The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  La Martiniere was founded in 1845 by Major General Claude Martin, an enigmatic Frenchman in the service of both the East India Company and the Nawabs of Lucknow, the last Muslim dynasty to rule India. In life Martin lived like a Moghul; in death he adopted the Moghul practice of building a tomb to commemorate his achievements. But in his will he broke with tradition by leaving the somewhat bizarre instruction that a school for children of all religions should be established in his vast mausoleum.

  So it was that within this strange Indo-baroque necropolis complex, India’s first English public school opened in 1845. Here, everything that might be expected in a school on the banks of the Thames was exactly reproduced on the banks of the Gomti, right down to the statutory inedible food and the oddball cast of eccentric schoolmasters. Of these, according to Saeed Naqvi, none was more memorable than Mr Harrison.

  ‘Harrison had a huge moustache which he used to wax,’ remembers Saeed, ‘and he also had a talking parrot which used to say things like, “Rise and shine, rise and shine” – you know, the usual public school nonsense. Chaufin, a friend of mine in school who hated Waxy for a variety of very valid reasons, used to get up in the morning at five o’clock and tried teaching the parrot to say, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

  ‘He did this with such an absolute sense of dedication and purpose that in a year’s time the parrot picked up the line, and every time Waxy walked past he’d squawk, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

  ‘Now, Waxy thought this was a joke, but then one day he was taking Doutre, the headmaster, on a tour of all the wonderful things he was doing to the dormitories, and as he walked past the parrot recited the famous line. So the story had a very macabre ending, because Waxy in his temper twisted the neck of the parrot; and that was the end of Waxy’s parrot.’

  On the surface, little appears to have changed at La Martiniere since Saeed left thirty years ago. Now, as then, boys of all religions still attend chapel every day, listening to a choir made up of Muslims and Hindus dressed in white surplices sing the ‘Te Deum’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. The masters still wear black academic gowns, the curriculum and uniform remain firmly those of the English public school of the 1930s, and khaki drill, cricket, the works of John Buchan and furtive schoolboy homosexuality are apparently all still very much de rigueur. Urdu or Hindi literature is never taught; instead pupils still learn by heart great swathes of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Byron.

  One morning, after the boarders had attended chapel and the whole school had massed at assembly to sing the school hymn, ‘Bright Renown’, I talked to some of the boys who were doing their prep in the spectacular Moghul-Gothic school library. At the rear of the room, the form mistress, Mrs Faridi (who earlier in the morning had doubled up as organist on the old manually-pumped organ in the chapel), was looking around her, scowling through her hornrims and shouting out: ‘Settle down now, boys! Settle down!’

  Obediently, I sat at a table next to three seventeen-year-olds: Samir, Pradeep and Tony, a Muslim, a Hindu and an Anglo-Indian Christian respectively. I asked them whether they knew about La Martiniere being the model for St Xavier’s, the boarding school in Kim.

  ‘We all know,’ said Samir. ‘But I’ve never read the book myself.’

  ‘I saw the film on Star TV,’ said Pradeep, referring to Murdoch’s satellite venture in India. ‘It was good. I mean, I was very proud when I saw it had been filmed at La Martiniere.’

  ‘What other British books have you come across?’ I asked.

  ‘All the books we are taught are British,’ said Tony.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Samir. ‘We still have Shakespeare, Great Expectations, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë – all those novels.’

  ‘Can you recite any British poetry?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Pradeep. ‘ “The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusted trees, the moon was a ribbon of moonlight tossed among cloudy seas …” We know all that stuff.’

  ‘And what about the great Urdu poets of Lucknow and Delhi: Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Dagh and so on. Are you taught those?’

  ‘No,’ said Pradeep. ‘We haven’t been taught about the culture of Lucknow at all. Or about the culture of India. We only study British poets and novelists.’

  ‘Does that seem odd?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Samir uncertainly. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

  ‘What about 1857 – the Indian Mutiny?’ I asked. ‘How is that taught?’

  There was an anxious pause.

  ‘Well, you know fifty La Martiniere boys fought in the defence of the British residency?’ said Samir. ‘So as far as the school is concerned, we are with the British. We feel very proud of the boys when we go to the residency and see La Martiniere’s name on the wall.’

  ‘But in other parts of India,’ added Pradeep, ‘we support the Indians, of course. Don’t we?’ The three boys looked at each other and giggled nervously.

  ‘But if you’d been there,’ I persisted, ‘which side would you have been on: with your school or with your countrymen?’

  ‘Um …’ said Samir.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pradeep.

  ‘It’s a difficult question,’ said Tony.

  Despite the extraordinary survival of such Anglophile sympathies, the recent murder at La Martiniere has shattered the notion that the subcontinent’s public schools can forever remain an archipelago of Englishness floating untroubled in an increasingly choppy Indian sea. Although they remain wholly English in outlook and style, schools like La Martiniere are beginning to realise quite how fragile is the bubble in which they exist.

