‘Four years only.’
A children’s party in India will be another new experience. Briha tells me about the boy, the apartment he’s recently bought and his career plans. Once he has the MA, he wants to do a PhD, again on contemporary Dalit literature. Right now, he’s reading Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable as context. I ask him how he developed this interest. For a moment he’s hesitant. Then he explains that he’s a Dalit himself. His grandfather was of the leather-workers’ caste but managed to scrape together enough to buy a plot of land. His father added to it and saved sufficient to get Briha through school and into college. His degree completed, Briha spent several years unsuccessfully seeking a teaching job, constantly knocked back because of his origins.
‘Shinde sahib gave me my chance,’ he says. ‘I’d written more than a hundred applications. I owe him everything.’
I warm a little to Bill’s accuser.
‘And you, what are you reading presently?’ he eventually asks.
‘About to start Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.’
His eyes light up. ‘I know it. The first part’s set in Ratnagiri.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, it’s about the exiled king of Burma and his family.’
Is this an omen? ‘I was thinking of possibly heading down there.’
We chat about contemporary Indian fiction. I find it hard to answer his questions about why exactly its English-language varieties are so popular in the West, where they often win the major literary prizes. Is this a benign legacy of empire? Or a malignant form of exoticism? Hardly anyone I can think of reads African work in English these days. And I’m a little ashamed that I know so little about the authors he’s researching. Writers who stay put in India and who use Indian languages certainly get much less exposure back home, even when they do manage to get translated. Perhaps, they’re the equivalent of the over-looked local historians whose obscurity Avanish bemoaned during my visit to the university yesterday.
I’m glad of the distraction. The butterflies in my stomach aren’t as bad as before Chafal. Nonetheless, I’m uncertain how I’ll be received. Doubtless there’ll be further damaging accusations against Bill.
‘We’re now in old Aundh princely state,’ Briha says as another junction approaches.
‘So Kundal was in Aundh?’
‘Just on the border.’
I wonder whether Lad cocked snooks at Bill from his sanctuary here. It’s flatter than around Chafal, but the land looks just as rich. Once again, the main cash crop’s sugar and we dodge intermittently round bullock carts heaped alarmingly high with canes.
Kundal’s larger than Chafal, however, more of a town, with many stone buildings and tarmac roads. In the distance looms a chimney, belching smoke, which our driver says is the local sugar refinery. We’re dropped at a modest school building, where the long classroom doubles up as a dormitory. I’m surprised to find it occupied, but Briha explains that these are boarders, some from so far away that they’ve spent the holidays here. A few sit cross-legged on tin trunks, glancing up from schoolbooks. A small group’s gathered to fix a long-tailed kite in one corner, too absorbed to register our presence. We’re shown through into an office and invited to sit. Several men are already there, associates and disciples of Lad, Briha informs me. Soon a vehicle pulls up outside and more people enter. Among them’s a slight man in his eighties, very dark, thick white hair, alert eyes, and an unsmiling, even grim, expression, to whom everyone defers. My heart rather sinks. Briha gives Lad my card, which he glances at and passes to an assistant.
Over a scalding glass of tea, I begin my interview, asking the ‘field marshal’ how he became involved in the Parallel Government. Lad sighs, as if it’s too complex a story to summarise easily. To start with, he speaks in English. But I can’t understand his accent, nor he mine. We’re soon communicating through Briha.
‘When I was in fifth standard here, I began reading Lokmanya Tilak.’
The man who split the Indian National Congress in 1907 by advocating direct action against British rule. Opponents labelled his faction as ‘Extremists’, while describing themselves as ‘Moderates’.
‘He travelled a lot between Pune and his home in Ratnagiri. Once I heard him speak in Satara, when I was a boy.’
I hadn’t realised Tilak came from Ratnagiri. Another sign that I should go there?
‘When I went to Pune to study Ayurvedic medicine, I became more involved in politics. I was in Bombay for Gandhi’s “Quit India” speech in 1942, and when he was arrested, I knew where my duty lay.’
‘So you returned here?’
