India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘And if he does get the 42 rupees for the ticket back,’ Deviah said, ‘he will probably travel without a ticket.’

  The presentation of need was extraordinary. Perhaps it was too much of a production, with the baby and the bottle and the sacking tunic. But the wild-eyed man looked a genuine wreck, genuinely ill and wasted.

  Prakash was cool. Leading us now to his car, as though the lecture was almost over, he said that people like that didn’t come from the traditional begging groups or castes. They fell into the way of life by accident, or example, or encouragement; they were surprised by the rewards. And then, Prakash added, with an alliterative flourish, ‘They become addicted and adjusted.’

  (And Prakash was right. More than a week later, when Deviah and I were talking to a state legislator in his room at the legislators’ hostel, this wretched man appeared, with the baby and the milk bottle, but without the sacking tunic, and without the official-looking form that said his wife was in the cancer hospital. The legislator’s assistants drove the man away immediately, and he went off without a word. He wasn’t as wild-eyed as he had been at Prakash’s; his skinned nose had begun to heal, and he looked curiously rested. He was as careful with the baby as he had been at Prakash’s; perhaps he had borrowed it against a deposit of some kind.)

  We went on in Prakash’s car through the dusty roads to the State Guest House. Minister at home, minister here too: people jumped about at his appearance. I began to feel the range of his power, began a little to see Karnataka through Prakash’s eyes; though the room we were shown into, for our private talk, was a rough little hostel bedroom with a high urine smell, and with the one table in it too low for me to write on.

  We went to the main guest house. It was a big stone building in the centre of the tawny grounds. When we were settled in the wide verandah on the upper floor, I asked Prakash about political power in India. How did people come by it? What Were a man’s qualifications for power?

  Caste, he said, was the first thing of importance. A man looking for office or a political career would have to be of a suitable caste. That meant belonging to the dominant caste of the area. He would also, of course, have to be someone who could get the support of his caste; that meant he would have to be of some standing in the community, well connected and well known. And since it seldom happened that the votes of a single caste could win a man an election, a candidate needed a political party; he needed that to get the votes of the other castes. So the whole parliamentary business of political parties and elections made sense in India. It encouraged co-operation and compromise; the very multiplicity of Indian castes and communities made for some kind of balance.

  Power achieved here, Prakash said, was very great, in the surroundings of Indian life, the surroundings of struggle and making do. And the fall, the loss of power, was equally great, and could be very hard to bear.

  The chairs in the stone verandah were heavy and ugly, government chairs, bleached and dulled by sunlight; and there were very many of them. The verandah, not yet in direct light, was nevertheless full of glare. The trees in the brown-grass grounds were few; the shadows emphasized the light and the dryness. The big rolled-up green blinds were the only decorative touch in the verandah, and they added to the bare, dull, official feeling of the State Guest House.

  Prakash said, ‘When the average politician falls he will have nowhere to go, and no cushion. He may be an advocate in a country area, or a son of a peasant or landlord, or son or brother of a petty merchant; but not a man with a lot of money. And many may not come from a movement.’

  ‘Movement?’

  ‘Movement would be the independence movement, or the movement against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, or the peasant movement here in this state, or the labour movement, or any people’s movement. When you don’t come from such a movement, and you have nothing to fall back upon when you lose power, you are in a hurry to make money.

  The power gives so much of comfort, perks, and status – a bungalow, all fully furnished, all personal attendants and secretarial staff. A chauffeur-driven car, and facilities to stay in government bungalows and guest houses when you travel out, and air tickets – you can fly around at the expense of the government. But when you come out of power, if you have no means, you may have to go back to the semi-urban area from where you came. There you can hardly afford to have a secretary or servants. You may have one servant, but not the bunch of servants you had as a minister. Or the free telephone calls.’

  Prakash appeared to be speaking against these things, but I thought I could detect a certain lingering over the details of privilege. He had been a minister for six years, and now his government, from what I could decipher in the newspapers, was in some trouble.

  I said, ‘Servants. You talk a lot about servants. Are servants very important to these men from the country areas?’

  Prakash was a lawyer, ironic, bright: he detected my drift. He said, ‘In the good old days too many servants, for the big landlords, the zamindars, and the feudals, gave a status. Today it is the power. Servants are there to make your life comfortable. If you are a minister, and you travel on an aeroplane, there will be somebody to buy you a ticket. There will always be a block of seats for the government, and these will be kept till the last minute; so there is always a chance that you will get a ticket. And your P.A., your personal assistant, will come right up to the airport to see you off – Prakash again lingering over the details, savouring the things he still enjoyed – ‘and at the destination somebody will come and receive you. There will be a vehicle at your disposal, and your reservation of accommodation has already been made.

  ‘But as a man without power’ – and now, as a preacher painting a picture of purgatory, to balance the heaven of success, Prakash began to darken the details of Indian air travel – ‘many a time you will not know where to buy a ticket, where to stand in a queue, how to get your baggage checked. In a western society, which is so very orderly, between a man with privileges and a common man there won’t be a big gap in the physical arrangement of life, arrangement of travel and comforts and stay.