  Lucknow is the capital of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (or UP), which with its 120 million inhabitants forms the very heart of the country, but is also a symbol of much that is most worrying about modern India. The terrifying speed of the corruption and decay of the state’s politics over the last decade can perhaps be best measured by charting the number of criminals among members of the State Assembly. In 1985, there were thirty-five MLAs with criminal cases registered against them. By 1989 the number had grown to fifty. In 1991, only two years later, that total more than doubled to 103. In the 1993 elections, a grand total of 150 Uttar Pradesh MLAs had criminal records.

  The symbol of this new style of north Indian politician is Mulayam Singh Yadav, a semi-literate village wrestler who quickly rose to be, for two successive terms, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, and has since become India’s Defence Minister. Prior to this elevation to high politics Mulayam had had over two dozen criminal cases registered against him, including charges of wrongful confinement, rioting, provoking breaches of the peace and criminal intimidation.

  Mulayam’s time as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh saw the state’s politics sink to new lows. At one stage a group of his MLAs, supported by the Lucknow University Students’ Union – around two hundred people, all armed with home-made guns and grenades – tried to murder Mayawati, the leader of a rival party, while she and her associates slept in the State Guest House. Following a shoot-out between the two groups of politicians and the police – all of which was caught on film by a television camera-crew – Mulayam’s government fell from power.

  According to Mohan Sohai, the Lucknow correspondent of the Calcutta Statesman, who has been monitoring the decay of UP for more than a decade, ‘There is intense rivalry between the leaders of the different political parties to recruit the state’s biggest criminals and gangsters. Of course, the criminals are delighted. Once they become politicians, the police who used to hunt them down have to protect them instead, while the cases which are pending against them – murder, abduction, banditry – will either be dropped, or else investigated so slowly they will not make it to the courts for decades. Moreover, if they are already in prison, and win their seat from behind bars, they will almost certainly be released on bail to attend parliament. It’s just getting worse and worse. Democracy is badly under threat.’


  Against such a background, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the violence and corruption seeped in to the precincts of La Martiniere: if anything, it is surprising that some sort of atrocity did not take place earlier. After all, the children of many of Lucknow’s most notorious politicians are pupils at the school, including a nephew of Mulayam. Moreover, on the edge of the school’s immaculate cricket pitches lie two villages which are said to be the headquarters of the Lucknow drug mafia, led by a caste-brother of Mulayam, Suraj Pal Yadav, one of the most wanted men in north India. One theory has it that Yadav’s gang had Gomes assassinated after he accidentally witnessed some mafia action.

  The Lucknow police, however, believe that the murder may well have been carried out by some of La Martiniere’s own pupils, and there certainly seems to be no shortage of suspects with motives. As well as being La Martiniere’s PT instructor, Gomes was in charge of administering beatings and punishments, a job which made him many enemies. A month before his murder, he had discovered a pistol in the locker of one of the school’s boarders. He beat the boy up, and made sure that he was expelled. Off-the-record police sources indicate that a student is one of the principal suspects.

  ‘Of course, it’s very unsettling and shocking when a murder has been committed,’ said the headmaster, Elton de Souza. ‘But what can we do? By and large the children and the staff have all pulled together, and somehow we seem to have overcome what happened. I don’t know whether it’s a reflection of what’s going on in the town, but the murder has certainly left a deep impression on the school, the boys, the masters – everyone concerned.’

  Many old boys have blamed de Souza himself for the decline of the school – a decline that the murder can only accelerate. But Saeed Naqvi believes that La Martiniere’s troubles are part of a much wider change that is affecting all that is left of Britain’s legacy in India: ‘The old Anglophile élite of India is being pushed in to the margins,’ he says. ‘In their place a new, lower-caste, Hindi-speaking élite – men like Mulayam – are rising up, and bringing a very different set of values with them. There is a change in the schoolmasters too: in my day they had an almost missionary zeal to propagate English values. Now that has all gone. The standard of teaching has gone right down, and so has the quality of the intake.’

  As evidence, Naqvi points to the figures: the Anglo-Indian community which dominated the school in his day has now largely emigrated and almost completely disappeared from the classrooms, while as many as a quarter of the present intake is from the newly empowered lower castes. These are often not from English-speaking or even literate backgrounds.

  ‘They are less well educated when they come in and they’re less well educated when they come out,’ says Naqvi. ‘It’s taken fifty years, but what is happening now is really the final twilight of the Raj. La Martiniere was a wonderful survival from a vanished world, and I still regard the place with great affection: I had a very good time there, and am none the worse for the corporal punishment or the bullying or the learning by rote. But in the long term the school just can’t go on. Already it’s no longer the school it used to be. It’s an ailing institution, in fast decay. In fifty years the culture and the society which sustained it have simply disappeared.’

  If I really wanted to see how bad the future of La Martiniere could look, Saeed told me, I should meet some of the Lucknow University students’ leaders. They were notorious, he said, for running protection rackets in the bazaars of the city, taking ‘donations’ from the shopkeepers and beating up any who refused to make the appropriate contribution. A recalcitrant photographer’s shop had apparently been reduced to ashes by the students only a week before.

