I taught myself to write with a tiny, eighty-five-page paperback called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.1 As far as I know there is no better book on writing English and, astonishing for a composition rulebook, it made the New York Times bestseller list in 1962 and has stayed there for years. The second of its two authors is the great American essayist E.B. White, whose literary style is as pure as any in the English language. In these unheroic times in India, I find solace in E.B. White, who was a sceptic and preferred to view life from a deliberately mundane and irreverent perspective. I learned from White to write in a way that comes easily, but not to assume that because it has come naturally your product is without flaw. I write by ear, often with difficulty and seldom with an exact notion of grammar, but it hasn’t put me off this book. Blaise Pascal, the French man of letters, would have agreed with me about the virtue of writing naturally. He said that when ‘we come across a natural style, we are surprised and delighted; for we expected an author and we find a man’.
I am also attracted to the Upanishads, which teach us to speak to others in a language that one speaks to oneself when one is alone, as Mahatma Gandhi did when he spoke to the goatherds on the banks of the Sabarmati. He did not adjust or speak down, because he knew that there is only one question, the same for everyone. And the goatherds breathed his vibrant words. Unlike university graduates who are filled with learning and analysis, the goatherds were just and sensitive (as we must all try to be), for they were accustomed to the voices of the fields. The language that I speak to myself when I am alone is the language I aspire to write in. It is, I feel, the Indian English that has blossomed in the Indian subcontinent in the past 150 years. It is also the language that actors who perform in English in India must use in the theatre when they are performing. Only then will the audience be willing to lose itself in the play and not think about how they are speaking. Only then will the audience forgive their mistakes.
Writing Larins Sahib
I began to think of Larins Sahib in the bazaars of the Punjab when I was learning to sell Vicks Vaporub. I was reading at the time a history of the Punjab, in which I came across the unusual Lawrence brothers. Henry Lawrence was the most interesting and the least imperial. His brother George was a soldier in the North-West and John was an empire-builder who went on to become Lord Lawrence, the Governor-General and Viceroy of India. We used to call the latter ‘Tunda Lat’ because his statue in the Lawrence Gardens in Lahore lacked an arm.
Henry was unusual because he formed easy friendships with the Sikh nobility. I was fascinated by his warm and affectionate relationship with Sher Singh, the scion of the Attari family, the fiery Rani Jindan, the widow of Ranjit Singh, and her son Dalip, who was taken away from her when he was young and who became the tragic ‘black prince’ at Queen Victoria’s court. I don’t quite know why I thought of it as a play. It could have been a novel. But it was fun doing research over the next twelve months. Reading the history of the Punjab was for me a search for identity. I was drawn to the events in 1846 because that is when the British first arrived in the Punjab and the first reactions of the Punjabis to the English and vice versa determined how we would behave with each other over the next hundred years.
The events in the play take place in the difficult period in the Punjab after the Sikh ruler’s death in 1839. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had established over forty years an empire in north-west India on the ruins of the Mughal Empire. It was a vast territory between the river Sutlej and the Himalayan mountain ranges of Ladakh, Karakoram, Hindukush and Sulaiman. On today’s maps it would have consisted of the Indian and Pakistan Punjabs, the North-West Frontier Province, and Jammu and Kashmir. A European traveller, Baron C. Von Hugel, called this empire ‘the most wonderful object in the whole world’.2 Other contemporaries compared Ranjit Singh to Bonaparte. A French traveller referred to the one-eyed Sikh as ‘a miniature Napoleon’. Both were ‘men of military genius’. The Sikh monarchy was ‘Napoleonic in the suddenness of its rise, the brilliancy of its success, and the completeness of its overthrow’.3 It fell to the British within ten years of his death. The comparison is apt because of Ranjit Singh’s enthusiasm for employing distinguished former Napoleonic officers: Generals Avitable and Ventura, Colonels Court and Allard, and many others helped make his army an efficient machine, as effective as that of the East India Company.
