A Portrait
ALLEN LANE
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PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
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First published 2011
Copyright © Patrick French, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-194700-6
Introduction
PART I
Rashtra: Nation
1. Accelerated History
2. There Will be Blood
3. The Centrifuge
4. Family Politics
PART II
Lakshmi: Wealth
5. The Visions of John Maynard Keynes
6. A Dismal Prospect
7. Falcon 900
8. A Quarry near Mysore
PART III
Samaj: Society
9. The Outcastes’ Revenge
10. 4ever
11. Solace of Religion
12. Only in India
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
MG
In 1997 I wrote Liberty or Death, an account of Indian independence and partition. Almost as soon as it was out, I wanted to do a sequel which looked at India in a new way, for what it was becoming rather than for what others wanted it to be. Some sort of unleashing was taking place, the effects of which were not yet clear, and the country appeared to be passing through epic and long-awaited changes. I was diverted by a biography, though even while I was writing it I was noticing the little revolutions in India, and the historical impulses that lay behind them.
Nearly everyone has a reaction to India, even if they have never been there. They hate it or love it, think it mystical or profane; find it extravagant or ascetic; consider the food the best or the worst in the world. For East Asians, it is a competitor and a source of some of their own spiritual traditions. For Americans, it is a challenge, a potential hub of cooperation or economic rivalry – both countries are diverse and hulking, their national identities strong and to an extent constructed, their populations loquacious and outgoing and admiring of entrepreneurial success. For many Europeans, India is a religious place with a special, undefined message. For the British, it is a link to old prestige, a land interesting mainly in the past tense. For the Pakistanis – the estranged siblings of the Indians – it is a site of threat and fascination.
Public discourse about India is caught in these old ways of looking. Inside the country itself, responses to recent economic progress are often pinned either to earlier socialist instincts against capital and globalization, or on seeing it as a triumphant riposte to past humiliations. The postcolonial outlook – vital in the early years of freedom as a means to take the nation forward, and as an antidote to constant Western assumptions about the restricted destiny of former colonies – has become an intellectual straitjacket which limits fresh thought at a time when something new is happening.
In India I have tried to write about the country both from the inside and from the outside – or from a distance. The information passes through three different prisms. The first is political, the second economic and the third social. The individual stories, calamities, aspirations and triumphs of many people are at the heart of the narrative. Each of the three sections – Rashtra or nation, Lakshmi or wealth, Samaj or society – seeks to answer, in an indirect way, the question: why is India like it is today?
Rashtra is about the birth of a nation. For any country, the moment of conception or formation is vital in explaining what happens later (think of Israel or the United States). In those early days, India was a beacon to Asian and African peoples who were seeking freedom from foreign rule. The dream turned stagnant, as a controlled, statist mindset took over. India was nominally not aligned in the Cold War and the Soviet Union was its friend – but many Indians wished to go West to seek their fortune. New political leaders arose, powered by caste, religion or regional affinity, and politics in India changed, following its own unique conventions and traditions. A handful of families became ever more important; the final chapter in Rashtra looks at how Indian democracy really works, and at the triumph of nepotism.
In Lakshmi, recent economic liberalization is placed in a deeper historical context. Why was international trade rejected with such force and certainty after independence? What makes a new nation prosperous? Why did people raised on a diet of socialism become robustly and even rapaciously capitalist, embracing the idea of economic creativity? Who becomes super-rich, who gets by and who remains super-poor? The rapid growth of the Indian economy was sparked by a near calamity in 1991, when the remnants of the country’s gold reserves had to be sent to Switzerland in a bid to raise cash. There was nothing inevitable about India’s rise, and Lakshmi uses the personal tales of the poor and the rich to explain how it happened.
The third section, Samaj, is more nebulous: it is about broad social patterns, and the characteristics that make India itself. The narrative shows things that might be taken for granted in India – the fact the ‘untouchable’ father of the constitution was not allowed to sit in a classroom, the misconduct of the police and bureaucracy, the role of servants, the genetics of caste, the importance of India’s many Muslims and their loyalty to the national ideal, and the deep and enduring influence of forms of faith. Through looking at the past, and sometimes at quite distant moments in history, the apparent peculiarities and continuing problems of the present can be revealed.
Globally, India is now sometimes portrayed as having a competitive edge over more sluggish developed countries that have abandoned thrift, given up on saving and refuse to postpone gratification. Values that are embedded in an Indian way of life appear to have an unexpected relevance. A friend, Niranjan, forwarded me an email. It caught the idea that people like himself had a distinctive way of operating, and their lateral approach presented them with a new advantage. Like other Indians, Niranjan was taking pleasure in the possibility that the citizens of his country were highly motivated, and no longer perceived only as the victims of famine or superstition:
An Indian man walks into a bank in New York City and asks for the loan officer. He tells the loan officer that he is going to India on business for two weeks and needs to borrow $5,000. The bank officer tells him that the bank will need some form of security for the loan, so the Indian man hands over the keys of a new Ferrari parked on the street in front of the bank. He produces the title and everything checks out. The loan officer agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan.
