India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  Guru Nanak’s illumination was the quietist one that there was a middle way: that there was no Hindu and no Muslim, that there could be a blending of the faiths. Islam had its fixed articles of faith, however, its fixed, pervasive rules – no room there for Nanak-like speculation and compromise. The full Islamic ‘law’ could be asserted at any time; and 100 years later, at the time of the fifth Sikh Guru, the persecutions and the martyrdoms at the hands of the Moguls began. Nearly 100 years after that, at the time of the 10th and last Guru, the religion was given its final form, and Sikhs were given their distinctive appearance: the hair not to be cut, and to be wrapped in a turban, a kind of underpants to be worn, and a steel bracelet, and a knife – so that every day, with these intimate emblems, a man would be reminded of what he was.

  As the Mogul power declined in the first half of the 18th century the power and numbers of the Sikhs grew. In the ravaged north of India, in the interim between the collapse of the Moguls and the coming of the British, there was for a short time the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh. This was the kingdom that the British defeated with the help of Tandy’ in 1849. But there was no great humiliation with that defeat; it might even be said that that defeat propelled the Sikhs forward.

  The British, at the height of their empire, had a general disregard for all Indians. Even in 1858, while the Mutiny was going on, Russell noted this slighting British attitude towards the Sikh soldiers who were fighting on the British side. But by being incorporated into British India the Sikhs were immeasurably the gainers. They were granted a century of development. Without the British connection, north-west India – assuming that there had been no more regional or religious wars – might have been no more than Iran until oil, or Afghanistan: poor, despotically ruled, intellectually disadvantaged, 50 or 60 or more years behind the rest of the world.

  Independence and the partition of India in 1947 damaged the Sikhs; millions had to leave Pakistan. But again, as after their defeat by the British, they quickly recovered. With the expanding economy of an industrializing independent India, with a vast country where they could exercise their talents, the Sikhs did very well; they did better than they had ever done. They became the country’s best-off large group; they were among the leaders in every field. And then in the late 70s their politics, always sectarian and clannish and cantankerous, became confounded with a Sikh fundamentalism preached by a young man of a simple village background, a man born in the year of partition. There began then the train of events which were to lead to the daily budget of terrorist news in the newspapers; and the khaki-clad policemen with guns in the green streets of New Delhi.

  For 150 years or more Hindu India – responding to the New Learning that had come to it with the British – had known reforming movements. For 150 years there had been a remarkable series of leaders and teachers and wise men, exceeded by no country in Asia. It had been part of India’s slow adjustment to the outside world; and it had led to its intellectual liveliness in the late 20th century: a free press, a constitution, a concern for law and institutions, ideas of morality, good behaviour and intellectual responsibility quite separate from the requirements of religion. With a group as small as the Sikhs, where distinctiveness of dress and appearance was important, there couldn’t be this internal intellectual life; even the idea of such a life wasn’t possible. The religion had reached its final form with the 10th Guru, and he had declared the line of Gurus over. Such a religion couldn’t be reformed; reform would destroy it. A new teacher could only restate its fixed laws and seek to revive old fervour. So it happened that India’s most advanced group could be called back by a village teacher to a simpler past.

  The preacher’s name was Bhindranwale, after the name of his village. His first name was Jarnail; this was said to be a corruption of the English word ‘general’. At his first appearance he was encouraged by the Congress politicians in Delhi, who wished to use him to undo their rivals in the state. This seemed to have given him a taste for political power. The word used most often – by admirer and critic – for Bhindranwale in this incarnation is ‘monster’. The holy man became a monster. He moved into – effectively, occupied – the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, built by the fifth Guru (who was more or less Shakespeare’s contemporary). He fortified the Temple, making use of its immunity as a sacred place; and, with a medieval idea of the scale of things, perhaps a villager’s idea of a village feud, he declared war on the state. To serve Bhindranwale and the faith, men now went out with the mission of killing Hindus. They stopped buses and killed the people in them. Riding pillion on motor-scooters, they gunned down people in the streets. The resulting shock and grief would have confirmed the terrorists in their idea of power, would have confirmed them in their fantasy that it was open only to them to act, and that – as in some fairy-tale – an enchantment lay over everyone else, rendering them passive.

  Eventually the army assaulted the Temple. They found it better fortified than they knew. The action lasted a night and a day, and there were many casualties, among soldiers, defenders, and Temple pilgrims. Hindus as well as Sikhs grieved for the violation of the holy place; Hindus also offered prayers there. Police officials were later to show that there was another, cleaner way of isolating the Temple. But at the time – to deal with a novel situation: a murderous insurrection conducted from the sanctuary of a holy place – the army action, heavy-handed though it was, seemed to be the only way.

  The damage was done. Stage by stage, then, the tragedy unfolded. To avenge the desecration, Mrs Gandhi was murdered by some of her Sikh bodyguards. And, again, it is as though the men who planned the murder didn’t sufficiently understand that their action would have consequences, that by doing what they did they would be putting their community at risk: Sikhs were settled all over India. There were riots after the murder. The most dreadful were in Delhi, where hundreds died. Out of that great fire in 1984, these terrorist incidents in the Punjab, on the frontier with Pakistan, were the embers.

