The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  Instead, Macaulay decided, Indians must learn mathematics, geography, science—and they would learn it in English. Far from singing praises of Indian culture, he saw it as British destiny to bring modernity to India—where a few decades earlier William Jones had immersed himself in Indian literature, Macaulay spent his time in Calcutta reading classics from Greece and Rome. ‘It may be,’ he hoped with patronising transparency, ‘that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having been instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions.’ And whenever that time came, ‘it will be the proudest day in English history’.

  The result was that Macaulay succeeded in replacing brahminical education with Western institutions, throwing open schools to all Indians. They could recite the Vedas at home if they so wished, but at school, children would absorb the fruits of European modernity. Nativists resented Macaulay but there were others who embraced his policy—after all, the likes of Jyotirao Phule, son of a gardener, could never enter Sanskrit schools but were welcome in English institutions. They felt no shame in being painted ‘Macaulayputras’ when the alternative was demeaning drudgery in service of the upper castes, who only appeared less haughty than Englishmen because they were brown and looked more familiar.

  ‘Too clever by half, too certain of what is truth, what falsity,’ as a scholar put it, Macaulay’s behaviour may also have had a great deal to do with his personal life and character. Very likely sexually repressed, he was obsessively attached to his sisters—the marriage of one resembled, for him, a personal calamity, and his death before sixty was hastened very likely by dread brought on by the imminent departure for India of the other. Studiously proper in his personal manners at first, he was bullied at school and grew into a stout little adolescent—indeed, even as a grown man he was lampooned in the British press as a ‘shapeless little dumpling’. His statistician father expected better from Macaulay, and produced a catalogue of his faults and weaknesses. ‘Loud-speaking, affected pronunciation in reading, late lying in bed, neglect of cleanliness’: these were some of the crimes for which he was pulled up. Cambridge, however, liberated him and as the writer Zareer Masani notes, here he was ‘at the centre of a scintillating intellectual circle … [spending] days and nights reading, sharing and debating poetry, philosophy and politics’. So when Macaulay the Elder called him out for being too fond of novels, a supposedly undignified habit, Macaulay the Younger had enough courage to respond that he didn’t care for criticism from men who were ‘mere mathematical blocks… beings so stupid in conversation, so uninformed on every subject of history, of letters and of taste… To me,’ he concluded in triumphant rebellion, ‘the attacks of such men are valuable as compliments.’

  India was merely one remunerative chapter in Macaulay’s life as a writer, parliamentarian and public intellectual in England—he came here not so much out of choice but because his father’s financial debacles placed great pressure on him to support the family. But having set foot in this country almost by accident, and despite his mulish character, he left behind a complicated legacy that still affects government, education, and the law in India. He famously wanted to create a class ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. To them, he grandly proposed, the British could bequeath the gift of modernity so that they might educate their inferiors and bring light to India. Even before he set eyes on Indian shores, he was clear about this—in 1831, he was convinced that in a generation there would ‘not be a brahmin in Hindustan who will not eat beef’. Little did he know that Indians have a unique capacity to absorb what is offered by the world, and to Indianise it altogether—the class he created, far from venerating the British in gratitude, turned instead against them. Its heroes united and forged a new Indian nationalism, using English and Enlightenment ideals to hold up a mirror to the oppressions of their colonisers. One wonders what Macaulay would have made of such Indians, from M.G. Ranade down to M.K. Gandhi. But of one thing we can be sure: whichever way the ‘civilising’ project in India went, Macaulay himself would never concede he made a mistake.

  FOOTBALL AND NATIONALISM IN INDIA

  In 1314, the mayor of London issued a proclamation banning a particularly rowdy sport that had captured the imagination of large numbers of the city’s residents. There was, he announced, a ‘great noise’ in town caused by this ‘hustling over large balls’, and so, ‘on pain of imprisonment’, the game was outlawed in the name of King Edward II—and, of course, god. The whole business concerned what we recognise today by the innocent name of football, but at the time it was considered a monstrous affair, as men kicked about an inflated pig’s bladder from one village to another. No rules existed, and the upper classes sneered at this disorderly pastime of their inferiors, oblivious that centuries down the line, ‘ffooteball’ fever would infect the entire world, birthing an industry so profitable that even god might be forgiven for reconsidering his position.

  As with the English language, when the British transported football to India, they didn’t expect the ‘natives’ to match them at it. Records suggest that it was in 1721, in Gujarat, that western traders first began to play cricket, while the earliest extant report of football appears over a century later, in an 1854 newspaper. This second sport, however, was inaugurated on India’s eastern flank, in Bengal, when the (white) ‘Gentlemen of Barrackpore’ played against the (white) ‘Calcutta Club of Civilians’. Football, by now, was acquiring a distinct shape and structure, with formal rules and codes. That these rules varied from place to place did not matter—the Victorians had realised that this was a ‘masculine’ exercise for boys as they grew into men, besides serving as an outlet for dangerous hormonal energies. Controlled aggression in an authorised environment appeared to impart lessons in discipline, obedience, honourable victories and dignified defeats. And so, slowly, football became respectable.

