Farthest Field

by Karnad, Raghu

  For their generation, raised in the doldrums of the Depression, the motorcycle was a promise of a new decade of speed. For Manek it was more: a simulation of his real dream, which was to join India’s new air force. In the Hunter’s skid and turn, he played at dives and spins and open sky. In the college canteen he was a one-man recruitment centre, reading IAF ads aloud from the papers. ‘Be a Leader Among Men,’ he hollered. ‘High up in the sky, you are in independent command, monarch of all you survey!’

  Parsi boys were mad about flying, anyway: the gadgetry, the gallantry, the gymnastic possibilities of the open sky.2 Even Manek’s little brother, Edul, was itching to sign up. The Indian Air Force was a new thing in the world, budding and flexible and deadly glamorous. But military aviation relied on advanced technology, and there was scepticism, especially within the RAF, of Indians’ ability to handle it. That scepticism was a headwind, creating both impedance and lift. It made the IAF a service for daredevils. Manek would go.

  Organised in alphabetical order, Bobby Mugaseth’s room-mate at college was P. Mukundan, whose family was from Calicut too. The Mukundans were Thiyyas, a caste deliberately advanced by the British to counter the strength of Brahmins and Maplahs. They were loyal in return, and around the Cannanore Cantonment, they had grown noticeably lighter-skinned, the wages of their hospitality to British soldiers. Mukundan taught Bobby bits of political doggerel – ‘Gandhi sanyasi, India maanthi punn’aki …’ – ‘Gandhi the sanyasi tears at India and opens its sores’ – with which they mocked the Congresswalas, boys who rose early in the mornings to struggle with cotton tufts and turning spindles.

  It was nothing personal, and in any case, things had been pretty quiet since Bobby had arrived in Madras. A new constitution had been introduced in 1935, and nationalist parties had agreed to join elections to form provincial governments. The Congress had done very well, and in 1937 it formed a ministry in Madras under the moderate premier Rajagopalachari, who was fondly called ‘Rajaji’. A few protests took place, but it was less easy to protest the government now that they were part of it.

  In the spring of ’38, Bobby and his friends finished at Loyola, and prepared to go their separate ways. It turned out that none of the ways led very far from Madras. Through most of the 1930s, a middle-class young man could expect to finish his education and find nothing to do, only irritating his family, squandering his eligibility and beating the air with superfluous certificates. Bobby and Mukundan enrolled together in the College of Engineering in Guindy, and Bobby saw plenty of Manek; in fact, he had to keep an eye on him.

  Manek’s magnetism had an opposite pole: Bobby’s sister, Khorshed Mugaseth, who had arrived in Madras in her turn. As with any risky manoeuvre, Manek was a dab hand at courtship. He found a sudden passion for the opera, and then the boys were over listening to La Traviata, and Kosh came along.

  Bobby had a theory that he had put to Nugs and Subur: that after Calicut, they had studied literature and medicine as the two most direct ways to learn about men. Kosh went and got herself a real one. Manek would pick her up at the hostel, and she ran out to the gates while her girlfriends catcalled from the verandah. Queen Mary’s College sat plumb on Marina Beach, so if he didn’t have the motorcycle they walked, eating puffed rice, and her pallu billowed in the breeze to run over his hands and face.

  At the end of her first year Kosh dropped out of college, and she and Manek were married. Kosh was young and out of turn, and should have let Nugs marry first. But Manek was a Parsi, and after Subur’s elopement the couple was harassed by the blessings of priests and parents. Their wedding day was a profound vindication for Khodadad, fitting with his new opinion on the proper schedule of education and matrimony for young women. Often he looked over at Nurgesh, expecting her confirmation that all was in order in the family, and nothing would happen again to upset him so dreadfully. But Nugs was not herself. To the guests who noticed, she explained that she was harried by all the organising, which they took to mean that she was dismayed at her much younger sister beating her to the altar. Bobby knew better.

  It was in Subur’s home that Bobby first saw him, apparently trying to hide beneath a towel. He sat on a chair with his head between his knees. The towel hung off his rounded back and fell like a curtain to his toes.

