India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  She raised her hands and the eight or nine thin silver bracelets slipped down her thin arm.

  ‘After this my brother-in-law talked to him. He asked him some questions about his background and his feelings. Namdeo didn’t like this. My brother-in law said to him that I had come to Lonavala to do some studying. “Since you’ve come she hasn’t read a single word. She is still at page 153.” ’

  ‘What book was that?’

  ‘A history book. So my brother-in-law said to Namdeo, “You better leave.” The next day Namdeo left.’

  But hadn’t her brother-in-law encouraged Namdeo? Yes, Mallika said; but when her brother-in-law had spoken to Namdeo about his intentions, he wasn’t speaking in anger or in rebuke; he was only speaking formally. Namdeo, though, hadn’t like being questioned at all; so he had been asked to leave.

  ‘Just before Namdeo left Lonavala, he took my hand. He called me “comrade” and he gave the “red salaam”, the communist salute. This excited me. Before he went he taped something by me – it was a song I used to sing night and day. I heard later that he would play that tape to his friends in Bombay.’

  They were married four months later. After the schoolgirl romance, the sexual side of marriage had been disagreeable for her. That was one of the things she had written about openly in her book. ‘The pleasure came when the routine started. It was then that I started getting the pleasure. The psychological pressure lessened with the experience.’ She hadn’t had any idea of the sexual give-and-take in a relationship. And it amazed her, it enchanted her, to be able to give her body and herself to someone she loved. She wrote of this in her book, and people reacted in different ways to her frankness. Some people ‘threw themselves at her feet’ in admiration; some people abused her.

  The marriage itself came under another strain almost at once. ‘Within two months of our marriage the Panther movement started breaking up. Dalits stay in small settlements and pockets, little groups. Each pocket and settlement began to have its own leader, and poisonous things began to be said about Namdeo in those settlements. His marriage to me added to his troubles. I was the daughter of a well-known communist, and the Dalits don’t like communists. The reason for that is simple. Dr Ambedkar, the hero of the Dalits, didn’t like communism. Every Dalit has Dr Ambedkar’s picture in his house. So the Dalits hate communists.

  ‘The next year, 1975, there was the Emergency. There were something like 350 court cases against the Dalit Panthers – speeches, fighting, etc. The government withdrew all those cases when the Panthers supported the Emergency. That wasn’t really what Namdeo wanted to do. And though he never said anything about it, I feel that was when he began to feel compromised. But that was when I, too, needed him most – in July of that year I had had my child. I needed Namdeo, and I felt he was neglecting me.’

  ‘Because of political pressure?’

  ‘His setbacks and frustration. That helped to send him away from me. So his political life had an effect on his personal life.’

  ‘Do you still find him an attractive man?’

  ‘Much water has flowed down the Ganges, but if he were to come in this room now, I would feel like a young girl. I would feel I had just fallen in love with him. Nothing has really changed in that. There are many other men who may be physically more attractive or intellectually superior. But I don’t want them.’

  I asked her about the ‘five-star life’ that – according to his critics – had come to Namdeo as a Dalit Panther, a man in the news.

  Mallika said, ‘This downward journey began right at the Emergency.’

  Namdeo’s mother had got up from her mat in the front room. Through the doorway I saw her in the kitchen, a thin dark figure in dark clothes, moving silently, like a shadow.

  Mallika said, ‘Namdeo is a born politician. If he decides tomorrow to write his autobiography, there would be just a page for me. That is why his political ups and downs had its repercussions on his private life. This is one of the questions I asked in my book. Why should this affect me? Why isn’t he helping me with my life?

  ‘After the Emergency he became unpredictable. His friends in the underworld began giving him money. One day he would have 10,000 rupees. The next day he wouldn’t have a rupee. And we both had a common trait – money never stuck to us. Namdeo used to say it was middle class to keep money in the bank. So whatever money he had he spent – and on high living.’