  But protection rackets were not the worst of it, I later learned. Rival wings of the Lucknow University Students’ Union, all of which were competing for political patronage from the government, had declared war on each other, and there were now open street battles between different factions armed with guns and grenades. So far thirty-odd students had been wounded; eight were dead. Both of the last two student union leaders had been given ‘tickets’ to stand for one of the political parties in the UP Legislative Assembly; both were now in jail on murder charges. There could not be a more grim – or geographically closer – model of what can happen when a great educational institution plummets in to catastrophic decline.

  I went over to the Habibullah Hostel – the most notorious student hall of residence – early one morning; it lay in a leafy campus a few miles from La Martiniere. With me came the son of the Lucknow Inspector General of Police, who said he knew some of the student leaders. We sat in front of the imposing Indo-Saracenic façade, once no doubt the pride of some high-minded Victorian Vice-chancellor. College servants brought out benches on to the overgrown front lawn, once a cricket pitch, and as we sat sipping small cups of milk tea, the student politicians crowded around and excitedly told me about their little war.

  It had begun three years earlier, apparently, when two student leaders had got in to a petty argument over who should sit in a particular seat during an exam: both had identified it as the best place in which they could get away with cheating. After the exam had finished there had been a fight outside, and several Habibullah students had been badly beaten up. The squabble quickly escalated in to a full-scale feud between two different halls of residence. When a group from the rival hostel ambushed and badly injured two students from Habibullah Hostel, they decided to counter-attack.

  ‘About fifty of us attacked the Victoria Hostel one night,’ said Veeru Singh. He looked a nice boy: shy, polite, well dressed. He was standing for Student Union President in the summer, he said, and was hoping that, like his predecessors, the position would enable him to receive a nomination from one of the political parties the following year. ‘We had about twenty guns and a lot of home-made grenades, but the first time we attacked them we were overexcited and began shooting off our guns as soon as we left here. By the time we got to Victoria we had no ammunition left. So we lodged a charge of attempted murder against the Victoria boys with the police, and managed to get two of them arrested. The second time we were more organised. We wanted to kill their leader, Abhay Singh.’

  At this point I interrupted: ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Did you say you wanted to kill him?’

  ‘Why not kill?’ replied one of the boys at the back of the group. ‘It’s not difficult.’

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Veeru. ‘We surrounded the hostel in silence then barged in. We went from room to room and wounded five or six of them, but in the dark Abhay escaped. Then the police raided here and arrested a couple of us. They also discovered half of our arms in Praveen Verma’s room.’

  Veeru indicated Praveen at one side of the crowd. He was a small, sly-looking boy of about nineteen with a downy adolescent moustache.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘They found sixteen country-made pistols, one proper grenade and eight home-made bombs,’ said Praveen. ‘But I said they belonged to my room-mate, so they arrested him instead. He didn’t dare say they were mine. He knew what would happen to him if he did.’

  ‘But where do you get all this weaponry?’ I asked.

  ‘The guns we buy in the bazaar,’ replied Praveen. ‘The grenades we make ourselves.’

  ‘After that Abhay began to get rattled,’ said Veeru, determined not to be sidetracked. ‘So on 7 January 1996 he shot one of my best friends, Bablu. Six people attacked him on motorbikes when he was sitting in the tea stall on the main road. They shot him in the back. Praveen was sitting next to him. Since then they’ve been trying to shoot Praveen. He is the only witness. He has to be armed twenty-four hours a day.’

  ‘Are you carrying a gun now?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Praveen. He unbuttoned his trousers and lifted a home-made pistol from his Y-fronts. It was a horrible thing: crude and ugly, with a barrel made from the steering shaft of a rickshaw. Praveen flicked a catch and opened it up. Inside was a small red shotgun
cartridge.

  ‘What about grenades?’ I asked. ‘Are you carrying any of them?’

  ‘I’ve got some in my room: country-made ones. Would you like to see them?’

  I said I would, so Praveen sent off one of the college servants to fetch one. The servant returned five minutes later with an innocent-looking bundle of white gauze about the size of a tangerine.

  ‘They’re quite effective,’ said Praveen proudly. ‘We fill them with glass and nails. But be careful: if you drop them they go off. I injured my leg with one once.’

  ‘Shall I continue?’ asked Veeru.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘The night they killed my friend, we attacked the Victoria Hostel properly. We managed to get some assault rifles and about fifty bombs. We did a lot of damage but they were expecting us, and two of our people were badly wounded.’

  ‘We took them to the hospital,’ said Praveen, ‘but the doctors wouldn’t operate. They said it was a police case and they couldn’t touch them. So we beat the place up. We trashed the emergency ward and burned an ambulance. We hit the doctors and tore the clothes off the nurses and shoved injections up the doctors’ backsides. We said, “Save them,” but the doctors said, “They’re dying. Let them die.” In the end the police came and thirteen of us were arrested.’

  For forty more minutes the students continued with their story unabashed: the attacks on the courthouse when Abhay was brought to trial; the attempts to kill him in prison; the police raids; the ambushes and the murders. At the end of it, when they were reviewing the death toll – four dead on each side – I asked them: ‘And do you think this is a good way to spend your lives?’