Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

I made fun of him for quite a while. Yet, there was no denying the change in him; it was palpable, and what’s more, he was aware of it. He kept telling me, ‘Saadat, please don’t make light of me. I know I’m a small man and don’t deserve this honour. But from now on I want to keep it this way.’

I returned to Jallianwala Bagh in the evening. It was packed with people. As I had come early I found a place close to the platform. Ghulam Ali appeared amidst tremendous applause. He looked dashing in his immaculate white khadi outfit, the slight swagger mentioned earlier adding to his attraction. He spoke for nearly an hour. Goose pimples broke out on my body several times during his speech. I even felt the overwhelming need to explode like a bomb then and there a few times. Perhaps I was thinking that such an explosion might free India.

God knows how many years have passed since then. Our emotions and events were in a state of flux. It is difficult to describe their precise modulations now. But as I write this story and recall him making that speech, all I see is youth itself talking, youth that was innocent of politics and filled with the sincere boldness of a young man who suddenly stops a woman on the street and tells her outright, ‘Look, I love you,’ then surrenders himself to the law.

I’ve heard many more speeches since. But in none of them have I heard even a faint echo of the bubbling madness, reckless youth, raw emotion and naked challenge that filled Shahzada Ghulam Ali’s voice that day. Speeches today are laced with laboured seriousness, stale politics and prudence dressed in lyricism.

At the time neither side, the government or the people, was experienced. They were at each other’s throats, unaware of the consequences. The government sent people to prison without understanding the implications of such a step, and those who submitted to voluntary arrest showed equal ignorance of the true significance of their act.

It was wrong-headedness, and potentially explosive. It ignited people, subsided, and ignited them all over again, creating a surge of fiery exuberance in the otherwise dull and gloomy atmosphere of servitude.

All of Jallianwala Bagh exploded with loud applause and inflammatory slogans when Shahzada Ghulam Ali ended his speech. His face was gleaming. When I met him alone and shook his hand to congratulate him, I could feel that it was trembling. A similar warm throbbing was evident on his bright face. He was gasping a bit. His eyes were aglow with the heat of passion, but they also hid traces of a search that had nearly exhausted itself. They were desperately looking for somebody. Suddenly he snatched away his hand and darted towards the jasmine bushes.

A young woman stood there, wearing a spotless khadi sari. The next day I came to know that Shahzada Ghulam Ali was in love with her. It was not a one-sided love because she, Nigar, loved him madly in return. Nigar, as is obvious from her name, was a Muslim girl; an orphan. She worked as a nurse in a women’s hospital. She was perhaps the first Muslim girl in Amritsar to come out of purdah and join the Congress movement.

Partly her khadi outfit, partly her participation in the activities of the Congress, and partly also the atmosphere of the hospital — had all slightly mellowed her Islamic demeanour, the harshness which is part of a Muslim woman’s nature, and softened her.

She wasn’t beautiful, but she was a model of femininity in her own way. Humility, the desire to respect and worship, and adarsh , so characteristic of a Hindu woman’s nature, had come together in Nigar in a most pleasing combination. Back then the image would never even have occurred to me, but now whenever I think of her, she appears to me as a beautiful confluence of the Muslim namaz and the Hindu aarti .

She practically worshipped Shahzada Ghulam Ali. He too adored her. When I asked him about her, he told me they had met during the Congress rallies and after a brief time together had decided to tie the knot.

Ghulam Ali wanted to marry her before his imminent arrest. I had no idea why. He could just as easily have married her after his release. Prison sentences used to be quite short in those days. Three months, at most a year. Some were let go after only a fortnight to make room for others. Anyway, he’d told Nigar of his plan and she was willing. All that was needed was Babaji’s blessing.

Babaji, as you must know, was a major figure. In those days he was staying outside the city in the palatial lodgings of the city’s richest jeweller, Lala Hari Ram. Ordinarily he lived in his ashram in a neighbouring village. But whenever he came to Amritsar, he encamped at Hari Ram’s. For the duration of his stay this house became a shrine for his devotees, who would stand in long lines, patiently waiting for his darshan. In the evening, seated on a wooden platform laid out under a cluster of mango trees some distance from the house, Babaji gave a general audience and accepted donations for his ashram. This was followed by the chanting of bhajans, and the session would end at his bidding.

Babaji was an abstemious and God-fearing man. He was also very learned and intelligent. These qualities had endeared him to everyone — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Untouchable alike. Everybody considered him their leader.

On the face of it, Babaji was indifferent to politics, but it was an open secret that every political movement in Punjab began and ended at his behest. The government found him intractable, a political riddle that even the brainiest government functionaries could never hope to solve. His barest smile stirred up widespread speculation, but when he proceeded to interpret it himself in an entirely novel way, the populace, already in thrall, felt truly overwhelmed.

The civil disobedience movement in Amritsar, with its frequent arrests, quite clearly owed a lot to Babaji’s influence. Every evening at darshan, he’d drop an innocuous word from his toothless mouth about the freedom movement in the whole of Punjab and about the fresh and increasingly harsh measures being taken by the government, and the mighty leaders of the time would scramble to pick it up and hang it around their necks like a priceless amulet.

People said that Babaji’s eyes had a magnetic quality, his voice was magical, and he had a cool head — so cool indeed that the worst obscenities, the sharpest sarcasm, could not provoke him, not even for the hundredth of a second — which made his opponents writhe in frustration.

He must have taken part in hundreds of demonstrations in Amritsar, but, strangely, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of him, from near or far, although I’d seen every other leader. Thus when Ghulam Ali mentioned that he was planning to seek Babaji’s permission to marry, I asked him to take me along.

The very next day Ghulam Ali arranged for a tonga, and we arrived at Lala Hari Ram’s magnificent mansion.

Babaji was done with his morning ashnan *and worship, and was listening to a beautiful panditani †sing patriotic songs. He was seated on a palm mat spread out on the immaculate white tile floor. A bolster lay near him but he wasn’t leaning against it.

The room had no other furnishings besides the mat. The panditani’s light brown complexion looked stunningly beautiful in the light reflecting off the tiles.

In spite of being an old man of seventy or seventy-two, Babaji’s entire body — clad only in a tiny red ochre loincloth — was free of wrinkles. His skin had a rich dark colour. I learned later that he had olive oil rubbed into it before taking a bath.

He greeted Shahzada Ghulam Ali with a smile, and glanced at me. He acknowledged our greetings by a slight widening of his smile and then made a sign for us to sit down.

Today when I recall that scene and examine it closely, I find it quite intriguing. A half-naked old man sitting on a palm mat in the style of a yogi; his posture, his bald head, his half-open eyes, his soft tawny body, indeed every line in his face radiated a tranquil contentment, an unassailable conviction that he could not be dislodged, not even by the worst earthquake, from the summit on which the world had placed him. And beside him sits a just-opened bud from the vale of Kashmir, her head bowed partly out of respect for the elderly man, the effect of the patriotic song, and her own boundless youth yearning to spill out of the confining folds of her coarse white sari and sing not just a song for the country, but to her youth as well; she wanted to honour not just the nearness of this elderly man, but also that of some healthy young man who would have the courage to grab her hand and jump head first into life’s raging fire. Opposite the elderly man’s granite confidence and serenity, her light brown complexion, her dark lively eyes, her bosom heaving inside her coarse khadi blouse — all seemed to throw a silent challenge: Come, pull me down from where I stand, or lift me up to sublimity.