Not a Nice Man to Know

by Khushwant Singh

  The affairs of the India League and its branch organizations could very well do with some scrutiny. Many a visiting maharaja and industrialist was entertained at India House and then asked to donate money for a students’ hostel or a club. In one case—that of a crook of the name of K.S.B. Ahluwalia who at different times passed off as a naval officer, a brigadier, a prince and had done his stint in Indian and British jails—Menon’s own role was not above board. He accepted a donation for India League from Ahluwalia in full knowledge of his past and that the money being given was not his and in return recommended him to the Liberal Party of Great Britain as a candidate for Parliament: the Liberals were anxious to put up a coloured man. When details of Ahluwalia’s criminal career came to light, it embarrassed everyone concerned save Menon. ‘We do not have to know his past, do we?’ he said to me nonchalantly when I brought him a sheaf of press clippings on the subject.

  Menon did not set any store by truth: he considered truth to be the monopoly of fools who did not have the wits to tell a convincing falsehood. I rarely heard him give a straight answer to a straight question. His instinctive reaction to any question was to question the motive of the questioner and then tailor his reply in such a way as to impugn the motive and also serve his own ends. This exercise called for a certain amount of skill and cunning. Most people confused this skill and cunning with ability. There never was any creative ability in Menon.

  My own career as Menon’s PRO came to a swift and deserved end. He never thought very highly of my ability: he never thought of anyone having any brains except himself. To any statement made by anyone Menon’s first reaction used to be, ‘You do not understand.’ In my own case he did to me what he had made me do to others.

  Kashmir was very much in the news and Menon decided that the Indian point of view should be put across in the form of letters in the press. Issue was taken on an editorial in the Manchester Guardian. A letter was drafted by the first secretary, P.N. Haksar, to be sent to the paper under my name. I acquiesced and signed it without demur. The Pakistani PRO, replied. In this process three or four letters appeared under my name—none of which I had written. There was nothing in them which I or anyone of my assistants could not have put across—and perhaps in better language; nevertheless, I had to suffer the indignity of being told that I did not know my job.

  The next step was to have press conferences where I was invited as a spectator. The third was to send for my assistants, and communicate orders to me through them. I was familiar with the pattern and knew that my days were numbered. I waited for the opportunity to bring matters to a head. I did not have to waft long. I do not recall the precise details but it had something to do with ‘Miss Singh’ conveying ‘H.E.’s’ instructions to my assistant, Jamal Kidwai, destined to be my successor. I pulled her up. She complained to Menon. I was summoned by Menon and asked to apologize to ‘Miss Singh’. My response surprised Menon. I was rude to both, slapped my resignation on his table and marched out of the office.

  Menon could not believe anyone could resign government service: that was why he took the liberty of being rude to the seniormost of the ICS and other services. I was re-summoned to the office and told that he would ignore my notice. I told him that I had already posted a copy to the ministry and asked for the three months’ leave due to me; and that I did not propose to come to the office from the next day and did not give a damn either for him or the Government of India.

  This time Menon believed that I meant what I said. His tone changed from bullying to whining. He recounted all that he had done for me; he described me as one of his friends. But my cup of bitterness was full to the brim. ‘You have no friends,’ I told him.

  Those were the last words I spoke to him.

  Shraddha Mata: The Making of a Holy Mother

  Four funeral pyres ablaze, a fifth corpse in a white shroud surrounded by women wailing and beating their breasts. The acrid smell of burning flesh. And in the midst of this macabre setting, Shraddha Mata reclining on a wood takhtposh calmly telling the beads of her rosary. This was in Delhi’s Nigambodh Ghat. She, a tantric sannyasin was performing a Maha Kal yagna. Graveyards and cremation grounds are regarded as particularly suitable for such rites.

  Shraddha Mata is a short, somewhat corpulent lady in her mid-sixties (b.1917). She wears thick-lensed glasses to read; when she takes them off you can see that she is a handsome woman who must have been quite a beauty in her younger days. As they say: ruins proclaim the glory of the monument that it once was. Even today, her fair skin is unwrinkled, her bosom full, her talk animated and her speech blunt: it is always too not aap—and yet her words exude affection.

  ‘Kaun?’ she demanded as I turned the flap of the gunny-sack curtain she had put around her little temporary ashram in the cremation ground. ‘It is me. I have come for your darshan,’ I replied.

