India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  The zamindars employed women for three rupees a day and men for five rupees a day. The minimum wage at that time was five rupees for women and nine for men. The aim of the Maoists was to create enmity between the workers and the landlords. They did this by telling the workers about the minimum wage, and encouraging them to ask for it. The landlords often refused, and brought in workers from other villages. Sometimes the landlords became rougher. The older man’s brother had been killed by a zamindar. After that, it was war: that zamindar had to be killed.

  Three attempts were made to kill the zamindar. He was shadowed, and one day, when he was on a bus, six of the Maoists got on the bus. But nothing happened. The rebels became indecisive, thinking of the other passengers; and in the confusion the zamindar got away. The second time they waited for the zamindar early one morning in a field. He came; they shot at him; they missed. The third time they got their man. A party of eight assaulted the zamindar’s house and threw pin-grenades. They killed three people: the zamindar, his mistress, and a baby. They didn’t know about the baby; the death of the baby upset them.

  After that they did only two more killings. They were just following orders at this stage. The orders were more like decisions: these decisions were made at group meetings. Their wish was to overthrow the government, and their aim, when they were dealing with people whom they had decided were ‘enemies’, was simply to kill them.

  Then the police began to move in. They threw a vice, a ‘wrench’, around the area where the Maoists were operating, and the wrench was gradually closed. Thirty Maoists were killed. The two men in the hotel room were lucky. They had surrendered to the police some time before, and were in prison, charged with the murder of the zamindar and his mistress and the baby. (This was how the story was told: it was blurred and unsatisfactory at this point. But because of the formality of the occasion, because of the time gap between what the speaker said and what came out in translation, because of the compression of the translation, it didn’t occur to me to ask further questions at the time. It was only later that the blurring became apparent.)

  The police could make no case against the two men. They couldn’t find witnesses, and the reason was that a warning had been sent out by the two men, 10 days before the hearing, that if anyone came forward to give evidence, he wouldn’t be alive the next day. This was said quite coolly in the hotel room; and the plain-clothes police officer, nodding, sucking in his breath, took it coolly too, as though it was all part of the game.

  Eventually the two men were released. Since their group had been wiped out, they had nothing to go back to – and here, though the question hadn’t been asked, they both said they had betrayed no one in their group. The younger man, the brother-in-law, said that the police had cut the ‘nerves’ on one of his feet. He showed a dark scar, like a burn mark, on the top of his sandalled foot. But even after that, the younger man said, he hadn’t given anyone away. The police officer didn’t look put out and didn’t try to interfere in what was being said; it was as though that, too, that wretchedness about the nerves and the foot, was part of the game, and everyone knew it.

  With the help of the police – and no doubt as part of the state policy of rehabilitation – the two men went into business. Neither did well. The older man went into the tomato business, deciding for some reason to ship his tomatoes all the way to Calcutta. He lost 25,000 rupees, about £1000. The brother-in-law started making beedis, cheap leaf cigarettes; he said his employees ran away with the money. Neither man looked cast down by his business failure; they both seemed quite content.

  I didn’t know what to make of what I had heard. There were so few word-pictures in what they had said, so few details. That might have been because of the translation, or because of the formality of our meeting, or because they had spoken their stories too often. There was an obviousness about them. I was reminded of the obviousness of the gangsters I had met in Bombay; they, the gangsters, were obvious because their lives were, after all, very simple. And perhaps the foot soldiers of a revolution, such as these men might have been, had to be simple people too, receiving messages simple enough for their capacities and needs.

  I asked them what they knew about Periyar. And at once, even in the crime reporter’s translation, they seemed to say more than they had done up till then – and it might have been because it wasn’t a question they were expecting.

  They honoured Periyar, the older man said. His father had been a follower of Periyar. But Periyar had struggled against caste alone; he hadn’t thought of class. ‘He shook us up, but he wasn’t relevant to our kind of struggle.’ That was the crime reporter’s first translation. Later he amended it. What had been said was, in a more literal translation, ‘We had no connection.’ And that hinted better at the caste gap between the Dravidian Movement and the Maoists.

  I asked them about the anti-religious side of Periyar’s message. The older man said they weren’t religious, but their women were. Though even the women had begun to do without brahmins in their ceremonies.

  This sounded genuine. So, right at the end, I began to feel that the two men, whatever their relationship with the police, might have been what they said they had been.

  Before they left, the brother-in-law asked to use the bathroom. I had my misgivings, but the police officer waved the man into the bathroom. We waited. There was no sound of a flush. Then the man came out; and carefully closed the door behind him.

  Later, opening that carefully closed bathroom door, I found the toilet bowl unflushed, and the seat and floor pissed over. Was it social inexperience alone? Or was there also – in this man who had fought the class war – some very deep caste feeling about the uncleanliness of latrines: places so unclean they were beneath one’s notice, places for other people to notice, other people to clean?

  I talked this over with Suresh, the sports writer, a day or so later. He said the two men were among the lowest of the low. However little I might have been aware of it, they would have stood out in the hotel lobby. They were far below the shudras, and quite outside the reach of the Dravidian Movement. Would they have had any idea of what was religiously clean and unclean? At that level, Suresh said, though caste and community distinctions might not be easily visible to people above, they were nevertheless rigidly followed.

