India (6 page)

Jagan won his war. Now, blinded by this victory to his own worldly corruption (the corruption that, multiplied a million times, has taken his country in Independence to another kind of political collapse), his Gandhian impulses decayed to self-cherishing, faddism, and social indifference, Jagan seeks only to maintain the stability of his world; he is capable of nothing else. To be pure in the midst of ‘the grime of this earth’, secure in the midst of distress: that is all he asks. When his world shatters, he cannot fight back; he has nothing to offer. He can only run away. Another Hindu retreat – like the Vijayanagar kingdom in 1336, like the pilgrims worshipping among the ruins of the Vijayanagar capital in 1975, like the
mantra
being chanted and written fifty million times to give life to the new image of the temple defiled during the last war.

Jagan’s is the ultimate Hindu retreat, because it is a retreat from a world that is known to have broken down at last. It is a retreat, literally, to a wilderness where ‘the edge of reality itself was beginning to blur’: not a return to a purer Aryan past, as Jagan might imagine, but a retreat from civilization and creativity, from rebirth and growth, to magic and incantation, a retrogression to an almost African night, the enduring primitivism of a place like the Congo, where, even after the slave-trading Arabs and the Belgians, the past is yearned for as
le bon vieux temps de nos ancêtres
. It is the death of a civilization, the final corruption of Hinduism.

With the Emergency, there was a ‘clean-up’. And it was on this, rather than the political crisis, that the censored press concentrated.

The former Maharani of Jaipur was then in jail, charged with economic offences and apparently without the prospect of a quick trial. The houses of the once ruling family of Gwalior were being searched for undeclared treasure. In Bombay the flats of government officials, bank officials, and businessmen – flats the newspapers described as ‘posh’ – were being raided, their contents assessed. Somewhere else – a touch of Hollywood India – an opium-fed cobra was found guarding (ineffectually) a four-kilogram hoard of gold and gold ornaments. Everywhere rackets were being ‘busted’: foreign-exchange dealings, smuggling, black-marketing, the acquiring of steel by bogus manufacturing units, scarce railway wagons shunted on to sidings and used as storage for hoarded commodities.

Panic was general, but not everyone lost his head. One New Delhi businessman (with a brother already raided), when told by his chauffeur that he was next on the list, handed over all his valuables for safekeeping to the chauffeur, who then vanished. Day by day the censored press carried communiqués about searches, arrests, suspensions, and compulsory retirements. By the third week of August, fifteen hundred smugglers alone were said to have been picked up. At this inauspicious time an expensive new jewellery shop opened in the Oberoi-Sheraton Hotel in Bombay, to big advertisements in the newspapers. Almost immediately, and as though they had been waiting for the place to open first, the authorities sealed the doors.

It was an arbitrary terror, reaching out to high and low: the
divisional engineer forging issue vouchers and selling off the stores of a steel plant, the sales-tax inspector accepting a five-hundred-rupee bribe, fifty dollars, from a small businessman, the railway servant carrying rice ‘illegally’ in a dining car, the postman suspected of opening a foreign packet. And for the moment, after the unrest and drift of the preceding years, it brought peace to India.

But it was only terror, and it came confused with a political crisis everyone knew about. It established no new moral frame for the society; it held out no promise for a better-regulated future. It reinforced, if anything, the always desperate Hindu sense of the self, the sense of encircling external threat, the need to hide and hoard. In the high Hindu ideal of self-realization – which could take so many forms, even that of worldly corruption – there was no idea of a contract between man and man. It was Hinduism’s great flaw, after a thousand years of defeat and withdrawal. And now the society had broken down. It was of that, really, that the press spoke, rather than of a clean-up, or of an Emergency, a passing crisis, which it was in the power of Mrs Gandhi or the opposition to resolve.

The Emergency, whatever its immediate political promptings, only made formal a state of breakdown that had existed for some time; it needed more than a political resolution. In 1975 the constitution was suspended; but already, in 1974, India had appeared to stall, with civil-disobedience campaigns, strikes, and student disturbances. The political issues were real, but they obscured the bigger crisis. The corruption of which the opposition spoke and indiscipline of which the rulers spoke were both aspects of a moral chaos, and this could be traced back to the beginning, to Independence.

