The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin

by Manu S. Pillai

  There were in Vivekananda’s message contradictions, and indeed he may have had more than one message. In his own time, however, these did not seem like contradictions at all. He spoke to different people in different ways. When addressing Indians struggling against caste, speaking multiple languages, and with regional identities, his purpose was to engender national unity through a common, reinvented Hinduism. To those abroad, his mission was to present Hinduism not as that tangled jungle of superstition the British deemed it, but as a highly mature and accomplished faith: ‘a robust, modernist and universalist Hinduism, anchored in its own precepts, that could look the rest of the world’s religions in the eye—and oblige them to blink’, as Shashi Tharoor puts it. Consistency was not Vivekananda’s strong point, but it was his inconsistency that made him such an appealing figure for large numbers of people. Besides, if he were to be consistent, why would he have ever even become a monk?

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER–PRINCE OF JAIPUR

  In 1857, when the great rebellion swept much of north India into a storm of gunpowder and rage, one of the consolations the embattled British possessed was the loyalty of numerous Indian princes. Even as several southern maharajahs issued proclamations of fidelity, a number of their northern counterparts mobilised actual armies in service of the East India Company (showing that, from the start, the rebellion was not a blanket uprising of Indians against their colonisers). Thus, leading princes of Punjab stood with the British, just as the reigning Scindia in Gwalior ‘strove hard to keep his own subjects faithful to his liege lords’. In Rajputana, similarly, support came despite widespread public sympathy for the rebels. ‘At every town through which we passed,’ an officer wrote of Jaipur state, ‘the inhabitants cursed and abused us … In fact, we were really in an enemy’s country.’ But the local ruler himself pitched his flag with the British, lending them thousands of troops who not only served the Company gloriously but even punished those ‘refractory villages’ for flirting with mutiny.

  From his position, it was a shrewd stand to take, for had it been otherwise, Sawai Ram Singh II of ‘Jeypoor’ himself might have been punished. Described subsequently as ‘a ruler of singular intelligence and enlightenment’, Ram Singh was only twenty-two at the time of the rebellion, and it was after some hesitation that he decided to endorse the cause of the British. He had spent his formative years in the guardianship of a regency council, which while ostensibly under Company supervision, was actually dominated by a coterie of noblemen. When in 1851 he succeeded to full powers, he had to balance both interests against each other—in order to actually exercise his authority, he proactively sought the ‘constant counsels and active official support’ of the British. His courtiers remained influential all the same, so that when they showed sympathy for the rebels in 1857, it took some time for Ram Singh to make up his mind about his own position—on whether he should raise swords in the name of the mutineers, or fight for a foreign power which bolstered his own princely authority.

  Had he opted for the former, Ram Singh might later have been deposed and banished to the footnotes of history. Instead, he made a choice that not only ensured his survival, but also enabled him to become one of the nineteenth century’s more remarkable Indians. That he had an interesting mind was clear early on in his life. When Prince Alexei Dmitrievich Saltykov of Russia (who travelled in India as far south as Kerala, sketching and diarising) met him a decade before the mutiny, the ‘plain-looking’ prince was still only old enough to play with wooden elephants and toy horses. But he left on his visitor a definite impression. ‘Asking after my health,’ recorded Saltykov, Ram Singh was quick to race on to other subjects. He wanted to know, for instance, ‘where Russia is located and how long it would take to go there from Jaipur’. He then ‘ordered his English language teacher to ask him a few words in that language’, no doubt to dazzle the Russian dignitary. Finally, ‘he got up from the throne, walked to the archery hall’ and ‘showed us his skill in archery’. Ram Singh, in other words, knew he had a captive audience—and he wanted to present an image that could not be easily forgotten.

  As ruler of Jaipur, the lean and somewhat morose-looking Ram Singh was firmly a progressive. In 1867 he set up the first girls’ school in his capital despite ‘popular prejudice’ against such innovations. He inaugurated the Maharaja’s College, where English and Sanskrit were taught side by side, even as he established a school of art, a public library, and a hospital that commemorates the visit of a British viceroy, Lord Mayo. The main streets in Jaipur were paved in his reign, while highways were constructed to connect his seat to other towns in the principality. Kerosene and gas lights were installed along thoroughfares, just as other projects were launched, from waterworks and a drainage system to a postal network and a telegraph office. Changes in administration were also made, launching modern governance in the state through new instruments, public bodies and buildings. Meanwhile, fluent in English as well as in Western thought, Ram Singh became a bridge between two worlds, tuned into evolving times, but also married firmly to his roots and to Indian tradition.