  ‘You must have a name, or don’t you?’

  I announced my name. ‘Baithja,’ she said pointing to the bare floor beside her wooden couch. As I lowered myself my feet touched a pair of pink, plastic slippers. ‘Arey kaisa admi hai too!—what kind of man are you? You put your feet on a sannyasin’s sandals!’

  I apologized. She peered into my face and asked : ‘Are you the same fellow who was editor of the Illustrated Weekly?’ I admitted I was. ‘Why did they sack you?’ I explained as best as I could.

  ‘Why have you come to see me?’

  ‘Darshan’—and since I could not think of the correct Hindi word, used the English, ‘aur thori curiosity.’

  ‘Arey chhod curiosity-phuriosity!’ she snorted with a kindly laugh. ‘You must have read what that fellow Mathai has written about me and Pandit Nehru. You want to write the same kind of bakwas—rubbish.’

  I gave her my word of honour that I would not write anything she did not approve of; and not even bring up the topic of her association with Panditji if she did not want me to do so. But I would like to know more about her, why she had renounced the world and become a sannyasin; what had she got out of it?

  She listened quietly as she told the beads of her rosary. After a while she spoke: ‘I have read some of your writings. Are you a nastik?’

  I admitted I was an agnostic.

  ‘You do not believe in Ishwara?’

  ‘No, Mataji I do not believe in anything I know nothing about.’

  ‘You seem to be an arrogant man—ghamandi.’ I protested, ‘No Mataji, I have no ghamand. I only plead ignorance of what I do not know. May be you have seen Ishwara and can tell me something about Him.’

  She promptly cut me down to size: ‘Arey ja! You have still to learn the alphabet, aa, ee, uu, and you want me to teach you the Vedas! Get rid of your coat-patloon, get into a loincloth, sit at my feet for a few years and I will teach you about god. You have a little twig before your eyes which prevents you from seeing the sun. I will remove that twig and you will see this entire drishti—cosmos—is Ishwara.’

  Thus ended the first seance. ‘Come again if you wish,’ were her parting words. Something, I do not know what, compelled me to return to Nigambodh Ghat the next evening. The ‘welcome’ was as blunt as the first. ‘Too phir aa gaya’—you have come again? she demanded. ‘You asked me to do so,’ I replied. ‘Baith.’ I took my seat beside her takhtposh. ‘I believe that Mathai has again written something about me in his second book. What has he said?’

  I told her that he had written about her association with Pandit Nehru some time in 1948–49, the birth of a son in a Catholic institution in Bangalore, her abandoning the child after a few days, the recovery and destruction of the letters Panditji is said to have written her. She heard my narrative without interrupting me and made a noncommittal comment. ‘I warned Panditji then that he should not trust Mathai; he was the kind of viper who would bite him after his death.’

  The second seance was followed by a third and a fourth. The Delhi Municipal Corporation ousted her from Nigambodh Ghat. She moved twenty miles away to Shiv Shambhu Dayal Mandir in the Okhla In
dustrial Estate. I sought her out in her new abode, this time determined to ask her life-story. After some hesitation, she complied.

  Her Life-Story

  ‘I am not sure of my date of birth, nor the name of the village in which I was born except that it was in Sultanpur district (U.P.). I was the only child of my mother. My father had taken a second wife and died a couple of months before I was born. I was given in adoption to my father’s sister who was Rani of Singhpur-Panhauna, a state near Ayodhya. This was done as the Rani had no child and my father had managed her estates.’

  “What caste are you?’

  ‘Brahma-Kshatriya—half-way between the two upper castes.’ ‘How did you get mixed up with religion—and sannyas?’