  The shirt and long dhoti and oily long hair of both men had probably been modelled on some star of the popular Tamil cinema. This care with their appearance was a sign that they had moved forward, had been shaken out of their village ways. The little paunches were also an aspect of the self-respect that had come to them with their rehabilitation. They had said that they had given up the revolution, and wanted now only to look after their families. And that, Suresh said – whatever other ambiguities there might have been in their stories – felt true.

  I went to say goodbye to Sugar. He was always there in his little ground-floor apartment, a prisoner of his reputation.

  I found him giving advice to a man who had brought a computer print-out of two horoscopes. A marriage was being considered, and Sugar was giving an opinion about the horoscopes. He was being firm. The girl’s horoscope was not suitable; in six months or so the boy would find someone more suitable. The inquirer, a high-up civil servant, didn’t seem to mind. He was from the boy’s side. In this business of match-making boys had the whip hand; girls and their families were the suppliants.

  I said, ‘Does the girl have a bad horoscope?’

  ‘Not bad,’ Sugar said. ‘Not suitable.’

  It was strange, finding him, with his own melancholy, so ready to play the tyrant as a seer. I felt that, in spite of what he had said about the selfishness and falsity of the people who came to see him, and what he had said about giving it all up, he took pleasure in his holy man’s work and reputation.

  Then he must have felt he had to make me some offering. He made it in the way that was now natural to him.

  He looked at me across the little room and said, ‘When I saw you in the Himalayas
in 1962, your face was bright. It was one of the things that attracted me to you. Now you look troubled. Has it to do with your life? Your work?’

  I said, ‘I was more troubled in 1962. But I was younger. Like you.’

  ‘Will you be coming back to Madras again? Come and see me. Come and see me before two years.’ He was exercising his gifts of prophecy on himself. ‘After two years – ’

  He shook his head and, slumped in his chair, his illness and solitude now like pure burdens, he let his glance take in the little space that he had made his own – the drawing-sleeping, without the furniture jumble I had first seen there, with the holy pictures on the wall and the hanging shelves with his headache tablets, the adjoining hall between the kitchen, which he couldn’t clean himself and which he could allow no one else to clean, and the temple room with its forbidding images – the little space he was soon to vacate.

  5

  After the Battle

  In India in 1962 I took much of the British architecture for granted. After what I had known in Trinidad and England, British building in India seemed familiar, not a cause for wonder. Perhaps, too, in 1962, just 15 years after independence, I didn’t allow myself to see British Indian architecture except as background. I was saving my wonder for the creations of the Indian past. Even Lutyens’s great achievement in New Delhi I saw in a grudging way, finding the scale too grand, looking in his ceremonial buildings for the motifs he had got from the Mogul builders, and finding in his adaptations further evidence of vainglory.

  I looked in this partial way even at the lesser architecture of the British, the bungalows and houses built for officials in the country districts. They were pleasant to stay in; with their porticoes and verandahs, thick walls, high ceilings, and sometimes additional upper windows or wall-openings, they were well suited to the climate. But they seemed too grand for the poverty of the Indian countryside. They seemed also to exaggerate the hardships of the Indian climate. So that, though absolutely of India, these British buildings, by their exaggeration, seemed to keep India at a distance.

  But the years race on; new ways of feeling and looking can come to one. Indians have been building in free India for 40 years, and what has been put up in that time makes it easier to look at what went before. In free India Indians have built like people without a tradition; they have for the most part done mechanical, surface imitations of the international style. What is not easy to understand is that, unlike the British, Indians have not really built for the Indian climate. They have been too obsessed with imitating the modern; and much of what has been done in this way – the dull, four-square towers of Bombay, packed far too close together; the concrete nonentity of Lucknow and Madras and the residential colonies of New Delhi – can only make hard tropical lives harder and hotter.

  Far from extending people’s ideas of beauty and grandeur and human possibility – uplifting ideas which very poor people may need more than rich people – much of the architecture of free India has become part of the ugliness and crowd and increasing physical oppression of India. Bad architecture in a poor tropical city is more than an aesthetic matter. It spoils people’s day-to-day lives; it wears down their nerves; it generates rages that can flow into many different channels.

  This Indian architecture, more disdainful of the people it serves than British Indian architecture ever was, now makes the most matter-of-fact Public Works Department bungalow of the British time seem like a complete architectural thought. And if one goes on from there, and considers the range of British building in India, the time span, the varied styles of those two centuries, the developing functions (railway stations, the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, the Gateway of India in Bombay, the legislative buildings of Lucknow and New Delhi), it becomes obvious that British Indian architecture – which can so easily be taken for granted – is the finest secular architecture in the sub-continent.

