by Sudhir Kakar
Before we reached the Ridge, I pointed out to my wife the path that led to a small public garden on the hill, with a view of the distant Himalayan peaks. When I joined St. Edwards in 1948 in the fifth class, I had fallen in love with the attractive Miss Dean who took our art classes. Sadly, the young lady was engaged to be married. I had found out that she met her fiancé in this park in the evenings. For a few days, I stopped at the park on my way back from school. I would hide behind a tree and watch the couple sitting close to each other on the stone bench, jealously registering her smile as she raised her face to his when he touched her shoulder. She must have seen me one day because she had a stern expression on her face when next morning she scolded me in class on my drawing. Or so I imagined. The ten-year-old stalker was utterly embarrassed.
We came to the expanse of the Ridge, now dubiously blessed with a tacky restaurant, and a couple of coffees shops and ice-cream parlours. Christ Church, once a lone, stately sentinel, looked diminutive with several constructions on the hill dwarfing it. Behind the church was Jakhoo Hill, the highest point in Shimla, that had an ancient Hanuman temple just below the top. I was always scared to accompany my mother to the temple that loomed spectrally in the mountain mist because of the numerous monkeys that were as fearless as the deity who sported their face. One of them had once come bounding up, its lips pulled back and teeth bared in a snarl, and snatched a box of sweets from my hands which we were taking to the temple as an offering.
We took the stairs next to Gaiety Theatre down to the Mall. I told my wife about Shakespearana, a travelling repertoire company that had come to Shimla every summer to stage excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays. The accent was on Shakespeare but occasionally there were forays into other dramatists: Shaw, Wilde, Sheridan, Goldsmith. Shakespearana was a family enterprise in which Geoffrey Kendall, his wife Laura, and their daughters Jennifer and Felicity played the leading roles. There were also aspiring Indian actors who toured with the company that played mostly in schools and colleges throughout India. I remember a young Shashi Kapoor, barely out of his teens, who later married Jennifer and became a Bollywood star, take his first steps into stardom on the stage of the Gaiety.
At the end of the Mall, past Clarkes, where the main road starts climbing up to Chhota Shimla, we walked down half a mile to Milsington and my old school, St. Edwards. The school had a couple of new buildings but was quite recognizable as the place where I had spent four wonderful years. The education was excellent, the missionary teachers dedicated without in the least trying to religiously influence their overwhelmingly non-Christian charges. Identical coloured lithographs, of Jesus with a bleeding heart, hanging on the wall at the top of each flight of stairs, was the extent of their missionary message.
My special object of nostalgia were the playing fields, enclosed on two sides with a high wire netting, where I had played passionate cricket and hockey. In spite of the netting, a ball would sometimes still get through a tear in the mesh or sail over it when hit for a big six in cricket. Clambering down the steep ravine, the khud, to retrieve the ball while taking care not to be stung by nettles and poison ivy—bichoo butia or scorpion weed as it was called—was the reward of the boy who had last touched the ball. I loved sports and, as the school-leaving certificate says, I was a member of the cricket eleven, had captained the hockey and table tennis teams, and had taken an active part in the school drama society.
I was also a part of the NCC, the National Cadet Corps, which gave basic army training in schools, an activity in which I did not distinguish myself. I remember our instructor, a retired Sikh subedar, the highest ranking non-commissioned officer, who one day in the theory class put the following situation before the cadets. ‘You are leading a company and are ordered by your commanding officer to advance through a narrow valley. The enemy has set up machine gun emplacements on both hillsides, raking your line of advance with fire. How will you move forward, Kakar?’
‘I won’t, sir,’ I answered.
As the other boys laughed, the subedar was livid. ‘That is why we don’t want intelligent people in the army,’ he said.
My father encouraged my sports as also other extracurricular activities, such as ice skating in winters, as long as I stood first in class each year, which I did for all the four years I was in school at St. Edwards.