  Ever since 1975, just a year or so after its time of glory (and a year or so after Mallika’s Lonavala romance), the Dalit movement had been in decay. She used an English word: numb. The movement fragmented and fragmented again, and there were allegations and counter-allegations about money being taken by various people from various sources. The Dalits, as a result, had lost faith in the people who had been their leaders.

  It was now five o’clock. We had been with Mallika for three hours. And at this moment – when our meeting would have been ending, if he had been there for it – Namdeo appeared. His mother was still in the kitchen.

  And it was as Mallika had said: Namdeo was in the house; she was aware of his presence; her thoughts were of him. She began to speak to us with only half a mind – speaking simple pieties about the Dalit movement – but then she calmed down again.

  I asked about the violent sexual imagery in some of Namdeo’s poems, the conflation of sex and excrement and degradation. When she had married Namdeo, her thoughts had been all of romance; even the sexual side of marriage had shocked her. Had she, after that first shock, become wholly accepting? Wasn’t she still unsettled, just a little, by certain things in Namdeo’s poetry?

  No; she wasn’t unsettled in any way. What she felt, more than shock at some of the words and images, was Namdeo’s great power as a poet. ‘It’s quite true and pure poetry. It’s not just an imitation. I look upon him as one of the greatest poets in Marathi. We’ve had people who’ve changed the course of poetry. He’s one of them. He’s a milestone.’ She spoke the last words in English.

  Namdeo came in from the kitchen to the little room where we were. His glasses were on his forehead. He smiled and was polite. He made no reference to the meeting he hadn’t come for. He said only that there were people waiting for him, and he couldn’t stay to talk.

  He was busy that day with his political work. He was organizing a demonstration by prostitutes in the Golpitha district, he said. He showed the black-and-white posters he had just picked up from the printers. He asked whether I would like to come to that demonstration. I said yes. He gave me a copy of the poster, and we arranged to meet at the house the day after the demonstration, when he would have more time. And then he was out of the room.

  I asked Mallika, ‘Does he show you his poems?’

  ‘If he writes something here, he will show it to me. If he writes it somewhere else, he will show it to the person nearest him, whether that person understands poetry or not.’

  All the shocks of her relationship with Namdeo appeared now to lie in the past – the discovery, for instance, in the first year of their marriage, that he had a venereal disease. She had written about that, and about other discoveries she had made. She lived more easily now with the things she had written about; and she thought her life with Namdeo could go on forever as it was going on now: ‘a middle-class family state’. She was not, besides, in a position to do anything extreme: she always had to think of her child.

  ‘I want the child to become my friend. I don’t want the child to grow up like his father – the negative aspects.’

  ‘What negative aspects?’

  ‘Raging, cursing. The movement is the first thing Namdeo thinks about. So, whatever our relationship, he will never break his ties to the movement.’

  The movement was now stalled. People might come together on certain issues; they might shout slogans and march. But people no longer had a direction or a purpose.

  I told her about the long line of people I had seen on the way in from the airport. What would their mood have been, waiting to
pay tribute to the long-dead Ambedkar?

  ‘Emotional. Dalits will sacrifice anything and everything for Ambedkar. He is not an extra god for them. He is God. They would slaughter their wife. Anything for Ambedkar.’

  Charu added on his own, ‘Like Christ to the Christians.’

  Mallika agreed.

  I asked whether she had been supported by any religious faith during these years.

  ‘Whenever things were bad I turned to myself.’

  ‘No faith?’

  ‘I have faith in myself. I have faith only in my own existence.’

  The first part of Mallika’s book had ended (in Charu’s spoken translation): ‘Male ego is the most hideous thing in our present society. Women find quite a pleasure in boosting it. It reminds me of a story in which the tree itself gave its branch to a woodcutter who had only an axe-blade and no handle … I do not believe that for anybody called Namdeo I should surrender my entire life.’ But the book was also an account of her obsession with the man and his poetry and his cause, and her consequent loss of freedom. The second part of the book ended: This has been the journey of a defeated mind.’ And though what she had done had been done for the sake of a man, she had always been alone. There was nobody with me.’

