Meanwhile, the battle for mastery over men was limited amongst the Brahmin and the Kshatriya: the merchants were busy with trade and did not bother with them. But recently, the world is seeing the establishment of the kingdom of the Vaishyas. Business is now no longer trade and commerce, it is now married to the Empire. Once, the merchant had owned material things, now he owns human beings. The difference between then and now is apparent. Unlike the times when the king and country were one, the empire builders are now traders who indulge in import and export in far corners of the world. In world history, this has ushered in a completely new era: the dominance of one country over another, even when they reside on two opposite corners of the ocean.
The world had never seen mastery on such a gigantic scale. Europe’s field of conquest is Asia and Africa.
The problem began with Germany. He is late to awaken; hurrying to the banquet he finds nothing save a few bones. Yet he is hungry, for he has smelt the richness of the leftovers. He is furious at being deprived. He is saying, ‘Never mind, you did not send me an invitation. I will now forcefully take what is my share.’ Hunger-crazed Germany believes there are just two kinds of people: the master and the slave. The master will snatch, the slave will provide. The powerful will drive the chariot and the weak will make way. When Germany announced this theory at large, Europe did not understand its bitter reality. Now it does. But this notion that Germany’s learned men has sent out to the world and that has made the country intoxicated enough to fight an unjust war does not originate only in the German mind. The root of that is to be found in the current history of European civilisation.
Translated from Bengali by Debjani Sengupta
1 Written in December 1914, as a rejoinder to an editorial in the journal Sabuj Patra (edited by Pramatha Chaudhuri), Tagore frames a scathing critique of the First World War that he sees as a battle between soldiers and merchants, between Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. Theorising through the tropes of the Indian caste system and Mahabharata’s Kurukshetra war, he links European mercantile interests with the expansion of the Empire in Asia and Africa. Written in his usual expansive prose style, Tagore’s unceremonious connection between commerce and war is possibly the first of such theorisations in the political history of the Empire that originates from Asia. The piece was given the title Loraiyer Mool by Tagore. (Translator’s Note)
2 The terms belong to the varna system of dividing Hindu society into four groups: Brahmin (the priests), Kshatriya (the soldiers), Vaishya (the merchants) and Shudra (the menial workers).
3 Hindu mythology denotes four yugas or ages the world goes through: Satya, Treta, Dwapar and Kali. Kaliyuga is characterised by discord and war. According to Puranic sources, Lord Krishna’s death marked the end of the Dwapar age and the start of Kaliyuga.
4 Fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the war is the ultimate example of fratricide and bloodshed in the epic Mahabharata. Lord Krishna helped the Pandavas to win the war while Balaram, his elder brother, remained neutral. Balaram is associated with the plough and farming.
The Weary Generations1
Abdullah Hussein
They fought on in Belgium and France for a year. In the month of July, the regiment was pulled out and ordered to go to East Africa. They spent a few days in Marseille where they were to board ship.
It had been a sunny, warm day and Naim had been out strolling along the city streets, which were crowded with men, women and children. A horse-cart, loaded with baskets of vegetables, passed. A few yards ahead, the horse’s hooves slipped on the road surface and it fell awkwardly with its legs spread out in all four directions. People gathered on the roadside, women uttering small, brief cries of pity and horror. The farmer and his helper, putting the strength of their backs behind it, first helped up the horse and then started picking up spilled heads of cabbage, parsnips and other vegetables from the road. Some more people gathered on the other side. Suddenly, Naim saw a figure in the crowd, walking away. He was a heavy-set man in a crumpled army uniform. There was something in the way he walked and the line of his shoulders that was recognisable. Naim caught up with him. The man turned round.
‘Mahindroo!’ Naim cried in surprise.
‘Neem!’ Mahinder Singh answered.
They grabbed one another’s hands and kept pressing and shaking them for minutes on end without saying another word, their eyes twinkling with old warmth. Finally, Naim laughed and said to him, ‘You are alive! And dirty. Great!’