  What really distinguishes this collaborator of the Raj, though, is a royal pastime that quickly graduated into an enduring passion. When Louis Rousselet, the traveller, met Ram Singh in 1866, he was surprised that the maharajah’s ‘dress was handsome, but showed an indifference to ornament’; instead of jewels and a sword, as the stereotypical image of a native prince would depict, there was ‘an immense revolver thrust into his belt’. Even more notable than the ruler’s appearance, the Frenchman recalled, was how their conversation ‘turned on photography’. And before long he realised that Ram Singh was not only ‘an admirer of this art, but is himself a skilled photographer’. In fact, for about a decade, the maharajah had been a member of the Bengal Photographic Society, well before he acquired his first camera in 1862. And while princes across India developed a general fondness for photography, few mastered it in the way he did—or created a collection that wonderfully encapsulates the world in which the Victorian and the Indian met both constructively as well as to do ideological battle.

  It was portraiture that most attracted the maharajah. In 1870, he photographed Queen Victoria’s visiting son, just as he did his new palace doctor. But what marked Ram Singh for distinction even here were the portraits he made of his harem women. There were Hindu women, and there were Muslim women; there were superior concubines (pardayats ) and there were junior mistresses (paswans ). As the scholar Laura Weinstein notes, to photograph women ordinarily in purdah was ‘completely without precedent’. Of course, Ram Singh never made portraits of his aristocratic wives—even he could not breach custom to that degree—but by bringing his establishment into view through the camera, he nevertheless dispelled multiple reigning stereotypes about the Indian harem. Where the British perceived the zenana as dark, sinister places, lacking in fresh air and guarded by scheming eunuchs (partly because this was the one cultural and political realm in India they could not penetrate despite their power), the women who appear in Ram Singh’s photographs are powerful and dignified, far from Victorian cliché. ‘The zenana portraits,’ concludes Weinstein, ‘reveal no sickness or dirt, depraved or deviant faces, exposed bodies or sexually suggestive poses.’ What they show, according to her, is a world where there is no pressing demand for Western ‘light’—where there is nobody crying to be ‘rescued’ from despotic oriental hands.

  Certainly, Ram Singh could have been making a conscious, deliberate statement in Indianising the gaze of the Western camera and he most definitely broke rules by immortalising in his album women of the Jaipur zenana. By photographing its inmates as exuding confidence and splendour, he was also challenging tropes about Indian women; about the self-righteous British claim to civilisation and the supposed Indian proclivity for debauched, unmanly sensuality. And yet, despite the scholarly approval he now enjoys, this is not the complete picture as far as this remarkable man is concerned—for Ram Singh was also able to employ the camera in ways that
would have horrified the British, as is evident from another series of pictures he took, featuring himself in sexual congress with bemused ladies of his harem. In one of them, for example, a lady is on her back, smiling at the camera. Her ornaments are intact, as is the cloth that covers her head. But in the scene with her is also her ruler and prince, his hands on her breasts, and squatting as he penetrates her.

  Perhaps, then, beyond his stately portraits of the high and the low, and over and above his desire to excel as a ‘native’ prince, Ram Singh was also a mischievous man whose curiosity took unconventional forms. But of all the achievements he lined up in his remarkable life, his love of photography remains the most memorable. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, even as he carried out his programme of administrative reform in Jaipur, the maharajah honed his skill with the camera, leaving behind a collection now valued in the tens of millions. And by the time he went to the grave in 1880, aged only forty-five, Ram Singh had journeyed through a world of personal and political experience, going from the young prince of 1857, who gambled in favour of the British against the temptations of rebellion, to the photographer-maharajah, who created his own images and rejected what had till then been perpetuated by the Raj.