  Charu and I got ready to leave. And now many of the details of the house had a fuller meaning: the photographs of Mallika’s father and mother, the colour snaps of Namdeo, the red flag (made by Mallika’s son) in the front room, the dark, shadow-like, silent figure of Namdeo’s mother who had had a breakdown many years before (and was about to die now), the framed certificate to Namdeo from the Bombay Russian House of Culture, the icon-picture of Dr Ambedkar, the poster for the prostitutes’ meeting Namdeo was planning. On one wall, above the very big colour photograph of a white baby (Mallika said she simply liked the picture) there was a framed drawing by her son: brown rocks, black boulder, red sun, black birds. In the up-and-down scratching of the brown crayon, which had given volume and solidity to the rocks, I had seen a great subtlety, and had thought that the picture was a contemporary Chinese print.

  The prostitutes’ meeting that Namdeo was organizing in Golpitha was to be on Tuesday. On Sunday there was an item in a newspaper that I was to be the ‘chief guest’ at the meeting. Other newspapers picked up the item the next day; and though people I knew in Bombay began to telephone me, some with worry, some with amusement, I didn’t think the newspaper story was of any consequence. I thought that misconceptions or exaggerations of that nature would blow away.

  From the impression of busyness Namdeo had given, and from the serious-looking black-and-white Dalit Panther poster, I expected the meeting to be quite an event. But when Charu and I went we found hardly anything. There were Dalit Panther banners across some lanes; there were many policemen and police vehicles about; but there seemed to be no extraordinary stir.

  We had gone early, to get something of the atmosphere of the brothel area. We went walking in the narrow lanes: the lights, the signboards, the booths, the people sitting out, some on string beds, in the shadows at the side of the lanes; the piles of wet rubbish, the smell of drains; prostitutes and their ‘mistresses’ and moneylenders and prostitutes’ clients all part of the same display, the mixture of sex and innocence and degradation as undermining as in the poems of Namdeo’s that the area had inspired.

  The evening life of the area was going on. The prospect of Namdeo’s Dalit Panther meeting – to protest against what was seen – was hardly causing a tremor. The meeting was to take place at the end of one of the lanes, dark and without motor traffic, but full of activity, with a walking space only in the middle, between the booths and stalls and the string beds. In bright light at the end of the lane, on a platform spread with white sheets, seated musicians were playing country melodies.

  No one seemed to be attending. But as Charu and I got nearer, men with cameras, and men and women whom Charu recognized as newspaper reporters, came out from the shadows. And Charu and I understood that, for that evening, so far as the newspapers were concerned, we were the story.

  I thought we should go away. Charu and I turned and walked back to the other end of the lane. The newspaper people followed us. When we were at the end of the lane, and near a brighter main road, Charu said it would be wrong to leave just like that. We would anatagonize the newspaper people, who had given up their evening for this event; and they might go away and write hostile stories. He thought it would be better for him to go and talk to the newspaper people – he knew them: some were his friends – and explain matters to them.

  He led me to a cigarette stall, and asked me to stand there and wait for him. He went back down the lane, and was soon lost in the darkness and the crowd. But the photographers didn’t go away. They stayed a few feet from me, keeping their eyes on me (in case I tried to run off), while the musicians, their white platform bright and distant at the end of the dark lane, played their rocking country rhythms. All at once a photographer took a picture; and at that flash all the photographers began to click and flash away, creating the effect of dud fireworks around me.

  At last Charu came back. He had news. Namdeo had arrived, and – unusually – Mallika had come with him. It was essential now for me to go back and be with them for a little, Charu said. If I didn’t do that, they might feel that I was letting them down. Already, Charu said, even if I wasn’t aware of it, and couldn’t understand the reason for it, a certain amount of caste hostility was building up in the people of the lane, who had witnessed our coming and going. It would take just one little spark for there to be trouble. There was another reason, Charu said, why I should go and be with Namdeo and Mallika. Mallika, after all the time she had given me, had gone to the further trouble of writing me a long letter in Marathi; she had given him the letter to pass to me.

