The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  It is said that Omichund died a broken man. It may have been so, for two of his sons left Calcutta to do business in Varanasi, where prosperity returned to them soon enough. But it would be some generations before one of their line could redeem the reputation of their perfidious ancestor. To be sure, this great-grandson, Harishchandra, often referred to as Bharatendu (Moon of India), was not a vengeful nationalist—before he died in 1885, many were the occasions when he hosted gatherings to demonstrate affection for the Raj that betrayed his forebear. But even as he sang of ‘the Western rays of civilisation’ and the ‘progressive policy of the British nation’, Harishchandra’s contributions to the development of Hindi carved for him a place in the eyes of posterity. He might have composed panegyrics when births and weddings took place in Queen Victoria’s household and tried his best to meet the visiting Prince of Wales, but it was also his pen that helped propel a movement to transform a neglected language of mixed origins into a mass cultural campaign that culminated in that famous cry, ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’.

  Harishchandra began life in 1850 in a combination of tragedy and grandiosity. He lost his parents young but grew up so rich that all his life his greatest difficulty was how not to mismanage more of his money. He founded and edited one of India’s first women’s journals, Balabodhini , but to his own wife all he offered was neglect. If an object caught his eye—a camera perhaps, or a new perfume—he required it at once. ‘This money,’ he laughed, ‘has eaten my ancestors; now I am going to eat it.’ But even as he reduced life to an oscillation between debt and extravagance, he also left behind a mark that endures to this day. His Kavivachansudha (founded 1868) and Harishchandrachandrika (founded 1873) emerged as iconic platforms for literary exchange in northern India. Featuring Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory as well as news from the local Dharma Sabha, it was through these publications that Harishchandra, as the scholar Vasudha Dalmia notes, ‘veritably created literary Hindi’ even as he gently voiced his support for Hindu consolidation. He became a catalyst for a vernacular nationalism that would achieve full force in the following century, simultaneously rising as the ‘Father of Modern Hindi Literature and Hindi Theatre’.

  If modern Hindi is today well entrenched, where it comes from is an issue that still provokes debate. As Harish Trivedi writes, ‘Hindi was commonly perceived to be an underdeveloped and underprivileged language, fragmented into several competing dialects, backward and dusty by association with its largely rural constituency’. The British recognised Urdu, instead, as the north’s language of government. Since it was spoken primarily by elite Muslims, this stirred resentment among others who competed for jobs but did not know Urdu. As Harishchandra argued, thanks to this official bias, Muslims enjoyed ‘a sort of monopoly’ where employment was concerned, which was not only ‘injustice’ but also ‘a cause of annoyance and inconvenience’ to masses of Hindi speakers who also happened largely to be Hindus. His rival and contemporary, Raja Sivaprasad, similarly insisted that the use of the Urdu script meant that for large numbers of common folk, government papers and documents were as alien as ‘hieroglyphics’. The matter was not black and white, but the message carried resonance. Both languages were cousins derived from the same roots—one was truer to Sanskrit, while the other had gained much from Arabic and Persian. Now they increasingly became rivals.

  But this movement also coincided with an urge to make new literature—something modern and suited to emerging feelings of cultural and political nationalism. Much of the poetry in Hindi was in the Brajbhasha and Awadhi dialects, traditionally considered prestigious but thought to be encumbered by an excess of devotion and piety. Khariboli, the dialect spoken around Delhi and present-day Uttar Pradesh, on the other hand, was an open vessel for literary innovation. ‘The progress of one’s own language is the root of all progress,’ Harishchandra argued, and page after page in his magazine was devoted to plays, poetry, satire and essays, all of which combined to create a new corpus for speakers of an increasingly standardised Hindi. Khariboli was swiftly invested with pride and disseminated widely through Harishchandra’s energy and enthusiasm. Only he could have pulled it off—wealthy, flamboyant, and with personal networks stretching from British officials to Bengal’s reformers, he was noticed in the right circles. That he also centred his activities in Varanasi, a city of special significance for Hindus in a time of political consolidation, further legitimised his ventures.