The bank’s president and its officers all enjoy a good laugh at the Indian for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral against a $5,000 loan. An employee of the bank then drives the Ferrari into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there. Two weeks later, the Indian returns, repays the $5,000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.
The loan officer says, ‘Sir, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and found that you are a multi millionaire. What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000.’
The Indian replies: ‘Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?’
Ah, the mind of the Indian!
With its overlap of extreme wealth and lavish poverty, its mix of the educated and the ignorant, its competing ideologies, its lack of uniformity, its kindness and profound cruelty, its complex relationships with religion, its parallel realities and the rapid speed of social change – India is a macrocosm, and may be the world’s default setting for the future.
In Ladakh the air is thin and dry, and it is cold even when the sunlight burns you. Tashi Norbu could remember how, in 1948, Buddhist monks in their dark red robes had built an improvised, rocky airstrip near the monastery in Leh. Out of the sky came a buzzing metal shape, a Dakota aeroplane carrying India’s new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It landed in a cloud of dust.
‘We had never seen a car or a motor vehicle at that time,’ Tashi Norbu said, sitting above his apricot orchard, speaking in a Tibetan dialect. He was an old man, an expert in medicinal herbs, water diversion and the correct way to shoot a bow and arrow. He wore a long brown robe secured with a lime-coloured sash, and on his head he had wedged a homburg.
‘There were no roads in Ladakh. A plane lands from the sky, you can’t imagine … All the local people put their hands together and prayed to the plane, we were all praying.’
Ladakh is a mountainous region by the borders of Tibet, China and Pakistan. In the rush of history, it might have ended up on the wrong side of the line; but it is in India. It feels like the remoter parts of Tibet, though without the Chinese influence. By a quirk of history, Ladakhis follow Tibetan Buddhism, having avoided the waves of Muslim invasions that changed the traditions of their neighbours. Geographically inaccessible, the region preserves an ancient way of living. The present, powerless King of Ladakh’s lineage dates back an incredible thirty-eight generations to 975. His family lost their influence more than a century ago, and he lives in a little hilltop palace.
Tashi Norbu thought of himself as a Ladakhi above all else. ‘As children, we hadn’t heard about India. We didn’t know who the Indians were. We knew they were “gyagarpa”, people who came from the plains, but it was not until I grew older and saw a map that I understood how big India was. Some things changed after independence: a politician came to visit us from Srinagar in Kashmir, but we didn’t know what that meant, whether he was a religious leader or a king, or what.
‘I can remember when I first saw the Indian army using kerosene! I couldn’t believe the flames, how easily they could make them. They told us we could buy kerosene in Leh if we sold eggs. We would take the eggs, carry them like a baby while crossing the [Indus] river, sell them to a trader, buy the kerosene, and carry the kerosene back to the village.
‘Pandit Nehru told the chief lama he should become a leader, and the lama said since we were in a mountain region he would rather be a worker. He handed a shovel to Nehru, who began digging! They took some photographs of it. Yes, I am content to be with India. We would never have got along with Pakistan, because they are Mohammedans and follow different customs. As for China, it is communist; you have to take permission for everything you want to do, and you can’t speak your mind. In India you can speak your mind, so I’m happy to be with them.’1
Ladakh is about as far north as you can get in India. The modern nation created after independence was implacably diverse, culturally and geographically.
Tamil Nadu is more than 1,500 miles south of Ladakh. It is a different kind of world. While Ladakhis are wiry, with narrow facial apertures – a small nose, mouth and ears and slit eyes, perhaps in response to the icy, windy climate – Tamils usually have a wide sprawl of a face, in keeping with the southern lushness. The land is rich with vegetation, paddy fields and mango trees, and the view from the coast is filled with fishing boats, long painted skiffs with curved prows, catching kingfish. Young men dive low for stone fruit – giant blue-green mussels, which they pluck off the rocks.
When the Indian national flag was chosen at independence, a tricolour of saffron, white and green, Ashoka’s wheel of dharma, or law, was placed at its centre. The emperor Ashoka had united the subcontinent before the birth of Christ, but even his kingdom stopped advancing when it reached the south. The southern tip of India, perhaps more than any other place on earth, has an unbroken chain to the ancient past. There have been caste wars, the usual comings and goings of power, with one imperial dynasty replacing another in earlier times, but no invasion. European traders – British, Dutch, Portuguese and French – had all pursued their interests forcefully over the centuries, but the society had retained its own earlier forms. It would be as if the religion or culture at the time of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE, had survived in snatches in the everyday life of modern Egyptians.