While Ranjit Singh was alive, both sides had sufficient regard for each other’s capabilities to avoid a head-on clash. But after his death, the Sikh kingdom was plunged into chaos. He had too many wives and too many successors, and as rival court factions sought support for their preferred candidates, the authority drained back to the army. The British saw their chance and the inevitable collision took place late in 1845. The first Sikh war began with two ferocious battles in the vicinity of Ferozepur. Helped by the treachery of the Sikh courtiers and commanders, who betrayed their own army, the British grabbed a victory from the jaws of defeat in Sobraon, a costly battle in which the Sikhs lost 10,000 men and the British, 2400.
It was sobering result. The British ruled out a more expensive bid for Lahore and opted for a peace package consisting of indemnity, partial annexation, a reduction in the Sikh army, and other safeguards. The annexation brought them some territory in the Punjab and their frontier moved from the Sutlej to the Beas River. Since the Sikhs could not pay the full indemnity, they got Kashmir instead and the vast Himalayan country between the Beas and the Indus rivers. Foolishly, they sold it to Gulab Singh, the Dogra Raja of Jammu, who had been one of Ranjit Singh’s feudatories, and who now became a vassal of the British. Thus, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was created, and this would descend through the Hindu king’s successors until 1947 and become a source of contention between India and Pakistan. No one at the time gave a single thought to the fact that a Hindu king would rule over a predominantly Muslim people. It was commonplace for Muslim nawabs to rule over Hindu populations in Awadh, Hyderabad, and elsewhere. But Kashmir would go on to enjoy a century of peace and prosperity that it seldom saw before or after.
After the first Sikh war, the British left behind an active and unusual Resident, Henry Lawrence, with a small staff and some British troops. His job was to uphold and direct the Regency Council, which would now operate in the name of Dalip Singh, Ranjit Singh’s minor son. The Resident was to see to it that the Sikh court and council would hold their own against the restless Sikh army and especially the disgruntled troops, who had been betrayed by their leaders and then laid off by the treaty. In 1848, the Maharaja’s garrison in the southern city of Multan mutinied and killed two Englishmen. This was precisely the opportunity that Lord Dalhousie, the new Governor-General, needed. As the mutiny spread among the Sikh troops to the rest of the Punjab, a large British army crossed the Sutlej once again from Ferozepur, passed the Ravi and the Chenab, and fought a major battle at Chillanwalla on the Jhelum. The Sikhs hailed it a victory, but the British pretended otherwise—even though they had lost 3000 men. However, the British came back a month later and decisively won the battle of Gujarat and with it the prize of the Punjab. On 29 March 1849, Maharaja Dalip Singh held his court for the last time in his life. He signed the document of annexation in Roman letters to become a pensioner of the British. ‘The majestic fabric raised by Maharaja Ranjit Singh was a thing of the past.’4
This is the historic background of my play. After writing two acts, I discovered that the Theatre Group in Bombay had announced a playwriting contest with a Rs 10,000 prize (which was a lot of money in 1968) and an offer to perform the winning play. This was just the incentive that I needed to finish the play. I entered it for the competition and fidgeted for three months. Larins Sahib won from around eighty entries, many of them from established authors. Theatre Group’s production opened in 1969 in Bombay, directed by Deryck Jefferies with Zul Vellani as Lawrence and Roger Pereira as Sher Singh. Many productions followed including one at Lawrence School, Sanawar, directed by Feroza Das. My favourite was the one i
n 1990 by Rahul da Cunha with Tom Alter as Lawrence, Rajat Kapur as Sher Shah, and Nisha Singh as Rani Jindan. I think it worked well because the director allowed the actors to improvise and turn some of the lines of the Sikhs into Punjabi or a Punjabized English. Thus, it got over some of the problems of performing in English. The audiences in Bombay loved it, and the company travelled with it to the Edinburgh festival. I learned from watching this production that English theatre, if it has to work on the stage in India, needs to be in an Indian English idiom with which the audiences are familiar. It doesn’t mean that it has to be caricature, nor that it has to be in Hinglish a la Zee TV, but the audience clearly needs familiar signals from the actors, in the way they speak and in their body language to help them identify with the characters.
