Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

Let us be honest: Gangaji was the kind of person it is more convenient to forget. The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow. While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.

When he spoke of his intentions to his three young wards, trembling tensely before him at the brink of adulthood, he was not lying or posturing. It was, indeed, Truth that he was after — spell that with a capital T, Ganapathi, Truth. Truth was his cardinal principle, the standard by which he tested every action and utterance. No dictionary imbues the word with the depth of meaning Gangaji gave it. His truth emerged from his convictions: it meant not only what was accurate, but what was just and therefore right. Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’, or unjust, or violent means. You can well understand why Dhritarashtra and Pandu, in their different ways, found themselves unable to live up to his precepts even in his own lifetime.

But his was not just an idealistic denial of reality either. Some of the English have a nasty habit of describing his philosophy as one of ‘passive resistance’. Nonsense: there was nothing passive about his resistance. Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity. If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

That is where Ganga spoke for the genius of a nation; we Indians have a great talent for deriving positives from negatives. Non-violence, non-cooperation, non-alignment, all mean more, much more, than the concepts they negate. ‘V.V.,’ he said to me once, as I sat on the floor by his side and watched him assiduously spin what he would wear around his waist the next day, ‘one must vindicate the Truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.’ In fact he said not ‘oneself but ‘one’s self’, which tells you how carefully he weighed his concepts, and his words.

I still remember the first of the great incidents associated, if now so forgettably, with Gangaji. He had ceased to be Regent and was living in a simple house built on a river bank, which he called an ashram and the British Resident — who now refused to use ‘native’ words where perfectly adequate English substitutes were available — referred to as ‘that commune’. He lived there with a small number of followers of all castes, even his Children of God whom he discovered to be as distressingly human as their touchable counterparts, and he lived the simple life he had always sought but failed to attain at the palace — which is to say that he wrote and spun and read and received visitors who had heard of his radical ideas and of his willingness to live up to them. One day, just after the midday meal, a simple vegetarian offering concluding with the sole luxury that he permitted himself — a bunch of dates procured for him at the town market many miles away — a man came to the ashram and fell at his feet.

We were all sitting on the verandah — yes, Ganapathi, I was there on one of my visits — and it was a scorching day, with the heat rising off the dry earth and shimmering against the sky, the kind of day when one is grateful to be in an ashram rather than on the road. It was then that a peasant, his slippers and clothes stained with the dust of his journey, his lips cracking with dryness, entered, called Gangaji’s name, staggered towards him and fell prostrate.

At first we thought it might simply be a rather dramatic gesture of obeisance — you know how we Indians can be — but when Ganga tried to lift the man up by his shoulders it was clear his collapse had to do with more than courtesy. He had lost consciousness. After he had been revived with a splash of water he told us, in a hoarse whisper, of the heat and the exhaustion of his long walk. He had come over a hundred miles on foot, and he had not eaten for three days.

We gave him something to chew and swallow, and the peasant, Rajkumar, told us his story. He was from a remote district on Hastinapur’s border with British India, but on the British side of the frontier. He wanted Gangaji to come with him to see the terrible condition of his fellow peasants and do something to convince the British to change things.

‘Why me?’ Ganga asked, not unreasonably. ‘I have no official position any more in Hastinapur. I can pull no strings for you.’

‘We have heard you believe in justice for rich and poor, twice-born and low-caste alike,’ the peasant said simply. ‘Help us.’

He was reluctant, but the peasant’s persistence moved him and in the end Ganga went to Rajkumar’s impoverished district. And what he saw there changed him, and the country, beyond measure.

12

I was there, Ganapathi. I was there, crowding with him into the third-class railway carriage which was all he would agree to travel in, jostling past the sweat-stained workers with their pathetic yet precious bundles containing all they possessed in the world, the flat-nosed, wide-breasted women with rings through their nostrils, the red-shirted porters with their numbered brass armbands bearing steel trunks on their cloth-swathed heads, the water-vendors shouting Hindu pani! Mussulman pani !’ into our ears, for in those days even water had a religion, indeed probably had a caste too, braving the ear- splitting shrieks of the hawkers, of the passengers, of the relatives who had come to bid them goodbye, of the beggars who were cashing in on the travellers’ last-minute anxiety to appease the gods with charity, and finally of the guards’ whistles. Yes, Ganapathi, I was there, propelling the half-naked crusader into the compartment as our iron-wheeled, rust-headed, steam-spouting vahana clanged and wheezed into life and heaved us noisily forward into history.

Motihari was like so many other districts in India — large, dry, full of ragged humans eking out a living from land which had seen too many pitiful scratchings on its unyielding surface. There was starvation in Motihari, not just because the land did not produce enough for its tillers to eat, but because it could not, under the colonialists’ laws, be entirely devoted to keeping them alive. Three tenths of every man’s land had to be consecrated to indigo, since the British needed cash-crops more than they needed wheat. This might not have been so bad had there been some profit to be had from it, but there was none. For the indigo had to be sold to British planters at a fixed price — fixed, that is, by the buyer.

Ganga saw the situation with eyes that, for all his idealism, had too long been accustomed to the palace of Hastinapur. He saw men whose fatigue burrowed into their eyes and made hollows of their cheeks. He saw women dressed day after day in the same dirty sari because they did not possess a second one to change into while they washed the first. He saw children without food, books or toys, snot-nosed little creatures whose distended bellies mocked the emptiness within. And he went to the Planters’ Club and saw the English and Scots in their dinner-jackets and ballroom gowns, their laughter tinkling through the notes of the club piano as waiters bearing overladen trays circled their flower-bedecked tables.

He saw all this from outside, for the dark Christian hall-porter who guarded the club’s racial character denied him entry. He stood on the steps of the clubhouse for a long while, his eyes burning through the plate-glass windows of the dining-room, until a uniformed watchman came out, took him by the arm and asked him brusquely to move on. I expected Ganga to react sharply, to push the man away or at least to remove the other’s grip on his arm, but I had again underestimated him. He simply looked at the offender: one look was enough; the watchman dropped his hand, instantly ashamed, eyes downcast, and Ganga walked quietly down the steps. The next morning he announced his protest campaign.