To be a school hero and a teacher’s pet is a sure recipe for retribution and it was inevitable that there were boys in the higher classes who would want to pull me down from the perch that I may have believed was my natural seat. The first challenge happened in the eighth class, and the challenger was Russell, an Anglo-Indian boy six inches taller and a foot wider in the shoulders, whose family was waiting to migrate to Australia. Russell had learnt boxing but would have decimated me even without that skill. I was lucky that I only had a black eye and a bloody but unbroken nose. There were other fights that year on the way back home from school, each fight the consequence of a challenge thrown by a boy eager to make his reputation, a challenge I had to accept however great my reluctance. The fight would take place on a grassy piece of flatland just outside the school and in a ring made by other boys who were avid spectators. All I can say is that I emerged from these fights bloody, defeated, but unbowed. The code of silence surrounding the fights could have been taken from the Mafia and I stuck to the code of omerta even after my parents began to get suspicious about my frequent falls from the stairs or being hit by a cricket ball on the face. That is, till my cousin Jagmohan, the son of one of my father’s sisters who also lived in Shimla, stepped in. A year older, Jagmohan or Bholu as he was called, was a pugnacious boy who loved to pick fights. Violence was his natural habitat, a consequence of his own experience. Bholu’s father, a minor functionary in a government department, was one of those men who were badly scarred by the partition. He was a brooding presence at home who rarely spoke but was capable of flying into uncontrolled rages over even a minor transgression by his eldest son. At such times, he would place Bholu’s hand under a foot of his bed and sit on the bed, jumping up and down, shouting obscenities while Bholu screamed in pain.
Since my challengers were much bigger than I, Bholu taught me to put my head down and go for their legs. That I should wrap my arms around my opponent’s legs, just under the knees, and pull them out from under. This single move served me well. I became an intrepid fighter. Although thin and not especially strong, I would close my eyes, crouch and rush for the other boy’s knees, unmindful of the pummelling I received on my head and back. And when the other boy fell down on his back with me on top of him, I would hold his head by the hair and bang it on the ground as if in a frenzy, hoping for the spectators to step in and stop the fight, which was usually the case. I always needed a rush of adrenalin; I was too scared to be a calm fighter. The news soon spread that to pick a fight with me was too dangerous and my stock soared further.
Kamla
1953–58
Jaipur – Ahmedabad
Kamla was my mother’s younger sister. She was also the mother of my youth, and adulthood. The three years I stayed with her, from when I was seventeen, rearranged the furniture of my provincial mind, opening it to possibilities and potentialities that would have otherwise remained stillborn. She introduced me to a world of ideas, ideals, and the people who incorporated them, laying out a wondrous vista for a teenage consciousness taking its first steps beyond its immediate environment. This chapter tells her story as much as it continues my own. It tells the story of an upper middle class Indian woman in the 1940s who struck out on her own at a time when the family, her husband’s or her own, was considered a woman’s sole sphere of activity and, in time of difficulty, her only refuge. The story is of a young woman who decided to break the mould by following a career at a time when career women in India were not only rarities but also objects of salacious gossip. It is the story of an independent-minded Punjabi woman who lived on her own in a deeply conservative Gujarati society which she shocked by entering into a twenty-year-lo
ng relationship with a married man who was a public figure and a scion of Ahmedabad’s most prominent family. Although in later years their relationship changed from being lovers to one of deep friendship, where they were each other’s closest confidantes, and Kamla had other lovers, Vikram Sarabhai remained the love of her life till his mysterious and untimely death in 1971.