‘Yes, nine groups were founded in different parts of Satara district and on the first of June, 1943, we raised the Indian flag in Kameri and sang the Vande Mataram.’
Kameri. Where Bill shot the Ramoshi.
‘But things didn’t come to a head until the atrocities at Vaduj in September of that year.’
The incident Bhosle referred to in his PhD thesis as a turning point in events.
‘DSP Yates fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing several and wounding many. It was followed by shootings in Islampur. After that we took up arms ourselves.’
‘Did you ever attack the British directly?’ The rural areas I’ve visited must have offered ample opportunities for ambushes.
‘Yes. For example, Satara police station was raided on Christmas Day, 1944. We got away with several rifles.’
What? Bill bearded in his own den? Revenge for the raid on Chafal three weeks earlier?
‘Did you know other policemen, apart from Yates?’
‘There was Gilbert, who was brought in especially to lead the anti-insurgency. An Indian, too.’
‘E.S. Modak?’
‘Yes, Modak. And another called Pradhan. Accomplices of Gilbert.’
Was it partly to counter such perceptions that Modak wrote his memoir? Suddenly, the possibility occurs to me that Lad doesn’t know who I am. Otherwise, wouldn’t he say ‘your father’ rather than ‘Gilbert’, the name some people have used on this trip? Surely Shinde’s son explained when he phoned to make the appointment? But Briha, following his principal’s lead, addresses me as ‘Professor Bart’ and perhaps these people also think that’s my name. Lad only glanced cursorily at my card. Maybe he doesn’t associate ‘Moore-Gilbert’ with ‘Gilbert’. Should I spell it out? But he might clam up, or sanitise what he wants to say. Exquisitely uncomfortable, I decide to let it slide.
‘During that time your critics accuse you of atrocities, of being terrorists.’
Lad shakes his head vigorously before launching into a long defence of the Parallel Government. What he adds to D.Y. Patil’s account is the claim that deeds of violence committed by ordinary criminals were regularly blamed on the movement.
‘It suited the police and criminals alike.’
Murkier and murkier. Further, he insists that the group was first and foremost interested in social reform. In order to carry out its programme, it needed political capital.
‘And so we attacked government buildings, the postal system and railways.’
I nod.
‘We wanted to bring down the pyramid of oppression by undermining the base it rested on. We weren’t terrorists, we were freedom fighters.’
There’s silence as I continue writing notes.
‘Gilbert was the terrorist in that campaign, not us,’ says Lad suddenly.
My father was a terrorist? I’m winded for a moment by Lad’s bald judgement. Is it one I should have arrived at myself, in the light of the debate at Briha’s college and my tour of the ‘Mutiny’ sites in Kolhapur? I can’t think of any response for the moment.
‘Mind, he wasn’t as bad as the others.’
The qualification is only partly gratifying. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Like Yates, firing on unarmed demonstrators.’
I nod. ‘Did you ever encounter Gilbert?’
Lad looks at me keenly. I can’t decide if he knows who
I am or not.
‘Only one time I met him face to face. At my marriage. He came here to Kundal on my wedding day.’
I’m bewildered. ‘You invited him?’
For the first time, Lad cracks something like a smile. ‘No, he was an unexpected guest.’
‘What happened?’
‘Word must have got to Satara I was getting married. It was the very beginning of May, 1945.’
This raid was probably Bill’s last hurrah in the district. According to his service record, he was transferred on the third.
‘But just as the British had their informers, so did we. Inside Satara police station. Even among the armed constabulary.’
Did Bill have any idea?
‘Anyway,’ Lad goes on, confirming D.Y., ‘Gilbert had to get permission from the Aundh authorities to come here. So we knew he was on his way.’
‘But you went ahead?’
‘We, er, increased the number of guests. By the time the police buses arrived outside Kundal, nearly twelve thousand were waiting. The enemy lined up, four or five hundred of them. I was flattered to see so many. Gilbert walked in front and stopped about ten yards from the front of the crowd. I could see him clearly. He was such a big man, his face was visible above everyone’s heads. He demanded I surrender. I shouted back that I wasn’t going to disappoint my guests. There was cheering.’
