The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  We started to dig

  A tunnel so big

  It made a geological impact.

  ‘We all set to work with a will.

  That Bhim! He’d eat his fill,

  Then with enormous power

  Dig out in an hour

  Enough mud to form a small hill.

  ‘In a short while our work was complete –

  A remarkable engineering feat:

  A spacious tunnel

  Ventilated by funnel

  And insulated from the inevitable heat.

  ‘And all this was done surreptitiously.

  (Purochan mustn’t find out adventitiously.)

  The opening (quite large)

  Was concealed by camouflage:

  Some shrubbery – placed most judiciously.

  ‘At last we were ready to flee

  The death-trap of Duryodhani.

  Invitations were sent

  For a festive event –

  Dinner, offered by Kunti Devi.

  ‘Purochan, unsuspecting, arrived,

  With those of his henchmen who’d strived

  So long and so hard

  And so cleverly, toward

  The elimination of the Pandava Five.

  ‘They ate, drank and made merry

  Uplifted by Kunti’s spiked sherry;

  By eleven o’clock

  Quite downed by the hock

  They dozed on the floor, quite unwary.

  ‘At a signal from me, your five,

  Like worker-bees fleeing the hive,

  Slipped into the hole,

  Each like a large mole,

  And scurried to safety – alive.

  ‘I went on to Stage Two of the Plan.

  (The Rabbit’s a reliable man.)

  I touched a flame to the door

  To the curtains, the floor –

  And as the fire blazed, I ran.

  ‘So Purochan had the end he had cherished:

  The fulfilment of the plot he had nourished.

  His house burned as he’d planned

  (With the lac, you understand)

  But it was Purochan himself who perished.

  ‘In the meantime, under cover of night

  The Pandavas made good their flight.

  Guided by the stars

  And the lights of passing cars

  They sought refuge at another site.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Vidur. I can take the story up from there.

  ‘The papers all spoke of disaster:

  The death of the heirs of the Master.

  Foul play was feared,

  For Purochan had disappeared,

  And his walls had been of lac, not plaster.

  ‘ “Heinous crime!” screamed the press.

  “National disgrace! What a mess!’’

  Said the P M on the morrow,

  “I’m overcome with sorrow”;

  And Duryodhani – well, you can guess.

  ‘I sent word to the boys: “Lie low.

  Wait for this whole thing to blow.

  Adopt a disguise,

  Avoid prying eyes,

  But as for coming back – no, no.”

  ‘So now they have started to wander.

  Elegant Kunti has to cook and to launder.

  From place to dim place

  Across the great face

  Of India, they walk, talk and ponder.

  ‘It is, of course, an education.

  They will learn about their great nation.

  Though of no fixed address

  And ignored by the press,

  They’ll be Indian (unlike others of their station).

  ‘I’ve told them it will take some time

  Before they can restart their climb

  To public acclaim

  And national fame;

  For now they must remain in the grime.

  ‘My nephews will travel in obscurity.

  Do good work in strict anonymity.

  But even if they chafe,

  At least they are safe –

  And not increasing too much their popularity.

  ‘Several birds I kill with one stone:

  Duryodhani doesn’t break any bone;

  Drona’s wings are clipped;

  (For he’s just not equipped

  Without my nephews, to succeed alone;)

  ‘Dhritarashtra, my brother, is pleased

  That the threat in his party has ceased;

  My stratagem stifles

  His potential rivals;

  And with everyone, my own stock has increased.’

  85

  ‘So they will wander about, perfectly safe, and I shall be even safer? Brilliant, Vidur, simply brilliant.’ The Prime Minister’s relief shone brightly between his upturned lips. ‘You see, Kanika, how Vidur has attained all that you were advocating, without any of the terrible means you proposed? I’m so glad, Vidur, that no violence was necessary.’

