The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  Ramanujan did not live long, but the year he and Janaki spent together had its moments of tender affection. She cared for him, and he told his mother to retreat—if only, he regretted, he had taken Janaki along, he might not have felt so lost on foreign shores. Their marriage, hitherto unconsummated, was at last given a semblance of substance. He remained orthodox—they moved from a house called Crynant because ‘cry’ was inauspicious. He approved of Gometra because it could be read in Sanskrit as ‘friend of cows’. His tuberculosis, of course, cared little for auspicious addresses, and his mother blamed Janaki’s stars for bringing upon her son the terrible eye of Saturn. When Ramanujan died on 26 April 1920, he took with him whatever trace of warmth survived between the two women feuding by his bedside.

  A widow at barely twenty-two, Janaki spent most of the following decade in British Bombay with her brother, learning English and acquiring the skills of a seamstress. In 1931, she returned to Madras, beginning a new life, working to supplement her meagre pension from the Madras University, and eventually adopting a boy, who cared for her till her end, six decades later. Occasionally, great scholars from abroad came to see Janaki, seeking answers to questions left behind by her legendary husband. But she only had memories and gentle words to offer. As this seamstress of Triplicane said to one of them, the chief thing she remembered about her beloved Ramanujan was that he was always surrounded by sums and problems.

  AN UNSENTIMENTAL MAN OF ACTION

  Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was a thin man with a big head. He had a long, sharp nose, surpassed by an even sharper intellect. The offspring of a Telugu brahmin family, he was born on 15 September 1861 in a Karnataka village called Muddenahalli. His parents were of modest means, but learnt quickly that English education was a passport to social mobility. Their second-born did not fail them—a diligent student, Visvesvaraya grew into an unsentimental man of action, leaving for greener academic pastures in Bangalore soon after the untimely death of his father. He did have to earn his keep: while an uncle gave him breakfast and meals, board and college fees came from a wealthy local family. It was in the service of this household that the future ‘Bharat Ratna’ launched his career, giving private tuition to prosperous children long before he won his knighthood and came to be called India’s Father of Economic Planning.

  The 101-odd years ‘Sir MV’ lived were full of work and unceasing activity. He wrote books and gave countless speeches. He worshipped fact alone, caring little for oratorical wit or the charms of rhetoric. The keystones of his existence were routine and grinding discipline—the story went that he wore a three-piece suit (plus turban) even for a walk in his garden. When he spoke, his words came pregnant with substance, and he travelled the world—from America to Japan—commenting on everything from urban drainage to women’s employment. He loved statistics with a passion: when he published Reconstructing India in 1920, he peppered it with facts and figures so diverse that it remains an encyclopaedia that tells us, among other things, how India a century ago had 19,410 post offices.

  Such rigour served Visvesvaraya well. Soon after he acquired his Bachelor of Arts degree, he went to Pune to qualify as an engineer. He worked in the Deccan and served in Sindh, developing irrigation channels and building filtering systems. By his late thirties, he had superseded as many as eighteen seniors in the jealous ranks of officialdom, retiring in 1908 when he realised he would never be made, on account of the colour of his skin, that special thing: chief engineer of an entire British province. While touring Italy later that year, he received an invitation from the Nizam of Hyderabad. And so Visvesvaraya commenced the next part of his career, designing infrastructure in the prince’s capital before transferring his services to the maharajah of his native state of Mysore.

  At first, Visvesvaraya was chief engineer in India’s most advanced princely realm, till in 1912 his ruler elevated him to the dignity of dewan (chief minister). Some muttered that handing the administration to an engineer was akin to placing a woodcutter at the helm of government, but the technocrat shook the place up, marching the state ahead by characteristically systematic leaps and bounds. He set up Mysore University, and pumped money into the Krishna Raja Sagara dam; he established the Bank of Mysore and set in motion what would become the iron and steel works in Bhadravati. From developing the sandalwood soap industry to promoting silks from Mysore’s looms, Visvesvaraya soon proved himself the force behind a thriving state. And without much ado, six years later, following a quarrel with the maharajah on the issue of reservations, Visvesvaraya resigned. Indeed, a popular story tells how he went to the palace in an official car to hand in his papers, but when he returned, it was in his private vehicle.