The noise of central and northern India can at times drown out the subtlety of the south, which has been so vital in determining the country’s present status. On the edge of Chennai or Madras, it can be so luxuriant and humid and quiet that you feel as if you are in another land; but it is just another face of India, with the tinkle of bicycle bells and the echoes of a temple the only distraction. Saravankumar, a professor, described it to me this way: ‘The identity we have here goes right back to the first century, to the Tamil poem Puram 183. I would say my Tamilness comes from the language.’2 I could understand what he meant, and could see – or hear, on the street and in the home – how the high-speed, bubbling Tamil tongue was part of the environment. So while the north had its upheavals, the south went on for ever.
The nation can be triangulated in many ways: it is all India. Far across to the east, about 1,750 miles from Chennai and the same distance from Ladakh – up near Burma, Bhutan and Bangladesh – lies Meghalaya. It is a hilly and rainy state, a kingdom with rushing waterfalls, tropical forests and unexpectedly successful rock groups. The people look different from Tamils or Ladakhis, and follow their own traditions.
Take just one tribe in Meghalaya as an example, the Khasi people, who are more than a million strong. Their language bears some connection to Khmer, which is spoken in Cambodia. They are a matrilineal society: their family name comes from the mother’s side, and the last daughter in the family to leave the family home is the custodian of all ancestral property. The Khasi religion is not connected to any other faith, and emphasizes a belief in one supreme god, U Blei. In their creation myth, the Moon (which is male) and the Sun (which is female) stand symbolically for the divine presence. The Khasis have a covenant with their deity – who is the dispenser, the maker, the giver, the creator, the divine law. They believe in the concept of ‘iapan’, or pleading with god for everything they need, and are very sure about how they came to be on earth – by descending a golden ladder from the mount of heaven’s navel. What they are not sure about is how exactly man came to be created by god.
As Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, a Khasi, explained to me in perfect English: ‘Although we believe we were created by god, we also think that it is not the business of humans to know exactly how. As I said, the Khasis believe in one supreme god, who is formless, or rather whose form man cannot even begin to imagine, for that is forbidden. A Khasi does not believe in idol worship, since he must not conceive the appearance of god. We do not have a place of worship since our religion is private and familial. True worship takes place in one’s heart, or at one’s family’s hearth. Because of this, the Khasi religion remains largely unorganized, and it is completely lacking in missionary tendencies. This is because a Khasi believes his god is also the god of the Hindu, the Muslim, the Christian, and of all other people. His motto is, therefore, “Ieit la ka jong, burom ia kiwei” – “Love one’s own, and respect others.” As for me, I will always prefer my own religion to any other because it’s the only religion that I know which does not believe in hell’s damnation. The Khasi universe is two-tier – heaven and earth – and there is no room for hell.’3
Each of these disparate places was part of the nation that was born in 1947.
When the British gained control of the subcontinent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often preferred to rule through a local potentate. They did not make a lot of converts to Christianity. By propping up client rulers and giving them imperial baubles and titles, they could secure influence at minimum cost. This strategy of containment succeeded until the early twentieth century, when a new class of Indian nationalists, stirred by ideals of liberty and democracy, used peaceful mass resistance to campaign for an end to foreign rule. The Indian National Congress had been established in 1885 by English-speaking professionals who wanted a greater involvement in government. Under the creative guidance of Mohandas Gandhi – the Mahatma, or ‘great soul’ – the Congress became a popular movement of liberation from the British empire.
While this new political force challenged imperial control and promoted itself as the true voice of India, many Muslims, who made up nearly a quarter of the population, felt excluded by the largely Hindu idiom in which it operated. The Muslim elite, which still retained much of its influence after the decline of the Mughals and the rise of the European powers, was not attracted by what Gandhi represented. Many felt that for all the talk of inclusiveness, the Congress leadership was made up largely of Hindus from the higher end of the caste system who would, if India became independent, undermine the security and status of Muslims. With their homespun khadi clothing, their emphasis on Hindi rather than Urdu as the national language of India, their big rallies and their belief in profound social reform, the Congress leaders seemed like a threat. The Congress-run provincial governments which took office in parts of India in the 1930s were presented as the heralds of a new ‘Hindu Raj’.