  ‘There is, of course, Prime Minister, the slight matter of Purochan Lal and his associates,’ said Kanika Menon, who rarely hesitated to voice an inconvenient truth. (Or, indeed, a convenient falsehood.)

  ‘Ah . . . yes.’ Dhritarashtra was briefly dampened. ‘I suppose that was unavoidable, was it, Vidur?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Prime Minister.’ Vidur’s tone was neutral, professorial. The police had to find bodies, and they had not to find Purochan. This was the only way to attain both objectives. And to protect your sister-in-law and nephews, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Dhritarashtra suddenly seemed less enthusiastic. ‘But enough of all this. Divert me, Kanika. What have you been learning during this visit to our newly independent land? You must have a great deal to tell me.’

  ‘Where can I begin, Prime Minister? Each day I am here I discover what a priceless collection of collaborators you have surrounded yourself with. Have you heard the latest about your Defence Minister?’

  ‘No,’ Dhritarashtra confessed. ‘Unless it is the one about him asking for an appointment with the head of the Afghanistan Navy.’

  ‘Ah, the old land-locked leg-pull. But really, P M, it’s not as funny as all that - after all, even you’ve received the U S Secretary of Culture.’ Kanika advertised his prejudices like a supermarket its sales, in large red letters. ‘No, the story I had in mind originated during Sardar Khushkismat Singh’s last visit to London. You know how much he likes a good joke, even - or especially - if he can’t understand it. At a dinner in his honour, Churchill, whose standards are definitely slackening in his anecdotage, announced to the men over the port and cigars: “Gentlemen, I have a terrible confession to make.” There was, as you can well imagine, a stunned silence. “For seven years in my dissolute youth, I slept with a woman who was not my wife.” All eyes were upon him at these words, all ears strained with incredulity, none more so than Sardar Khushkismat Singh’s. Churchill timed it to perfection. “She was, of course,” he added carefully, “my mother.” The guests laughed in relief as much as appreciation, and our good Sardar, albeit a little mystified by the British sense of humour, made a mental note of what had apparently been a highly successful joke. Last week, he gave a little dinner for me with some of the resident diplomats and military attachés, and after dinner, as the saunf was brought out, he decided to try out the witticism. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I must confess that in my dissolved youth, I slept with a woman who was not my wife.” The consternation of his guests rivalled that of those at Churchill’s party. The good Sardar practically tripped over himself in his haste to reassure them. “Not to worry, not to worry,” he waved his hand. “It was Winston Churchill’s mother.”’

  Dhritarashtra was laughing helplessly. ‘Oh, Kanika, I don’t know how I manage without you in Delhi,’ he said. ‘But then I don’t know how I’d manage without you abroad. Eh, Vidur? Who’d stand up for us in the United Nations and defend us passionately over Manimir?’ His face darkened. “You know, I never thought, Kanika, that the Karnistanis woul
d so completely turn the diplomatic tables on us as they have over Manimir. Had I known, I’d never have gone to the United Nations in the first place.’

  No, Prime Minister, but they might have,’ Kanika Menon said. ‘And outsiders who know nothing of our struggle for freedom, our history, our people, would have continued to sit in judgement on us. Karnistan was created for the Muslims, most Manimiris are Muslims, ergo Manimir should be in Karnistan. That is the extent of their political geography. I, of course, stand up and tell them that India does not consider that religion should determine statehood, and that the bulk of Manimir’s Muslims were behind us when our troops marched in to protect them against the Karnistani invaders. But then they ask why, if that is the case, the most prominent of these Manimiri supporters of Indian intervention, your own friend Sheikh Azharud- din, is in jail.’

  ‘I had to put him there, Kanika,’ Dhritarashtra muttered unhappily. ‘He was getting out of control. Vidur will tell you.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Kanika said. ‘I know all the answers. In some cases I made them up myself. Remember I hold the record for the longest speech ever made at the United Nations, and it was on Manimir. There were a lot of answers in that speech, and a lot of counter-questions too. Would any of them in India’s place have tolerated a Sheikh Azharuddin on their most sensitive border, flirting with the idea of his state’s independence? That’s what I asked them.’