  By now Visvesvaraya, who among other things was a M.I.C.E. (Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers), was ready for even bigger challenges. He had views not only on economics and governance, but also on social policy and national enlightenment. In Reconstructing India are ideas that even today resonate with Indian thinkers. ‘If bureaucracy prevails,’ he warned, for instance, ‘industries will not prosper.’ Without modern industry—which meant progressive education, social reform, and, crucially, women’s empowerment—the nation itself would not prosper. The state had to guide the process but also recognise its limits: the ‘people require help and backing,’ he argued, ‘not control and direction.’ Page after page presented Visvesvaraya’s vision for India, one in which caste retreated before ‘a saner social system’ and nationalism meant a love for the country that was not divorced from mundane civic awareness.

  By the 1920s and 1930s, Visvesvaraya was already an elder with a voice that mattered. He sat on the board of the Tata Iron and Steel Company and served as president of the Indian Science Congress. He lambasted the British for their economic exploitation of the subcontinent, even as he lectured his countrymen against making fatalistic philosophical excuses. In 1934, he argued even with Gandhi—the Mahatma did not share Visvesvaraya’s faith in large-scale industry, noting that ‘we hold perhaps diametrically opposite views’ on which path would deliver the country to its destiny. ‘I could never persuade myself to take up a hostile attitude toward … one with your brilliant achievements,’ wrote the south Indian to the Gujarati sincerely. But he still believed that alongside the village and its cottage industries, India needed steel plants and factories, to transform itself and shine in the twentieth century.

  Though they respected each other, Visvesvaraya had disagreements with Jawaharlal Nehru too. On one occasion, he admonished the future prime minister publicly. He was also a strong advocate of meaningful federalism, where the centre’s ‘intervention in provincial affairs [is] reduced to the lowest possible minimum’. Nehru, on the other hand, empowered the capital and would [or could, according to some] not grant the states real autonomy. But between them emerged a constructive engagement, and the old man’s letters were always welcome on the prime minister’s desk. Visvesvaraya, by now, had risen from legendary mind into an object of sheer wonder. Nearing his hundredth birthday, when asked about the secret of his longevity, he remarked in a matter-of-fact fashion: ‘Death called on me long ago but found me not at home and went away.’ It returned on 12 April 1962, and this time the bachelor from Muddenahalli was ready, having made his mark in the world, and having said everything that needed to be said.

  THE RESURRECTION OF BALAMANI

  In 1903, one of Kerala’s earliest advocates of the freedom of the press, K. Ramakrishna Pillai, issued a lamentation that suggests he was not necessarily as convinced an advocate for feminist thought. ‘Oh … the predicament you have reached!’ he cried, with reference to his coastal homeland. ‘You who were governed by noble ministers with high ideals … what sin have you done to be trapped under the misgovernment of a wicked minister taken in by female charms!’ His intention was to sharpen his attack on the local maharajah’s controversial chief minister, but it was also an attack on an attractive woman—a public performer—who had evidently ensnared the old man with her treachero
us charms. His proof? Her visit to Thiruvananthapuram drew sensational crowds, and the delighted minister had presented her a gold chain—by publicly placing it around her neck.

  Pillai ascribed to the lady in question, the scholar Udaya Kumar notes, a ‘destructive, seductive spell’ that combined ‘the perilous allure of theatrical exposure… manipulative charms and sexual promiscuity’ to ‘capture in her net the very authorities who [were] meant to protect the public’ from everything she represented—female individuality, sexual autonomy, and the stage. As with all women performers of her time, scandal was firmly entangled with her appeal—an appeal that saw special trains organised to convey admirers to her shows. And it was not the first time she had provoked suspicion: The maharaja himself was ‘much pleased with her’ (which was interpreted as nocturnal pleasure), and so, as art historian Rupika Chawla records, when she sought to commission the court painter Ravi Varma for a portrait, his brother displayed ‘intense disapproval’, fearing it would affect the artist’s own reputation and dignity.