When political uncertainty grew during the Second World War, large numbers of Muslims turned to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted to establish a homeland or a place of safety for their community in parts of north India where Muslims were in a majority. The Indian National Congress failed to acknowledge the gravity of this demand. As late as 1946, Jinnah’s Muslim League was willing to accept a federation in which defence, foreign policy and communications remained under common control, rather than a fully independent Pakistan. During the final negotiations, Jinnah was boxed in by a triumphalist Congress and British incompetence: the result was the bloody and disastrous partition of the Indian empire into two dominions, Pakistan and India.
It was a time of accelerated history, when a political leader’s decisions might have enormous and fateful consequences. In the largest mass migration in history, Hindus and Sikhs escaped to India and Muslims escaped to Pakistan. Even setting aside the vast, unexpected convulsion during the creation of the two new wings, East and West Pakistan, the shape of free India remained highly unclear. Most significantly, the status of India’s princely rulers was left unresolved at independence. Each kingdom had its own treaty with London, and control could not legally be handed over to the successor government – controlled by the Congress – without a signature.
Take Jodhpur as an example: Hanwant Singh was a volatile young man, and like most princely rulers he was not accustomed to being told what to do. Tall and bulky with a toothbrush moustache, he was called ‘Big Boy’ by his father. He liked playing polo, shooting sand grouse and performing magic tricks. As heir to the dry, flinty kingdom of Jodhpur in the west of India, a princely state not much smaller than England, his life had been mapped out for him. When he went to boarding school, he took with him two cars, a stable of horses and a retinue of servants, including a tailor and a barber.4
In June 1947, life became more complicated. His father died, making him Maharaja of Jodhpur just as India was about to become free. On the personal side, the 23-year-old intended shortly to breach protocol by marrying a European, although not long before that he had taken a sixteen-year-old princess from Gujarat as his first bride. He dealt with the tension by going off on pig-sticking hunts, but the decisions facing him could not be postponed because he was in an unexpectedly important political position. Jodhpur bordered the emerging Muslim homeland of Pakistan, and its founder, Jinnah, had asked him to break with India and link his kingdom to the new nation. Unfortunately, the prince and most of his people were Hindu. Jinnah offered extraordinarily favourable terms: the maharaja could use Karachi as a free port, purchase whatever weapons he wanted, control the railway line to Sindh and receive free grain for famine relief. It sounded like a good deal. He agreed to sign up for Pakistan. Then, as he was about to touch his fountain pen to the paper, he learned that none of his fellow Rajput princes had yet thrown in their lot with the Pakistanis and he got cold feet. He told Jinnah he would go home and think about it.5
India’s capital had moved earlier in the century from Calcutta to a processional new city on the edge of ancient Delhi. A few days after he met Jinnah, the maharaja was staying at New Delhi’s finest hotel, the Imperial. A short south Indian man appeared there and told him he must come to Government House and meet the viceroy. This was unexpected. Unlike other members of the princely order, the Maharaja of Jodhpur disliked the British, and was glad they were leaving, even if his late father had been made a Knight Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India by the King Emperor George V. He claimed that as a boy he had at night crept out of his marble and sandstone palace (which had been built by his father over fifteen years, using 3,000 skeletal labourers) and put up anti-colonial wall posters. Hanwant Singh did as he was told, and accompanied the south Indian man to Government House.
Here the departing imperial power, in the form of the suave viceroy Mountbatten, told him it would be unwise to join Pakistan since his subjects could rise up in rebellion.6 The maharaja was incensed. It was clear that what the viceroy was really saying was that independent India’s new rulers – lawyers, agitators, socialists, Gandhians; the sort of people who had never shot a sand grouse – would foment revolution against His Highness. He wanted the imperialists to leave, but he certainly did not want their power or his patrimony to be taken over by the Indian National Congress. So would the new Indian government, then, give him what Pakistan had promised? Mountbatten looked to his adviser. No, said the short south Indian man – V. P. Menon, the senior political reforms commissioner – but they might offer a donation of grain. The big prince argued and blustered at Lord Mountbatten, and prevaricated and argued some more, and finally signed the instrument of accession.
At this point the viceroy left the room – he had other things to do – and the Maharaja of Jodhpur found himself alone with V. P. Menon. The encounter was too much. He had no entourage with him here, no cowering Rajput retainers to show him respect in the usual manner. All the young maharaja had was the painful knowledge that he had just given up control over the huge kingdom his family had ruled for many hundreds of years. Should he have gone with Pakistan? Might he have stood out for full independence, and approached the United Nations for protection, as some other rulers such as the Nizam of Hyderabad were thinking of doing? And why, anyway, was this snaggletoothed southerner, this clerk, telling him what to do? Enraged, he pulled out a .22 calibre pistol, pointed it at his tormentor and shouted, ‘I refuse to take your dictation.’ He added for good measure that he was descended from the Sun, and would shoot down Menon like a dog if he betrayed the people of Jodhpur.7
V. P. Menon responded coolly and bureaucratically to the irate young Maharaja of Jodhpur, focusing on the matter at hand. His brief was to snare every princely kingdom for the new Indian union (few princely states fell inside Pakistan’s borders).