  In 1885, not yet thirty-five, Harishchandra died, by now less convinced of the Raj and its goodness for India. But what he had helped launch assumed a life of its own, becoming the Modern Standard Hindi of today in the course of a few decades. By 1893, a Nagari Pracharini Sabha emerged to lobby for official recognition of Hindi and Devanagari—the request was granted in 1900. By 1910, the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan was born, of which Gandhi remained a member longer than he was of the Congress. Gandhi, in fact, went to the extent of advising south Indians that the ‘Dravidians being in a minority… they should learn the common language of the rest of India’—a patronising remark that inspired C.N. Annadurai to quip that by this fallacious logic of numbers, the best candidate for national bird in India was not the minority peacock but the majority crow.

  But change was already in the air. Poets and writers raised to think of Urdu as the language of culture invested increasingly in Hindi. As Premchand wrote in 1915, ‘Urdu will no longer do. Has any Hindu ever made a success of writing in Urdu, that I will?’ This ‘Hindi Renaissance’ was infused with nationalism and some even drew links to 1857—seeds of a standardised Hindi were sown, they claimed, when speakers of various dialects united for the ‘First War of Independence’ and recognised themselves as one people.

  Harishchandra did not live to see the fruits of his work—but for many, by helping Hindi rise to its feet, he more than paid off his ancestor’s debt. Omichund may have erred by siding with the British, but by creating a vehicle for cultural and national aspirations, Harishchandra earned only honour.

  THE RAILWAYS AND INDIA

  In 1857, soon after the sepoys rose against the East India Company in a burst of volcanic fury, the Delhi Gazette carried a proclamation issued in the name of the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Popularly called the Azamgarh Proclamation, this was authored most likely by a junior member of the imperial household, though its contents are not remotely less fascinating on this account. Besides predictable denouncements of the ‘tyranny and oppression of the treacherous’ English, the document was also a manifesto that sought to win support from influential quarters, offering—like political manifestos today—a cascade of promises. Thus, for instance, the rights of zamindars were guaranteed, just as attractive pay was guaranteed to soldiers. More interestingly, among promises made to the commercial classes was one that speaks much of the age in which the mutiny took place. For it was pledged to men of trade that when the badshahi regime was restored, they would enjoy ‘gratis’ the use of ‘government steam-vessels and steam carriages for the conveyance’ of their all-important merchandise.

  As it happened, the rebels scattered and the Mughal emperor fell. But on his journey to Burma (now Myanmar) in a bullock cart, Bahadur Shah Zafar did witness the construction of railway lines on which would ply the ‘steam carriages’ that only yesterday were being offered free in his name. While rebel leaders discerned advantages in this new mode of transport for purposes of trade, they were hardly alone: Ten years earlier, The Times in London had claimed that while ‘there may be no diamonds [left] at Golconda’, there was ‘the worth of a ship-load of diamonds in the cotton fields of the Deccan’. All that was needed to exploit this plentiful land was a reliable network. Then, of course, the mutiny confirmed for the British the military advantage that the railways offered, as loyal armies could in future make their way at record speed and contain any threat of rebellion. This, perhaps, was among the reasons that agitated Gandhi when he beheld the welding of India’s geography with steel and steam. He declared ominously that this was all for �
��bad men [to] fulfil their evil designs with greater rapidity’.