  PERIYAR IN THE AGE OF ‘ANTI-NATIONALS’

  ‘There is no god. There is no god at all. He who created god is a fool. He who propagates god is a scoundrel. He who worships god is a barbarian.’ In a time when scrutiny of even powerful mortals is deemed ‘contrarian’ and the simple application of common sense is seen as ‘anti-national’, Periyar’s philosophy is a refreshingly blunt reminder of the freedom of thought and expression that existed in India in times gone by. As the Internet mobs and over-dramatic television anchors tell individuals off with alarming regularity for daring to possess a dissenting opinion ‘while soldiers are dying on the border’, for instance, one wonders what Periyar, born E.V. Ramasamy Naicker in 1879, would have said if someone asked him to swallow his voice because it was the fashion of the day to obey like good children and to think inside the box.

  While over four decades have passed since Periyar died, one can’t help but imagine him leading the ranks of ‘anti-nationals’ if he lived in contemporary India. He came close enough in the age of the Mahatma, against whom he maintained a catalogue of disagreements, declaring that Independence Day was really ‘a day of mourning’. On another occasion, he thought the constitution deserved all the honour that came from being consigned to flames. ‘Anti-national’ was not the chosen term for those who refused to follow the herd in Periyar’s time, but he was something perhaps even more unusual: He was the anti-Gandhi. Those who were privileged in caste could stomach Gandhi’s message with its clear blunting of radicalism, while Periyar gave them a severe case of indigestion. And yet, many Indians of his day embraced him and millions celebrated his rationality instead of falling in line with what venerable elders chastely decided was ‘proper’.

  Where Gandhi was the embodiment of saintly piety, Periyar exemplified rebellion. Where Gandhi romanticised rural contentment, Periyar envisioned an ambitious age of aircrafts and heavy machinery. While Gandhi renounced sex in his thirties, Periyar married a thirty-year-old in his seventies. When Gandhi’s satyagrahis in white stood up to British tyrants, Periyar excoriated the very Indian tyranny of caste by leading his Self-Respect Movement wearing black. Where the Mahatma’s nationalism was immersed in Hindu morality, Periyar was an atheist who wrote op-eds titled ‘Honeymoon in the Hindu Zoo’. Gandhi spent a lifetime seeking to tame the flesh while Periyar flaunted it (and had himself photographed) among like-minded nudists abroad. And where Gandhi was cremated like a good Hindu, Periyar was buried, flouting every dictum issued by his forefathers, who too were not beyond reproach or criticism.

  Gandhi celebrated Sita as the embodiment of Indian womanhood with her purity and self-sacrifice, while Periyar declared the Ramayana to be full of ‘absurdities’, with quite a controversial sequence of superlatives for its heroine. Gandhi painted visions of ideal women, while Periyar warned ordinary women to beware of deification. ‘Have cats ever freed rats? Have foxes ever liberated goats or chickens?’ he asked. ‘Have whites ever enriched Indians? Have brahmins ever given non-brahmins justice? We can be confident that women will never be emancipated by men.’ Gandhi thought motherhood was divine and spiritual; Periyar saw pregnancy and childbirth as ‘impediments to liberty and independence’, promoting birth control even if it came at the expense of maternal salvation. Against Gandhi’s sage-like pronouncements on the female, Periyar was branded immoral. ‘Morality,’ he wryly retorted, ‘cannot be one-way traffic.’

  So too with nationalism (a word much misused in today’s world) was Periyar irreverent. He viewed it as finely woven, brilliantly designed deception, diverting masses of people from the real state of affairs, sometimes through emotional blackmail and sometimes through the intoxications of pride, keeping them from checking the book of democratic accounts. He was suspicious of saints, arguing that Gandhi, with his ‘religious guise, god-related discourse, constant mention of truth, non-violence, satyagraha, purifying of the heart, the power of the spirit, sacrifice and penance on the one hand, and the propaganda of his followers’ had become a ‘a political dictator’. Sure, there were many who ‘consider him to be a rishi, a sage, Christ, the Prophet, a Mahatma’, indeed even ‘an avatar of Vishnu’, but this was all, at the end of the day, plain politics.

