India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  He had a memory of something that had happened when he was in the second standard. The village children didn’t have caste prejudices; they would play together. One day he went bathing in a pond with some upper-caste boys. The guard spotted him and threw stones at him. He had defiled the pond. He was chased and stoned. He ran bleeding back to his own settlement and hid there. His mother was abused, and afterwards his mother beat him for defiling the pond and causing trouble.

  He thought he was born in 1940, but he couldn’t be sure. Even at school – this would have been in 1951 or 1952 – the scheduled-caste boys would have to sit outside the school-room. They weren’t allowed to touch any source of water; water had to be poured into their cupped hands. A teacher couldn’t touch a scheduled-caste child. When a teacher wanted to punish a child from one of those castes, he threw things at the child.

  His family was of the Mahar caste. They lived in a joint family: the wives and children of three brothers, about 25 people in all, lived in one house. Namdeo’s father didn’t live in the house; he had migrated to Bombay, leaving his family behind. The family had land. They lived by farming, and also by the traditional duties of their caste.

  As Namdeo was talking of the traditional duties of the Mahars in his native village, we were joined in the small inner room by a man I had seen in the house before, one of those silent, unintroduced, unexplained people who appeared to have the freedom of the house. This small, dark man, with a thick moustache and an orange-coloured tunic, stood beside Namdeo’s chair, and listened with especial attention now, shaking his head in solemn affirmation as Namdeo spoke of the duties of Mahars.

  Mahars had to summon people to the revenue department. That was an official duty, for the government, and in the old days it could mean travelling long distances in all kinds of weather. Other duties were more traditional. When someone in the village died, it was the Mahars who were entrusted with the task of informing all the relatives of the dead person. Mahars also disposed of dead bodies. In return, the Mahars were given an allowance of grain three times a year by the upper-caste villagers.

  The friend of the house solemnly swung his head from side to side, staring down at a point half-way to the floor, so that it was as if, while Namdeo spoke, the friend of the house was nostalgically remembering the old ways.

  He repeated now, ‘Three times a year.’

  Mahars had another privilege. This was like a daily ritual, and Namdeo spoke long about it, and the friend of the house listened and looked down at the floor and shook his head.

  Mahars, Namdeo said, had the right to call on the upper-caste houses every day and ask for bread. If there were 10 Mahar households in a village they would divide the upper-caste households among themselves, and each Mahar household would be allotted certain caste households to call on. The Mahar who had that task would leave his house early in the morning with a woven basket or a metal basket on his head. When he got to the upper-caste house he would make his obeisance and ask for bread. He would ask for bread twice. If the bread wasn’t given then, it was the right of the Mahar absolutely to demand it. The Mahars did this every morning. And the upper-caste people would give bread, letting the bread fall into the basket, without themselves touching the basket.

  ‘Without touching,’ the friend said.

  This was the way the caste system worked when it was still strong, before 1955. After that it began to break down. Instead of grain and certain rights, Mahars could be offered money for what they did; but sometimes they weren’t offered anything. So while their duties in the village remained the same, such rights as they had had began to diminish. Ambedkar was powerful at that time; and Mahars and other scheduled-caste people began then to make political demands.

  Among the scheduled castes in that area, Mahars were the only ones with the right to own land. That was why Namdeo’s family had land and made a certain amount of money from farming. That right of the Mahars, to own land, had come about for an interesting reason.

  Once upon a time, there was a raja of Bidar. He wanted to send his daughter to a certain place. The Mahars were the people who traditionally carried the palanquins, and the raja ordered the local Mahars to carry his daughter to where she had to go. The Mahars understood the seriousness of what they had been asked to do; as a precaution, to avoid accident or misunderstanding, they castrated themselves before setting out. The raja’s enemies started to spread a story that the raja’s daughter had been carnally used by the Mahars. The raja summoned the Mahars and questioned them. They displayed themselves to him, and said they had castrated themselves before taking the princess. The raja was so pleased he gave the Mahars land. That was how the Mahars became the only scheduled caste in the area to own land.