‘I told him,’ he wrote later, ‘that he was making a very serious mistake if he thought that by killing me, or threatening to kill me, he could get the accession abrogated.’8 The pistol disappeared. What Menon did not mention was that Jodhpur would soon be absorbed into the new state of Rajasthan, and that the days of the maharajas, rajas, nawabs and nizams were over, even if they were allowed to use regal red licence plates on their cars. Five years later, during the voting in India’s first general election, Hanwant Singh died along with his Muslim third wife in a plane crash; he never did learn that he had just been elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Jodhpur.9
Imagine for a moment you are the good-looking Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. With your colleagues, you have to decide what shape the new system of administration is going to take. Gandhi and Jinnah are old, and shortly to die, one from an assassin’s bullet, the other from lung disease. You are in your late fifties, a widower, and have spent in total nine years of your life in prison. How do you proceed?
Nehru had been given much time, like Nelson Mandela after him, to refine his political thinking. His jail during the Second World War was not a place of orange jumpsuits, black goggles and dead headphones: he and other members of the Congress Working Committee were installed in Ahmadnagar Fort, located in a dry region to the east of Bombay, and treated in something like gentlemanly fashion. He cultivated a small garden, and the group held impromptu seminars. He told his niece Chandralekha in a letter that he was ‘dabbling in Persian’, and learning much from his fellow detainees. ‘Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Sindhi and Oriya – we practically cover every important language of India.’10 His family sent books to him, and he wrote The Discovery of India, an elegant combination of history and propaganda. It was an engaged, nationalist work which drew on the wide learning of his fellow detainees, including his room-mate, Maulana Azad, the Mecca-born scholar who, unusually for a Muslim, had become a Congress leader.
The book’s premise was that India’s present culture was linked to the Indus Valley civilization of four or five thousand years ago, a sophisticated sphere of planned cities, baths and sculptures. While Hinduism had been a common thread for millennia, he felt it would be ‘entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture’, since it contained Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influences too.11 The emperor Ashoka had brought unity to the subcontinent more than 2,000 years ago, and it would be wrong, he said, to describe the repeated invasions by Muslim marauders over the last millennium as Muslim invasions, ‘just as it would be wrong to refer to the coming of the British to India as a Christian invasion … The Afghans might well be considered a border Indian group, hardly strangers to India, and the period of their political dominance should be called the Indo-Afghan period.’ Although the Mughals were outsiders from Central Asia, ‘they fitted into the Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.’12 Having travelled widely in India during the 1930s, Nehru knew the nation had ‘depth of soul’ and realized that although its people varied hugely, ‘everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us.’13 In this optimistic interpretation, India was a cheerfully composite and syncretic civilization, which would remain united.
London liked to think of Nehru as the last Englishman to rule India: rather, he came from a wealthy, Anglicized, Hindu Brahmin family, originally from Kashmir, which had been influenced both by the West and by the refined, mannered culture of the Muslim nobility. It was a world in which literary references were expected to range from ancient Indian thinkers to contemporary European writers. His view of history came from this intellectual collision: the culture of the nawabs met Cambridge University. Nehru had a liberal, modern, perceptive, pluralistic view of India’s past, and his ambition was to make it come true for the future too. The Discovery of India was a fine, slanted and sometimes romantic version of history.
Come freedom, how would he implement his nationalist dreams? Would it be easier to borrow the mechanisms of the departed colonialists? You could have an autocracy where one social group prevailed, or a dictatorship where progress grew out of the barrel of a gun. Or – and this is where India was unusual – you could have a public discussion about the ideal system of government, and which outdated traditions should be given up.
First, it was necessary to secure the nation, the rashtra. When the British empire closed down, it was near to collapse. The police were demoralized, the army was breaking along religious lines and the administration was cracking. The imperialists had left no effective peace-keeping force; nearly bankrupt after depending on American financial support during the Second World War, Britain’s main concern was to get out.14 In independent India the situation was particularly unstable because, from a legal and practical perspective, the government was inheriting less than half of the empire’s original land mass. The north-east and north-west became Pakistan, leaving six complete provinces (Bombay, Madras, Orissa, Bihar, the United Provinces and the Central Provinces) which had been under British rule, and the partitioned remnants of three others (Punjab, Bengal and Assam). The princely rulers, whose states had covered more than a third of the empire, were in theory free to do as they liked. Some had private armies, while the larger kingdoms like Kashmir and Hyderabad – which had a government income equal to that of Belgium – thought they might stand alone.