Larins Sahib is a work of youth and betrays a degree of diffidence. My advice to the director (and the actors) would be to work on Lawrence’s motivation. I would try to find ways to explain why such a fine person with ideals crumbles so easily. Hubris explains it only partially. I would try to integrate ‘the three avatars of Henry Lawrence’ as M.K. Naik of Karnatak University calls them.5 These are the enlightened empire-builder, the would-be ‘Lion of the Punjab’, and the cog in the wheel of the East India Company. If you can dig out why Lawrence does what he does, you will create a stronger performance.
Writing Mira
Saints are not interesting for the theatre—only human beings are, and God is ultimately a human problem. But saints are as natural as the sunshine in India and one of the reasons certainly is the influence of bhakti poets like Mira. I grew up in a bhakti-filled atmosphere as a child. My father was a mystic and my mother used to sing Mira’s devotional songs in the mornings. But I went on to receive a secular and liberal education, acquired a sceptical temper, and I found saints deeply problematic. I did not dismiss spiritual experience, but it would take a great deal to make me a believer. At around the age of twenty-five, I began to question what it meant to be a saint, and this led me to write Mira.
Indians believe in three basic ideas: first, the world is sorrow (dukha) and suffering is at the root of existence. This idea has come to us from the Buddha. The second is the notion that our day-to-day world is an illusion, and we must transcend it to find reality. Shankara (AD 788–820) expressed this notion most forcefully. The third is the passionate belief that ‘I’ or my soul can become one with God by unconditional love and devotion. This is the central idea of bhakti. Love has long been a metaphor for religious experience in India. An ancient passage in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad compares the attainment of freedom and enlightenment to the experience of a man in his wife’s embrace. A person, it says, ‘in the embrace of the intelligent Soul [knows] nothing within or without … [H]is desire is satisfied, in which the soul is his desire, in which he is without desire and without sorrow’.6 Tamil saints first popularized the idea of bhakti, and later it spread across medieval India via a galaxy of bhakti saints—Kabir, Mira, Nanak, Tulsidas, Lalla, Chaitanya, Tukaram, Ravidas, and many others.
The chief mood of bhakti poetry is erotic (sringara), as seen from a woman’s point of view, whether in its phase of separation or of union. When Mira addresses love poems to Krishna she adopts the feminine personae of a wife, illicit lover, a woman with a tryst, even Radha herself. Krishna is her god but he is also her lover. The most common sentiment is the pain of separation from the lover and the constant theme is self-surrender of the beloved.
In classical times Indians sensibly pursued multiple ends in life. These were virtue or righteousness (dharma), wealth and power (artha), pleasure and sex (kama), and release or enlightenment (moksha). During the prime of his life a worldly householder (grihasta) pursued wealth, power, and pleasure. Only later in life did he turn to moksha. Thus, in antiquity there was a nice balance in the aims of life and Indian civilization was not as other-worldly as it became later in medieval times when pancham purushartha, the ‘fifth objective’, swept the minds and hearts of men and women. This was love and it supplanted the other goals, becoming the highest, higher even than moksha.
By reaching out to the masses in their everyday languages, the bhakti saints created a veritable social revolution. By offering entry to the lower castes they forced reform on Hinduism and prevented mass conversion to Islam. Since boundless love of God was the only requirement all were rendered equal. By promoting a direct relationship between the soul and God, the bhakti saints eliminated the priests (as Martin Luther did in the Reformation in the West and Buddha did 2000 years earlier). They offered confidence to the poor masses and helped bind together the diverse elements of the subcontinent into a single functioning society. A new form of musical composition also took shape in their songs, which continue to be performed even today in concerts, on the radio and television.
Although saints like Mira subverted the traditional ideals of Indian womanhood and challenged the social order, her mystical love for Krishna did not create the sort of problems for her as Saint Joan’s visions did in the West. Conservative Rajputs thought she was either mad or a liar or a sorceress, but she was not burned at the stake as Joan was.