  Namdeo had seemed to take much pleasure in the romantic tale; just as, earlier, encouraged by his friend, he had seemed, with something like nostalgia, to call up the caste practices of his village. I asked Charu to ask him about this nostalgia: I thought I might have missed something.

  Namdeo spoke for a long time, and his friend in the orange-coloured tunic was as encouraging as always.

  Finally Charu reported: ‘He’s fully aware of the pain he’s undergone. But there is also a poet and writer in him, and as a poet and writer he wishes to search out his own roots. Pain has always been part of his psychology. There was no question in the old days of complaining. You were a Mahar and you did your duties, and that was that.’

  It wasn’t all pain for him in the village. The village teacher had the prejudices of his caste, and he neglected Namdeo. But this neglect gave Namdeo some freedom as a child. He enjoyed taking the cattle out to graze; he went swimming in the river.

  In 1958, when he was seventeen or eighteen, and in the fourth standard, he left his village and came to Bombay. He remembered that Mother India, with the actress Nargis, was showing in the cinemas. He stayed in a slum area with one of his uncles, who had two rooms in a chawl. The chawl was called ‘Dhor Chawl’, after the Dhor caste, a caste who disposed of dead cattle and ran the tanneries. Only people of that caste were living in the chawl. So Namdeo didn’t leave caste behind in his village; caste followed him to Bombay.

  He didn’t go out to work. He went to school. In the school in the village he had been a failure in the fourth standard; in Bombay, in the same standard, he stood first. It was then, too, that he began writing poetry.

  All his poems came straight out, ‘in a flow’. He had read about Bob Dylan and Eldridge Cleaver. And he had read some Negro poets; and Leroi Jones. He had read them in English. He understood English, though he couldn’t speak it. There was no direct influence, but he was aware of those poets. He also knew Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Rilke, Baudelaire, Lorca, the last four in English translations. He’d read all the major mid-20th-century poets.

  And though, from a distance, his career seemed to be like the careers of a number of Black Power people in the United States – he had become someone the newspapers and magazines wrote about, and in the end he had become more famous than his cause – yet, talking to him in this little room of the Bombay house, I felt that he was the prisoner of an Indian past no one outside could truly understand. It had been harder for him to break out, to reject the past, than it had been for black people in the United States. And now Namdeo was again, if in a different way, a prisoner of India, with its multiplicity of movements and desperate needs; he could easily sink again. It wasn’t really possible for him, as it might have been possible for a black activist in the United States, to withdraw, to settle for ease.

  I asked whether he was now more a poet than a politician.

  ‘The roles are not separate. I am against this caste system. I express it in my politics and in my poems. Poetry is a political act. Politics is part of my poetry.’

  Only now I thought I could refer to the adventure of the previous night.

  ‘You will keep on working with the prostitutes?’

  ‘I will keep on working on various problems. Prostitutes are a major prob
lem.’

  ‘Are there Dalits who are jealous of you?’

  ‘There is a jealousy of me. There are allegations that I am a communist.’

  When he had first come out to greet us, before going in again to continue eating, he had seemed casually dressed, a man at home, with a brownish shirt and a many-coloured dhoti. In fact, he had dressed carefully. The shirt was elegant, fawn-coloured, thick and textured; and his dhoti had a plaid pattern. He fitted into the room, with its walls in an eggshell finish, and the plastic flowers in a vase on the window-sill in front of the vertical iron bars: a lot of Mallika’s taste here.

  I said, ‘Mallika says your poetry is a milestone.’

  ‘I feel surprised when people say things like that. Marathi literature is so poor. There were nice poems like Tukaram’s, and then there was nothing for hundreds of years.’

  His life was very public now. Was it possible for him to write poetry while living such a public life?

  He misunderstood the question. ‘I’m not really troubled. I don’t expect to be praised.’

  ‘Mallika said you defended her right to publish her book.’

  He didn’t make a direct comment. ‘It’s a conflict between two cultures, two backgrounds. Mallika’s mother was a traditional Hindu. Though her father was Muslim, her culture was traditional Hindu middle-class culture.’