Kamla played a role in my adult life that was in some ways even more pivotal than that of my father. I was the son she never had and she showered me with an affection that nourished me through periods of emotional drought, such as the prolonged search for a professional identity in my youth, the deaths of my parents, and the ending of a relationship in my middle years that denuded me of self-possession for many months afterwards. We were privy to the most intimate details of each other’s lives. During the difficult times of my first marriage, Kamla was the person on whom I depended upon the most for emotional support and advice. The memories of many evenings in her apartment in Delhi, where we sat together munching on roasted Gujarati peanuts and peppery Amritsar papads, sipping our drinks—gin and tonic for her and vodka and soda for me—while I poured out my woes and confusions, are easily summoned. She would listen quietly, conveying through the way she listened that she was completely on my side and felt some of what I was feeling, before gently reminding me to also look at how I was contributing to the mess I found myself in. In the fifty years from July 1955, when I came to live with her in Ahmedabad, till a few years before her death in Delhi in January 2005, she never lost her key place in my affections though in the last years of her life our relationship became strained.
I had remarried and decided to leave Delhi to settle in Goa with my new wife. Kamla took these acts as desertions she found difficult to accept. This remarkable woman to whom I owe so much, who was fiercely loyal and generous to a fault, could also be stubborn and cussed when she was crossed. She was aware of her character but also of its firm grip on her actions. Even at the young age of twenty-three, in a letter to my surgeon-grandfather, she attributes their conflict to the similarity in their personalities. Like him, she is an ‘introvert, living in a house encased by ideas, intellectualism. Afraid to go out of it and because surroundings are not completely the kind I want [I] get hurt, disappointed and disillusioned and rush back to my own world again where I am at least the master.’ It remains a matter of deep regret that we were estranged when she died. All my regrets cannot undo the rift, which I seek to heal in my own psyche through a telling of her story. But to maintain the linearity of my narrative, I first need to step back to the memories of the years 1953 to 1955, until I went to stay with her in Ahmedabad when I was seventeen and began my studies of mechanical engineering at the city’s L.D. Engineering College.
My father left Shimla in 1952 to take up his new posting in Jaipur. My mother and sister followed him. I had to stay back in Shimla to sit for my school-leaving examinations. My aunt Darshana had recently got married and come to live in Shimla with her husband. I stayed five months with them while I prepared for my examinations.
The couple lived in a one-room apartment near Christ Church on the hillside overlooking the road to Jakhoo Hill. At the end of the room, a long, narrow hall twice as long as it was wide, and next to the window overlooking the winding road, a curtain cut off the space where I had my bed and a small table as my study desk. Another curtained space on the opposite side of the room served as the bedroom for the newly married couple. A door led to a small bathroom where we bathed from buckets of water heated on the kitchen stove. Next to the bathroom was the latrine where the three of us relieved ourselves in the enamelled bowl of a wooden commode that was emptied each morning by a scavenger.
Because of her plain looks and the dislocations caused by the partition, the family could not find Darshana a husband till she was well over twenty-five, a shockingly late age for marriage for a middle class Indian woman of those times. Her husband, an accounts clerk in a government office, was a good-looking man who exuded selfsatisfaction. I was repelled by her slavish adoration of him as much as by his masterful manner and easy assumption of superiority. From an adventurous teenager, her head crammed with the fantasies of a voracious reader of romantic fiction, Darshana had become a mousy woman besotted with her husband and absurdly grateful that he had married her. She spent much of her afternoons restlessly pacing the room from window to the door and back again, awaiting his return from office. After a hurried cup of tea, they would duck behind the curtain and promptly repair to bed. These are, of course, the memories of a jealous fourteen-year-old. Actually, Prem, Darshana’s husband and my uncle, was an affectionate and caring man who was far from being the brute of my memory’s portrayal. I lost touch with them after I left Shimla, meeting them a few times on the occasion of a marriage or death in the family. What I saw in these brief encounters was a contented couple, devoted to each other and their children. Our lives had taken very different turns and we didn’t have much to say to each other. I never told Darshana that she had been an architect of my earliest fantasy life, one of the more important persons in the extended family who contributed to the making my self. We are accustomed to regard the self in individual categories of I, me and mine, whereas it comes into being by incorporating parts of the selves of others and thrives on their bounty and benevolence.