Hindu society, which Gandhi had appeared to ennoble during the struggle for Independence, had begun to disintegrate with the rebirth and growth that had come with Independence. One journalist said that the trouble – he called it the betrayal – had started the day after Independence, when Mr Nehru, as prime minister, had moved into the former British commander-in-chief’s
house in New Delhi. But the trouble lay more with the nature of the movement that had brought Mr Nehru to power, the movement to which Gandhi, by something like magic, had given a mass base. A multitude of Jagans, nationalist but committed only to a holy war, had brought the country Independence. A multitude of Jagans, new to responsibility but with no idea of the state – businessmen, money-hoarding but always pious; politicians, Gandhi-capped and Gandhi-garbed – had worked to undo that Independence. Now the Jagans had begun to be rejected, and India was discovering that it had ceased to be Gandhian.

It was hardly surprising: Gandhian India had been very swiftly created. In just eleven years, between 1919 (when the first Gandhian agitation in Madras had ended with a distribution of sweets in a temple) and 1930 (when the Salt March ended with squads of disciplined volunteers offering themselves, in group after group, to sickening police blows), Gandhi had given India a new idea of itself, and also given the world a new idea of India. In those eleven years nonviolence had been made to appear an ancient, many-sided Indian truth, an eternal source of Hindu action. Now of Gandhianism there remained only the emblems and the energy; and the energy had turned malignant. India needed a new code, but it had none. There were no longer any rules; and India – so often invaded, conquered, plundered, with a quarter of its population always in the serfdom of untouchability, people without a country, only with masters – was discovering again that it was cruel and horribly violent.

In a speech before the Emergency, Jaya Prakash Narayan, the most respected opposition leader, said: ‘It is not the existence of disputes and quarrels that so much endangers the integrity of the nation as the manner in which we conduct them. We often behave like animals. Be it a village feud, a students’ organization, a labour dispute, a religious procession, a boundary disagreement, or a major political question, we are more likely than not to become aggressive,
wild, and violent. We kill and burn and loot and sometimes commit even worse crimes.’

The violence of the riot could burn itself out; it could be controlled, as it now was, by the provisions of the Emergency. But there was an older, deeper Indian violence. This violence had remained untouched by foreign rule and had survived Gandhi. It had become part of the Hindu social order, and there was a stage at which it became invisible, disappearing in the general distress. But now, with the Emergency, the emphasis was on reform, and on the ‘weaker sections’ of society; and the stories the censored newspapers played up seemed at times to come from another age. A boy seized by a village moneylender for an unpaid debt of 150 rupees, fifteen dollars, and used as a slave for four years; in September, in Vellore in the south, untouchables forced to leave their village after their huts had been fenced in by caste Hindus and their well polluted; in October, in a village in Gujarat in the west, a campaign of terror against untouchables rebelling against forced labour and the plundering of their crops; the custom, among the untouchable men of a northern district, of selling their wives to Delhi brothels to pay off small debts to their caste landlords.

To the ancient Aryans the untouchables were ‘walking carrion’. Gandhi – like other reformers before him – sought to make them part of the holy Hindu system. He called them
Harijans
, children of God. A remarkable linguistic coincidence: they have remained God’s chillun. Even at the Satyagraha Ashram on the river bank at Ahmedabad, which Gandhi himself founded after his return from South Africa, and from where in 1930 he started on the great Salt March.
Son et Lumière
at night these days in the ashram, sponsored by the Tourism Development Corporation; and in the mornings, in one of the buildings, a school for Harijan girls. ‘Backward class, backward class,’ the old brahmin, suddenly my guide, explained piously, converting the girls into distant objects of awe. The antique violence remained: rural untouchability as serfdom, maintained by
terror and sometimes by deliberate starvation. None of this was new: but suddenly in India it was news.