It is curious that romantic love rose in the medieval West at the same time. Medieval Western society was also rigid and arranged marriages were the norm. Whereas in Europe romantic love went on to become a worldly norm, bhakti in India was absorbed into the reform movements of the nineteenth century and remained an other-worldly phenomenon. Only later in Hindi cinema, from the 1940s, did romantic love begin to spill out into this world and the secular life.
Critics contend that bhakti flowered because Muslim rule prevented most men from pursuing worldly power. Society had become rigid, the caste system more entrenched, and this checked the ambitions and mobility of men. Turning inwards was a natural response, allowing people to accept their unhappy material condition. They argue that bhakti permanently damaged the Indian psyche by making us ambivalent about the value of human action in this world, and this places us at a competitive disadvantage today. Personally, I am wary of such cultural explanations. I do believe, however, that whether one is a believer or an agnostic, these desperate medieval lovers made a great contribution to world civilization.
Historians differ with regard to the dates of Mira’s birth, marriage, and death.7 But all agree that she was a princess who belonged to the Rathor clan of Merta in Rajasthan. According to the most reliable account, Mira was born in AD 1498 when the Muslim dynasty of the Lodhis ruled in Delhi. Another Muslim king, Bahadur Shah, ruled Gujarat to the south. It was during Mira’s lifetime—in 1526—that Babur, the first great Mughal, invaded India, and established the famous Mughal dynasty in Delhi which went on to dominate India for 200 years. Thus, Mira lived in a time of exceeding political turmoil. Muslims and Hindus were constantly at war and there were bloody conflicts amongst the Rajputs themselves. Mira must have known frequent deaths amongst her Rajput relatives, whose first imperative was to maintain high traditions of martial valour and family honour. Rajput honour required courage in men, and chastity and obedience in women in an archetypal feudal patriarchy, whose extreme form was the custom of jauhar, in which women avoided falling into the hands of the enemy after a defeat by committing mass suicide in a ceremonial fire.
Mira’s great-grandfather was the famous Rathor noble Raja Jodhaji, the founder of Jodhpur. She grew up in the company of her cousin Jaimal, who would become a hero in Rajput history. She married the son and heir apparent of the great Rana Sangha, head of the Sisodiya clan and the ruler of Mewar, who was the unquestioned leader of the Rajputs at the time, and ruled from the famed citadel Chittor. Thus, she entered a life of unquestioning duty, heavy martial responsibility, and rigid domestic hierarchy. It is not quite clear when Mira abandoned the palace to begin the life of a wandering singer. Perhaps, the turning point was the bloody battle of Khanua in 1527, when the Mughals defeated the Rajput confederacy under the leadership of Mewar.
There are rich legends that try to explain Mira’s conversi
on. One says that she refused to perform the first duty of a new daughter-in-law which was to worship the family deity, the goddess Kali or Durga. Her obvious absorption in something other than her marriage bed is said to have aroused the suspicions of her husband who burst into her room one day hoping to surprise her in her adultery. But he found her deep in worship before the idol of Krishna. Another legend tells of a wedding celebrated in the house next door when she was a child. As the excitement grew in anticipation of the groom’s arrival, Mira asked her mother about her own bridegroom. Her mother laughed and pointed to Krishna’s statuette, saying, ‘There he is, your bridegroom.’ In yet another story the Sisodiyas sent her a cup of poison, which turned to ambrosia. A venomous snake was sent in a basket to kill her, but it turned into a garland of flowers.
In the end, Mira struck a radical blow at the feudal conventions of the Rajput aristocracy, and the mighty Sisodiyas of Chittor felt shamed by her public defiance. It did not come as a surprise to me, therefore, that in Rajasthan her name is sometimes used as a term of abuse for promiscuous women. By abandoning her husband, she had defied male prerogative and upset Rajput honour. The Rajputs in turn retaliated and suppressed her name not only in written records but deep within their society’s memory. Her devotional songs, so popular all over the country, were not sung in Rajasthan until recently.8
Three Plays Page 2