A Suitable Boy

by Vikram Seth

  Mirza Amanat Hussain Khan (Democratic Party): I rise to a point of order, Sir. Is the honourable member to be permitted to wander off the subject and take up the time of the House with irrelevancies?

  The Hon’ble the Speaker: I think he is not irrelevant. He is speaking on the general question of the relations between the tenants, the zamindars, and the government. That question is more or less before us and any remark which the honourable member now offers on that point is not irrelevant. You may like it or not, I may like it or not, but it is not out of order.

  Shri Devakinandan Rai: I thank you, Sir. There stands the naked peasant in the hot sun, and here we sit in our cool debating rooms and discuss points of order and definitions of relevancy and make laws that leave him no better than before, that deprive him of hope, that take the part of the capitalist, oppressing, exploiting class. Why must the peasant pay for the land that is his by right, by right of effort, by right of pain, by right of nature, by right, if you will, of God? The only reason why we expect the peasant to pay this huge and unseemly purchase price to the treasury is in order to finance the landlord’s exorbitant compensation. End the compensation, and there will be no need for a purchase price. Refuse to accept the notion of a purchase price, and any compensation becomes financially impossible. I have been arguing this point since the inception of the bill two years ago, and throughout the second reading last week. But at this stage of the proceedings what can I do? It is too late. What can I do but say to the treasury benches: you have set up an unholy alliance with the landlords and you are attempting to break the spirit of our people. But we will see what happens when the people realize how they have been cheated. The General Elections will throw out this cowardly and compromised government and replace it with a government worthy of the name: one that springs from the people, that works for the people and gives no support to its class enemies.

  5.16

  The Nawab Sahib had entered the House during the earlier part of this last speech. He was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery, although, had he wished to, he would have been welcome in the Governor’s Gallery. He had returned from Baitar the previous day in response to an urgent message from Brahmpur. He was shocked and embittered by what had happened and horrified that his daughter had had to face such a situation virtually on her own. His concern for her had been so much more patent than his pride in what she had done that Zainab had not been able to help smiling. For a long time he had hugged her and his two grandchildren with tears running down his cheeks. Hassan had been puzzled, but little Abbas had accepted this as a natural state of affairs and had enjoyed it all—he could tell that his grandfather was not at all unhappy to see them. Firoz had been white with anger, and it had taken all of Imtiaz’s good humour when he arrived late that afternoon, to calm the family down.

  The Nawab Sahib was almost as angry with his hornet of a sister-in-law as with L.N. Agarwal. He knew that it was she who had brought this visitation upon their heads. Then, when the worst was over, she had made light of the police action and was almost cavalier in her assumption that Zainab would have handled things with such tactical courage. As for L.N. Agarwal, the Nawab Sahib looked down on to the floor of the House, and saw him talking very civilly with the Revenue Minister, who had wandered over to his desk and was conferring with him on some point, probably floor management with respect to the impending and critical vote later this afternoon.

  The Nawab Sahib had not had the opportunity to talk to his friend Mahesh Kapoor since his return, nor to convey his heartfelt thanks to the Chief Minister. He thought that he would do so after today’s session in the Assembly was over. But another reason why he was present in the House today was that he realized—as did many others, for the press and public galleries were all crowded—that it was a historic occasion. For him, and for those like him, the impending vote was one that would—unless halted by the courts—spell a swift and precipitous decline.

  Well, he thought fatalistically, it has to happen sooner or later. He was under no illusions that his class was a particularly meritorious one. Those who constituted it included not only a small number of decent men but also a large number of brutes and an even larger number of idiots. He remembered a petition that the Zamindars’ Association had submitted to the Governor twelve years ago: a good third of the signatories had used their thumb-prints.

  Perhaps if Pakistan had not come into existence, the landowners would have been able to parlay their way into self-preservation: in a united but unstable India each power bloc might have been able to use its critical strength to maintain the status quo. The princely states, too, could have wielded their weight, and men such as the Raja of Marh might well have remained Rajas in fact as well as in name. The ifs and buts of history, thought the Nawab Sahib, form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

  Since the annexation of Brahmpur by the British in the early 1850s the Nawabs of Baitar and other courtiers of the erstwhile royal house of Brahmpur had not even had the psychological satisfaction of serving the state, a satisfaction claimed by many aristocracies widely separated in space and time. The British had been happy to let the zamindars collect the revenue from land-rent (and were content in practice to allow them whatever they obtained in excess of the agreed British share) but for the administration of the state they had trusted no one but civil servants of their own race, selected in, partially trained in, and imported from England—or, later, brown equivalents so close in education and ethos as made no appreciable difference.