‘And then?’
‘He ordered the first platoons to advance. Their rifles were at the ready. He made his demand a second time. The crowd began shouting, but no one budged. They were ten deep between him and me. I was just then ready to give myself up because I was convinced he’d give the order to fire.’
My heart’s racing. ‘Did he?’
‘No. We stared at each other over my supporters’s heads. I could see he was beginning to waver. It was something in his eyes. He was too weak or too good to fire on a wedding crowd. After a minute or two, he ordered his men to pull back. The police all got in their buses and reversed down the road. It was a great moment.’
I can’t stop a sigh of relief. ‘The ceremony went ahead as planned?’
Lad grimaces. ‘Not quite.’
‘What happened?’
‘In Hindu marriages, the bridegroom must put khum-khum between the bride’s eyebrows.’
‘A red powder,’ Briha explains, ‘for luck.’
‘I carried a dagger on my person at all times then,’ Lad goes on. ‘I took it from under my marriage gown. Everyone gasped and my bride looked frightened. I cut my thumb and when the blood ran, I pressed it to her brow. It was a token of the sacrifice we were prepared to make.’
I’m somewhat chilled by his tone. But desperately relieved that Bill preferred the humiliation of retreat to a bloody bid for glory. Why did he back off? Perhaps because he was leaving Satara imminently and it was no longer his quarrel. Or he understood the reaction that attacking a wedding would provoke. But I hope it was less laziness or political calculation than simple humanity.
I raise the question of the differences between life in British territory and the princely states. It seems paradoxical for revolutionaries to have sheltered amongst feudal regimes.
‘You see, in Aundh the rulers were enlightened. In fact before the war they’d already decided to devolve power. It was known as the Aundh Experiment, and Gandhi endorsed it. The British never did anything like that, not until they had to. But in other places, the feudal rulers wanted to hang onto their privileges. The Nizam of Hyderabad, for instance. After we sent the British away we had to deal with him. That was a bitter struggle.’ His gimlet eyes have a steely glitter. ‘There was much more bloodshed than in Satara. But it was worth it,’ he adds with satisfaction.
I know the Nizam ruled what was once an almost entirely Muslim principality in the middle of British India. According to Orientalist legend, he was fabulously wealthy, loved hunting and boasted an enormous harem. He elected for complete independence in 1947, which the British agreed to on the same constitutional-legal basis that allowed the Hindu Rajah of Kashmir to join India rather than Pakistan, despite its overwhelmingly Muslim population. Unwilling to sanction an independent polity in their heartland, however, the new Congress government gave the Nizam an ultimatum to join India. When it was rejected, anschluss followed. There was clearly one rule for the Rajah and another for the Nizam. The latter bravely – or foolishly – set his ill-equipped army to defend Hyderabad, only for it to be annihilated by Indian units battle-hardened during World War Two. Two to three hundred thousand Muslim civilians died as the Indian army and its hangers-on ran riot, including, I now understand, former members of the Parallel Government.
‘There were more schools, more hospitals on average in British territory than in many princely states,’ Lad goes on meditatively, ‘but what’s the use of such things if you are slaves?’
‘Weren’t the British already democratising in the 1930s? Didn’t you have an Indian prime minister in Bombay Province?’
‘My friend, haven’t you heard about the Defence of India Rules introduced when war broke out?’
I’m suitably chastened.
When it’s time to leave, Lad gestures to one of his assistants. The man comes forward with a book. It has a loud red cover of a man staring at the rising sun, chains on his wrists bursting asunder.
‘My autobiography,’ Lad murmurs gravely. ‘Here you will find the full and true story of the movement.’ He signs it in a shaky hand.
My earlier suspicions are confirmed. Like Charunder Shinde’s yesterday, the dedication reads: ‘To dear Professor Bart’. But despite his gift, the time he’s given me and his story about Bill, I’m glad to escape. I’ve felt on edge, withered by his glare, from the moment he entered the room. Lad radiates disapproval. Is it because he does know who I am, or continuing bitterness about the Raj?