  Leaving the Mahatma’s suspicions aside, the railways in India roused many, from Rudyard Kipling to Rabindranath Tagore, Florence Nightingale to R.K. Narayan. Talk of its introduction in the subcontinent began in the 1830s and, ironically, the concerns raised were endless. One question was of viability: would ‘the Hindoos’, with their caste and religious taboos, embrace the railways, or would they boycott it resolutely? In the event, ‘the Hindoos’ nodded approval: pilgrimages that took weeks could now be covered in days, even if by means of the devil’s contraption. Others argued that the fire carriage was at best a vanity project—India’s destiny lay in waterways, insisted Sir Arthur Cotton, whom we encountered in a previous essay. Yet another set of people welcomed the steam engine for its political potential. ‘If India is to become a homogenous nation,’ wrote Sir T. Madhava Rao, the nineteenth-century statesman, ‘it must be by means of the Railways [and]… the English language.’ (Good for him that he lived then, for today he would be labelled anti-national.)

  The dawn of the Indian railways (now the fourth largest in the world, transporting billions, and with over a million employees), like new technology in general, inspired opportunity while also birthing subversion. As the scholar Arup K. Chatterjee writes, the railways could become ‘clandestine spaces for experimentation’ where ‘vegetarian looking businessmen’ tasted chicken and mutton: removed physically from their everyday universe, days and hours spent on the track offered a window into something new, something that was usually taboo. To Europeans in India, meanwhile, the way the railways functioned offered a ‘nominal provincial Europe’ on wheels, where the food, cutlery, decor and everything else reminded them of home. There could also be disease and horror—to quote Ira Klein, ‘plague [too] rode the rails’. In 1947, similarly, the railways conveyed death across the border, as photographs recorded their role in the appalling tragedy of India’s partition.

  The British, of course, presented the railways as proof of their civilising mission—this, when it was an elaborate commercial enterprise delivering obscene profits to English investors at the expense of the Indian peasant. The railways also allowed for architectural experiments: buildings like the erstwhile Victoria Terminus in Bombay projected colonial splendour, visually stamping India with the presence (and threat) of British supremacy. To the dismay of the architects of empire, however, the railways also ended up transporting that inconvenient thing called nationalism. Soon, even the Mahatma was able to Indianise the railways, using it, as Chatterjee notes, to collect donations just as much as to demand Swaraj, every station and every third-class carriage a platform for his invigorating politics. Revolutionaries, meanwhile, could disrupt rail lines, and even such small things as travelling ticketless or pulling the chain became acts of civil disobedience. What began as a (lucrative) civilising mission ended up embodying Indian resistance.

  In the end, the story of the railways in India is one of splendour as well as shock, elegance as well as embarrassment, opening up many worlds in which its carriages and engines served as both witnesses and participants. In its early avatar, it was a symbol of colonial oppression. But like with foreign ideas that were seized by Indians for their own domestic purposes and intentions, the railways quickly won local imagination, becoming integral to the shaping of India’s national character. The Father of the Nation might well have continued to suspect the railways even as he used it, but there is no doubt that its steel frame occupies a place of importance in the tale of the Indian people: one that bridged far and diverse provinces, even as it connected everyone from Bahadur Shah Zafar to the Mahatma himself.

  THE PHULES AND THEIR FIGHT

  When Jyotirao Phule (1827–90) embarked with his partner, Savitribai, on their journey to promote radical (and necessarily painful) internal reform, he had already smashed the social shackles that came with being the son of a greengrocer and the grandson of a gardener (mali ) in orthodox Pune. This was a boy who received a rudimentary education in Marathi, found himself married before thirteen to a bride of less than ten, and who then resumed his education in a Christian mission school at the insistence of a Muslim neighbour. While ‘correct’ behaviour would have been to quietly keep stock of pulses and vegetables and pursue his family profession, Phule digested Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and The Age Of Reason and charted a course of his own, asking all those inconvenient questions that reason sparks in sensible people.