  And indeed, apart from racial mistrust, there was, the Nawab Sahib was compelled to admit, the question of competence. Most zamindars—himself alas, perhaps included—could hardly administer even their own estates and were fleeced by their munshis and moneylenders. For most of the landlords the primary question of management was not indeed how to increase their income but how to spend it. Very few invested it in industry or urban property. Some, certainly, had spent it on music and books and the fine arts. Others, like the present Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, who had been a good friend of the Nawab Sahib’s father, had spent it to build up influence in politics. But for the most part the princes and landlords had squandered their money on high living of one kind or another: on hunting or wine or women or opium. A couple of images flashed irresistibly and unwelcomely across his mind. One ruler had such a passion for dogs that his entire life revolved around them: he dreamed, slept, woke, imagined, fantasized about dogs; everything he could do was done to their greater glory. Another was an opium addict who was only content when a few women were thrown into his lap; even then, he was not always roused to action; sometimes he just snored on.

  The Nawab of Baitar’s thoughts continued to oscillate between the debate on the floor of the Assembly and his own meditations. At one point there was a brief intervention by L.N. Agarwal, who made a few amusing comments—at which even Mahesh Kapoor laughed. The Nawab Sahib stared at the bald head ringed with a horseshoe of grey hair and wondered at the thoughts that must be seething under that layer of flesh and bone. How could a man like this deliberately, indeed happily, cause so much misery to him and to those he held so dear? What satisfaction could it have given him that the relatives of someone who had worsted him in a debate would be dispossessed of the home in which they had spent the greater part of their lives?

  It was now about half-past four, and there was less than half an hour before the division of votes. The final speeches were continuing and the Nawab Sahib listened with a somewhat wry expression as his sister-in-law circumscribed the institution of zamindari with a luminous purple halo.

  Begum Abida Khan: For more than an hour we have been listening to speech after speech from the government benches, filled with the most odious self-congratulation. I did not think that I would wish to speak again, but I must do so now. I would have thought that it would be more appropriate to let those people speak whose death and burial you wish to preside over—I mean the zamindars, whom you wish to deprive of justice and redress and
the means of livelihood. The same record has been going on and on for an hour—if it is not the Minister of Revenue it is some pawn of his who has been trained to sing the same song: His Master’s Voice. I may tell you that the music is not very pleasant: it is monotonous without being soothing. It is not the voice of reason or reasonableness but the voice of majority power and self-righteousness. But it is pointless to speak further on this.

  I pity this government that has lost its way and is trying to find a path out of the swamp of its own policies. They have no foresight, and they cannot, they dare not, keep their eyes on the future. It is said that we should ‘Beware of the day that is to come’, and in the same way I say to this Congress government: ‘Beware of the time that you are about to bring upon yourself and upon this country.’ It is three years since we obtained Independence but look at the poor of the land: they have neither food to eat nor clothes to wear nor shelter to protect themselves from the sky. You promised Paradise and green gardens under which rivers flow, and gulled the people into believing that the cause of their pitiable condition was zamindari. Well, zamindari will go, but when your promises of these green gardens prove to be false, let us see then what the people say about you and do to you. You are dispossessing eight lakh people, and openly inviting communism. The people will soon find out who you are.

  What are you doing that we did not do? You are not giving them the land, you are renting it out just as we did. But what do you care about them? We lived for generations together, we were like their fathers and grandfathers, they loved us and we loved them, we knew their temperament and they knew ours. They were happy with whatever we gave them, and we were happy with whatever they gave us. You have come between us and destroyed what was hallowed by the bonds of ancient emotion. And the crimes and oppressions you blame on us, what proof do these poor people have that you will be any better than you claim we are? They will have to go to the venal clerk and the gluttonous Sub-Divisional Officer, and they will be sucked dry. We were never like that. You have separated the nail from the flesh, and you are happy with the result. . . .

  As for compensation, I have said enough already. But is this decency, is this a just provision—that you should go to someone’s shop and tell him: ‘Give me this and this at such and such a price’ and if he doesn’t agree to sell it, you take it anyway? And then when he pleads with you at least to give him what you promised him, to turn around and then say, ‘Here is one rupee now, and the rest you will get in instalments over twenty-five years’?

  You may call us all kinds of names and invent all manner of miseries for us—but the fact is that it is we zamindars who made this province what it is—who made it strong, who gave it its special flavour. In every field of life we have made our contribution, a contribution that will long outlive us, and that you cannot wipe away. The universities, the colleges, the traditions of classical music, the schools, the very culture of this place were established by us. When foreigners and those from other states in our country come to this province what do they see—what do they admire? The Barsaat Mahal, the Shahi Darvaza, the Imambaras, the gardens and the mansions that have come down to you from us. These things that are fragrant to the world you say are filled with the scent of exploitation, of rotting corpses. Are you not ashamed when you speak in this vein? When you curse and rob those who created this splendour and this beauty? When you do not give them enough compensation even to whitewash the buildings that are the heritage of this city and this state? This is the worst form of meanness, this is the grasping attitude of the village shopkeeper, the bania who smiles and smiles and grasps without any mercy—

  The Hon’ble the Minister for Home Affairs (Shri L.N. Agarwal): I hope that the honourable member is not casting imputations upon my community. This is getting to be common sport in this House.