Congress had not come this far, had not endured the Morley–Minto reforms (which allowed a limited number of Indians to elect legislators) and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre (in which nearly 400 unarmed demonstrators were killed) and the Simon Commission (talks about talks) and the Round Table conferences (further talks, in London) and the Government of India Act of 1935 (which introduced some provincial self-government) and the Quit India movement (total opposition to British rule during the Second World War) and the Cripps Mission (a time-wasting exercise) and the Bengal famine (in which several million people perished) and the Simla conferences (further talks) and the tortuous negotiations with viceroys Wavell and Mountbatten and the baroque bigotry and chilly indifference of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, let alone the beatings and marches and bandhs (general strikes) and dharnas (mass sit-ins) and the repeated terms of imprisonment, only to concede power to hereditary monarchs. According to the Gujarati lawyer and Congress power-broker Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the princes of India were parasites, ‘rotten fruit … incompetent, worthless human beings, deprived of the power of independent thinking and whose manners and morals are those of the depraved’.15 To break their substantial influence, though, would require subtlety.
This was where V. P. Menon proved the perfect flexible operator. Clever and thoughtful, he was the son of a schoolmaster from Kerala in the far south, and had worked as a railway stoker, coal miner and Bangalore tobacco company clerk before gaining a junior post in the civil service. He had an unusual home life: after his wife left him and returned to southern India, he had moved in with the Keralite friends who had arranged their marriage, and the couple helped to bring up his two sons. When the husband died, Menon married his widow, who was some years his senior.16 In the years between the two world wars, he had worked his way up the civil service and become a respected senior bureaucrat.
Menon had recently drafted the text under which Congress and the Muslim League agreed the terms of independence. When Mountbatten asked him how to deal with the princes, he said they should be encouraged to join the new nation, giving up control of external affairs in return for the retention of autonomy and a chunk of local taxation – their ‘privy purses’. He wrote craftily later: ‘The alternative to a peaceful and friendly settlement of the states’ problem was to allow political agitation to develop in the states and to create, especially in the smaller ones, dire confusion and turmoil. Anyone conversant with the conditions in the country after partition must be aware of the inherent dangers of such a course.’17 Despite his own royal connections, Lord Mountbatten was a pragmatist who preferred Menon’s plan to risking the possible Balkanization of India into a subcontinent of warring states, as had happened in China during the 1920s. So he personally persuaded the princes to sign up.
After independence, as the north imploded in the violence and chaos of partition, Menon worked under the iron guidance of Vallabhbhai Patel to integrate the remaining princely states. It was an epic task (there were estimated to be 554 kingdoms in all) which he performed with great speed and diligence. Patel was clear in his intentions, telling his staff, ‘Do not question the extent of the personal wealth claimed by [the princes], and never ever confront the ladies of the household. I want their states – not their wealth.’18 V. P. Menon’s experience with the pistol-wielding Maharaja of Jodhpur was to be one of many bizarre encounters from Srinagar to Cape Comorin. His targets ranged from seriously obscure potentates to sophisticated royals who kept suites in the grander hotels of Paris or London; some taluqdars, or landowners, even approached him and asked to make treaties of accession despite having no princely status. The powerful and progressive Maharaja of Bikaner called on all hereditary rulers to be true patriots and embrace independent India, while an irate but inconsequential raja from near Mysore, who had only 16,000 subjects, refused to sign until the latest possible moment.
The complication was Kashmir, which should logically have joined Pakistan since it had a Muslim majority. The Hindu ruler thought otherwise, and India and Pakistan fought their first war within months of the end of empire. This led to the rough partition of its territory in a form that left everyone unhappy.
Each Indian kingdom was different, showing the sheer range of the subcontinent’s social, ethnic and religious communities. Up in the ancient hill kingdom of Tripura in the north-east, the monarch was a child, and his mother signed away the state on his behalf. In Orissa, Menon found ‘excited aborigines’ were fighting the local raja with bows and arrows in an effort to make him join India. A neighbouring Oriya prince was attempting to sell his kingdom’s mineral rights in perpetuity before surrendering. In Rewa, a nervous V. P. Menon found himself gheraoed, or surrounded, by a fierce mob which refused to let him enter the palace. He suspected the ruler had himself arranged this reception, and asked him to put in writing that he refused to cooperate; the maharaja became nervous, and backed down.
