Notes On the Great Indian Circus

by Khushwant Singh

  Sunday, 27 April 1985

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  The Other Ali

  I have carried anecdotes illustrating Maulana Mohammed Ali’s ready wit. His younger brother Shaukat Ali was an equally witty person who, because of his enormous size, was known as ‘big brother’. There was a third and eldest brother, Zulfiqar Ali. Mohammed and Zulfiqar were minor poets. The muse of poetry had not affected Shaukat. A friend tried to needle him. ‘Your eldest brother Zulfiqar wrote verses under the pseudonym ‘Gauhar’ (diamond); the next Mohammed wrote verses under the pseudonym ‘Jauhar’ (jewel); what takhallus (poet-pseudonym) do you use?

  Maulana Shaukat Ali replied promptly, ‘My pen-name is Shauhar (husband).’

  Jalal Zakaria who sent me this anecdote has sent another one of Maulana Shaukat Ali’s close association with Mahatma Gandhi during the days of the Khilafat agitation and their subsequent parting of ways.

  Gandhiji often addressed meetings from Khilafat platforms. Audiences which were largely composed of Muslims wanted to know why a Hindu Bania had taken up the cause of the Caliphate which was entirely a Muslim affair. Being a tall and stout man, Maulana Shaukat Ali would have a dig at Gandhiji: ‘He is a small man; I have him in my pocket.’

  Later Shaukat Ali quit the Congress and joined the Muslim League. ‘Where is that Mahatma Gandhi who had promised to get us Muslims our rights?’, Maulana Shaukat Ali would ask at every public meeting. The Mahatma replied to the question at one of his prayer meetings: ‘The Maulana wants to know where I am. He used to say he had me in his pocket. Let him look inside and he will find me.’

  Sunday, 12 October 1985

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  Allama Iqbal on Pakistan

  Whether or not Iqbal propagated the notion of a separate, independent Muslim state is now a matter of academic speculation. Pakistan is a fait accompli and we respect its sovereignty. But millions of admirers of Iqbal would still like to know what his stand was on the subject of separatism. I maintain that it is futile to try and pin labels like nationalist, internationalist, communist or communalist on him. He was full of contradictions but like other great poets, passionately eloquent on whatever he took up.

  S.M.H. Burney, currently Governor of Haryana, in his recently published book, Iqbal: Poet-Patriot of India, has devoted an entire chapter to prove that Iqbal did not support the idea of a separate Muslim state but only an autonomous state consisting of Punjab, NWSP, Sind and Baluchistan within the Indian Union. This was in 1930. Five years later when Chaudhry Rehmat Ali spelt out his scheme and coined the word ‘Pakistan’, both Iqbal and Jinnah dismissed it as ‘hair-brained’. Shortly before the publication of Rehmat Ali’s thesis, Iqbal had written to Raghib Ehsan, a Muslim League youth leader of Calcutta, ‘I propose to create a Muslim province within the Indian Federation.’ Till then he had only thought of the Muslim majority areas of the north and not conceived of what later became East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). It must also be said to Iqbal’s credit that unlike Jinnah, he never ran down non-Muslims, and although he used the word ‘nation’ to describe different communities, it was not in the sense the word came to be interpreted: to refer to people who needed to have independent states of their own. The Muslim League’s resolution demanding Pakistan was passed two years after the Allama’s death. This led scholars like K.K. Aziz (The Making of Pakistan) to pronounce that ‘it is one of the myths of Pakistani nationalism to saddle Iqbal with the parentage of Pakistan.’

  None of this really convinces me. I can quote innumerable lines from Iqbal making Muslims out as a chosen people above all others, justifying idol-breaking and spreading the message of Islam through the sword. However, this, as the cliché goes, is neither here nor there. Even when the fiery revolutionary, who would burn every blade of corn of which its tiller is deprived, sings qaseedas (eulogies) of his patron, the Nawab of Bhopal, he remains the supreme songster—of both India and Pakistan.

  I recommend Burney’s little book to all lovers of Iqbal. It is lavishly illustrated with translations by Syeda Hameed (nee Saiyidain) with the originals in Roman Urdu.

