by M G Vassanji
“Tell me about Moscow,” I tell him.
One could not imagine one without the other, Bhishm-ji and Sheila-ji, Bhishm and Sheila Sahni. He nearing eighty, with shrunken frame and crumpled face; soft-spoken and gentle is the overall first impression. She with hip-length gold and white hair, a flushed clear face, somewhat squat from age now, though it is not hard to imagine the sprightly girl she must have been from all her talk about her youth. A venerable old couple, an institution during their two years in Shimla, humane light in an otherwise dry academic atmosphere, reservoirs of memory—of the decades of glorious idealism and expectations in Punjab before Independence, followed by that tragic divide of Partition, which displaced them both, and then the struggles of a literary life in place of a Congress idealism. They live here in what must once have been a lovely cottage belonging to the viceroy’s bandmaster. There is a ramshackle wooden verandah in front, behind which are the large dining and living rooms, with high ceilings and large windows looking out to the yard and the trees; upstairs are two bedrooms with private baths, connected by a corridor. In the morning she paints watercolours, he writes.
Every day at lunchtime they set off together from their house, walk slowly up the rising driveway, to the dining room; she in her Punjabi shalwar-kameez, he in kurta-pyjamas and vest, in the rather drab pastels that often adorn the men in northern India. After lunch they come outside for their tea: sitting on the lawn under the solitary tree there, or on the steps between the two levels of the garden, they become the epicentre of our gathering, for we are all aware we are in the presence of two luminaries. When they depart from the Institute, their two years ending during my tenure, the monsoon has finally set in; they could have stayed longer, but the dampness has been a concern for his breathing. It is fitting that many of the other fellows leave at the same time, on holidays, on assignments, or permanently, for the place will no longer be the same.
He is one of the most renowned modern Hindi writers. While some of his contemporaries indulge in Western modernist storytelling, Sahni’s stories and plays are concerned more with the reality of Indian life as experienced by simple, ordinary people. He examines the cynical brutality of rulers, the tragic consequences of bigotry, the plight of the lower classes and of women. His gentleness and humanity pervades his work; if one needed to find a fault, it is perhaps the lack of anger or passion in the writing, yet there is a dogged probing of human foibles, and a humour that persists in the face of tragedy. He has come to the Institute to write a play on Dara Shikoh, the liberal-minded brother of the puritanical Mughal Aurangzeb, who had his brother beheaded and the headless corpse paraded before the denizens of Delhi in Chandni Chowk; but he’s discovered that he’s more captivated by the loneliness he sees in Aurangzeb. His most famous work is the novel Tamas, which describes in relentless detail the unfolding of an episode of communal violence and is now a classic in the literature of the Partition. The first chapter of the novel, a masterpiece of humour and terror, introduces a low-caste Hindu man who is coerced into killing a pig and placing it near the entrance to a mosque. It is typical of Sahni to describe the plight of this lowly individual, who has a pregnant wife and an ailing mother, and who has no stake in the politics of the day as he goes about his humble business. He is both a victim and a pawn in the hands of the fanatics who foment violence to vent their hatred in the days before Partition.
I spend many hours with the Sahnis after my family’s return to Toronto. Conversation with them is always touched with humour. He will talk, and she will augment; or she’ll talk and he will remain silent, on his mouth a touch of an indulgent smile, as she reveals her frustrations, her regrets: his life a success, she the wife and companion who sacrificed.
But for a silk string, Bhishm-ji once says with that smile, he might have risen high in politics. Then we might have been something, Sheila-ji interjects, unable to hold back her regret. Ministers, rich! But would he have written?