  ‘Even in western countries it is an innate thing in a man to look to be in power. And it is all the more so in India, because the power means everything here. When an American president leaves the White House, it makes no difference as far as his lifestyle is concerned, and his physical comforts. Many a time in India it wouldn’t be like that, unless you have a will to live in austerity, like the old gods of the Gandhian era.

  ‘Our new-generation politicians don’t have that spiritual power, and they feel the difference. They try for a while, after they have fallen, to capitalize on their so-called contacts with the authorities. They undertake certain commissions for people who want things done. But those contacts very soon go away. And the industrialist who courted you drives by in his big car to his rich house in his nice area, and he doesn’t even look at you.

  ‘Because of industrialization, and the green revolution in the rural areas, a new class of nouveau-riche persons are emerging, and these people are being exposed for the first time to university education, comfortable urban life, stylish living, and western influences – materialistic comforts. During this transition period, we are slowly cutting from the moral ethos of our grandfathers, and at the same time we don’t have the westerner’s idea of discipline and social justice. At the moment things are chaotic here.’

  I would have liked him to talk more personally. But it wasn’t easy. The political crisis in his government, the glimpse of the possibility of the end of things, was encouraging him to put a distance between himself and the delights of power. It was at the same time bringing out his political combativeness. It was making him moralize in an old-fashioned way (almost as though he had already left office) about Gandhianism, materialism, and the dangers to India of the super computer the people in Delhi were talking about.

  At last he said, ‘I wasn’t rich, but I wasn’t poor. My family could live in comfort and with securit
y. This was in Bellary. I have land there, and much of what I needed was produced on my land – millet, rice, tamarind, chili, vegetables, and fuel. I can go back any time. But after six years in office here I can notice a change in my children. Their formative years have been spent in this opulence and status, and people giving so much concern and attention to them. Now they don’t wish to go back to the village. For me it’s nothing.

  ‘Bellary is very hot. And many of these relatives and friends of mine feel a little awestruck when they come here. The friends may have a little jealousy, friends from the village, or people who worked along with me in the old days and have seen me walking the streets of a small place. Now they feel I’ve become all-important, and there is a jealousy – and this is apart from the ruthlessness of the system, where my own colleagues are pulling down my legs when I am climbing up fast. This is innate in the system, but the jealousy is different.

  ‘Even my voter, he will be more comfortable to talk to me when I am there, in my abode. But when he comes here and sits on a sofa’ – it was interesting, getting this idea of the world as it appeared to Prakash’s voter, seeing even the drabness of the State Guest House transformed – ‘when he sits here, with this big garden, lawn, police people, attendants, it makes him ill at ease, and immediately he feels I am too far away, and that personal equation goes away or changes.’

  Car doors banged outside the Guest House. Someone, or some party, had arrived. Very quickly after the banging of the doors a briskly moving group of men in coloured robes came up the steps and walked through the inner room: big men in big shoes, taking firm strides. I saw this only at an angle; I was sitting slightly turned away from the inner room. And then Prakash, lowering his voice, told me it was the Dalai Lama who had arrived.

  It was a little unlikely, but I was half prepared. I knew that the Dalai Lama was on tour in India. In Bombay I had read in the newspaper one day that the Dalai Lama was coming to the city to visit Buddhists there. I wasn’t sure what was meant by that. When people in Bombay spoke of Buddhists they didn’t mean Tibetans; they were more likely to mean Dalit neo-Buddhists. But I hadn’t asked further about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Bombay. And now, without any announcement I had heard of, with only a few cars, and few state policemen, he had come even further south, and was really far from home.

  The Dalai Lama moved so fast that, almost as soon as Prakash had told me who it was, the figure had gone through the inner room, half hidden by an assistant walking close to him, swinging a briefcase. The end of a stride, the swing of the assistant’s briefcase – that was all I had really caught.

  Afterwards, monks came out to the wide verandah where we were sitting. After the rush of their arrival, they were calmer. From the bareness of the verandah they looked down at the scorched lawn and gardens. Their heads were shaved, and they wore sweaters below their dark-red robes. It seemed at first that they were only staring at the strange aspect of the Indian South. But they were looking for their followers.

  Prakash told me there was a Tibetan ‘camp’ near Mysore City, about 100 miles to the south. There, on land that had been given them by the Indian government, the Tibetans grew maize, did dairy farming, and knitted their distinctive sweaters. There had been no Tibetans in the grounds of the State Guest House when we had arrived. But gradually, in small informal groups, the Tibetans from the Mysore City camp – who had been waiting in the streets outside – began to appear on the burnt lawn, the women in traditional Tibetan dress, the men in jeans, bright-faced, handsome people, who perhaps now, after more than a generation away, were beginning to lose touch with home: another Asian dispossession, part of the historical flux.

  My thoughts for some time were with those people. The monks remained on the verandah, looking out, as though they wanted to fix their gaze for a while on each person in the small, scattered, waiting groups. And even when Prakash began to speak again, I felt we were continuing to be part of that wordless Tibetan scene.