  Sunday, 21 February 1987

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  Gunter Grass and Calcutta

  Last month I got a call from the editor of a German magazine asking me to do an article on ‘Gunter Grass in India’. This was the day after I had met Gunter and his wife Ute very briefly at a dinner party and the day before the couple were to leave India. Both his hosts, the West German Ambassador Schoedel and Ingo Rott, director of the Max Muller Bhavan, expressed their helplessness to arrange an interview for me. Although Grass had spoken to dozens of press men all over the country, they had to pretend that they had come for a friendly chat. He did not mind being quoted. But no sooner did a journalist produce a tape recorder or notebook than he was politely but firmly told to eff off.

  I had no choice except to follow Grass’s footsteps, meet people he had met and reconstruct his third odyssey in India. He spent six months in Calcutta, visited Madras, Hyderabad, Pune, Bombay and Delhi. The deadline set for me did not give me time to go to all these places nor meet more than half-a-dozen people who had been with him. Amongst the people I missed was the Bangladeshi poet, Daud Haider, who had been his escort in Calcutta.

  ‘This recent visit to India has done something to Gunter Grass,’ the editor who commissioned me had said, ‘Try to find out what it is.’

  One myth I can explode is that Gunter Grass loves Calcutta more than any other city. The myth is entirely Calcutta-generated and spread by its literati in a desperate bid to establish that Calcutta has that something Je ne sais quoi that no other city of India has: art, literature, music, etc. In his novel, The Flounder, he described the city as a ‘crumbling, swarming city, a city that eats its own excrement . . . there are no slums, or bustees, in Calcutta. The whole city is one bustee, or slum.’ And a few pages later, ‘. . . a pile of shit that God dropped and named Calcutta. How it swarms, stinks, lives and gets bigger and bigger . . . let us not waste another word on Calcutta. Delete Calcutta from all guide books.’ It is not the kind of description a writer gives of a place he loves.

  Why then did he choose to spend most of his Indian days in Calcutta? Because to writers of Grass’s genre, Calcutta provides better material to write about than any other place in the world. ‘Reality is richer than make-believe,’ he said in an interview over Hyderabad Doordarshan. In Calcutta he found reality stripped of all make-believe. Being an artist he wanted to experience it and live as close to it as he could. For the first few months he lived in a rented villa in a suburb, Baruipur (24 Parganas), commuted by local train and walked about Calcutta’s bazaars and bylanes. The following few months he lived in Salt Lake City with the artist Shuvaprasanna’s wife’s parents. Give it to the Grasses; they could afford to stay in the most luxurious of hotels or in comfort with their European friends. They chose instead to live in Calcutta, as bhadralok-Calcuttans live. It was not because they enjoyed discomfort but because he felt that he owed it to his craft to see life in the raw so that what he wrote about had the ring of authenticity. ‘It is not right that Grass has special fascination for slums or that other people’s squalid way of living gave him a sense of herrenvolk superiority,’ Dr Nagel of Calcutta’s Max Muller Bhavan told me, ‘He went wherever he was invited. After a day in the bustees he went to the homes of rich industrialists. He felt more at ease with artists and writers. Shuvaprasanna saw more of him than anyone else.’ All experiences were grist to Gunter Grass’s mill.

  It was in a televised interview with Dr Sequeira of Osmania University that he revealed himself. The programme was aptly entitled ‘Gazing at Hopelessness’. In answer to a question he said, ‘It is a crime to hope when there are no reasons for hope.’ Where in the world can you come face to face with hopelessness as much as you can in Calcutta?

  Gunter Grass is almost certainly now working on his novel and poems on Calcutta. He is not likely to portray it as Lapierres’s ‘City of Joy’. Nor as Rajiv’s ‘dying city’. He regards Calcut
ta as ‘still vibrant, still fascinating.’ I am pretty certain the outcome will be a masterly portrayal of a vast dung heap swarming with human maggots.

  Sunday, 4 April 1987

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  Martin of La Martiniere

  One of the most fascinating characters of 18th century India was the Lyon-born French commoner-turned-Lucknawi nawab, Claude Martin (1735-1800). When only 17, he was shipped out of France to Pondicherry. When Pondi fell to the British (1761) he joined the forces of John Company and rose to the rank of a major general in the British army without ever giving up his French nationality.