  Bobby knew that Gopalaswami Parthasarathi – GP – had a lot of socialist friends from London, and that even now he and Subur sometimes harboured young Tamil communists while they hid from the police. For a moment, Bobby wondered if that might be what this man was doing. But of course it wasn’t.

  ‘You’re … Ganapathy?’ Bobby asked the mound. It straightened, and the towel was pulled aside. Ganapathy’s face emerged with a puff of steam, like a conjuror’s trick. A bucket of just-boiled water was between his feet, and his face was glazed with condensation. ‘Yes,’ he wheezed, ‘Hullo. Sorry about …’ and wiped his forehead with the towel. ‘It’s my asthma. Your sister has been …’ he wheezed.

  ‘Don’t talk, then,’ Bobby said, and sat.

  The man nodded. He touched his chest and said, ‘Ganny’.

  Looking him over, Bobby must have thought: typical. Nugs would always choose the sick puppy. Sick, though really quite well built and evidently well treated by life. His face had a residual roundness, and a tidy moustache held within the bound of his lips made the curve of his cheek look fuller. A face like that made a person look trusting, even without its being steamed pink. Nugs obviously trusted it in return. Something between them made them allies against the rough tendencies of the world. The truth was the reverse, though. It was their alliance that would make the world cruel.

  Bobby had heard through collegiate chatter how much time his sister spent in ‘joint revisions’ with a fellow, not a Parsi, as his name made clear. Kodandera Ganapathy was a Kodava, of the arrogant tribe from the densely timbered, isolated hills north-east of Malabar. Those hills had bred a martial race, not one recognised by the Army, but definitely by their neighbours in Canara and Mangalore, who considered them dagger-bearing, boar-spearing, maiden-stealing terrors; worshippers of rifles, or of ancestors to whom they made offerings in arrack. Which was fairly accurate.

  By the twentieth century, however, the Kodavas had been tamed by the Raj, and their wealthier clans sent sons into the police and forest services. Ganny’s father had been Deputy Conservator of Forests, so Ganny was raised in civilised postings across the Presidency. Fourth in a household that had six children and zero privacy, he had grown into a shy, asthmatic young man, reluctant to make easy friendships but devoted to the ones he had.

  Nugs and Ganny were in love, and for four years they had found no way of ending it. The Kodavas took endogamy seriously, and were even better than Parsis at enforcing it. One distant aunt had promised to set herself on fire if her son married a Telugu girl; when he went ahead, she did too. Ganny’s family was above that, he knew, which only meant that it was the family that would face the ire of the clan. He would be long gone: a limb infected by romantic insolence, so cut off.

  Thanks to Subur, Nugs had seen what she was in for if she married Ganny. The scales could never settle when she weighed young love against the old bond of family. To marry Ganny would mean a fugitive existence, and already, at least until they finished medical school, it meant lying low. They spent their summers apart, pretending the other didn’t exist. He carried a fountain pen in his breast pocket, and in its cap, in a tight scroll, he kept her photograph.

  Their lives in Madras were their own, however, and the Mugaseth siblings met the new additions with happiness and curiosity. Soon they saw less of Subur and GP, whose lives were helter-skelter between a new baby and his job at the national newspaper, The Hindu, and their trips to Kashmir, where his father was Dewan to the Maharaja. When they did meet, they only quarrelled with Manek about the war.

  It was the other five who learned to laugh at and tease one another, the way Kosh teased Ganny about the mole – the chic ‘beauty spot’ he had on his lip. She pretended t
o pinch it off and place it on her own.

  ‘Can’t I have it, Ganny?’ she said.

  ‘You’re pretty enough already,’ he replied. ‘But you can have it if Nugs says so.’

  Like children in a treehouse, out of reach of their parents, they formed a new unit in Madras, with new rules of membership. Through his sisters, Bobby was bound to new brothers, and they built themselves, half-unawares, a new family. It was his sisters who poured the milk and roses down his neck on his twentieth birthday. The boys dressed their hair after Ganny’s instruction, with rich pomade and many pulls of the combs they kept in their pockets, whisking the hair grown long on top into victory rolls. They learned new dances and how to drive, had brandy evenings and gramophone nights. They let their days slip from the clutch of memory into the quickening stream of the decade.