  Gandhi, so it seemed to Periyar, sought freedom from the British but feared social upheaval at home even if it offered greater justice—he preferred order over turbulent equality. ‘A bhangi does for society what a mother does for a baby,’ claimed Gandhi patronisingly, seeking ‘the beauty of compromise’ in social dynamics between the low, who had answers to seek, and the high, who had much to lose. Periyar ached for radical action to the extent that his remarks could seem patently hateful, once recommending that ‘if you have to choose between killing a brahmin or a snake, spare the snake’. Gandhi thought ‘life without religion is a life without principle’ and that education must never lose sight of its moral responsibilities. Periyar believed that the ‘worship of god, practice of religion, propitiation of rulers, which are all calculated to keep men in mental slavery, should never [even] enter the portals of education’.

  Periyar was the enfant terrible of his time, puncturing with unafraid focus holy narratives of India’s destiny at a time when the Mahatma was convinced of this destiny. He was a contrarian, and was branded worse, but many Indians of his time absorbed his philosophy even as they embraced Gandhi’s vision. He was, in the larger scheme of things, handicapped by language, and besides, political incorrectness hardly makes for a great career. But as the ruckus around the world grows and even elementary expressions of reason provoke admonishments, one wishes we had a Periyar here again—not to set the cat among the mice but to hold up a mirror and to remind us that there is always another way, and that we must sometimes stop following and start thinking.

  ANNIE BESANT AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN

  When Annie Besant arrived in India in 1893, she had already accumulated enough notoriety for a lifetime. This was a woman who had separated from her clergyman husband, losing custody of both her children. And given her ‘wayward’ conduct, his Victorian peers justified the raising of his hand against her, including, it appears, for her reluctance to share his bed. Her son was handed over to the father during the divorce, but she lost her daughter only after the man discovered the girl had forgotten her prayers—her mother had confidently told her there was nobody listening at the other end. Distraught though she was on losing her child, Besant remained defiant. ‘It’s a pity there isn’t a God,’ she declared as she exited the courtroom. ‘It would do one so much good to hate him.’

  The irony was that this Irishwoman who eventually found her way to India, began her life immersed in religiosity. She was born on 1 October 1847, a day and twenty-two years before Mahatma Gandhi, whose ascent would mark her eclipse. Her widowed mother enrolled her
in an unconventional school where Besant obtained a good education, and where the boys too were made to sew. But it was a deeply Christian setting, and unquestioning service was the cornerstone of her existence. At eighteen, she met Frank Besant and accepted his proposal, hoping it would bring her closer to god—in reality, she found herself discussing laundry with other pious wives. Her restless mind, fear of domesticity, and a waning belief in Christ resulted in a meeting with a theologian to get closer to the ‘truth’. ‘It is not your duty to ascertain the truth,’ he announced sharply, nearly accusing her of blasphemy.

  After her marriage collapsed in 1873, Besant joined the National Secular Society. Alongside Charles Bradlaugh, leader of what was called the Freethought movement, she wrote on science and economics, becoming also a public advocate for women’s rights. While her ex-husband appointed a detective to see if she was sleeping with Bradlaugh, Besant embraced atheism. ‘Atheist is one of the grandest titles [one] can wear,’ she explained in her autobiography. ‘It was howled over the grave of Copernicus … it was yelled … at Voltaire … [so that] where the cry of “Atheist” is raised… we [may] be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption of humanity.’ And if all this were not adequately scandalous, in 1877 Besant confirmed her status as a rebel by republishing Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy , an innocently titled work that was actually a forbidden handbook on birth control.

  Unsurprisingly, given the times, Besant and her colleagues were charged with obscenity. ‘I risk my name, I risk my liberty; and it is not without deep and earnest thought that I have entered this struggle,’ she stated with determination, but the book was banned anyway to protect ‘public morals’. For Besant, what followed was social persecution. She had certificates from London University qualifying her to teach chemistry, botany and mathematics, but when she sought access to the Botanical Gardens, her request was denied—the curator’s daughters went for their walks there, and the last thing he wanted was to expose them to this refractory divorcee. Others called her a deranged female, but Besant remained steely. ‘The moment a man uses a woman’s sex to discredit her arguments,’ she pointed out, we know ‘that he is unable to answer [her] arguments’.