  Most of his life he lived in Lucknow where he amassed a vast fortune and built many palatial residences—all a hotch-potch of decadent Franco-Moorish architecture—and lived in lavish style entertaining Governor Generals, Mughal royalty and the Nawabs of Avadh. He kept a harem of European and Indian concubines and sired many children with them. What distinguished Martin from other European soldiers of fortune was that he made his money by legitimate means through real estate, indigo, commissions, moneylending and sale of French perfumes and artefacts to dissolute zamindars. And he was perhaps the only one of his tribe of European adventurers who left his entire fortune to charity. The chain of La Martiniere schools in Lucknow, Calcutta and Lyon owe their existence to him. To this day, oil lamps are lit on his maqbara (tomb) in Lucknow and money distributed amongst the poor. He described India as ‘my second motherland’.

  Martin was born a Catholic. His years in India changed him into a secularist. Executors of his will had perverted his legacy by restricting entry into La Martiniere schools to the poorer sections of ‘Europeans and Eurasians only’, and it was only after 1935 that Indian children were admitted to these institutions.

  Sunday, 11 April 1987

  The Confidence Trickster

  We Indians get so flattered by interest taken in us by foreigners that we turn a blind eye to their credentials lest we see skeletons in their cupboards. Some months ago I exposed some of them in my review of Annie Besant’s biography by Rosemary Dinnage. Our Annie had quite a few extramarital affairs and a string of lovers including Bernard Shaw before she emerged as a messiah maker in Madras and was elected President of the Indian National Congress. I now discover that her guru and initiator into theosophy, Madam Blavatsky, was no less colourful a person. So were their colleagues Colonel Olcott, C.W. Leadbeater and the so-called founder of the Congress, Alan Octavian Hume.

  I devote this exposé to Blavatsky.

  She was born Helena Hahn in 1831. Her father was an aristocrat serving in the Tsar’s army. Her cousin, Count Sergei Witte, rose to be prime minister and a friend of Rasputin. At 16 Helena was married off to a man of 40. She left him without consummating her marriage. She was somewhat of a female mustang and tried all kinds of occupations: bareback riding in a circus, giving piano lessons and acting as a medium to call spirits of the dead. She was a restless traveller and toured America, Canada, most of Europe, Egypt, India and Tibet. Despite the hectic life she led, she kept putting on weight: by the time she was in her thirties she weighed over 232 pounds (over 116 kilos). It was during one of her circus performances that she fell from her horse and displaced her uterus. Knowing she could not conceive she tried to smother desire for sex by declaring it unclean. ‘I am lacking something and the place (womb) is filled up with some crooked cucumber,’ she wrote to a friend. And despite her aristocratic lineage, she learnt to use the coarsest language punctuated with four letter words. G.K. Chesterton described her as ‘a coarse, witty, vigorous, scandalous old scally-wag.’ Colin Wilson is kinder when he describes her language as ‘colourful and imaginative profanity.’ She became a chain-smoker and often took marijuana.

  Without being divorced, Helena took on a second husband named Michael Butanelly. He was seven years younger than her and had undertaken never to try to get into her bed. He broke his promise and was booted out of the house. ‘Sexual love is a beastly appetite that should be starved with submission,’ wrote Blavatsky. However, it did not prevent her from having affairs of the heart. In America she met a grey-bearded lawyer with an honorary rank in the army, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who was a married man. We do not know whether the relationship became adulterous, but the Colonel left his wife and three children to set up house with Blavatsky.

  Colonel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (later referred to by her initials H.P.B. by her followers), shared much in common: interest in magic, invoking spirits of the dead and the study of esoteric cults. Between them they formed a Miracle Club. Members saw furniture flying in space, heard tables being tapped and received messages from ‘masters’ floating about in Egypt and Tibet. These messages would mysteriously drop down from the ceiling. In September 1857, the two set up the Theosophical Society.

  H.P.B. spelt out her views in her famous book, Isis Unveiled published in 1877. It dealt with ‘root races’ starting at the North Pole; and by the time they reached Asia, ‘inventing sexual intercourse.’ The book was a runaway success.