Mahinder Singh laughed. ‘I am going to have a bath today.’
‘Good. Then you will be alive and clean.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Mahinder Singh asked.
‘We are going to Africa. I am in the 129th Baloch. A machine-gunner. And you?’
‘No. 9, Hudon Horse, Ambala Brigade.’
‘Have you been fighting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
Mahinder Singh pointed in an indefinite direction with his hand. ‘There.’
‘Against whom?’
‘Turks–Germans,’ Mahinder Singh said vaguely, as if he was not sure who they were.
‘Are you all right?’ Naim asked.
‘Yes. You?’
‘I got a bullet. But only in the flesh. Healed quickly.’
They walked on in silence.
‘You want to go and eat something somewhere?’ Naim asked him.
‘Er, no, I am going back to my unit. Come, there is a place where we can talk,’ Mahinder Singh said.
Walking alongside one another, they left the neighbourhood. People, especially children, stopped to gape at this soldier with a beard and a turban wrapped round his head. The two of them entered a vast cemetery. Concrete-slab graves with headstones spread out from narrow red stone pathways, on either side of which stood tended fruit trees. Looking at Mahinder Singh out of the corners of his eyes, Naim noticed that the young Sikh no longer had the agility in his limbs; he had grown fat and moved ponderously, like an old bull — something unlikely to happen to a soldier in the midst of war.
‘Any news?’ Naim asked.
‘There were floods.’
‘Somebody told you?’
‘Ramzan.’
‘The cobbler? He wasn’t with us.’
‘No, he was away when we were taken. He was caught six months later.’
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘He was sent to our regiment.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘It came non-stop for four days after we left. Crops washed away. Many houses collapsed under the rains. Ramzan’s too. After the floods foot-and-mouth spread and killed many cattle. But our two best bulls were sold to Juginder in good time, Chaudri Niaz Beg also sold most of his animals before the disease came, so you’ll be all right.’ Bad though the news was, Mahinder Singh perked up as he spoke to Naim of their homes. ‘After we came away many Roshan Pur girls ran off with boys from Jat Nagar who had hidden and escaped being taken, Ishtamal was done by the land department. Our barley field by the pond was exchanged with one of yours by the graveyard. Our field is good soil, you have nothing to worry about. Everyone’s hand is in one place now, what more do we want? Good for animals too, they don’t have to go from one field to the other…’
In the growing dark of evening, they were the only two left in the sprawling cemetery. Much of their talk had been exhausted in the first half-hour. Still reluctant to part, walking up and down the paths in silence like ghosts from another time and another place, only occasionally breaking the quiet of the place with a word from Naim or a grunt from Mahinder Singh, they kept repeatedly looking at one another without words. As the light of the day died, Naim stopped and put his hand on Mahinder Singh’s shoulder.
‘Mahindroo, are you well?’
After a pause, Mahinder Singh said softly, ‘I am well. Only tired. Much too tired.’
‘Of the war?’
Mahinder Singh shrugged.
‘I didn’t think war would do you
any harm,’ Naim said, laughing. ‘Remember back in the village? You could kill without blinking an eye.’
Mahinder Singh left the path and went to sit on the raised slab of a grave. ‘That was different,’ he said after a few long minutes. ‘To avenge the blood of one of your own, even a rat can kill. Here we don’t even know the people. It is like killing a pig, or a jackal in the jungle.’
‘Well,’ Naim said, ‘that is what war is.’
Although supporting his weight on hands placed on either side of him on the stone, Mahinder Singh looked slumped, his back in the shape of a bow, his shoulders fallen, as if his body had taken on a different form.
‘Tell me,’ Mahinder Singh asked suddenly, ‘why are we here?’
‘Because of the war,’ Naim said. ‘The enemy has attacked.’
‘What, attacked our village?’
‘Attacked the British Sarkar and their friends.’
‘What is it to us?’
‘They are our masters.’
‘Our master in Roshan Agha,’ Mahinder Singh said simply.