  ‘You defended her book.’

  ‘Her book was damaging to me, it is true. My image outside was that of a progressive, and Mallika’s picture was damaging. But Mallika was right. I’ve always been an Ambedkarite. That’s been part of my being, and I feel that Mallika has a right to say what she feels about her husband.’

  Then, explaining himself, not waiting for me to ask questions, he began to speak of some of the things I might have heard about him or wanted to know about him.

  ‘My political rise started in 1971–1972. Before that I was living in that Kanthipura area in the underworld. Money was easy to come by. It was a red-light area, full of ignorance and the mafia and cruelty. It’s a cruel area, and that had an effect on me. It had a tremendous impact on my character. When you are young, you are tough and militant. Your energy can take you on to a good path or a wrong path. If I didn’t have my special past, and if I wasn’t aware of Ambedkar’s movement, I might have been one of the big men of the underworld, and I mightn’t have gone into politics. Because of the way I had been brought up, I was full of anger and ready to fight at the slightest provocation. Some of the fights I got into came close to murder. Everybody in the Bombay underworld knew me.’

  The afternoon had gone; dusk was almost upon us. Our talk had taken a long time, because Namdeo had always spoken at length, and I had had to wait for Charu’s translation or summaries. I was tired. Charu was tired, and he had missed the visiting Russian circus to which he had been hoping to take his wife that evening. I got up, ready to leave. But Namdeo didn’t want it.

  He said, ‘You haven’t asked me about my personal life.’

  And then, like a man doing what was expected of him, giving full value, he spoke the things people said about him and sometimes used against him.

  ‘I used to be a taxi-driver. From 1967 to 1971. I used to go with prostitutes. I have tried all kinds of vices. Now I’m too much normal and gentleman.’ The last sentence was in English. ‘Even after I got married, I used sometimes to go to prostitutes. When the Dalit Panthers split, I used to drink very heavily. I started the Panthers, and then they put me in a minority. It was a great blow. It saddens me still.’

  ‘Why do you think you lost your power?’

  ‘I was ahead of my time. I tried to expand the definition of Dalits – to take in all the oppressed, not just the scheduled castes. If you really want to break untouchability, you have to get into the mainstream. I wanted to be in the mainstream. That was why I wanted to expand the definition of Dalits. But the reactionaries among the Dalits didn’t want to be in the mainstream. Their feeling was that, to break communal feelings, you have to be communal yourself. And those were the people who put me in the minority.’

  Then there was his illness. That came in 1981; that was also the year he had published his last book. He had spoken in a cool, open way of his life and failings, while the friend of the house with the thick moustache and the orange or saffron tunic (looking more and more like a religious garment of some kind) had listened and looked down at a point half-way to the floor and shaken his head affirmatively from time to time. And Namdeo spoke now of his illness in the same way. It was as though he was detached from his life, and observing it from a distance. He was no longer looking for praise or approval: he spoke of Mallika’s right to publish her critical book as though the other possibility, of anger and suppression, had never entered his head.

  He had spoken of his own past violence. But he was calm now: it might, after all, have been something he had inherited from the Hindu culture around him.

  ‘What does Ambedkar mean to the Dalits?’

  ‘There was a time when we were treated like animals. Now we live like human beings. It’s all because of Ambedkar.’

  So, just as greater meaning could be read into the house with the eggshell lilac walls and the white-painted rattan chairs, so a greater understanding became possible of the long, patient line of dark men and women on one side of the road on the morning I had arrived: not just the poor of India, but an expression of the old internal cruelty of that poverty: people at the bottom, full of emotion, with no politics at that moment, just rejecting rejection.

  2

  The Secretary’s Tale

  Glimpses of the Indian Century

  Nikhil said one day, ‘I know a man here called Rajan. He is the private secretary of an influential politician and businessman. He says he met you in Calcutta in 1962.’

