their cultures. So when we have got such an old heritage we believe that our race is great, is noble. My grandfather, Harbilas Sharda, has written a book called Hindu Superiority. In the 1930s. He has given all the facts and figures to show how the Hindu race is superior to others.”

  Mr. Sharda was in his fifties, small, compactly built, in a striped brown suit. He wore tinted glasses; for all his aggrieved talk of the “blind old man” his own eyes were not too good. Eye trouble, in fact, had made him give up the practice of law and go into business as a commission agent dealing in cement and cloth. He lived in a new concrete bungalow at the bottom of the Circuit House hill, opposite a rock wall plastered with drying cow-dung cakes. He had a glass case of knick-knacks in his drawing-room; bits of vine grew out of whisky bottles, one brown, one green. On the white wall there was a portrait, like a tinted photograph, of Harbilas Sharda, the author of Hindu Superiority: a gentle old brahmin with a drooping moustache, in British days an elected member of the Central Legislative Assembly, given the title of Dewan Bahadur (one step below the knighthood), and famous in India as the author of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (still known as the Sharda Act), which in 1930 had banned child marriage.

  “My family were the first to revolt against the social evils of the country,” Mr. Sharda said. But his party was now committed to the protection of the sacred cow, as it was committed to the creation of an Indian nuclear armoury. There was no inconsistency. Like parties of the extreme right elsewhere, the Jan Sangh dealt in anger, simplified scholarship and, above all, sentimentality. It spoke of danger and distress—“Our civilization is in danger,” Mr. Sharda said—and from present impotence it conjured up a future of power, as pure as the mythical Hindu past, before the British conquest, before the Muslim invasions.

  “We want nuclear bomb for the safety of the country. But this is a matter of our all-India policy. I don’t talk too much about it to our villagers.” The cow was different. “We feel that cow is a very important animal in our country, being an agricultural country, and as such should not be slaughtered. There is a candidate in Delhi, Mr. Ram Gopal Shal-wala, is fighting only on that. Government should give protection and give good bulls to have a better type of animal. Good arrangements of fodder should also be made, because generally there is famine in this area and thousands of animals die of famine.”

  He didn’t think Muslims would object. “Muslims who live in villages and are agriculturalists like to live as Hindus do. It is only the educated fanatics who want to create this gulf of Hindus and Muslims for their own selfish motives.” But later, when we were talking about the way the forty thousand Muslim votes would go, Mr. Sharda said in his direct, unrancorous way, “They will be divided. But generally most of the Muslim votes do not go to Jan Sangh.”

  As I was leaving, a barefoot servant in a torn dhoti brought in the up-country edition of The Motherland, the new English-language Jan Sangh daily published in Delhi. The Kishangarh story, and the charge of political murder,
was still big on the front page.

  THE MUSLIM votes wouldn’t go to the Jan Sangh. But Mr. Mukut thought they would go to him personally, for his past services. This was on a day of exaltation when, after an evening of well-received speeches, he seemed to think that by allying himself with his former enemies he had left almost no votes for the other side.

  We were driving in one of the campaign jeeps from Ajmer to the military town of Nasirabad, through country that had been stripped almost to desert by eight successive years of drought. Between the driver and myself Mr. Mukut sat or half-reclined, small, frail, easily tossed about, in a dhoti and a black waistcoat, with his fine head thrown back, his sightless eyes closed, his delicate hands occasionally clutching at air. Sometimes, between sentences, his wide, expressive mouth opened and closed wordlessly, and he was then like a man gasping for breath. His gentle manner and fragility imposed gentleness on all who came near him; and I occasionally felt, as I leaned close to catch his exalted words, that I was rushing a garrulous invalid to hospital, and not racing with one of Rajasthan’s master-politicians to a hard day’s campaigning.

  A leaflet had appeared in Ajmer calling on Jan Sangh supporters to boycott Mr. Mukut. Mr. Mukut said this was another trick of Mr. Bishweshwar’s party; he had, he said, been astonished by the loyalty of his Jan Sangh workers. Mr. Mukut spoke, not quite as one who had seen the error of his Congress ways, but as someone who was at last able to speak of the errors of the Congress. The Jan Sangh said that the Congress was corrupt. It was true, Mr. Mukut said. “The power corrupted us. Our politicians became Gandhian only in name.” But he himself had been helpless; he had never been a minister. And now he saw no moral or political complication in his alliance with the Jan Sangh. His position was simple: it was as a Gandhian that he was fighting the Indira Congress, which was illegitimate, Communistic and Westernizing.