Raghu Karnad - Farthest Field - An Indian Story of the Second World War

News, like almost everything, travelled slowly to Calicut, though it was the largest town in Malabar. The province lay in the narrow lap of the western coast, with its head leaned up against the high range of the Western Ghats, and its feet dipped in the Indian Ocean. The town was a minor entrepôt for timber, pepper and cashew coming down to the sea, and fish, petrol, shop goods, and the post going back up. Once it had mattered more. It had been the seat of the Zamorin of Malabar, whose rule extended south as far as Cochin, and it was here that Europe first trod on India’s soil, when Vasco Da Gama scraped up on the beach at Kappad.

The centuries since had left Calicut to turn in its own slow eddy of trade.1 Its provincialism concealed the scale of its wealth and commerce, and the rhythms of the town played like a drowsy accompanist behind the full-lunged score of the sea. Arab dhows rode at anchor, waiting to unload sacks of dried fruit from Yemen, then raised their sails and blew away like kites on the horizon’s glittering string. Coconut trees crowded the shore, and further inland all was covered in layers of matted green. Pink lotus wilted in the temple pond, and in the courtyards stood elephants, black and mottled and as brilliantly daubed as the lingam within. At the market, Maplah wives in long-sleeved blouses and headscarves mingled with bare-breasted Ezhava women selling clams and jackfruit. The town had no garrison, no real port. So Calicut concerned nobody but the sahibs who owned plantations on the Wynaad Plateau, the many local castes and creeds, and the Parsis.

The Parsis: pale as scalps, mad as coots, noses like commas on the page. They were devoutly civilised, consummately lawful, and still abided by the spirit of the first contract they made in India,2 as refugees shin-deep in the surf. Parsi : it meant from Persia, and the label never peeled away; the centuries only stiffened their pose, polite and helpful, as India’s permanent houseguests.

They were friends to all, up to the King and down to the cobbler, and while they could be silly buggers, there was always a politesse, acceptance of the King’s law, distaste for conversion or preaching aloud. They were sporting in business, and businesslike at sport. What Gurkhas were in the Army, Parsis were in civilian life – the exemplary race, making the best of British command without any desire to usurp it. So they retained the state of public grace that best served private wealth. Humata, hukhta, huvrastha : Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

Bombay was their metropole, Karachi too; further south they got a bit native. In Malabar the men all spoke Malayalam, could gallop it in their mouths, but the women were not exposed too much, for the sake of their complexion, and their accents remained. Women wore saris but the men wore shoes indoors. Like Anglo-Indians, they were attentive to cutlery; unlike Anglo-Indians, they were content – a creed of Oneness had chased them out of Persia, and a creed of Innumerables had received them, and they had prospered, most major of minorities. At the beginning of the new war they were as numerous as they would ever be, and that was only 100,000, a homeopathic dose for India: a thimble of sweet milk set down beside its vats of steaming oils and syrups.

Away from the pier, near the Heerjees’ soda factory, was the house in which Bobby Mugaseth grew up with his three sisters. The pier was where Bobby staged one of his classic pranks: going down at dawn, when the boats knocked against it like toddy-drunks clutching at a rail, and dropping into the water for a swim, against his father’s rules. Afterward he splashed up the beach to circle the Marshall house, tapping at the louvred windows until Bacha Aunty suffered him coming in to bathe.

Bobby, properly Godrej Khodadad Mugaseth, did believe himself a good Parsi. If his hand was easily turned to mischief, that was not necessarily un-Parsi-like – only unlike the paragons of Parsi merit who occupied the nearer branches of his family tree.

His grandfather Dhanjibhoy had arrived in Malabar in the 1850s, and quickly transformed from a sunken-cheeked boxwallah into the very Moses of Parsi society there. On the broad Beypore he had built Malabar’s first steam-powered sawmill, turning its estuary into one of the busiest timber yards in the world, and himself into the patron of Calicut’s industrial and civic life.

Bobby was relieved to have never known him, and to encounter him principally through the clipping books in which his obituaries were preserved. He was a ‘sincere admirer of British rule and British institutions’ (the Statesman ) ‘held in high esteem among a very wide circle of European friends and admirers’. He was ‘the Grand Old Man of Calicut’ (the Spectator ). Yet the most captivating image of his grandfather was from the story, gleaned from these admiring reports, of a single spectacular failure.

The coffee-planters of Wynaad had long struggled with transport between plantation and coast. Dhanjibhoy had an inspired solution: a camel caravan. He purchased a herd from the Rann of Kutch, had it transported by boat and equipped in Calicut. But there his animals perished, unable to tolerate the tropical climate. Nothing could displace the picture in Bobby’s mind of a silver-bearded prophet, brow shining with sweat, struggling up the slick incline to the promised plateau, followed by a train of damp, doomed camels.

Young eyes primed for slights, Bobby noticed that every obituary tipped its hat to Dhanjibhoy’s older surviving son, his Uncle Kobad. None bothered to name the younger son, Bobby’s father Khodadad. Kobad, a doctor, had both retained ‘a large practice among the European community’ and ‘nobly maintained the traditional charity of his honoured and esteemed father’. He was in a big book called Who’s Who , and was the sole Indian member of the Whites-only Malabar Club. Nothing persuaded the British to embrace an Indian as warmly as when the Indian could treat a baby that had squalled through the night.

Kobad served the Empire directly, too. The Great War had ended the year before Bobby was born. In Europe they said there’d be no war ever again, but in Asia it started at once: in the Arab states, in Afghanistan, and eventually in Malabar. The Maplah Muslims, many of them soldiers demobilised after 1918, rose in rebellion and took the districts around Calicut hostage. Thousands were killed, even British soldiers, before order was restored. Afterwards, hundreds of Maplahs were sent to penal settlements in the Andaman Islands. When an Indian delegation was sent to check on their welfare, Kobad was asked to join. The other delegates reported that the convicts were half-dead, but Kobad authored a minority report, insisting that ‘the Maplah had proved himself to be an ideal colonist and pioneer’. For this – for recognising the humane intentions of the Maplah Colonisation Scheme – he was specially thanked by the Excellency-in-Council in Madras.

Britain was their good master. Dhanjibhoy’s early career had been testament to how the colonial economy rewarded enterprise, and his later life showed how the government rewarded loyalty. The family firm was given a monopoly contract to supply salt to all of Malabar. They had, even in a literal sense, accepted the salt of the Raj.3

They were happily out of the salt trade by 1930, when Gandhi rallied against the monopoly, leading his long march to lift a clump of slimy salt at Dandi.4 Inspired, the local Congressmen planned their own salt satyagraha , to start out on the Calicut beach and end up at Payyanur. But the police let them have it, right there in front of the Cosmopolitan Club. Bobby could hear the cries from his house, and drew a picture of the thin men being knocked one way and the other by the arcing lathis and the curl of the morning waves. Some left on stretchers.