‘Yes, and the English Sarkar is Roshan Agha’s master.’
A brief hollow sound emerged from Mahinder Singh’s mouth. ‘How many masters do we have?’
Naim laughed. ‘Well, it’s just the way it is.’
Mahinder Singh got up ponderously, as if making an effort to carry the weight of his clothes. ‘I like this place,’ he said, gesturing towards the graves. ‘Here good people are buried. With names.’
Naim didn’t know what to say to awaken within Mahinder Singh the old friend he once had. Cheerily he pressed on, ‘And dates.’
‘Yes,’ said Mahinder Singh. ‘Some with the names of their fathers and mothers too.’
Naim laughed again. ‘But, Mahindroo, you can’t even read.’
‘But I know. On the stones are names and dates.’
He thumped his sides, as if dusting his clothes, although there was no dust. Then he offered his hand to Naim. Naim grasped it in both hands and kept squeezing it, as if to reach the inner places of the man.
‘I will see you later,’ Mahinder Singh said, freeing his hand.
‘Yes, yes. When all this is over. Once we are back in the village we will snatch all the girls from Jat Nagar’s scoundrels, won’t we?’
After a long moment, during which Mahinder Singh looked around at the graves and their headstones, which had lost their contours in the dark, he said, ‘Yes.’ Without another word he walked away, quickly disappearing from view, leaving Naim standing there with visions of his village and the two of them as they had been, in past seasons so far back that it was hard even to recall them, although there was no more than a year-and-a-half in between. In that time they had seen the face of a war they did not understand.
Africa
Making their way through six-foot-high grass with the help of bayoneted rifles, they emerged on the bank of a lake that divided the jungle into two halves. The sun was reflected like a conflagration on the waters of the lake.
‘Bah oh!’ exhaled Lance Naik Sajan, pressing a piece of cloth on to his face, which was covered with fine cuts that oozed tiny drops of blood. ‘Sharp as swords it is, and they call it bloody grass.’
Naim, screwing up his eyes to scan the jungle on the opposite bank, suddenly felt his feet sinking into the earth. He looked down in horror.
‘Retreat,’ he shouted.
The soldier jumped, fell, leaped in panic and pulled themselves out of the shifting earth, withdrawing quickly into the grass.
‘Swamp,’ Naim told Sajan.
Sajan swore. ‘Strange country. My blood has turned black, look.’
‘Everything looks black in the shade.’
‘No, no, I am telling you. It is the mosquitoes. You know, I have crushed a mosquito and its blood was black,’ he said, uttering a forced, hollow laugh peculiar to men in the battlefield.
They had been camping in this part of Africa, undergoing exercises to ‘familiarise’ themselves with the African war in grassland and small dense forests, where the rule was ‘fire first and apologise afterwards’. In this land of swamps, they lived among large mosquitoes that outnumbered them by a million to one. There were deaths from malaria. The condition of the white troops was worse, because they fell victim not just to malaria but to diarrhoea and skin diseases as well. Many died without firing a shot. The only ‘healthy’ troops on their side were the African battalions who, although reputed to be poor fighters, were not in the least affected by the elements. Across the lake, in the other part of the jungle, was the enemy. There had been no engagement so far. All night long the men stayed half-awake, fighting the bee-sized mosquitoes. One of their men died of snake-bite. When a death occurred among the ranks, the men of the platoon stayed up, remembering the dead and killing mosquitoes, which they considered their first opponents in the war, more deadly than the enemy soldiers because they were always there and attacking.
‘Such a useless death,’ Lance Naik Sajan said to Naim as they sat around, tired but sleepless. ‘I mean an insect that you can easily kill sneaks up on us and kills us.’
‘No more useless than any other,’ Naim said.
‘Except those that come from God,’ Sajan said with a certain satisfaction.
‘So you think a death in war comes from God?’ Naim asked after a while.
‘No,’ answered Sajan, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘All right, why not?’