Menon crisscrossed India by aeroplane, working out the best way to integrate the new nation. In Danta, a tiny state in Gujarat, a peculiar problem occurred: he could not contact the ruler. It seemed His Highness spent much of each day and night performing Hindu rituals, and between June and September in particular had not a moment to spare for official duties. In October 1948, he agreed his son could take the throne and sign the document of accession. In Cochin the royal family included several hundred princesses, and Menon made special provision for them because he thought they resembled ‘a rare collection of birds’ that would be unlikely to survive if released into the wild. Where necessary, he made symbolic concessions, enabling rulers to retain their ancient princely dignity; in one case, he allowed a grant for the supply and maintenance of royal cars. ‘It is high statesmanship,’ wrote Mountbatten’s press attaché admiringly, ‘that can cover a revolutionary act in the mantle of traditional form.’19
Without the integration of the princely states, it would not have been possible for India to become a cohesive nation, or to invent itself as a modern democracy. In the crack-up of partition, the temptation might have been to reach for the gun and the edict. For many people, though, bloodshed would be the abiding memory.
The events of 1947 have an enduring capacity to shock. Bir Bahadur Singh is a retired shopkeeper, a handsome old man with an elaborate white beard. In the spring of that year, his village near Rawalpindi, in what is today Pakistan, came under siege. All the Sikh families in the area gathered together in a haveli, a large house with a courtyard. When they walked across the rooftops between the buildings, they risked being shot. There seemed to be no way out. In the distance they could see fires burning and, according to the rumours, a large gang of armed men was approaching the village, seeking revenge for horrific attacks committed against Muslims many hundreds of miles away in Bengal. Yet only days before that, everything had been normal: theirs was a lovely village, protected by hills which were dotted with trees and bushes, running down to fields of ripening green wheat and paddy and an orchard, and the houses themselves were well-built and well-ordered and the place was kept clean.
A local Muslim farmhand came to the trapped Sikhs and offered a solution. If they gave him a woman of his choosing, he would try to broker a settlement with the mob. It was discussed. What was the use of keeping the girl? Hadn’t this one been having a secret relationship with the farmhand? Wasn’t she a bad girl anyway? Why not give her up, if it meant saving all their lives? It was agreed: she would be swapped for freedom. But when the farmhand returned, Bir Bahadur Singh’s father intervened and said no, this was a question of their dignity. A long cultural tradition of purity and sacrifice met raw fear. They would pay money, pay anything, but they would not give up a member of the community. He told them that even centuries before in the time of Mahmud of Ghazni, the first of the Muslim invaders of India, they had never abandoned their women to these raiders. ‘We brought those girls back,’ he said in Punjabi, casting his imagination across many hundreds of years, ‘and today you are asking us to give you this girl, absolutely not.’ They would preserve their honour, and face death.
What happened next has lived with Bir Bahadur Singh ever since. Tears came down his face and he turned his head away to one side as he described – sixty years on – how his father had prayed to the Sikh gurus. Seeing there was no way out, he would sacrifice the vulnerable before being killed himself, knowing the girls faced abduction, rape and forced conversion. Bir Bahadur Singh’s father took his kirpan, his sword. A labourer confronted him and asked to be killed because he had swollen knees and would not be able to run. The labourer was beheaded. Another old man came and said to him: ‘Do you think I will allow Musalmans to cut this beard of mine and make me go to Lahore as a sheikh? For this reason kill me.’ So he too was killed. Now Bir Bahadur Singh’s father approached his own daughter, Maan.
‘My father said, “Maan Beta, come here.” She was eighteen or nineteen years old, two years older than me. She sat down and my father raised his sword, but it didn’t strike properly. My sister lifted her plait over her head, and my father angrily pulled her scarf back and brought down his sword. Her head rolled away. My uncles started beheading. All you could hear was the “cut cut cut” sound. They just chanted god’s name. Nobody ran away, nobody screamed.’