  Jyotirao must have been an unusual man at the time for transmitting the ideas he absorbed to his wife—indeed, not only did he tutor her in private, he supported her when she embarked on a teachers’ training course in Ahmednagar, far away from home. They were on either side of twenty when the they ventured into female education in 1848, dismissing the resultant conservative hysteria as ‘idiotic beliefs’. ‘There was no school for girls that could be called ‘indigenous’ at that time here,’ Jyotirao told a government commission later. And so ‘I was inspired to set up such a school’ where ‘My wife and I worked… for several years.’ Activities had to be briefly suspended for some time, but soon after they were resumed in the form of not one but three girls’ schools in 1851, the Phules offered a remarkable 237 candidates for examination—an event so sensational that, according to Hari Narake, as many as 3000 people gathered to witness the proceedings. As a newspaper correspondent reported in the summer of 1852, ‘The number of girl students in Jotirao’s school in ten times more than the number of boys studying in the government schools… If the Government Education Board does not do something about [the inferior quality of its own schools] soon, seeing these women outshine the men will make us hang our heads in shame.’

  All this was revolutionary enough, but Jyotirao, who drew inspiration from George Washington and dedicated his most significant book—Gulamgiri (1873)—to ‘the good people of the United States’ for eliminating slavery there, went on to establish a school for untouchables with Savitribai. And this in a city where, until recently, the government of the brahmin Peshwas required the low-born to move around with brooms tied to their waists so that the ritual defilement they brought into town could also be brushed away after every polluting step. The consequences of such radicalism were dire. As Jyotirao himself stated in an 1853 interview, his father threw his wife and him out of his house in response to their controversial activities. Conservative angst manifested in petty ways too: when, for instance, Jyotirao was draped at a public felicitation with a ceremonial shawl, many insisted that the son of a mali did not deserve such an honour, no matter what his personal or professional achievements.

  Yet, recognition came steadily to the Phules: The Poona Observer and Deccan Weekly noted how their work was ‘the beginning of a new epoch in the history of Hindu culture,’. The couple themselves did not rest on encomiums: As Jyotirao, aged only twenty-five, declared after he was honoured by the Government of Bombay, ‘What I may have done towards furthering the cause of educating native females is indeed too little and falls far short even of the demands of duty as one of the sons of the beloved land.’ A lot more energy and enterprise were needed to make a lasting difference, and prioritising the girl child, the Phules were convinced, was the secret to the reform of social structures and the Indian family. That said, public events where he appeared also served as platforms for Jyotirao to disseminate his radicalism even if he did not have the wherewithal to scale up his activities to the extent he desired. In 1853, for example, he lambasted the brahmin orthodoxy for its stand against female education, stating that, ‘In their opinion, women should forever be kept in obedience, should not be given any knowledge, should not be well-educated, should not know about religion, should not mix with men, and they bring out extracts from our Shastra in which women are so deprecated, in support of these idiotic beliefs, and ask whether anything written by the great and learned sages be untrue!’

  Every inch a contrarian, Jyotirao was clearly willing to take on his largely high-caste opponents even in
the intellectual realm, without mincing words or concealing his indignation. He dusted up in the dialect of the poor (which was thought crude) tales of the Maratha king Shivaji’s valour, casting him as a protector of peasants and upholder of the rights of the weak. His irate respondents reacted with the more enduring construction of Shivaji as a protector of sacred cows and Sanskritic high tradition. Jyotirao didn’t care and carried on with his criticism. When brahmins claimed that they were high because they were born from Brahma’s mouth, Jyotirao enquired if the creator also menstruated from that area, before deploying Darwin to demolish his scandalised interlocutors.

  Because Jyotirao was a man, and an influential man with access to the British, it was Savitribai who often faced physical retaliation for their work. This came in the form of being pelted with dung and stones while she walked to their schools, for example. She remained undaunted, inspiring her husband and countless others.

  There was, for instance, an incident in a village outside Pune, where an untouchable girl was made pregnant by her upper-caste lover. Lynching was proposed—the boy for disgracing his family’s honour and the girl for being disgrace itself—when Savitribai appeared. ‘I came to know about their murderous plan,’ she wrote to her husband later, with a palpable sense of accomplishment, ‘[and] rushed to the spot.’ And there she ‘scared [the mob] away, pointing out the grave consequences of killing the lovers under the British law’.