  To most people what had happened in the Punjab was a pure tragedy, and not easy to understand. From the outside, it seemed that the Sikhs had brought this tragedy on themselves, manufacturing grievances out of their great success in independent India. It was as if there was some intellectual or emotional flaw in the community, as if in their fast, unbroken rise over the last century there had developed a lack of balance between their material achievement and their internal life, so that, though in one way so adventurous and forward-looking, in another way they remained close to their tribal and country origins.

  *

  Something went wrong with a tire of my hired car on the road to Chandigarh. It wasn’t only a puncture. The much-used, much-recapped tire had also split in an arc half-way down the wall. Chandigarh was more than three hours away, and the other tires didn’t look too good. There was no question of taking a chance; the ravaged tire had to be mended before we went on. Help was at hand, though. There was a Punjabi truck stop just a short way down the road – we could see it from where we were – and after we had changed the wheel we went there.

  The truck stop was a dusty yard with brick sheds on three sides. Some of the sheds were walled, some open. Advertisements for Apollo tires nailed to a wall gave a reassuring technical feel to the place. At the back and sides of the yard were fields of ripe wheat; down one side was a ditch of stagnant, blackish water. Drivers turbanned and unturbanned sat above the dust on string beds in the open sheds and drank tea. The tea was prepared in an open kitchen at the back (a lot of blue smoke over black earthen fireplaces), and served by two boy waiters in long trousers and very dirty (and now perhaps uncleanable) long-tailed Indian shirts.

  While the driver of my hired car manhandled the wheel with the split tire, traffic roared and rasped by, the brown smoke from unmuffled exhausts mixing with roadside dust. Within the split tire there was, surprisingly, an inner tube. I hadn’t seen one for years. Over this tube the driver, an unturbanned Sikh, then squatted with the repair
man, and after they had pumped the tube up they passed it through water in a red plastic basin. (There was another red plastic basin in which glass tumblers and heavy china cups were soaking on a stand outside the cooking shed.) The flaw in the tube was found, the spot was dried and rasped, some adhesive solution was applied, and a bandage was stuck on. The procedure sent me back to my childhood; it made me think of the way we used to mend bicycle punctures; I had thought it was something that had passed out of my life forever.

  Stepping down from the greasy brick platform, where they had been working on the tube, the driver and the repair man selected, from a small collection, a tire so worn it had been finally abandoned. They cut two sleeves out of this tire, one sleeve out of the thin part of the tire, the other out of the thicker part. Both sleeves were then fitted into the tire where it had split; the mended inner tube, pink and deflated and flabby, was also fitted in; and then somehow the driver and the repair man hammered and malleted the whole thing together, pumped the tire up, and bumped it up and down professionally a few times on the grease-blackened earth. Finally, like a man more fulfilled than irritated by the accident, Bhupinder the driver set the nose of his car towards Chandigarh, and we didn’t stop until we got there.

  The traffic was of all sorts: buses, trucks with towering loads, packed three-wheeler taxi-buses with about 20 people each (I counted), mule carts, tractors with trailers, some of the trailers carrying very wide loads of straw in sacking, or carrying logs placed crosswise, so that they occupied a good deal more of the width of the road than you thought from a distance. There seemed to be no limit to a load. Metal, being metal, was deemed to be able to carry anything that could be loaded onto it. Many bicycles carried two or three people each: the cyclist proper, someone on the cross bar, someone sitting sideways on the carrier at the back. A motor-scooter could carry a family of five: father on the main saddle, one child between his arms, another behind him holding on to his waist, mother on the carrier at the back, sitting sideways, with the baby.

  Always in India this feeling of a crowd, of vehicles and services stretched to their limit: the trains and the aeroplanes never frequent enough, the roads never wide enough, always needing two or three or four more lanes. The overloaded trucks were often as close together as the wagons of a goods train; and sometimes – it seemed to depend on the mood or local need of drivers – cars and carts came in the wrong direction. Hooters and horns, from scooters and cars and trucks, sounded all the time, seldom angrily. The effect was more that of celebration, as with a wedding procession.

  Chandigarh, when I first saw it in 1962, was a brand-new city. It had been built as the capital of what was then the state of Punjab. It was an empty, still artificial-feeling city in 1962. It was full of Punjabi tourists, running up and down the modern concrete towers Le Corbusier had built for the state assembly, the high court, and the secretariat. The city was now full, built up. It was squabbled over by the two states into which Punjab had split.

  Le Corbusier’s unrendered concrete towers, after 27 years of Punjab sun and monsoon and sub-Himalayan winter, looked stained and diseased, and showed now as quite plain structures, with an applied flashiness: megalomaniac architecture: people reduced to units, individuality reserved only to the architect, imposing his ideas of colour in an inflated Miróesque mural on one building, and imposing an iconography of his own with a giant hand set in a vast flat area of concrete paving, which would have been unbearable in winter and summer and the monsoon. India had encouraged yet another outsider to build a monument to himself.

