The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin Read online

  It was India, though, that truly made Curzon—and unexpectedly so. ‘From nobodies,’ his American wife exclaimed, ‘we have jumped into grandeur.’ Only thirty-nine when he was propelled into his viceregal mission, Curzon couldn’t stand the demands of the ‘native’ elite for a share of power and a fraction of respect. India’s maharajahs and nawabs he dismissed as ‘a set of unruly and ignorant and rather undisciplined schoolboys’, while the Congress was a ‘microscopic minority’ of jobless lawyers, completely divorced from reality and with a propensity for grandiloquent speeches. ‘You can as little judge of the feelings … of the people of India from the plans and proposals of the Congress party as you can judge of the physical configuration of a country which is wrapped in the mists of early morning, but a few of whose topmost peaks have been touched by the rising sun.’ This Curzon declared before he set eyes on a single Congressman.

  He did, however, show empathy for ordinary people, partly because in those days ordinary people didn’t ask inconvenient questions. When British soldiers raped a Burmese woman, he was horrified by the conspiracy to protect them—the entire regiment was expelled to Aden, ‘the worst spot I could find’ after his seniors vetoed stricter action. When a planter flogged his Indian servant to death and escaped a harsh sentence, Curzon appealed for real punishment. ‘I will not,’ he wrote, ‘be party to any scandalous hushings up of bad cases … or to the theory that a white man may kick or batter a black man to death with impunity because he is only “a damned nigger”.’ The English, he argued, must set an example in India by their ‘superior standards of honour and virtue’. While he personally went about setting examples, other Englishmen continued to kick Indians, calling Curzon a ‘nigger-lover’.

  Good intentions aside, Curzon was also the kind of man who centralised power and reigned over mountains of paper. ‘The Government of India,’ he mourned familiarly, ‘is a mighty and miraculous machine for doing nothing.’ His solution, was not to empower Indians, but to pile up more on his own imperial plate—on one occasion, he set out to catch a chicken-thief when accounts did not add up in the stately kitchens of his palatial establishment. He couldn’t quite understand why the Indian education system—designed by men of his ilk like Macaulay—was so focused on manufacturing a ‘rush of immature striplings’ interested ‘not to learn but to earn’. He made half-baked but well-intentioned attempts to develop a research-oriented university system and emphasise technical education, though in implementing these wonderful ideas he again forgot to involve those brown people for whose benefit they were intended in the first place.

  What most offended everybody, however, was Curzon’s notorious partition of Bengal. He had already carved the North-West Frontier Province out of Punjab, and had plans for Berar, Orissa and other provinces as well. As the cradle of Indian nationalism, however, Bengal was unique. Despite mastering the principle of divide et impera , London warned Curzon not to proceed because ‘the severance of old and historic ties and the breaking up of racial unity’ would backfire on the Raj. But he went ahead anyway—and lived to regret it. The partition, to begin with, settled the internal doldrums of the Congress, rallying all factions against this single cause. Curzon, who in 1904 began a second term, was recalled within twelve months into a future with no more spectacular prospects, while his partition itself was eventually reversed. By the time of his death in 1925, he was reduced to complaining how not enough people were visiting to check on his welfare. ‘I must be entirely forgotten,’ he lamented, ‘or have no friends left.’ Both were partially true.

  There is, however, one thing for which Curzon deserves lasting credit: his genuine interest in preserving India’s monuments, a responsibility ‘scandalously neglected’ till then. When some complained that he was protecting ‘pagan’ structures, he reminded them that as sheer manifestations of human genius, to him ‘the rock temple of the brahmin stands precisely on the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara and the Mohammedan Masjid as the Christian Cathedral’. Personally touring swathes of land, climbing up hills and down ruins, Curzon ensured that the Archaeological Survey of India began to do its job. And for all his prejudices, this one contribution was enough for Nehru, no great admirer of friendless, resentful Curzon, to later remark: ‘After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.’ That, one hopes, would give Curzon’s soul some gratification even though he went to the grave abandoned and alone.