  Calcutta, more than New Delhi, is the British-built city of India. It was one of the early centres of British India; it grew with British power, and was steadily embellished; it was the capital of British India until 1930. In the building of Calcutta, known first as the city of palaces, and later as the second city of the British Empire, the British worked with immense confidence, not adapting the styles of Indian rulers, but setting down in India adaptations of the European classical style as emblems of the conquering civilization. But the imperial city, over the 200 years of its development, also became an Indian city; and – being at once a port, a centre of administration and business, education and culture, British and Indian style – it became a city like no other in India. To me at the end of 1962, after some months of Indian small-town and district life, Calcutta gave an immediate feel of the metropolis, with all the visual excitement of a metropolis, and all its suggestions of adventure and profit and heightened human experience.

  Twenty-six years later, the grandeur of the British-built city – the wide avenues, the squares, the attractive use of the river and open spaces, the disposition of the palaces and the public buildings – could still be seen in a ghostly way at night, when the crowds of the day had retreated to their nooks and crannies, to rest for the restless vacuity and torment of the new Calcutta day: the broken roads and footpaths; the brown gasoline-and-kerosene haze adding an extra sting to the fierce sunlight, mixing with the street dust, and coating the skin with grit and grime; the day-long cicada-like screech, rising and falling, of the horns of the world’s shabbiest buses and motor-cars. The British-built city could still be seen, even in this ghostly way, because so little had been added since independence; so little had been added since 1962.

  Energy and investment had gone to other parts of India. Calcutta had been bypassed, living off its entrails, and giving an illusion of life. Certain buildings in central Calcutta seemed to have received no touch of paint since 1962. On some walls and pillars – as on the walls and pillars of buildings awaiting demolition – old posters and glue had formed a tattered kind of papier-mâché crust; you felt that if you tried to scrape off that crust, you might pull away plaster or stucco. The famous colonial clubs – the Bengal Club, the Calcutta Club – were in decay, and Indians now moved in rooms once closed to them. Decay within, decay without: Calcutta in some places had a little of the feel of an abandoned Belgian settlement in central Africa in the 1960s, after Africans had moved in and camped. Camped: it was the word. At independence, with the partition of Bengal into Indian West Bengal and Pakistan East Bengal, there had been a very big movement of refugees from the east. They had camped where they could; they had clogged up large areas in and around the city. And since then the population of the city had doubled.

  There was no room by day on the streets or in the large sunburnt parks. There was no place to go walking. You could drive very slowly along a dug-up road and through the crowds to the Tollygunge Club, and there you could go walking on the golf course. But the drive was exhausting; and the drive back, in the kerosene-and-gasoline fumes, undid the little good you might have done yourself. People told you that up to 15 years ago the streets of central Calcutta were washed every day. But I had heard that in 1962 as well. Even then, just 15 years after independence, 16 years after the great Hindu-Muslim riots which had marked so many memories, people were looking back to a golden age of Calcutta.

  The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. And – though the circumstances were fortuitous – when the British ceased to rule, the city began to die.

  One of the people I met in Calcutta in 1962 was Chidananda Das Gupta. He worked at the time for the Imperial Tobacco Company, later known less provocatively as the ITC. Because he worked for such a grand British company, Chidananda was one of the select and envied group of Indians known as ‘boxwallahs’.

  These boxwallahs represented in their own eyes a synthesis of Indian and European culture. They were admired and envied by Indians outside the group because their boxwallah jobs were secure, in addition to being, with the British connection, a badge of breeding. The s
alaries were very good, among the best in India; and – to add to the boxwallah superfluity – there were company cars and furnished company apartments. And the work was not hard. Any firm a boxwallah worked for more or less monopolized its particular field in India. All that was required of a boxwallah was that he should be a man of culture, and well connected, an elegant member of the team.

  Chidananda had another interest. He loved the cinema, and was one of the founders of the Calcutta Film Society. It was at the Calcutta Film Society that I met him one evening. And 26 years later I was to be reminded – by Rajan, the secretary, who had told me his story in Bombay – that at the end of that evening Chidananda had entrusted me to him, asking him to see me safely back to the guest house of the drug company where I was staying. No memory had stayed with me of Rajan, to whom this easy intercourse with film people and Bengali men of culture at the Film Society had come as a joy, a glimpse of a Calcutta far sweeter than the one he knew. Of the society office I had the merest impression: a dim ceiling light in a small room full of old office furniture. Of Chidananda I carried away a boxwallah picture: a slender moustached man of forty in a grey suit.

  Chidananda didn’t last at ITC. He became a film-maker and writer; that became his career, and it took him away from Calcutta. Twenty years or so later, as a semi-retired man, he had come back to Calcutta. He worked for half the week as editor of the arts pages of The Telegraph newspaper. The rest of the week he lived at Shantiniketan, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, the poet and patron saint of Bengal.

  Shantiniketan was two and a half hours away by train from Calcutta. Chidananda was building a house there, living in the house while it was being built around him. I went to see him there one Sunday.

  What did I know of Shantiniketan? I thought of it as a poet-educationist’s version of Gandhi’s Phoenix Farm in South Africa: something connected with the independence movement, and at the same time a protest against too much mechanization: some idea of music, of open-air classes, of huts as lecture halls: something Arcadian and very fragile, depending on a suspension of disbelief and criticism, and something which – since I hadn’t heard about Shantiniketan for a long time – I thought had faded away.