  Grass grew now between the blocks of the paving. Armed policemen guarded the buildings in the evenings; visitors were driven off. The people of Chandigarh, following a more natural Indian inclination, promenaded in the afternoons on the lakeside, far from the dreadful public buildings. The city over which people squabbled was without a centre and a heart.

  But the air was clean. It was still cool; in the evenings it was cold. The hotel garden was full of flowers, and the big shaved lawns, soaked by a fat hose every day, were bright green.

  Gurtej Singh was famous as a Sikh who had resigned from the Indian Administrative Service – the highest branch of the Indian civil service – because of his commitment to the Sikh cause. He was represented to me as someone who would give me some understanding of the Sikh alienation. On a number of mornings he came to the hotel, after he had taken his sixteen-year-old daughter to her school in Chandigarh, and we talked. I didn’t know then that he had been acquainted with Bhindranwale; that he had gone underground for four years after the army assault on the Golden Temple in June 1984; that he had been charged with sedition, and was still technically on bail.

  He was forty-one, tall, just over six feet, slender, with sombre, intense eyes. He was carefully dressed, in pale colours. There was an elegance about his manner as about his physique – nothing of the big-eating Sikh or Punjabi there. It was hard to imagine that he had come from a farming family and a village background, and that he was the first in his family to have received anything like a formal education.

  He wanted, the very first time he came, to talk about the importance of water. Punjab depended on the water of its rivers; it didn’t like sharing its water with other states. Since 1947, he said, more people had died quarrelling over water than had died during the upheavals of partition. ‘The water problem is the crux of the matter.’

  But I could hear about water from many other people. I felt, too, that it was a simplification, something to be put forward at a first meeting. Fundamentalism and alienation would have had other promptings as well; and I was more interested, at this first meeting with Gurtej, in understanding how his ideas of religion had come to him.

  The first ideas, he said, had come to him from his grandfather. From his grandfather he had also got the idea of ‘gentlemanliness’.

  ‘We don’t have many rituals. My grandfather taught me the simplest form of prayers. It’s just a simple prayer for the well-being of the entire world. It lasted from half an hour to 45 minutes. Every morning my grandmother would get up for the household chores – and that included churning the morning milk – and she would keep on repeating the prayers while at work. She was not an educated person, and she remembered only those things she had heard, the simplest of couplets from the scriptures.

  ‘She got up at four. After she had got up I couldn’t sleep, and then I gradually got interested in those prayers of hers. My grandfather would pray in a more formal manner. He would wash himself in the morning and sit with the holy book in his hand. We have a small version, with the daily prayers, and he would carry that with him all the time. The last thing would be the ardas, the conclusion of the prayer, the supplication.

  ‘My parents were living in a different village. There was no school in that village, so they had sent me to my grandparents’ village, where we had a school next to the house. I went to that school until I was big enough to go away to Dehra Dun, to a boarding school.’

  I wanted to hear more about the ‘gentlemanliness’ of the grandfather.

  Gurtej thought. He began to remember; his intense eyes softened. ‘He always dressed properly, in clean clothes, and a white turban. He always had his watch with him. He was conscious of time, which no one else in the village was. He was a progressive man. He was the first man to get a radio, the first man to buy a jeep in the village. And he kept a daily diary. He had a contact with some saint, who had taught him to make anti-snakebite medicine. This he religiously used to make before the onset of the rainy season every year, and he would distribute it to the neighbouring villages. People used to come to ask for that medicine whenever there was a case of snakebite.

  ‘Sometimes I used to go with him on a camel to the neighbouring market town. When we passed through a place where the village elders used to sit he would ask me to greet them loudly. And I never heard him shouting at anybody. When he thought the worst of a person he would say ‘Dusht!’ – ‘Wicked man!’ – and then we knew he was very
angry.

  ‘He used to give pocket money to me and to his son – who was my uncle – wanting us to be on our own, not depending on him for anything. He would help anybody who came. He was the only person to have a horse carriage, and when people wanted it – for a wedding or to go to hospital – he let them have it. He was widely respected. He was one of the better-off farmers.’

  From this protected life Gurtej was taken away when he was sent to the boarding school in far-off Dehra Dun.

  ‘I was in a different sort of culture, and there must have been a yearning in my heart to be in touch with my land, my culture, my people. I began to read the poems of Sohan Singh Seetal. He’s a poet and a writer. He is still living in Ludhiana. The books I read at that time were ballads, concerned with Sikh history in the Mogul period and the British period.

  ‘I still remember several poems – which were full of the suffering of my people. One poem was about the general order of massacre given by two or three Mogul governors – that every Sikh should be hunted down. And the mothers from whom the children were snatched, to be cut up to pieces. Young boys being murdered. Women being incarcerated, tortured. The torture of the companions of the ninth Guru – that was in 1675. They were killed in front of his eyes. One was set on fire. This was in Delhi, in Chandni Chowk. Another was sawn alive – put into a wooden casket and cut into two. You see the helplessness and anguish of people at that time. They were doing no wrong. They were just following God according to their own lights.’

  His eyes misted over. He found it hard to bear the details of physical pain, which he was yet stressing. Then he related what he had said – almost mythical suffering, but with real, historical dates – to the problems of the present.