He joined the Rawalpindi area branch of the Congress Party during the Quit India Movement around 1940. He was on the verge of a party nomination, but someone at a meeting noticed that the string of his pyjama was made of silk, not khadi, the homespun cotton which was the Congress dress code inspired by Gandhi. Sheila-ji apparently had threaded in the silk string, hoping nobody would notice. But it was noticed, and so his nomination was refused and he never made minister. But he was campaign manager for a Congress candidate, a Muslim, in the 1945 elections—the name of the candidate escapes him, but he recalls how reviled the candidate was in many Muslim areas, refused service in restaurants, entry into homes. Nevertheless his candidate lost only by the narrowest of margins, a few hundred votes, against a prominent opposition member.
The years of 1946 and 1947 were tense; communal riots sprang up in all the major cities, and in hundreds of villages. Since they lived in a Muslim area, he saw the dynamics of the violence from up close. Marauding gangs went about murdering, looting, raping, burning, but not in the areas they themselves came from, the gangs unable or unwilling to turn against their own neighbours and friends. He recalls a young man in his neighbourhood called Lateef who was friendly and even protective towards his Hindu friends, and yet up to all sorts of devilry in other areas. Bhishm-ji and his father would watch as the riot victims from the villages arrived, took trains for the south. “How foolish,” his father would say. “So what if this becomes Pakistan? We’ll stay.”
He went to Delhi in August 1947 to witness the Independence Day ceremonies at the Red Fort as a Congress Party official. On the way, he saw Lahore burning—a sight many people, including my friend Mahesh, remember. He didn’t know he would never return. When the train reached Meerut he realized that communication with areas in Pakistan had broken down. His wife and mother were in their family home in Kashmir, his father back in Rawalpindi, his brother Balraj in Bombay.
He recalls a disturbing incident from those days. It was discovered that in a Sikh village a number of women had jumped into a well to save themselves from attackers. During communal violence, it is commonplace even today that women and girls are brutally raped. After the attack was over, the deputy commissioner of the area had asked health officers to go and do the necessary. Bhishm-ji went along as observer, with some members of the Congress Party. When they arrived they saw a gruesome sight: the bloated bodies of the dead women had surfaced in the well. The husband of one of them came to Bhishm-ji and said, “My wife had a gold bangle on, can you help me retrieve it, it’s mine.” A callous thought, it might seem, but refugees needed all they could get to survive.
His father remained alone in Rawalpindi for a few months, before being smuggled out by some of the locals, wearing a red fez so as to appear a Muslim. He left for Kashmir, whence he flew to Delhi.
Following the afternoon seminars at the Institute, where we sit around a long oak table on plush upright chairs bequeathed by the viceroys, and tea is served individually with separate milk and sugar, and accompanied by biscuits and crackers, some of us repair to the outside cafeteria at the cliff edge, less for the extra tea than for the conversation. Further along the ledge where we sit on our flimsy plastic chairs, sometimes there will be an entire family of Tibetans or some mountain tribes people crouched on the ground pounding stone to pieces for use in paving; other women and children walk by bearing bricks on their backs; men pass carrying heavier loads. A caste or tribe of people, coolies to a town.
Here Bhishm-ji and Sheila-ji one afternoon reveal a standing argument: Which brand of Punjabi, the variety of Sialkot, where she comes from, or the one from his native Rawalpindi, is the better? She admits that his is the softer, but hers, she says, is the more authentic; the difference apparently is in the gender allocations for certain nouns. And then she tells of the time when the poet Faiz, perhaps the greatest modern poet in the Urdu language, came to Delhi. There was shortage of water or electricity, problems Delhi was prone to, and it was blistering hot, and she apologized to him for the discomforts, at which he told her, Am
I a foreigner? Faiz, too, was from Sialkot, but being a Muslim he remained and became a Pakistani, while these two became Indians and had to leave. Both Bhishm-ji and Faiz had been members of the influential Progressive Writers’ Movement in their early years, a collective that believed that writers should serve the public interest. I remember seeing Faiz at a mushaira, a recital, in Toronto, where an adulating crowd of more than five hundred had gathered to hear him; the next day at a meeting with him I asked him some rather foolish questions about a writer’s commitment.