  But such pronounced scandal eclipsed much of what Balamani of Kumbakonam achieved, and the rich, albeit tragic accumulation of experience that is her story. Balamani, in the words of commentator Veejay Sai, was the first of many remarkable Indian women who challenged ‘heteropatriarchy’ in her day—and who, for her pains, mainly received, in return, ignominy and obscurity. Even though Balamani was ‘fortressed amongst a thousand anecdotes’, it ‘is almost impossible to believe a character like her lived in the remote south’, where today she is largely forgotten. But this was a talented woman who left fans ecstatic across the peninsula, even as she pursued an intellectual mission to reinvent on the modern stage, as she remarked herself to a French contemporary, ‘the whole of the ancient Sanskrit plays’.

  Balamani was a woman of ambition and resolve, determined to transport the art she had inherited as a devadasi to wider audiences in imaginative forms. Breaking out of the temple, she became among the earliest to establish a formal enterprise: the Balamani Drama Company. She was the first to introduce Petromax lighting onstage, just as she was the earliest to allot ladies-only spaces at her ticketed public performances. Her entire venture was female-run, and while others like the Kannamani and Danivambal companies in the same late nineteenth century period also followed this pattern, what distinguished Balamani was her preference for destitute women who were disenfranchised by anti-devadasi legislation. Her company, it has been noted, was in fact ‘almost an asylum for women who needed shelter and security’. Of course, none of this alleviated the stigma that came with being ‘the dancing girl’ of Kumbakonam, but Balamani flourished as a businesswoman and a patron of the arts, as much as an individual of singular personality.

  As an artist too, she was inventive. She was, Sai points out, a pioneer in taking up ‘social themes in Tamil theatre’ and moving beyond mythology into fresher genres—a detective play she performed was later adapted for film. Infatuated poets and musicians composed pieces extolling her beauty and one such javali was later sung by the venerable M.S. Subbulakshmi for the gramophone. Instead of seeking approval from the orthodox by shoring up pious ‘respectability’, Balamani was what is pejoratively termed ‘bold’, cleverly executing even a nude scene in one play—naturally, the play was banned for this very reason by thin-skinned men of less ‘bold’ persuasions. Success also brought in its wake much wealth—Balamani drove in silver carriages and presided over a mansion staffed by fifty servitors (again, largely rehabilitated women). But it also wove through Balamani’s life debates on censorship, the social challenge that came from the brahminisation of the arts, and of course, the anomaly of a successful working woman who had the capacity to claim that prized patriarchal prize: a legacy.

  Patriarchy wouldn’t be patriarchy if it allowed a challenge like that absolute success, though. ‘History and fate turned cruel to Balamani,’ Sai says, though her solitude in a world designed for men did its own damage. The years passed, and she aged. Her sense of charity, which included getting young girls married and settling them with handsome dowries, led to financial calamity. She, who lived in gardens, surrounded by peacocks and deer, moved impoverished to overcrowded Madurai—when Balamani died in 1935, it took an old, loyal associate to collect money from well-wishers to pay for her cremation. But somewhere, the flame was kept alive. As the novelist Pierre Loti recorded in her heyday, ‘The poor know the road to her house well enough.’ And it was among those poor that Balamani’s name survived, awaiting its resurrection as a story marked by many triumphs but also great tragedy.

  THE GRAMOPHONE QUEEN OF INDIA

  26 June 1873 is the birth anniversary of a remarkable Muslim woman. She wasn’t born Muslim—this lady of decidedly imperious mien was in fact the daughter of an Armenian and his half-Hindu, half-British-Christian wife. Her mother was known as Victoria Hemmings, and the girl was named Eileen Angelina Yeoward. But when she was still a child, her identity was transformed forever after Victoria embraced Islam and became ‘Badi’ Malka Jaan. Her daughter followed suit and took the name Gauhar Jaan, a name that would deliver her to greatness as the ‘first dancing girl of Calcutta’, India’s earliest recording sensation, and the foremost of this country’s musical divas.