  The Colonel and H.P.B. decided that India was the country for them. And perhaps they could join hands with the Arya Samaj. Swami Dayanand rejected their overtures. The rejection did not put off other Indian admirers. H.P.B. drew crowds at her seances; materialized objects out of the air, received messages from a spirit named Koot Hoomi Lal Singh. Amongst those who corresponded with Koot Hoomi was Allan Octavian Hume. Indians fell in love with H.P.B. So did Annie Besant. Their meeting earlier in London had been dramatic. Annie had been bowled over by H.P.B.’s The Secret Doctrine sent to her to review. She went to call on her: ‘I went over to her, bent down and kissed her…I knelt down before her and clasped her hands in mine and asked, ‘Will you accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my teacher in the face of the world?’

  H.P.B.’s reputation as a spiritualist and a guru came to a sad end. Her housekeeper in Bombay, a certain Emma Coulomb, revealed to an investigator of the Society for Psychical Research that H.P.B. herself wrote out the Koot Hoomi messages and had them dropped from crevices in the ceilings and walls. At the same time, an American writer wrote to the press claiming that several passages in Koot Hoomi’s messages were taken from his book.

  H.P.B. who was in London when these revelations were made in Bombay, rushed back to India swearing vengeance on Emma Coulomb and Christian missionaries whom she suspected were behind the conspiracy to denigrate her. She was advised not to take the matter to court. The missionaries scored over her by getting Emma Coulomb to sue a retired general who had called her ‘a liar and a thief’, for libel. That would have forced H.P.B. into the witness box. She discreetly fled India. She died on 8 May, 1891, at the age of 60. Her biographer, John Symonds, described her as ‘one of the most remarkable women who ever lived. She was larger than life-size.’

  What would we make of a confidence trickster like her today?

  Sunday, 4 July 1987

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  The Rise of Bhindranwale

  My current preoccupation is writing the last 15 years’ history of the Punjab and the Sikhs. The one thing I have been unable to understand is the phenomenon of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. When he first burst on the Punjab scene, I had dismissed him as one of the hundreds of rustic preachers who are found all over the countryside where sants are a dime a dozen. When he entrenched himself in the Golden Temple complex and launched on his anti-Hindu tirade, I described him as a ‘demented hate-monger’.

  When he was killed in Operation Bluestar, I conceded that he had met his end like a warrior but also heaved a sigh of relief in the hope that we had heard the last of him. That is not so. His full-length portrait in the Golden Temple draws large crowds. To a sizeable section of Sikhs he has become amar Shaheed (eternal martyr). His photographs and cassettes of his speeches sell by the thousands. He continues to be venerated as Sant Baba Jarnail Singhji Khalsa, Bhindranwale. His ghost haunts the Punjab countryside disturbing the sleep of the Punjabi Hindu and the conscience of the educated S
ikh.

  How is it that a man who had so little to say that made sense and said so much that was hateful, came to gain so much popularity? I dismiss the explanation often given that he was a creation of the Congress(I) think-tank consisting of, at the time, Mrs Gandhi, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi. Neither Mrs Gandhi nor Sanjay ever set their eyes on him. Zail Singh talked to him once and saw him at a distance at another time. No doubt the Congress(I) did try to exploit his popularity; but so did the Akalis. Both parties were thoroughly mauled by him. Sant Longowal once described him as saada danda (our stick) to beat the Congress government. The stick belaboured both the Akalis and the government.

  I have at long last come across a plausible explanation of the Bhindranwale phenomenon. In a compilation of essays, Punjab Today, edited by Gopal Singh of the Himachal University, there is a paper on Sikh revivalism by Pritam Singh of the Punjab University, Chandigarh. It gives the background of the conditions which made Bhindranwale possible. Believe it or not, most of it was due to the prosperity that came with the Green Revolution. With prosperity came degeneration, spread of alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, gambling, blue films, fornication. The worst sufferers were women and children, wives and offspring of peasants who would not digest their prosperity. On this scene came Bhindranwale preaching against these evils and carried on a vigorous campaign of Amritprachar.

  Everywhere he went, he baptised Sikhs by the thousands and made them swear in front of congregations that they would never again touch these things. They did not break their oath. Money previously squandered, was saved. Time previously wasted in drunkenness or being stoned was now spent on more careful tillage—bringing more money. Bhindranwale saved a large section of Sikh peasantry from rack and ruin.