Sajan was quiet for a moment. ‘You know, havildar,’ he said then, ‘whenever I think I have killed someone, not hand-to-hand but even unseen, I feel the blood in my throat. Death that comes from God’s will does not stick in anyone’s throat.’
‘I think we will have an engagement with the enemy tomorrow,’ Naim said to change the subject, although he did not believe it. He had only had some doubtful information about their strength. ‘They are massed over there, on the western side of the trees. Intelligence says they have sixteen thousand troops. Two thousand white and fourteen thousand black.’
‘Where do they get the blacks?’
‘Don’t know. Each company has two hundred men, sixty big guns and eighty machine guns. We will have a job to do...’
‘Motherfucking mosquitoes,’ Sajan said. ‘Oh yes, sir, big job to do. Havildar, are there mosquitoes where the enemy is?’
‘Of course, much more.’
‘Good.’
Not long after, they had their first real engagement. There had been no word from intelligence. They were on a routine exercise when it happened. Light-footed as forest foxes, they were advancing through thick grass when suddenly they came up against a company of white soldiers.
‘Black Bird!’ The company commander shouted the code word.
He was answered by rifle fire. The company hit the ground and returned the fire. Birds flew up from the grassland and small animals scurried away. After a few minutes’ silence, a line of soldiers appeared virtually at arms’ length from them and attacked. Hand-to-hand combat began. Naim, still on the ground, took aim at a soldier’s chest and fired. The soldier, a husky, red-faced man, fell back and gathered up in the shape of a ball. He didn’t get up. Finding attacking soldiers almost looming above him, Naim jumped up. A few feet away he saw a soldier running across, his bayonet pointing at the body of Naim’s company commander. Without a moment’s pause, Naim charged and sank his bayonet in the side of the soldier. The commander, alerted by the cry of the wounded man, turned and fired his revolver at him. The soldier slumped to the ground. The commander glanced round and fired again at a soldier attacking Naim. At the same moment, Naim looked to his side and saw that his left arm was hanging by thin threads of flesh and veins just below the elbow. Before he lost consciousness he distinctly recalled thinking, why was it always his left arm that got hurt?
The hospital was in a building once used as a school. In a long narrow room, Naim lay among the other half-fallen, their heads touching others’ feet, squeezed into spaces too small for them. Amid
cries and moans from the wounded, the maimed and the near-dead, the old bandaged ones looked at the new arrivals as a buffalo would look, with uninvolved concern, at another in the agony of giving birth. A Pathan soldier lay beside Naim.
‘How are you feeling, jawan?’ a doctor on his round asked the Pathan.
‘Son of a donkey,’ the Pathan said to the doctor, glowering at him with red, swollen eyes. Then suddenly, he burst into tears. ‘I have become lame — I will be a lame man, always…’
The doctor threw a tired glance at the soldier and moved on to Naim. ‘Your last dressing will be on Friday,’ he said, looking at the patient’s papers, before moving on.
Following the doctor came Nurse Doris. ‘Stop crying, you baby,’ she said to the Pathan affectionately.
‘He is not a baby, nurse,’ Naim said, laughing.
‘You are all babies here. When you arrived here last month you were crying too.’
‘No I wasn’t.’
‘Yes you were. You have forgotten. You were very small then,’ she said, sweetly mischievous, passing on to the next man.
Naim got off his bed and went to sit on the Pathan soldier’s bed.
‘What is your name?’
‘Amir Khan,’ the Pathan replied.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Kaka Khel. Near Peshawar.’
‘Where were you wounded?’
‘Some place out there. Don’t know the name.’
‘Unit?’
‘Frontier Force Rifles.’
During this exchange the soldier’s gaze remained fixed upon Naim’s arm. Naim smiled and showed him the bandaged stump.
‘Yes. It had to be cut off.’
The Pathan soldier shook his head in aggrieved sympathy, looking from Naim’s half arm to his own half leg for a few seconds, then smiled, as if taking strength from the other man who looked alive and well, minus an arm.
The Great War Page 4