  Shraddha Mata reclined on a bolster and after pondering for a while replied: ‘I’ll tell you all. My conversion to the sannyasi’s way of life came in three successive stages. I was perhaps born with the desire because even as a child of five I was fascinated by sadhus and sannyasis. I began wearing gerooa (saffron) and refused to wear any other colours. Then I came across a statue of the Buddha in the meditation (dhyan mudra) pose. I was captivated. I got a small figurine of the same and instead of playing with dolls as other girls of my age did, I always carried my Buddha on me. The third incident that made me finally decide to abandon the world I lived in came two years later when I was only seven years old. As in many landed families, I spent more time with the servants than with my adoptive mother. I was particularly close to the woman who had been my dhaya (wet-nurse) who I came to address as booa—auntie. One evening she was taken ill and did not come to the house. The next morning I went to the servants’ quarters. There she was laid on the ground wrapped up in a shroud. I asked someone “Where is my booa?” They replied “She has gone to Rama.” This created a veritable storm in my breast. I wanted to know who that Rama that my booa had gone to was and where he lived. As is customary in our part of India poor Hindus bury their dead and place a charpoy upside down on the grave. I used to visit booa’s grave everyday, through sun and rain, winter and summer till the charpoy had crumbled to bits and the grave was hardly recognizable. And every time I asked myself “Where is Rama that my booa has gone to?” It was perhaps a year later when I was eight that I persuaded an old woman who was going on pilgrimage to Badrinath to take me along with her. I slipped out of the house unnoticed at midnight. Instead of going to the railway station where they were sure to look for me, we went along the Ganga and took the train from the next station.

  The party of pilgrims returned to the village but I stayed in Badrinath for another six months. Ultimately my adoptive mother Rani Ragho Nath Koer bullied the old woman into telling her where I was and sent a party of men to fetch me. The Rani decided that the one way out for her was to marry me off to someone. I was only nine when she arranged my betrothal. Then real trouble began. My husband-to-be and I quarrelled all the time; we had bitter fights. This went on for over two years till that engagement was called off. I was then twelve or thirteen. Now my quarrels began with my Rani mother. Many times we went into sulks, refused to eat or talk to each other. I got so fed up that I decided to agree to anything that would get me out of the situation. There were lots of distant cousins who wanted to marry me: there was the property that I would inherit and I was regarded as good-looking. Another marriage was quickly arranged. This was with another distant relative called Phanindra Pal Singh. I don’t remember exactly whether he had done his Bar or was going to do it. But he was considered quite a catch. Even this marriage did not work out. My husband and his parents kept me under surveillance as if I was a prisoner. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the toilet without a couple of maidservants watching me and an armed guard close by. It was not a marriage but a kind of death. Ultimately I wrote a letter to Gandhiji telling him that I belonged to a taluqdar family and had been forced into a marriage against my will. And that I wanted to become a sannyasin, and join him to serve my country. I sent this letter through a cousin who was going to Gandhiji. A few days later I got a reply from Mahadev Desai, saying that Gandhiji had agreed to my joining him and I should come at once. Altogether I had spent no more than five-six weeks with my husband. Then I slipped away.’

  ‘You seem uncommonly well-educated. But you have said nothing about your schooling.’

  ‘Oh that! I had dozens of tutors at home. I was taught Sanskrit, Hindi, English, everything. I did not take any degrees because women in families like ours did not go to school or college or sit for exams.’

  Shraddha Mata resumed her narrative. ‘I was with Gandhiji for forty days. My husband turned up to claim me and even showed Bapu our wedding picture. Gandhiji was very firm in his reply. He said: “I know of no taluqdar’s daughter; I only know this girl who has come to me. She is like a wave of the Ganges (Ganga ki dhara) and you cannot lock her up in a cage. Let her go.” I stayed with Gandhiji till I was taken very ill. But by then I had become a free person.’

  ‘How did you come by the name Shraddha Mata? Surely it was not the name given to you by your family?’

  ‘I have had a variety of names. In my horoscope I am Parvati. My real name which was never used is Shyam Kala. At home everyone called me Bacchi Sahib. When I took sannyas I was given yet another name Sushriyananda Saraswati. But somehow it was Shraddha that stuck. I think I gave it to myself at Gandhiji’s ashram. Shraddha is an abbreviation of Sat Ko Dharan—one who clasps the truth. Mata—mother—came to be appended to it in later life.’

  Lady of the Fort

  This is all that I was able to elicit in the five evenings I spent with Shraddha Mata in Delhi. She invited me to visit her in Jaipur where she would give me whatever she had in the way of photographs of her earlier days and articles written on her. She promised, ‘I will tell you what I have told no one else.’ That was too tempting an invitation to let go. Ten days later photographer Raghu Rai and I flew into Jaipur.