  It was another matter that the British were not particularly dignified in the manner in which they passed on the sport to Indians. They had their exclusive clubs in various cities, besides the teams of army regiments. But even after the 1880s, when Indians formed their own clubs in Bengal—Shobhabazar, Aryans, and so on—the establishment thought little of locals and their sporting capabilities. ‘By his legs you shall know a Bengali,’ declared one journalist in 1899, asserting that the typical Calcutta male’s legs were either hopelessly thin, or else ‘very fat and globular … with round thighs like a woman’s.’ ‘The Bengali’s leg’, simply put, was ‘the leg of a slave’ (Macaulay would have approved). And this at the end of a decade when Bengali clubs had already started to win small victories against British teams, and just before Mahatma Gandhi was inspired to establish in South Africa his ‘Passive Resisters Soccer Club’.

  What really announced India’s arrival on the football scene, however, was the contest between the Mohun Bagan Athletic Club and the East Yorkshire regiment for the legendary Indian Football Association (IFA) Shield in 1911. The team was representative of emerging middle-class Indian aspirations—one member, the sports historian Ronojoy Sen records, was a clerk, while another was an employee of the Public Works Department. A third was a veterinary inspector, but all of them were products of the English education system, with a growing consciousness of their identity as Indians. They played barefoot, partly because a pair of boots in the early 1900s didn’t cost less than 7—an average schoolteacher’s monthly salary. It was no surprise, then, that when Mohun Bagan made it to the finals, against all odds, the football maidan attracted some 100,000 visitors, including from as far away as Bihar, Orissa and Assam.

  As it happened, the Indians won both the trophy and much prestige. ‘May god bless the Immortal Eleven of Mohun Bagan for raising their nation in the estimation of the Western people,’ rhapsodised the Amrita Bazar Patrika , noting that this victory demoli
shed the old jibe about Bengalis being ‘lamentably deficient’ in physical prowess. Besides reasserting the Indian male’s masculinity, the victory of a barefoot team against a privileged English set also rang resoundingly of nationalism—as the scholar Partha Chatterjee notes, the win in 1911 came at a time when Bengal was electrified by armed resistance against the Raj, not to speak of agitation challenging the partition of the province by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, six years earlier. If sport had helped discipline Englishmen to grip the world in the Victorian era, football shattered imperial arrogance as Indians reclaimed their pride at the close of the Edwardian age.

  Of course, expectations of football sparking a righteous nationalist fire did not pan out quite so romantically. As with cricket in Bombay, where Parsis played against Hindus who played against Muslims, in football too, differences and disagreements reared their heads. In 1911, the Mohammedan Sporting Club enthusiastically celebrated the victory of their ‘Hindu brethren’ against the British, but by the 1930s the mood had chilled. There was the leading ‘Muslim club’ and then there were ‘Hindu clubs’, for whom rivalry went beyond sport. Among the Hindus, there emerged an additional problem of regionalism—the East Bengal Club was formed mainly on account of a grievance that West Bengalis looked down on easterners. In other words, where two decades earlier nationalism had electrified the sports arena, football was afflicted now by the poison of communalism and its divisive cousins.

  It might have spelt wholescale disaster, but luckily, a change in political winds transformed the horizon. With the Second World War and the advent of independence, sport for the love of sport—and not as a vehicle of nationalism or communal pride—slowly began to become possible. And in 1947, with those very legs once written off as resembling those of slaves, Indians turned around and gave the British a proverbial kick off the field they had for so long sought to dominate. New problems emerged—of poor infrastructure and state indifference—which plague sport to this day in India. But by then Indians had already embraced football, doing their bit to transform an old game that once featured a pig’s bladder into an enduring obsession of their own.

  MANUBAI THE RANI BEFORE THE BATTLE

  Manubai Tambe was a woman of formidable spirit, long before she was lost to a nationalistic fog of myth and legend. Better known by her more elaborate name, Manikarnika, she was a sharp judge of horses. She wrote official letters in Persian and during the rebellion of 1857 famously led men—and women—into battle. Round of face, she was taller than most of her peers, and is said to have favoured simplicity, unlike the bejewelled depiction chosen by today’s film directors. ‘She bore,’ an Englishman later recorded, ‘all the outward signs of a powerful intellect and an unconquerable resolution.’ But if there was one thing that ruined the impression she left, it was her voice: as her legal adviser bemoaned, when the Rani of Jhansi began to speak, substance of great intelligence was conveyed in a sound that could only be described as ‘something between a whine and a croak’.

  Lakshmibai, a name bestowed on her after her marriage (and one which she would make famous), was not born royal. Her father, Moropant, was a retainer of the Peshwas of Pune, serving the latter even after they were deposed by the British. It was in Varanasi that the future rani was born to this brahmin, though the auspiciousness of the setting was dulled somewhat by the loss of her mother. Moropant gave his daughter both affection and the confidence born of education: she read, she rode, she fenced, and she saw to it that her male playmates treated her as an equal. Many are the tales woven around her fascinating personality: once, it is said in a story that survives in multiple iterations, the Peshwa’s adopted son refused to take her along on his elephant. Years later, when she was granted three wishes at her wedding, she expended one of them to courier to this old friend the present of a particularly mighty elephant.