The talk now turns to the subject of real people turning up on whom fictional characters have been based. Bhishm-ji says the eponymous character of one of his books used to live in his neighbourhood, and he hopes that she will never pick up the book. “If after seven or eight years I don’t hear from anybody, then I know I’m safe.” Once, though, he had got into a fix. The most unpleasant character in one of his novels was based on a man who had been flattered by the portrayal, and said to him, Please write another one about me. But a minor character turned out to offend family members and Bhishm-ji’s brother Balraj flew in from Bombay to convince him to withdraw it. He didn’t.
Balraj, whom they both recall very fondly, was the famous Bombay film actor Balraj Sahni, one of whose best roles was in the film Garam Hawa, based on a story by the Urdu writer Ismat Chugtai. Bhishm-ji himself is no mean actor, having appeared in several cameo roles.
It was while in Bombay that he was offered the chance to go to Moscow as a translator. He jumped at it. This was during the tenure of Premier Khrushchev. Bhishm-ji’s first translation assignment was a difficult mining treatise, and he remembers also long translations of Khrushchev’s speeches. He wishes he had translated Tolstoy instead. There were some wonderful times in Russia, and their attachment to Moscow has remained, but Bhishm-ji and Sheila-ji both concur that those seven years of their life were wasted. Sheila-ji alternates between describing the wonderful visits to the ballet, the grand parties they attended, the adventure of living in a foreign place, and calling that period a black hole in her youth.
Their son is a physicist who has been in Toronto, and it turns out that I might have run into the three of them in an elevator when I didn’t know them. Their daughter is a professor of Russian.
In the early 1970s, after their return from Moscow, Bhishm-ji was in Bombay when communal riots erupted. Balraj was on his way by car to the distressed area, to observe and assist, and Bhishm-ji went along with him. What he saw brought back memories of what he had witnessed during the carnage of the Partition; it inspired him to write almost nonstop, and the result was the novel Tamas, which won the country’s highest literary prize. The novel leaves no community free from blame, no community free of suffering. The role of the British commissioner is that of a cynic, impatient of the natives’ barbarities, whose lives matter little: You want us out, so solve the problems yourselves. The cynicism of the British rulers then, Bhishm-ji believes, is matched by that of India’s current politicians, which subject he has explored in other works.
When Tamas was serialized for television, opposition to it mounted from the Hindu nationalist organizations, such as the VHP and RSS, the identification of the latter with the khaki-clad fascists of the film rather obvious and accurate in many eyes. Effigies of the author and director were burnt in public demonstrations.
And what of the writer’s wife? Favourite daughter of a police inspector, trained in painting and classical singing, top of her Master’s class in philosophy. She cannot but divulge her disappointments, the opportunities she missed being an Indian wife, and a socialist writer’s one at that. She couldn’t take up singing after marriage, had to follow him with two kids to Moscow in his quest to see socialism first-hand. She had had a job as a news reader at All India Radio; after Moscow, she got the job back but then lost it on account of her husband being branded a communist. Obviously she has sacrificed her opportunities for his career, her marriage. She says as much: “Just any mother could have raised children.” Now she’s started painting again, doing watercolours, having taken instructions from a young professional. She works at them every morning in the living room, where several of them stand displayed on easels. It is frustrating; she so much wants to be better at it.
She’s complained about her sacrifices so many times to him, she cannot control herself even before a guest. No writer whose career has been aided by his family, even just by their diminished demands upon him, could fail to appreciate the situation. But she loves him. He’s too good, she will say, meaning he is too nice to one and all. And she is a stalwart defender and promoter of his work: Read such and such, it’s wonderful. He’s a wonderful translator; I was a translator too.
One thing they disagree on is the reservation system for so-called scheduled castes and backward tribes, India’s affirmative action, a hotly debated topic among the middle classes during my time in Shimla. “Some form of reservation is necessary,” he affirms one afternoon, true to his natural sympathies, and she clams up, picks up a book. A subject that has come up many times before, apparently.