  Prakash said, ‘Our people, because of the long tradition of the rajas and maharajas and feudal lords, they always look with awe and fear on the seat of power, and at the same time they nourish a dislike and hatred towards the seat of power. But there is a dichotomy. They like an accessible, simple, compassionate, benevolent man in the seat of power. But at the same time they have a mental picture of power – of pomp, pageantry, authority and aristocracy. These things don’t go together many times.

  ‘In a case like me, they would like to see me as their good old humble country lawyer – as before 1983, when I came to power and became a minister. But they will respect my authority only if I’m surrounded by a group of officers, and if I myself assume postures.

  ‘On the 16th of February 1983 I took the oath of secrecy and office as a minister at Bangalore. On the same day there was a communal disturbance at Bellary – with a police firing, seven deaths, arson and looting. I immediately that night left for Bellary by car, 200 miles down. And I immediately assumed the authority there, and started directing the District Inspector of Police, the Deputy Commissioner of Bellary, and other officers. And I was able to control the disturbance in a day.

  ‘As a lawyer, I had appeared before the Deputy Commissioner of Bellary in several cases, where I used to address him as “Your Honour”. But, as a minister, there was a transformation. I started giving him commands. Within a day there was a change in me. And people wouldn’t have liked it, and the situation wouldn’t have been controlled, if I had just been a mofussil lawyer. It’s a very strange society we’ve created. Democracy has made it possible for people like us to have a different role.’

  And his government had cut down on ministerial pomp. There had been a lot more in the Congress days: police escorts, red lights flashing to warn off cars, sirens. In those days people couldn’t just turn up at the ministers’ houses; they had to have an appointment.

  Power came from the people. The people were poor; but the power they gave was intoxicating. As high as a man could be taken up, so low, when he lost power, he could be cast down. So the legislators were in a frenzy from the start, and in constant movement, like a group of penguins in an Antarctic blizzard, the ones at the outer rim seeking to work their way through the seething mass to the warm centre. The politics of the state, the comings and goings which filled the local newspapers, were the politics of alignment and realignment. When a majority became shaky, a politician’s vote in the chamber became an asset: it could be sold any number of times. Recently (I heard this from another politician), there had been 10 very difficult men who required a lakh of rupees, 100,000 rupees, £4000, for every vote they cast in the chamber. The government and opposition parties had to raise funds to meet these expenses; the ways they chose to raise those funds could be controversial.

  The politics of the state, as reported in the newspapers, were opaque to the visitor. In the politics of alignment and realignment there were no principles or programmes. There were only enemies or allies: penguin politics. What was true of this state, Karnataka, was true of other states as well. There were very many columns of the newspapers that one could ignore, or take as read. Political knowledge didn’t come from learning the names, just as computer skill didn’t come from trying to learn a computer programme by heart. The programmes could be changed or abandoned; the politicians could disappear, or move about very fast.

  It seemed miraculous that there was government at all. But, with the growth of the Indian economy, active governments generated the greatest profit for all. And out of the political frenzy there had come a kind of balance: for the first time in the history of India, perhaps, most people felt that they or their representatives, someone of their group, had a chance of getting to the warm centre of power and money.

  Prakash was that day in the midst of yet another crisis of some sort, which was taking up a lot of space in the newspapers. We walked down to the asphalted area around the Guest House, where four or five middle-aged men, chewing pan, in fresh cream-coloured homespun tunics and
dhotis, with an air about them of sweet conspiracy, were waiting for him in the bright light – a little distance away from the cars and khaki-clad policemen of the Dalai Lama’s party. Legislators were being asked that day to sign a loyalty statement, and there was much of the eternal counting of Gandhi-capped heads. Homespun clothes, once the clothes of the poor, now no longer worn by the poor, worn only by the men to whom the poor had given power.

  People of all conditions spoke with respect of the days of the old maharajas, and there was a reminder of old Mysore glory in the three-mile-long wall of the palace park in the centre of Bangalore. The palace there had been only the summer palace of the maharajas. It stood deep within the park and couldn’t be seen from the road. The park itself, immensely valuable as land alone, was now the subject of litigation, and was closed to the public.

  The main palace was in Mysore City, 100 miles to the south. I heard from Deviah that there was still a barber in Mysore City who had been in the service of the 25th and last maharaja. There was also a brahmin who had acted as a pundit of some sort to the maharaja. The barber was said to be full of stories; but Deviah and I went to Mysore one day to see the brahmin.

  The road was good, one of the roads of the old Mysore State. It was shaded for long stretches by the big rain trees that had been planted in the time of the maharajas, and were now looked upon almost as part of the continuing bounty of the maharajas. And there were rich green fields that had come into being because of the irrigation works undertaken by the famous chief minister of the 24th maharaja.

  Mysore City was built around the palace. We had a glimpse of part of the grounds as we entered the city. Tempting; but that spaciousness and splendour were for later. Our business that morning lay in the city itself, in a small concrete marriage hall, which the former pundit of the maharaja was now supervising. The marriage hall was new and quite ordinary-looking, but it belonged to a foundation that had been set up by the ninth-century philosopher Shankaracharya. So the pundit, though he might appear to be doing commercial work, was still close to religion.