Jaipur, where I began my Intermediate studies at Maharaja’s College in 1953, was a beautiful and quintessentially Indian city. With the old City Palace at its centre (the new Rambagh Palace was outside the walled city), the havelis of nobles and the living and trading quarters of merchants and artisans lining either side of broad, spacious bazaars, Jaipur was unlike any other city I had ever seen. Enclosed by a high crenellated wall with seven gates, all its buildings were in a uniform Indo-Mughal style and coloured various shades of pink. Whether in architecture or dress, the influence of British colonialism, so marked in much of urban India, was negligible here. Like many other princely states scattered all over the country, Jaipur had never been a part of British India and its accession to the newly sovereign Indian state was recent.
On the eve of independence in 1947, India was not only the territory of the Raj, ruled directly from London through the viceroy in Delhi, but also a ‘princely India’. The latter consisted of over five hundred kingdoms and principalities and made up two-fifths of the territory. The princely states came in all shapes and sizes. Sanjeli, in Gujarat, had a total area of 88 square kilometres; Hyderabad and Mysore, in the south, were as large as mid-size European countries. Most of the states were ruled autocratically by their rajas, maharajas and nawabs; but a few, like Mysore, were regarded as progressive, with administrative systems that were equal, and in some respects superior, to those of British India.
The successful integration of the princely states into the Republic of India within a few months of the country’s independence was a signal achievement of the new regime, especially of the home minister, Sardar Patel. Using a mix of coercion, flattery and simple deal-making, he persuaded most of the princes to relinquish their hereditary rule and privileges in exchange for a generous financial allowance called the privy purse, and some customary dignities such as a gun salute, the number of guns depending upon the size and importance of the state.
In Rajputana, nineteen princely states, of which Jaipur, Jodhpur, udaipur and Bikaner were the largest, were amalgamated into a single political unit, the state of Rajasthan, with its capital at Jaipur.1 One of the major tasks before Rajasthan, as also other unions of princely states such as Saurashtra in Gujarat that united 228 principalities, or Madhya Bharat in central India that arose out of the union of eighteen states, was to replace hereditary rule by a democratically elected government. The other was to create new institutions and transform old ones so as to align the system of governance in the unions of erstwhile princely states with the one that prevailed in the rest of the country. Selected for the Indian Administrative Service which had replaced the old ICS, my father was one of the half-dozen officers
sent to Jaipur in 1952 to accomplish the task of integration.
Enmeshed in the solipsistic turmoil of adolescence, I was unaware of the historical significance of the times I was living through when, as the political scientists Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph have observed, institutional changes which had taken place in British India over more than one hundred years were brought into being in Rajasthan in less than five.2 The old feudal elite who kept their contact with the new dispensation to a minimum regarded my father and his colleagues sent by the government in Delhi as interlopers. The three clubs in Jaipur mirrored the fault lines in the city’s elite. The Jai Club, next to our house on Mahavir Road, was the watering hole of lawyers, college teachers, doctors and other professionals, as also the more modern local businessmen. The Jaipur Club, much further away, our club, was the meeting place of the new bureaucratic elite and top executives from the commercial world of ‘British firms’ such as Burmah Shell or the Imperial Bank. The status of these ‘boxwallahs’ was much higher than of those who worked for the disparaged ‘bania’ Indian companies (the Tatas were an exception) and who would have been denied admission to the club. The third, Ashoka Club, was where members of Jaipur’s ancien regime and princelings of small principalities of the state, the Rajput nobility, gathered under the patronage of its polo-playing maharaja, Sawai Man Singh, and his beautiful wife Gayatri Devi. His Highness and Her Highness, as they were commonly referred to, may have become private citizens, but were accorded the same bent-back deference as in earlier times whenever they visited the club. My father and his colleagues may have been part of the new ruling dispensation but it was unthinkable that they would want to be or were wanted as members of the Ashoka Club.