  Gauhar and her mother were performers, both of them talented, impetuous women whose lives featured disappointing men or, at any rate, disappointments caused by men. Malka Jaan’s marriage with her ice-factory-engineer husband ended when Gauhar was less than six years old. They moved from Azamgarh to Benares with Malka’s paramour, and here the mother achieved considerable celebrity as a dancer and courtesan. By 1883, when the child was ten, they settled in Calcutta, and quickly grew accustomed to a life of luxury and success, even as Gauhar was trained in Kathak, to sing, and acquired a rich grasp of languages: Between 1902 and 1920, she would sing for around 600 gramophone records in tongues as diverse as Persian, Gujarati and Pashto, though at least occasionally, one presumes, she did not have a clue what she was actually singing.

  Following in her mother’s artistic footsteps, Gauhar’s first public performance came in her teens at the court of the Rajah of Darbhanga in 1887. Though recognised immediately for her talent, she was not satisfied as a court musician in a second-grade principality, and chose, instead, to return to bustling Calcutta to cement her name. It was here that she began to attract the high and mighty, their wealth and riches collecting in proverbial mountains before her. Gauhar soon became something of a legend: the woman who drove around in splendid carriages and cars, the lady who disappeared to Bombay now and then for the races, the tawaif (courtesan) who demanded a whole train from a royal patron to convey her entourage to his capital and, most famously, as an eccentric who spent the then extravagant sum of 20,000 on a party to celebrate the advent of her beloved cat’s kittens.

  But what distinguished Gauhar from other wealthy tawaifs was the gramophone. In November 1902, at the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, Gauhar arrived with her retinue to sing for Frederick Gaisberg of The Gramophone Company. Prolonged negotiations had preceded this meeting, and Gauhar was paid the princely sum of 3,000 for singing into a contraption rumoured to be the devil’s own—something, people said, that might irreversibly seize her voice. She was undaunted, though perhaps somewhat irritated, by having to sing into the massive brass recording horn that was placed near her face. She had three minutes—and indeed, would master the technique of delivering an entire song in that duration—at the end of which, she spoke into the device, in English, signing off with what became her trademark: ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan.’

  Over the next two decades, and through hundreds of her recordings, Gauhar changed the way music was practised in India, and amplified its reach. Her voice travelled not only to faraway places in the country but also abroad, and as her biographer Vikram Sampath discovered, her unibrowed face appeared on picture postcards in Europe and even on matchboxes. Gaisberg knew he had a figure of great glamour here, noting that he never saw her repeat either her clo
thes or her jewellery, both of which she possessed in inexhaustible quantities, while rumour placed the price of a pass to her salon at anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000. Less than a decade after she first announced her name into that brass horn, Gauhar was at the height of her fame, performing at the famous Delhi Durbar of 1911 before the newly crowned British king, George V, and his royal consort.

  But while professional successes were many, personal tragedy too forced its way into Gauhar’s life through unfortunate romances. She fell in love with a famous stage actor and lived several happy years with him. When her mother died, it was he who consoled her, becoming a pillar of strength. His death by a sudden illness, however, terminated that relationship. What followed was a disastrous affair with her secretary, a man ten years her junior, who in the end proved to harbour more affection for Gauhar’s possessions than Gauhar herself. Court cases had to be fought and at one time she was compelled to prove her paternity to a judge, pleading before her hostile, long-lost father to acknowledge her as his blood.

  The ostentation that was as much a part of Gauhar’s life as her talent, would, in the end, dissolve her life and career. Accustomed to a life of glitter and style, she made predictable mistakes where her finances were concerned. By the 1920s, she had passed her prime, and her legal battles and other woes had taken their toll on her bank balance. She moved, eventually, far away from the Calcutta where she once towered over her peers, and settled in Mysore, where the local maharajah granted her a modest pension. And here, in a cottage in the south of India, she who was born Eileen, knew fame as Gauhar, and whose voice thrilled a million admirers, died a forgotten woman in 1930.