Twenty-five women and girls were killed in this haveli, in this one village. Nearly all of the men died too, including Bir Bahadur Singh’s father, but the son escaped. When he thinks back to those childhood days, he remembers the happier moments, like the times when he was little and sat with an old Muslim lady whom he called dadi, or grandmother. ‘Her name was Ma Hussaini, and I would go and sit on one side in her lap, and her granddaughter would sit on the other side. I used to pull her plait and push her away and she would catch hold of my jura, my hair [the Sikh topknot], and push me away. I would say she is my dadi and she would say she is my dadi.’ Relations between the communities were destroyed by the reciprocal massacres. Bir Bahadur Singh wondered, looking back over the decades, whether Hindus and Sikhs were themselves in part to blame, through their attitude to caste and religion. When they visited a Muslim household during his childhood, the family would refuse to eat, and if they were walking with a lunch box and happened to shake hands with a Muslim along the way, the food would become polluted and have to be thrown away. ‘If we had been willing to drink from the same cups,’ he said wistfully, ‘we would have remained united, we would not have had these differences, thousands of lives would not have been lost, and there would have been no partition.’20
During the months after August 1947, similar scenes of retribution were played out across the north, and an estimated one million people were murdered. In Punjab, in particular, each community killed and was killed, raped and was raped, looted and was looted. Because India was perceived as the natural successor to the Indian empire and retained many of its institutions, Pakistan found itself in a desperate situation, financially insecure and lacking the key structures that were needed in a fledgling nation. In a terrible irony, it became the opposite of a place of safety. Jinnah’s dream of a secular homeland for Muslims – ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state,’ he had told his people at its foundation – was replaced by a kind of chaos, as they struggled to establish a functioning country.21 Many hoped the partition would be temporary, and Pakistan and India might reunite; you did not require a passport to travel between the two new nations in those days.22 In the rush to gain freedom, nobody had worked out what division might entail. Nehru’s niece, Nayantara Sahgal, unwittingly summed up the problem: ‘As children the idea of Pakistan was a joke – literally a joke. It was so outlandish and absurd to imagine that we would have such a thing happen in India.’23
Everywhere, there was change, as traditions were uprooted. The character of Delhi altered for ever as hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled to Pakistan, to be replaced by an even larger number of homeless Sikh and Hindu Punjabis. Yet despite the chaos, killing, kidnapping, food shortages and refugee camps, discussion was quickly underway in India about a constitutional settlement. Indeed, less than a week after the transfer of power from the British, politicians were busy in New Delhi debating such trivial matters as flag protocol in Hyderabad, and the president of the Constituent Assembly had to remind these leaders – never slow to express an opinion, or a number of opinions, since in India people tend to have more than one answer – of the matter at hand: ‘May I point out that we have met here today for the purpose of proceeding with the framing of the Constitution.’24
Just over two years later, a document was agreed which has remained in place to this day, even during a brief hiatus in the 1970s when a state of emergency was declared. Free India was to be a secular, democratic republic, with strong reformist instincts. In the Muslim homeland, the framing of a constitution was postponed after Jinnah’s death only a few months later and democratic politics were to be offset by decades of military rule; Pakistan’s constitution has been suspended and reworked several times, and is still up for debate.
Earlier, both opponents of independence like Winston Churchill and supporters like Franklin D. Roosevelt had been sceptical of the idea that India would adopt a universal franchise. Could Asiatics rule themselves? Was democracy possible in such a fissiparous and undeveloped place? Remarkably, the new constitution was arrived at after vigorous discussion between rival interest groups: tribal people, communists, Muslim women and Hindu fundamentalists all had their say, and the final document, the longest constitution in the world, was overseen by Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, a formidable lawyer who had been born an ‘untouchable’, a man who came from a community that was still expected to step aside when walking in the road rather than cross the path of someone from a higher caste.
Sovereignty was to be derived from the people, and justice, liberty, equality and fraternity were to be the aspiration of each citizen. Like the United States, modern India was founded on the idea that a few good men (and women, in this case) might come together and dream of a great nation, and enshrine that dream in law.
Stung by suggestions that the new dispensation would be a stitch-up for Congress, Nehru in particular was adamant that all shades of opinion should be heard. Dr Ambedkar was recruited as law minister, although he had long been a political opponent. Nehru helped to shake up the very social rules that had brought him – the only son of a family of Kashmiri Pandits or Brahmins, who was sent abroad to be educated at the same boarding school as Churchill – to prominence. The constitution was to be about more than politics; it would be about society, on a grand scale.
The makers of the Indian Constitution met for the first time on 9 December 1946 (the very day on which a baby girl called Sonia Maino was born in Italy, handcuffed to history). In the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi bright new lights and electrically heated desks were in place, and leading figures in the soon to be victorious independence movement sat in tiered rows in semi-circles facing the dais. The assembly’s members included historic names such as Nehru, Ambedkar, Patel, C. Rajagopalachari, Shyama Prasad Mookerji, Sarat Chandra Bose, J. B. Kripalani, Nehru’s son-in law Feroze Gandhi, Jagjivan Ram, Maulana Azad and G. B. Pant. The chairman advised delegates to think carefully and to look to ‘the historic Constitutional Convention held at Philadelphia by the American constitution-makers, for their country. Having thrown off their allegiance to the British King in Parliament, they met and drew up what has been regarded, and justly so, as the soundest, and most practical and workable republican constitution in existence.’25 The United States was an important example for Indians, a large and diverse nation which had thrown off the British colonial yoke and invented itself as a new country with a fresh identity.
common national purpose at a time of change and reconstruction? Who organizes elections? How do you select the judiciary? How do you respect the position of minorities without letting them dominate? Of course, there were digressions.