There is bitter anger among the upper classes with regard to reservations of government jobs and university positions for the lower and “backward” classes. The resentment, liberal middle-class Indians take pains to point out, is against the cynical politics behind the ways in which the reservations are implemented.
In 1979, the Indian government set up the Mandal Commission to “identify the socially or educationally backward” classes among the population and consider the question of reservations, or quotas, for them in the educational and government sectors. The commission took into consideration social, economic, and educational criteria to determine “backwardness,” and in its report, released in 1980, recommended an increase in the number of reservations that were already in place for these classes, which included the lowest castes among Hindus, the “tribals,” and others. The report was implemented in 1990 amidst great controversy and led to the fall of the government. The percentage of reservations for the backward classes was increased, and the upper castes found the number of university places and government jobs for their children drastically reduced. In some areas, protesting students went so far as to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire. The Supreme Court of India, in its ruling on the issue, while admitting that the number of reservations allocated to the backward castes was large, put a ceiling of 50 per cent on them. For the court to allow even this number of reservations in a bid to right past wrongs was a strong admission that Indian society had a long way to go to be rid of systemic inequalities. For it even to consider the question is a triumph of India’s democracy, whatever its practical and historical problems.
At public functions that I have attended, in the representations of India at home and abroad through books and columns, and in Bollywood films, which project images of India all across the globe, the almost complete predominance of upper-caste Hindus is truly remarkable. India’s story, it would seem, is their story. Of course, this lower-caste submergence has to do with their traditional occupations and poverty. The lowest castes traditionally did the lowliest jobs, associated with dirt and pollution, such as sweeping streets, cleaning toilets, and tending to corpses, and in the past they could not even approach the upper castes. In my own childhood, not as much exposed to the caste system, the derogatory epithets “chudo,” “neech,” and “bhang,” all indicating the lowest castes, were common, though I was not aware of their meaning. They were even used for the Africans, who did most of these jobs, but we had our shoemakers and potmakers who were visibly of the lower castes.
And yet, here in India, even among the most liberal, especially those with children, resentment of the reservations is common. The policy rewards mediocrity in the name of equality, runs the familiar argument. Or, economic status should be the criterion, not caste. It is pointed out that a beneficiary of the present system can rise up to wealth and privilege yet continue to receive further benefits for his children, depriving
others less privileged. And the so-called backward classes constitute well over half the population in many areas. The system can be further abused in almost comical ways: castes competing as to which is the more backward.
There is a deep yearning among some intellectuals for an essential Indian-ness, to do away with these ancient divisions, the messiness of India. The nostalgic Oxonian at the Institute blithely speaks of the Hindu mind, comparing it with the Jewish mind. This is silly, if not dangerous, for it only enhances exclusivity and division. What of the Christians, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jains, all as ethnically Indian? Is a Tamil “mind” the same as a Bengali “mind”? A visiting professor says, of the nationalist policies of the BJP, the right-wing political party that recently fomented the communal tension in the country, “Even if it’s Hindu nationalism, it’s nationalism. Is it my fault that I was born a Brahmin?” One might ask, Would you have liked to be born an Untouchable, one whose ancestors dared not raise their heads to exchange a look with a high-caste person?
One of the ironies of the upsurge of middle-class Hindu nationalism is that this same class of privileged Indians is instrumental in shaping the new concepts of citizenship in Canada, Britain, and the United States, by their immigration to these countries and their largely successful struggles for equal rights even as small cultural, racial, and religious minorities. Their Western host countries, of course, no longer see themselves in racial or nationalist terms—which is not to say that such consciousness, especially in discussions of culture, do not exist. But it is always contested, and not the least by people of Indian origin. Affirmative action continues to be used successfully to redress a racist past, and systemic non-representation. In a reverse irony, many of the Indian middle classes, assured of their rights in their new, multicultural homes, turn around to support financially and promote militant nationalism in the native country. Many of them would wish for a Hindu India but not a Christian or Euro America or Canada.