  WHEN SAVARKAR JUMPED SHIP

  A little after 6.30 a.m. on 8 July 1910, V.D. Savarkar made more than a ripple in history when he plunged from The Morea into the Mediterranean Sea. The ship, on its way east with this high-profile prisoner, had docked at Marseilles when Savarkar expressed a desire to use the toilet. Two ‘native constables’ stood guard outside, but before they knew it, their charge had shot the door bolt, deciding to seek personal liberty via the porthole. Even as Constable ‘Amarsing’ and his colleague took off after him—sensibly choosing the land route—Savarkar swam to the quay and climbed into Marseilles harbour. He was quickly apprehended, of course, and this sensational attempt at escape soon became part of the Savarkar legend. But what he inadvertently provoked in the process was a diplomatic headache for Britain and France, the Hindutva ideologue’s brief, wet moments on French territory opening up a can of legal worms that took months to settle.

  Though The Morea and its precious cargo set sail from Marseilles the very next day, by 18 July the affair was being discussed at the highest levels of state. The French envoy in London set forth his government’s view that ‘As the prisoner had reached French soil… questions of international law were involved’ in the matter. In other words, the moment Savarkar set foot, it was argued, on the sovereign territory of France, his British-Indian keepers no longer enjoyed legal rights over him—and certainly not the right to apprehend, seize and cart him back to a foreign vessel. Since Savarkar was already out of hand and en route to India, the request of the French government was simple: until the matter was settled between the two nations, the prisoner should not be tried for the charges that had provoked his arrest in London in the first place. If the French had any say in the matter, Savarkar should first be left to them to handle.

  The British authorities were puzzled by the French claim, and, by 29 July, the Home Office, India Office and Foreign Office were all involved in the bureaucratic nightmare. Among those in the loop, interestingly, was a certain Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, whose note emphasised that ‘Great Britain should maintain an attitude of dignity and of dispassionate submission to the law of nations (i.e. international law). ‘The petty annoyance,’ he added, ‘of a criminal escaping may have to be borne.’ Curious as it is to picture Churchill inadvertently promoting the cause of ‘Veer’ Savarkar, he was stoutly resisted by paladins in the India Office. Unlike their colleagues, the India hands insisted that while a pious commitment to international law was admirable, it was ‘of the utmost importance from a political point of view’ that Savarkar should be tried. There was, to them, no question of returning him to French soil.

  A somewhat topsy-turvy solution suggested, then, was to have Savarkar tried as scheduled, to suspend the sentence when delivered, hand him over to the French thereafter, and finally have him extradited to India to serve the sentence—all this involving Savarkar being given a two-way ticket to sail overseas and back simply to satisfy legal requirements. But the charges against him being what they were—a veritable catalogue including ‘Waging and abetting the waging of war against the King’, ‘Collecting arms with intent to wage war against the King’, ‘sedition’, ‘abetment to murder’, and more—it was decided to explore all possibilities to retain him in India while the matter was resolved. Churchill might have wanted to preserve British dignity in the face of French legal incandescence but, for the colonial authorities in India, Savarkar was the ‘head of a widespread conspiracy, the threads of which it was essential to unravel’ through trial.
r />   As both the French and the British got into the matter, there appeared two versions of what had transpired in Marseilles. The French asserted that once Savarkar appeared on the docks, it was a gendarme who caught him—he claimed to have chased him ‘about 400 metres’ before catching up. He then walked ten metres with Savarkar in his physical custody before the Indian policemen showed up. Constable ‘Amarsing’ and his colleague, however, said that while the gendarme’s action was crucial, he had appeared from the left while they were closing in on Savarkar, and that they arrived moments after the Frenchman had the prisoner by the arm. Savarkar himself may well have been conscious of a legal opportunity to obtain asylum, for he appealed to the officer to take him to a local magistrate. Instead, he was marched back to the ship and guarded even more closely till he got to India.