  A month after Kosh’s wedding, far away in the west, the war began. Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, and from Whitehall, a morose Neville Chamberlain informed the world that he had waited until a quarter past eleven, giving Hitler an extra fifteen minutes, but was compelled at last to declare war. The next day, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared for India.

  Indians, who had spent two decades entering the river of nationalist sentiment, now found its flow violently reversed or eddying in confusion. The freedom struggle was a diversion from the fight against fascism, or vice versa. The word ‘freedom’ pulled one way and then the other. It meant freedom for the men of Europe. It meant freedom from the men of Europe. Likewise ‘victory’: frowning black Vs appeared amidst the newsprint and on walls, everywhere, demanding that the populace believe the war their own.

  Beneath the turbulence of ideology, the tow of opportunity pulled as hard and also in many directions. Khodadad, like most Parsis, supported the war. It was almost tradition that, when the Empire got into fights, the Parsis were entitled to what spilled from its pockets. War in Europe and Africa would mean a tidal rise in industrial orders, without any risk to Indian property. As leaders of Indian capitalism, the Parsis could appreciate how the economy would be fattened up by military salaries and rising commodity prices. Where Congress ministries had failed to bring about import substitution, German U-boats would succeed. Europe’s combustion was a genuine concern, but also an opportunity.

  The princes were similarly aligned. They raised funds and regiments, and freed up land for new airfields: favours they hoped to redeem whenever decisions were made about the fate of the princely states in free India. The Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha and other parties of the right were happy, too, to trade global support for domestic credit.

  The communists and socialists called Nazi tyranny no different from British tyranny and disdained the war effort. In the main recruitment districts in Punjab, they chanted, ‘Na ek pai! Na ek bhai!’ – Not one penny, not one man. Before long, however, Germany would invade the Soviet Union, and the tow would reverse. The survival of the communist hope was more important than India’s transition to bourgeois self-rule. The college comrades then rose from their picket lines to line up instead at the recruitment centres. At the same time, the insurgent Bengalis of the Forward Bloc, friends with whoever opposed the British Empire, gave rapturous speeches comparing Hitler to Lord Vishnu, and spread implausible tales about Panzer tanks in France flying the Kapi Dhwaj, the standard of the chariot of the mythic hero Arjuna.3

  It was the Congress, the party that would speak for the nation, which remained perplexed. Through the thirties it had opposed fascist aggression: much more so than the British government. ‘In India there are no fascists,’ Gandhi’s protégé, Nehru, told a Czech journalist in 1938. ‘We are very well aware of what Berlin, Rome and Tokyo want but we shall never allow the forces of our national anti-imperialist movement to be harnessed to their carriage … They want to drown the world in blood.’

  With the war begun, however, Nehru could not accept that Indian soldiers would die for the freedom of a nation which denied that very freedom to India; or that Indian taxes would pay to maintain those troops. Above all, the Congress leaders were appalled by the arrogance with which the Viceroy had committed India to war, without even consulting them.4 Linlithgow had met Gandhi, whose first reaction was keen anguish at what violence lay ahead. Gandhi expressed his sympathy for Britain’s heavy task. During the Great War he had personally recruited ambulance teams for the British side. Afterwards he had felt betrayed, as Britain would not repay India’s sacrifices with freedom. Now he would write letters to Hitler imploring him to ‘shun the method of war’. But he could not endorse a violent reply to the blitzkrieg.

  Nehru, though an ardent Anglophile and anti-fascist, took a stronger position. If some Indians saw their private opportunity in supporting the war, Nehru saw all of India’s best chance in opposing it. After meeting in council, the Congress leaders offered support for the war effort in exchange for Indian independence at the war’s end. It was declined. In October 1939 all the Congress’s provincial ministries resigned. They had governed since 1937 and grown complacent with petty powers. Now the movement could be re-energised as a true opposition, though its first agitations did not strike much of a chord.