  ‘I know,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘Kanika, you have done an excellent job abroad, defending and projecting India’s position before and since Independence. Now I think it is time you came home. I will find you a safe seat at the next election. I want you in politics, and I want you in my Cabinet. I have even decided which ministry to give you.’

  ‘The Foreign Ministry?’ Kanika asked hopefully. ‘Will you let me sink my teeth into the bloodless hounds of South Block?’

  ‘No,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘You know, Kanika, that is the one ministry I have always wanted to hold myself. Foreign affairs is the only subject where it doesn’t matter that I can’t see: everything else requires an empiricism of which I’m incapable. You understand?’

  ‘Of course.’ Kanika’s hawk-like features concealed his disappointment. ‘But then, whose place do you intend me to take?’

  Dhritarashtra smiled wickedly. ‘Sardar Khushkismat Singh’s,’ he said.

  86

  Travelling southwards, guided by the stars and by their own instincts, the Pandavas sought security in constant movement. At each place, they performed some good deed, much like the itinerant cowboys of the more idealistic Western films, who rode into terrorized towns, guns blazing, demolished the good, the bad and the ugly, and rode off into the sunset, leaving the populace less miserable if more mystified.

  The Five found themselves performing a different if not entirely dissimilar order of service in their peregrinations. They would enter a village in which the local priest, defying the new Constitution, was refusing to allow the Untouchables, Gangaji’s Children of God, to enter the temple; or another where a landlord had evicted a pathetic family of tenants because they had been less than fully cooperative with his exactions; or a third in which a corrupt village official, a policeman or a patwari, was exploiting the poor and the illiterate for his personal profit. In each case, Yudhishtir would intervene in the name of righteousness; should his appeal fail, Arjun would attempt the method of reason; and if even this did not work, Bhim would settle the issue decisively with his highly personal techniques of persuasion, with Nakul and Sahadev standing by to pick up the pieces afterwards (and Arjun, marvellous Arjun, returning to the scene to reconcile his brothers’ victims to the new dispensation). In each case the villagers were awed and grateful and anxious to offer a permanent home to the five strangers, but the Pandavas always picked up their few belongings and moved on before the villagers’ demands became irresistible. On buses, bullock-carts, passing lorries but mainly on foot, our five heroes and their mother disappeared unobtrusively into the horizon, leaving behind, in each locality, a lesson and a legend.

  Yes, Ganapathi, in villages across the alluvial trans-Gangetic heartland of India, in the dusty squares where the poor congregate to forget their misfortunes, in the twilit housefronts where old women tell the stories that their daughters and nieces will cherish and repeat and pass on like precious oral heirlooms, the legends grew of the five wanderers who came and did their good deeds and went. The stories always developed in the telling, being modified and embellished by each teller, so that eventually the details differed so greatly from one village’s version to the next’s that they might have been tales of totally different people. In one the five princes of Hastinapur became mendicants and holy men; in others their education and confidence proclaimed them quite clearly as exiles from a distant city; in some it was said that their impossible combination of attributes could only have been divinely inspired, and so they had come from Heaven to ensure that the dictates of dharma were followed in dusty Adharmapur. The ever less elegant figure of Kunti in their midst became variously that of a mother, a sister, a cook and a goddess - Shakti - in person, with her five arms in human form bringing justice to an evil world. And the legends grew, Ganapathi, even though it was not long after the Pandavas’ passage that the reforms they had wrought quietly lapsed, and their erstwhile victims, convinced the wanderers would not return, returned to their old ways with a vengeance.