  A length of matting covered by some kind of cloth, a version of a red carpet, had been laid down the middle of the wet, dirty lane. Down that we walked, back towards the musicians, who were playing on. We turned into a little room: Mallika was there, welcoming, smiling, in a fresh sari, and Namdeo. I was glad to see them, glad that Charu had made me come back. Women of the area garlanded me. It was what the photographers wanted; and it was those happy pictures – rather than the furtive ones in the dark lane – that made the newspapers the next day.

  In the taxi back, Charu translated Mallika’s letter: many sheets of foolscap in a beautiful, stylish script. She was concerned that I might not have understood the two sides of her way of feeling: her love of freedom, her love for Namdeo. But she had, in fact, said it all when we had met.

  We went to see Namdeo the next day at the house. That was the arrangement we had made some days before. But Charu was nervous, and even worried. We hadn’t stayed for Namdeo’s meeting; he might have felt that we had walked out on him. He might have felt that we had damaged him politically, and there was no knowing what he might do. He was an unpredictable man.

  When we got to the house Mallika told us that Namdeo was there. He was inside, eating. He came out and greeted us and right away went back in. We saw all the day’s newspapers in the front room: they had been unfolded and looked at. I hadn’t read the stories that had accompanied the photographs. Charu had; and out of a wish to make peace for both of us (and rebuking me for not having accepted Namdeo’s offer of lunch when it had been made some days before), he settled down, at Mallika’s invitation, and with Mallika serving him, to eat an enormous meal in the front room. He ate all she gave him, and then he asked for more.

  But Charu had been too nervous. Mallika was happy with the way the evening had gone. She even wanted me to know that the musicians at the meeting had been part of her father’s folk-song troupe. Namdeo was very happy. He was eating at the back, but that didn’t mean anything. When the eating was over, Charu’s in the front room, and Namdeo’s in the back room, we all met in perfect amity in the back room, with the olive-green metal wardrobe with the tall mirror, and the bronze-coloured lamp-stand; and Namdeo made it c
lear that he was ready, as he had promised, to give me the whole afternoon.

  Still, bearing in mind what Charu had said, I didn’t think I should talk right away about the prostitutes’ meeting. I thought I would begin with his poetry. I told him about the early poem Charu had translated for me, ‘The Way to the Shrine’. I asked about the sexual violence of that poem and other, later poems of his I had got to know.

  He replied at great length. Charu, perhaps out of a continuing nervousness, and perhaps also out of his interest in literary matters, allowed Namdeo to talk for a long time before he translated or summed up; and Namdeo talked slowly, reflectively.

  In the middle of Namdeo’s Marathi I caught the English words not sexual. He said ‘The Way to the Shrine’ was not one of his best poems. He gave this interpretation of the poem. The poet was like an orphan in the land of his birth. The shrine that the poet was going towards was a real place, a famous sea-side mosque in Bombay; but Bombay was a cosmopolitan city, and the shrine of the poet’s pilgrimage could be any of the city’s sacred places. The ‘darkness in the sari’ and ‘the ghost in the footpath’ was the social system into which the poet had been born. The darkness in the sari was not a sexual image – even the lowest woman would have her own code. The darkness in the sari meant ignorance: the poet had spent much of his life washing away this darkness, this ignorance.

  But he had written better poems. He wished I had got to know some of those. He had written a poem about water. It was quite a well-known poem.

  Water is taught caste prejudices …

  That idea about water was important to him. He referred to it more than once. It came from his memories of the strict untouchability that prevailed in the village near Poona where he had grown up. The upper castes used the river upstream; the scheduled castes used the river downstream; and the upper castes used the river first.