  The war was far away. There was no chance of dissuading new Indian volunteers. Their rural homes in Garhwal and Rajputana were as removed from the havoc as they would have been at the top of Kanchenjunga. It was still the year of the ‘phoney war’, when Britain only scowled at the fascists from across the English Channel. Around the world, the belligerent states chewed on their new possessions – Eastern Europe and Manchuria – in their respective backyards. India was safe, and its confident army sailed abroad to distant campaigns.

  No place felt further from the action than Guindy. The college was a handsome one, the oldest school in India for training engineers, a monumental pile of pink brick and granite crowned by another sola-topi dome, and skirted by a cool arcade. Students sat in the archways, cross-legged over diagrams, the Brahmins tugging at top-knots which would be gone by their third year.

  On the morning before his lunch escapade, Bobby had burst into the room where Verghese Kurien was spreading textbooks open on a mat on the floor. ‘Kurien!’ Bobby implored, pushing pinched fingers into Kurien’s face. ‘One rupee. One rupee. One rupee … Please?’

  He got the rupee.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you –’ and he was gone. His day was in motion. The ticket at the New Elphinstone, nine annas; a cool drink at the soda fountain, one. Nobody would bring him back to Guindy for less than four annas, so his lunch had needed to be free.

  That evening, he went searching for Kurien again. He found him at the Non-Veg Mess (D),5 where they were both invariably drawn by sizzle of pepper and coconut oil. Bobby wasn’t about to pay Kurien back yet, only to reassure him how well his rupee had been spent. Kurien was from Calicut too; in fact, he had been brought into the world by Kobad’s hands, and for that service, Bobby thought, it was fair to still be charging twenty years later.

  Some alarm entered Kurien’s eyes as he listened to Bobby breathlessly brag about his complimentary lunch. He finally told him: ‘Mugaseth – I think you had better join the Army.’

  Bobby thought so, too.

  At Guindy, both boys were enrolled in the University Training Corps, the voluntary training unit for potential army officers. Early every Saturday, before the sun poured its jellied heat over Madras, they lined up at the Allen Grounds, occasionally for some riflery but mainly for endless parade. Kurien was hopeless. Ordered to shoulder arms, he’d get his rifle stuck in the next man’s shirt-cuff, and drop it onto the ground. ‘Pick up your damned rifle, you butter-fingered idiot!’ a sergeant shouted down the line, in some terrifying English Midlands accent. Bobby, with callous lack of effort, made the top student rank. He could out-shoot some of the NCOs at the rifle butts. Though the discipline never pleased him, every week his officers clapped him on his shoulder, and told him to put some stripes on it.

  The Indian Army was the world’s largest mercen
ary organisation; though it did not regard itself as such, its critics did not hesitate to. It was a force of paid soldiers who upheld the foreign occupation of their own land, and other people’s lands as well. The Army was older than the Raj itself, and it had filled with the silt of centuries, out of which grew all its pomp and folly.

  But the period between the wars had stirred that sediment. The first principle of the Indian Army had always been European command. The officer’s commission, a King’s Commission, was the privilege of White men. It brought moral order to the quarrelling castes and creeds in the other ranks, the natives whom Kipling had depicted in ‘Her Majesty’s Servants’ as a conference of mules, bullocks, horse and elephant, united only by the animal grunt of ‘Hukm hai!’ – It is an order! – ‘Hukm hai!’

  After the Great War, so many British men lay in the ground that the government began to wonder how in the future it could staff its armies in Britain as well as in the colonies. The Congress, too, was insisting on a plan of ‘Indianisation’ of state personnel, including military brass. The year Bobby was born, native officers were cautiously commissioned into seven Indianised battalions. By 1932, an Indian Military Academy was opened at Dehra Dun, and established the right of Indians to join the army command. The numbers admitted were small, and the men selected were practically, and often literally, princelings.

  Facing a new world war, with its allies under German occupation, Britain needed the strength of its colonies and dominions. It needed to expand their armies and – an unnerving thought for leaders like Churchill – their corps of native officers. A gate that had creaked open an inch in two decades suddenly flew wide. In came the newest martial caste of the British Raj: the Indian middle class. With an Emergency Commission, an Indian would be trained and paid on a par with White officers, and would receive his pips in just six months, instead of thirty. On college grounds across India, young men traded one uniform for the other, khadi for khaki.