  No, let me not be so categorical. Of every five good deeds they performed, four did not long outlast their departure, but in about one case out of five the Pandavas left behind a true convert, an unalterable new reality or a genuine change of heart. So it was in the country as a whole, Ganapathi. As the giant that was independent India lumbered into wakefulness and slowly purposeful motion, Parliament passed laws that a few implemented and many ignored, reforms were enacted that changed the lives of the minority and were subverted by the majority, idealistic policies were framed that uplifted some and were perverted to line the pockets of others, and everywhere it was five steps forward, four steps back. But the one step that was not retraced still made a difference. That was the only way that change would come to a changeless land.

  In Delhi blind Dhritarashtra ruled with Priya Duryodhani by his side, and he pledged the nation not so much to the gas and hot water of his Fabian preceptors but to the smoke and steam of the modern industrial revolution their ancestors had denied his country. So factories sprang up amidst the mud and thatch of our people’s homes; gigantic chimneys raised themselves alongside the charcoal braziers of our outdoor kitchens; immense dams arose above the wells to which our women walked to draw their clay urns full of water, India was well on the way to becoming the seventh largest industrial power in the world, whatever that may mean, while 80 per cent of her people continued to lack electricity and clean drinking water.

  It was the same for the people themselves. Institutions of higher learning, colleges of technology, schools of management mushroomed in the dark humid forests of our ignorance. The British had neglected village education in their efforts to produce a limited literate class of petty clerks to turn the lower wheels of their bureaucracy, so we too neglected the villages in our efforts to widen that literate class for their new places at the top. Within a short while we would have the world’s second largest pool of scientifically trained manpower, side by side with its largest lake of educated unemployed. Our medical schools produced the most gifted doctors in the hospitals of London, while whole districts ached without aspirin. Our institutes of technology were generously subsidized by our tax revenues to churn out brilliant graduates for the research laboratories of American corporations, while our emaciated women carried pans of stones on their head to the building-sites of new institutes. When, belatedly, our universities became ‘rurally conscious’ and offered specializations in plant pathology and modern agricultural methods, their graduates were to bid a rapid farewell to the wastelands of Avadh and Annamalai and earn immense salaries for making Arab dese
rts bloom.

  But, as usual, Ganapathi - you are not strict enough with me - I digress; my mind wanders across this vast expanse of our nation like the five heroes whose tale I am trying to relate. Yet we cannot tell it all; we must soar above the mountains and the valleys, the hillocks and the depressions of India’s geography and take the larger view of our cavalcade of characters as their wheels scratch the surface of our immense land. And occasionally we must swoop down to watch them at closer quarters, as they perform the acts and utter the words that give our geography its history.

  87

  Thus we spot our five in a village torn by the conflict between two landlords, Pinaka and Saranga. Pinaka, wealthy and powerful, always seen with an eagle on his shoulder, has immense holdings, farmed by battalions of tenants who are paid well for their services but have no title to the land. Saranga, an immense bear of a man, controls as big an area, but has signed over to his share-croppers the land they till, though he still exacts a tribute from them for this act of emancipation. Both landlords employ gangs of toughs armed to the teeth to protect those on their side of the divide and make menacing noises at their rivals. The Pandavas are the first people in the village who have no stake in the conflict; they arrive, they take up lodgings, they stay neutral. Both Pinaka and Saranga are suspicious, then solicitous; each assumes, the first because he is generous, the second because he is just, that the Pandavas will join his side. When they do not - for they see merit in aspects of both arguments, and are fully convinced by neither - they invite the opprobrium of both.

  ‘How could you refuse to condemn Saranga when his hired hoodlums beat up poor Hangari Das, molested his wife and abducted his children merely because he wanted to keep his own harvests for himself?’ Pinaka asked bitterly.

  ‘What good would it do to condemn him?’ Arjun replied. ‘Would it have restored his teeth, his wife’s pride or his children?’

  ‘How can you refuse to join me when Pinaka fails to give his tenants their land, earns so much profit and heartlessly replaces a tenant when he finds another who can produce more revenue by his work?’ Saranga was equally bitter.