From Kundal to Walwa, where we’re meeting the second surviving nationalist leader, is half an hour across more monotonous countryside, the road bisecting endless sugarcane plantations. I flick through Lad’s book, the text of which is enlivened by several cartoons of the Parallel Government at work – attacking a police post, training recruits in the fields, doing social work. One shows someone being given the bastinado, hands tied behind his back, bare soles tied by a rope and raised to be thrashed.
‘Justice for an oppressive moneylender,’ Briha translates the surrounding Marathi script.
Is this what Bill had in mind at Chafal, when he said it was time such people were given a taste of their own medicine? But why, after two centuries of rule, hadn’t the British stamped out rural usury, which kept the peasants so impoverished? I wonder, too, about the justice of Lad’s claim that Bill was a terrorist. He didn’t fire on the wedding crowd, thank God. And Chafal was nothing compared to what Colonel Jacob got up to in Kolhapur. However, what’s uncomfortably similar is the principle: using ‘shock and awe’, staging public performances of summary ‘justice’ on victims selected on fairly arbitrary gounds, in order to cow civilians into obedience to an authoritarian foreign power. Perhaps that’s one definition of ‘state terrorism’?
When we pull up outside the community hall in Walwa, a burly man of medium height is waiting on the veranda with a broad smile. He’s wearing a loose beige kurta which doesn’t fully conceal chunky, varicosed calves and feet in brown socks. His thin, silvery hair is cut into an almost military short back and sides, set off by a neat Clark Gable moustache. Though he moves slowly, the former guerrilla’s handshake remains strong. Perhaps he spent time as a young man in wrestling talims like the one I saw yesterday. In contrast to the grim-mannered Lad, he can’t stop chuckling as he leads us inside the hall and motions us to sofas facing a glass-topped table. He insists we eat something and have tea first. I’m instantly at ease. Our host is one of those people who, the very first time you meet them, you feel you’ve known forever.
On the surrounding walls are several portraits, including Gandhi, Shivaji, Nana Patil and Lad addressing a mass rally. There are
a couple of photos of Nayakwadi as a younger man. One of them arrests me. It must have been taken in his twenties and has an uncanny resemblance to Bill at that age. I examine my host carefully. Is this how my father would have looked if he’d lived as long? He was taller, but they have the same burly build and mischievous expression. A strong pang of loss catches me unawares and I warm to Nayakwadi even more. Briha, too, seems more relaxed than at Lad’s. He addresses our host as ‘Anna’. I assume it’s an honorific, judging by my friend’s awestruck demeanour. I follow suit, cracking our host into another grin. He takes my hand and squeezes it in his bearlike paw, keeping hold until an assistant serves tea and chapattis, together with a dish of the same spinach fried with garlic which Kiron Modak prepared.
I repeat many of the questions I asked Lad. Once more, I’m not sure Nayakwadi knows who I am. He doesn’t speak English and presumably he doesn’t read it either, since he barely glanced at my visiting card. I heard ‘University of London’ in Briha’s introduction, but although listening out for it this time, no name at all. I decide to say nothing again. I want my host to be frank, not shelter behind the ritualised courtesies typical of most Indians I’ve met on my journey. Through Briha, he tells me he was born in Walwa in July 1922 and that his father was a poor farmer. His mother supported Congress, though her husband was less keen.
‘He said Congress was for the elites,’ Nayakwadi adds. ‘I never belonged myself. I was more a communist. The people who joined Congress later,’ he shakes his head sadly, ‘betrayed our ideals. But in those days, you made alliances with anyone who opposed the Raj. I approved of S.C. Bhose’s links with the Japanese and the formation of the Indian National Army. Anything to be free.’
‘But once the Soviets entered the war, weren’t communists obliged to support the struggle against fascism?’
‘Mine was more a local, Indian form of communism, not the official CP kind. I simply wanted all our resources to be shared. And improve the condition of women, end the slavery of caste. You see this young man who brought your food?’
His assistant hovers.
The Setting Sun Page 23