  Hathroi Fort, atop a rocky escarpment broods over the city of Jaipur. Its topmost turret gives a spectacular view of the huddle of pink bazars and beyond them to the range of hills crowned with other forts and palaces. Hathroi was designed to block an invader’s path to Jaipur and Amber. It fell into disuse and became the haunt of flying foxes, rock pigeons and sand lizards. In 1953 Maharaja Sawai Man Singh turned it over to Shraddha Mata. She converted the citadel into the headquarters of the Mahashakti Peeth. The look-out turret from which Rajput warriors had scanned the horizons to sight an approaching enemy is now occupied by a life-sized marble statue of a goddess. When the city of Jaipur sleeps, the goddess and her worshipper keep vigil. Shraddha Mata prays and meditates through the night into the early hours of the dawn.

  We stride uphill to a massive gate and let ourselves in through a small aperture. An obese mongrel welcomes us with a happy bark and vigorous wagging of its tail. This is Bhairon; he is a brahmachari dog who has been kept away from the temptations of sex by never being let out of the fortress. While Surendra Singh, Shraddha Mata’s young secretary and acolyte, goes to announce our arrival, we take a look at the courtyard. It has a well in the centre; pigeons rest deep down its sides and fly out like bees from a hive. On one side is a pumpkin patch smelling of green leaves; against another wall is a marble statue of Shiva; a woman squats in front reciting jap out of a hymnal. Rising above the parapet of the well are the priests’ quarters; their women-folk are busy cooking the morning meal. Through a turning, twisting, perpetually shaded passageway a flight of broad stone stairs mounts skywards to the turret temple. Along the parapets on either side are Shraddha Mata’s gufa (cave) and her ‘reception rooms’. We take off our shoes and go up to greet her. ‘First go and pay homage to the goddess; she will rid you of your nastikta (agnosticism) and give shakti to your pen. Then come back to me.’

  Shraddha Mata has a lot to say and drops broad hints that she may not have too long a time at her disposal to say it. Mathai’s insinuations about the nature of her relationship continue to bother her. She denounces him as one of the ‘a
nti-Hindu’ group who conspired to create misunderstandings between her and the late Prime Minister. ‘A good man continues to reform and become better till his last breath; an evil man remains evil till he dies,’ she remarks. ‘And what was it that I tried to instil into Nehru’s mind? Only that India had a great spiritual tradition which must not be thrown away in the name of secularism. I believe in democracy: it liberates people from fear. But if you wish to preserve democracy you must replace the void created by the absence of fear by something positive, something spiritual which gives you a sense of responsibility and discipline. I call this Adhyatmik Samajvad, the nearest English equivalent is spiritual policy. Otherwise the only alternative is the dandebazi (rule by force) of the MISA.’

  I looked up my notes and asked her to resume the narrative of her life from the time she left Gandhiji’s ashram. ‘For the next three years or more I worked with the Harijan Sewak Sangha, organizing night schools in villages round Agra and in the Avadh region. My chief contacts were Thakkar Bappa and Acharya Jugal Kishore. This must have been between the sixteenth and nineteenth years of my life. Then I threw it all up and retired to the Himalayas. I lived in a cave above Gangotri from where the holy Ganga begins its course.’ She observed the strictest vow of silence (kashta maun) and lived off whatever wild berries were available at the height (21,000 feet), sucking icicles to slake her thirst.

  Apparently she was back in the plains in the early 1940s—and politically active. There was a warrant for her arrest during the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement. She evaded it by remaining underground. She was taken very ill and for a while was treated by sadhus in the jungles of Koil Ghati.

  It was early in 1943 that she decided to be formally initiated into a sannyasi order. As required by tradition she first sought the permission of her adoptive mother. By now Mateshwari, as she called her, had reconciled herself to her daughter’s waywardness and gave her consent. At Ayodhya she was accepted as a dandiswami sannyasin by Sri Karpatriji, and given another name, Sushriyananda Saraswati. Before the initiation there was considerable debate on the issue as neither a woman nor anyone who was not a Brahmin had been admitted by the Sankarapeeth. The Arya Samaj supported her against the orthodox elements. For sometime after the initiation ceremony she stayed in the village temple built by her mother. Then suddenly one morning, clad in her deer skin and with kamandal (bowl) in her hand she disappeared from her village to return to her cave in the Himalayan vastness.