  It was as a child-bride that the heroine of 1857 first arrived in Jhansi. The Newalkar family in power here were minor royalty of recent vintage. A late eighteenth-century creation of the Peshwas, their loyalties were ceded in the early nineteenth century to the East India Company. ‘Maharajadhiraj Fidvi Badshah Jamjah Inglistan’ (Devoted Servant of the Glorious King of England) was the title Lord Bentinck bestowed upon them in 1832, transforming the line from subedars to maharajas. And it was when Lord Dalhousie withdrew favour in 1853 that their fortunes were reversed. In 1851, meanwhile, young Manubai had given her husband an heir, but the baby did not survive. Two years later, when the rajah followed his child to the grave, there was nobody to occupy his place. With that the stage was set for the drama that now cements Lakshmibai’s memory: as the ‘Jezebel of India’ in unkind Victorian eyes and as a patriot in the Indian imagination.

  The annexation of Jhansi, as is well known, was opposed by the rani. It so happened that from his deathbed, her husband—a bibliophile whose love of drama sometimes saw him appear on stage, according to the scholar Joyce Lebra-Chapman—had adopted a relation as his heir. The British, of course, decided there was no compelling reason to recognise any of these proceedings: They had upgraded provincial officers into princelings, and they reserved the right to demote them now. Interestingly, this was despite popular sentiment: their own local representative had expressed confidence in the young widow (she was ‘highly respected and esteemed’ and ‘fully capable’ of ruling in her husband’s place), while another argued that since adoption had been recognised in a neighbouring state, there was no reason to deny the privilege to the Newalkars. The rani herself, meanwhile, petitioned the governor general, arguing her case logically, highlighting portions from consecutive treaties to show the latest British decision to be what it truly was: an injustice.

  In an April 1854 letter, Lakshmibai appealed to Dalhousie to remember ‘How loyal the Rajas of Jhansi have ever been; how loyal are their representatives; how strong are the inducements that they should continue to be loyal in the future.’ Her husband had not, she pointed out, any warlike characteristics, and Jhansi’s military capabilities were limited to ‘five thousand rusty swords worn by people called the army’. ‘Helpless and prostrate,’ she ended, ‘I once more entreat Your Lordship to grant me a hearing.’

  Of course, she was exaggerating her helplessness and the impotence of her armies, but at this stage she was willing to plead with Dalhousie—if only he had relented, in 1857, she might even have stayed loyal, like other princes, to the British. However, the governor general dug his heels in, leaving Lakshmibai to protest the ‘gross violation’ of previous understandings, warning that this would cause ‘great disquietude’ among India’s nobility, with lasting repercussions on the future of the Company and its designs.

  Dispossessed, at first the rani declined the British offer of 60,000 per annum but was soon persuaded to accept the settlement. In the years that followed, there was much bickering and haggling—over the late raja’s debts, which were deducted from her allowance; over the continuation of the pension to Lakshmibai’s adopted son, which the British were against; over a temple; and even such issues as cow slaughter. When the rebellion broke out, at first the rani was undecided—in a letter dated June 1857, she hoped the rebels would go ‘straight to hell’. Even months later, by which time the local British presence had been destroyed through a massacre, Lakshmibai was uncertain. It was only early in 1858, when many of her old friends, including the aforementioned Peshwa’s adopted son, Nana Sahib, became confirmed leaders of the rebellion and she herself was being viewed with suspicion, that she made her final choice: a choice that saw her ride out bravely on horseback towards tragedy, and enshrined her in India’s national history.

  POWER, PREJUDICE AND CURZON

  Studying the feud between its moderate and extremist factions, in 1900, Lord Curzon wrote to his superiors in London of his belief ‘that Congress is tottering to its fall’. What would become the grand old party of Indian independence was still in its early infancy at the time, but already had become something of a nuisance for the Viceroy. Relishing the sight of dissens
ions exploding from within into the public domain with all its chaos and clamour, Curzon added with smug delight how ‘one of my great ambitions while in India’ was to assist the Congress to ‘a peaceful demise’. He spent six years investing precisely in this ambition, only to withdraw frustrated—the Congress took a deep breath and resurrected the freedom struggle. And the viceroy’s own career went down the wrong path, smashing what were once prime ministerial ambitions into a chapter remembered in India only with rejection and dismay.

  As viceroy, Curzon ruled India with self-appointed purpose. That it was the wrong purpose altogether is another matter, but his conviction was unparalleled. He always had a sense of his own importance, and made every effort to flaunt it. At Oxford, his peers came up with the doggerel: My name is George Nathaniel Curzon /I am a most superior person /My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek /I dine at Blenheim (Palace) once a week . It didn’t help that he had a most disagreeable habit of passing judgement everywhere he went. On a trip to Canada, he sniffed about how there were few well-bred passengers on board, and the ‘social status of the remainder is indicated by the aristocratic names they bear—Tulk, Tottle, and Thistle’. Funnily, he married a blacksmith’s descendant called Leiter, a match perhaps less repulsive after the small matter of a not-too-small dowry was discussed with the bride’s millionaire father.