  Begum Abida Khan: You understand very well what I am saying, you who are a master at twisting words and manipulating the law. But I will not waste my time arguing with you. Today you have made common cause with the Minister of Revenue in the shameful exploitation of a scapegoat class, but tomorrow will show you what such friendships of convenience are worth—and when you look around for friends everyone will have turned their face away from you. Then you will remember this day and what I have said, and you and your government will come to wish that you had behaved with greater justice and humanity.

  There followed an extremely long-winded speech by a socialist member; and then the Chief Minister S.S. Sharma talked for about five minutes, thanking various people for their role in shaping this legislation—particularly Mahesh Kapoor, the Minister of Revenue, and Abdus Salaam, his Parliamentary Secretary. He advised the landowners to live in amity with their erstwhile tenants when the divestiture of their property took place. They should live together like brothers, he stated mildly and nasally. It was an opportunity for the landlords to show their goodness of heart. They should think of the teachings of Gandhiji and devote their lives to the service of their fellow-men. Finally Mahesh Kapoor, the chief architect of the bill, got the chance to round off the debate in the House. But time was too short for him to say more than a few words:

  The Hon’ble the Minister of Revenue (Shri Mahesh Kapoor): Mr Speaker, I had hoped that my friend from the socialist benches, who talked so movingly of equality and a classless society and took the Government to task for producing an impotent and unjust bill, would be a just man himself and would confer some equality on me. It is the end of the last day. If he had taken a little less time for his speech I would have had a little more. As it is I now have barely two minutes to speak. He claimed that my bill was a measure created with the intention merely of preventing revolution—a revolution that he believes to be desirable. If that is so, I would be interested to see which way he and his party vote in a couple of minutes. After the honourable Chief Minister’s words of thanks and advice—advice which I sincerely hope will be taken by the landlords—I have nothing to add except a few further words of thanks—to my colleagues in this section of the House and, yes, in that section too, who have made the passage of this bill possible, and to the officers of the Revenue Department and the Printing Department and the Law Department, in particular the drafting cell and the Office of the Legal Remembrancer. I thank them all for their months and years of assistance and advice, and I hope that I speak for the people of Purva Pradesh when I say that my thanks are not merely personal.

  The Hon’ble the Speaker: The question before the House is that the Purva Pradesh Zamindari Abolition Bill of original date 1948 as passed by the Legislative Assembly, amended by the Legislative Council and further amended by the Legislative Assembly, be passed.

  The motion was put and the House passed the bill by a large majority, consisting mainly of the Congress Party, whose numbers dominated the House. The Socialist Party had to vote, however reluctantly, in favour of the bill on the grounds that half a loaf was better than none, and despite the fact that it somewhat assuaged the hunger that would have allowed them to flourish. Had they voted against it they would never have lived it down. The Democratic Party voted against it unanimously, also as expected. The smaller parties and Independents voted predominantly for the bill.

  Begum Abida Khan: With the permission of the Speaker I would like a minute’s time to say something.

  The Hon’ble the Speaker: I will give you a minute’s time.

  Begum Abida Khan: I would like to say on behalf of myself and the Democratic Party that the advice given by the pious and honourable Chief Minister to the zamindars—that they should maintain good relations with their tenants—is very valuable advice, and I thank him for it. But we would have maintained such excellent relations anyway regardless of his excellent advice, and regardless of the passage of this bill—this bill which will force so many people into poverty and unemployment, which will utterly destroy the economy and culture of this province, and which will at the same time grant not the least benefit to those who—

  The Hon’ble the Minister of
Revenue (Shri Mahesh Kapoor): Mr Speaker, what sort of occasion is this for speech-making?

  The Hon’ble the Speaker: I gave her permission merely to make a short statement. I would request the honourable member—

  Begum Abida Khan: As a result of its unjust passage by a brute majority we are left at this time with no other constitutional means of expressing our displeasure and sense of injustice other than to walk out of this House, which is a constitutional recourse, and I therefore call upon the members of my party to stage a walkout to protest the passage of this bill.

  The members of the Democratic Party walked out of the Assembly. There were a few hisses and cries of ‘Shame!’ but for the most part the Assembly was silent. It was the end of the day, so the gesture was symbolic rather than effective. After a few moments, the Speaker adjourned the House until eleven o’clock the next morning. Mahesh Kapoor gathered his papers together, looked up at the huge, frosted dome, sighed, then allowed his gaze to wander around the slowly emptying chamber. He looked across at the gallery and his eye caught that of the Nawab Sahib. They nodded at each other in a gesture of greeting that was almost entirely friendly, though the discomfort of the situation—not quite an irony—was lost on neither of them. Neither of them wished to talk to the other just yet, and each of them understood this. So Mahesh Kapoor continued to put his papers in order, and the Nawab Sahib, stroking his beard in thought, walked out of the gallery to look for the Chief Minister.