  I couldn’t remember, and I still didn’t remember even when Nikhil took me one afternoon to Rajan’s office. Rajan was a small, sturdy man of the South with a square, dark face. His office – or the suite of which it formed part – was one of the most spacious and stylish offices I had seen in Bombay. It was in the international style, in cool, neutral colours, and it was beautifully air-conditioned. Rajan was clearly a man of authority in that office. He wore a fawn-coloured, short-sleeved Mao outfit, which might also have passed as a version of Indian formal clothes, or might simply have been a ‘safari’ suit.

  He said, ‘You came to Calcutta in 1962, during or just after the China war. You were with some film people. In those days I myself took a great interest in films and the arts – it was the most hopeful period of my life. Someone from the Film Society at the end of one evening introduced me to you. My duty was to take you back to the drug-company guest house where you were staying.’

  The painful war in the background, the mingled smoke and autumnal mist of Calcutta, the small, ceiling-lit rooms of the Film Society, full of old office furniture: one or two moments of the vanished evening began to come back, but they were the merest pictures, hard to hold on to. And nothing remained of the end of the evening.

  ‘I was twenty-two,’ Rajan said. ‘I was working in an advertising agency. I was a kind of clerk. My salary was 315 rupees a month. I was tipped to be an assistant account executive, but that wasn’t to be.’ Three hundred and fifteen rupees, £24, a month.

  ‘When did you leave Calcutta?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Rajan said.

  And later that afternoon – while we sat outside the club house in Brabourne Stadium, the old international cricket ground of Bombay, and had tea, and watched the young cricketers practising at the nets (at the other end of the ground: the high, scaffolded back of the big stage built for the Russian ice show, part of the visiting Festival of Russia) – and on another day, in a hotel room not far from his office, beginning after his office work, and talking on until late in the evening, Rajan told me his story.

  ‘I was born in Calcutta in 1940. Our family came from the South, from what in British times was known as the province of M
adras and today is the state of Tamil Nadu. My grandfather used to be some kind of petty official in one of the law courts near the town of Tanjore. He was respected by people for his honesty and courage. Courage in the sense that if something wrong happened, or if someone asked him to do something his heart wouldn’t let him do, he would turn violent or resist it in any form he thought fit.

  ‘A Britisher was above him. He wanted my grandfather to be a witness in a lawsuit and say what was not true. I know only that it ended up in a kind of fracas, and my grandfather took off his footwear and hit the Britisher. He realized that after that life would be difficult for him in Tanjore. He decided to migrate to the North with his only son, who was a student at that time. This would have been early in the century, between 1900 and 1905. He chose to move to Calcutta, which was the British headquarters. He could make a living there and have some kind of life.

  ‘In Calcutta he stayed with some friend or distant relation till he found his feet. He got his son to learn stenography. South Indians, brahmins especially, had a better grasp of English because they were more exposed to it, and they would get jobs as secretary, stenographer, or even typist. These were probably the most widely followed professions for the South Indian or Tamil brahmins in British times – and this is something that has changed only in very recent years. Otherwise, as a class, South Indian brahmins worked as teachers or as priests or as petty clerks. Or, if they were lucky enough, they would take up a job in one of the government departments. These were the days when a 10-rupee-a-month government job was a most prized thing – it was the ultimate aspiration of the bulk of the Tamil brahmins who had done some schooling. And quite a few of them migrated to the North, to the big cities, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi.

  ‘After he settled, my grandfather lived in Howrah, on the other side of the river from Calcutta city. It was one of those typical Calcutta residential houses – a pucca house, a proper house, not kaccha, something unfinished or improvised, and it was in a respectable middle-class locality. These places could be rented. It was a locality where there were other people from the South who had similarly migrated, and it gave them some security to live among their own kind. There was no ill-feeling at that time towards South Indians in Calcutta – those times were different. In fact, South Indians were widely respected by the Bengalis. It’s quite different today. Since the 1960s South Indians in Calcutta feel they don’t belong, in spite of their having been there for many decades. Which is perhaps one reason why I left Calcutta and moved to Bombay – but that was many years later.