Mr Nehru had once observed that a danger in India was that poverty might be deified. Gandhianism had had that effect. The Mahatma’s simplicity had appeared to make poverty holy, the basis of all truth, and a unique Indian possession. And so, for twenty years after Independence, it had more or less remained. It was Mrs Gandhi, in 1971, who had made poverty a political issue. Her slogan in the election that year had been
Garibi Hatao
, Remove Poverty. Her opponents then, fighting another kind of war, had only replied
Indira Hatao
, Remove Indira. But India had since moved fast. There was now competition in protest. And as a cause for protest the holy poverty of India was all at once seen to be inexhaustible. There seemed always another, lower level of distress.

The government now, committed by the Emergency to radical reform, decreed the quashing of certain kinds of rural debts. Two or three hundred of the moneylenders who had been terrorizing the colliers of the Dhanbad coal-fields in Bihar were arrested. And, twenty-eight years after Independence, bonded labour was declared illegal. Bonded labour! In thirteen years I had made three visits to India and had in all spent sixteen months there. I had visited villages in many parts of the country, but I had never heard of bonded labour. An editorial in the
Deccan Herald
of Bangalore suggested why: ‘The system is as old as life itself … In the country itself, the practice of slavery had attained [such] a sophistication that the victims themselves were made to feel a moral obligation to remain in slavery.’
Karma!

With Independence and growth, chaos and a loss of faith, India was awakening to its distress and the cruelties that had always lain below its apparent stability, its capacity simply for going on. Not everyone now was content simply to have his being. The old equilibrium had gone, and at the moment all was chaos. But out of this chaos, out of the crumbling of the old Hindu system, and the spirit of rejection, India was learning new ways of seeing and feeling.

An exponent of the ‘new morality’ of post-Gandhian India is the playwright Vijay Tendulkar. He writes in Marathi, the language of the region around Bombay, but he is translated into other languages. When I was there, an ‘Indian English’ version of his play
The Vultures
was being put on in Bombay. The title says it all: for Tendulkar industrial or industrializing India, bringing economic opportunity to small men (in the play, a family of petty contractors) releasing instincts that poverty had suppressed, undoing old pieties, has become a land of vultures.

It is the theme of
The Vendor of Sweets
again: the end of reverences, the end of the family, individuals striking out on their own, social chaos. But Tendulkar is more violent than Narayan; his India is a crueller, more recognizable place. And though Tendulkar is Hindu enough to suggest, like Narayan, that the loss of one kind of restraint quickly leads to the unravelling of the whole system, and purity is possible only to the man who holds himself aloof, for Tendulkar there is no pure past, and religion can provide no retreat. Tendulkar, for all his brutality, is a romantic: in
The Vultures
the man who holds himself aloof is a poet, an illegitimate son, an outsider.

Tendulkar’s India is clearly the same country as Narayan’s. But it is a country to which change has come. The world has opened out, and men have become more various and individualistic; the will rages. Sensibility has been modified. India is less mysterious: Tendulkar’s discoveries are like those that might be made elsewhere.

The hero of
Sakharam Binder –
Tendulkar’s most popular play, which got him into trouble with the censors in 1972, long before the Emergency, and later ran simultaneously in four languages in four
Bombay theatres – is a working man of low caste who has rejected all faith, all ties of community and family. Sakharam stands alone. His material security is the technical skill which gives him his second name: he is a binder in a printing shop. He will not marry (it isn’t said, but he will be able to marry only within his caste, and so continue to be categorized and branded); instead, he lives with other men’s discarded wives, whom he rescues from temples or the streets (a glimpse, there, of the Indian abyss). Sakharam is not tender or especially gifted; all he insists on being is a man, when he has closed the door on the outside world and is in his own two rooms. Hinduism, in him, has been reduced to a belief in honesty and a rejection of all shaming action. In the end he is destroyed; but he has been presented as heroic.

With Sakharam we have come far from the simple rebellion of Jagan’s son in
The Vendor of Sweets
, which could be satirized as un-Indian and a mimicry of Western manners. Sakharam’s rebellion goes deeper, is immediately comprehensible, and it is entirely of India. India, coming late to situations that have been lived through elsewhere, becomes less mysterious.