  Pressed immediately after by the French press, which raised issues of law and national pride, the authorities in Paris came to regret the actions of the otherwise efficient gendarme. In London, the claim that the French had any kind of right over Savarkar was, meanwhile, rejected. The French, it was accurately argued, were informed in advance of Savarkar’s presence on the ship, and the gendarme had been posted precisely to prevent his escape—that he succeeded in doing what he was meant to do merely confirmed Savarkar’s position as British prisoner and could not be construed as creating a right of asylum even by the most generous reading of the case. ‘His Majesty’s Government,’ it was firmly communicated by September, ‘are therefore unable to admit that they are under any obligation to restore Savarkar to French territory.’ He was now in India, and that was where he would remain.

  The matter did not end there, however. In October 1910, it was decided by the French to take the dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and in February the next year the court ruled in favour of Britain—while there was an ‘irregularity’ in Savarkar’s arrest, London’s logic made sense to them. Perhaps, if the gendarme had handed over Savarkar to his superiors instead of taking him back to the ship, the story might have been different. But in the circumstances as they were, the British prevailed. And so—even as the French erupted in righteous protest—the matter finally came to an end, and the fifty years Savarkar was sentenced to serve began. Fifty years, that is, till he composed his infamous mercy petitions and obtained an early release, which, of course, is another story.

  SAVARKAR’S THWARTED ‘RACIAL DREAM’

  In November 1940, V.D. Savarkar presented a most fascinating proposition in a newspaper called the Khyber Mail . Authored under his usual pseudonym of ‘A Mahratta’, the architect of Hindutva went beyond his familiar arguments about ‘Hinduness’ and nationalism here, highlighting instead a political framework in which these concepts could achieve fruition. Ostensibly, this was a rejoinder to a ‘spineless’ statement by Mahatma Gandhi that the Nizam of Hyderabad was a potential candidate for emperor of united India when the British left. But Savarkar’s ‘virile antidote’ to Gandhi’s ‘inferiority complex’ is not less puzzling. The thrust of his argument painted India’s rajahs (‘defenders of Hindu faith and honour… the reserve forces of Hindudom’) and not the nizam as the road to the future. And if, he argued, Hindus in British territory and the princes joined forces, they could offer a sparkling alternative vision for India, establishing a nation that was a veritable ‘racial dream’.

  Like much of Savarkar’s writing, this essay too features a good deal of anti-Muslim polemics. The ‘academical’ view offered was that if it came to civil war, Hindu military camps would spring up spontaneously in the princely states, from Udaipur and Gwalior in the north to Mysore and Travancore in the south. ‘There will not be left a trace of Muslim rule from the Seas in the South to the Jamuna in the North,’ while in the Punjab Sikhs would keep at bay the Muslim tribes of the west. Independent Nepal (of all countries) would emerge ‘as the Defender of the Hindu Faith and the commander of Hindu forces’, mobilising ‘Hindu rifles’ to ‘spit fire and vengeance in defence of Hindu Honour’. Indeed, Nepal might even make ‘a bid for the Imperial throne of Hindusthan’. Its march into India would be reinforced, of course, by Hindus across the board, and at the end of the day they would together consecrate a Hindu rashtra with its own suzerain, ready to inherit ‘the Sceptre of Indian Empire’ as it fell from colonial hands.

  The Hindutva family of organisations understandably perceived a community of interests with the princely states for a long time. The latter were, as the scholar Manu Bhagavan observes, viewed as ‘portals to a pure, ancient past’, ‘sites of India’s imagined past of purity’, and ‘the foundation on which the future nation’ could be launched. In 1944, in a letter to the ruler of Jaipur, Savarkar openly declared the Hindu Mahasabha’s policy of ‘standing by the Hindu states and defending their prestige, stability and power against the Congressites, the Communists, [and] the Moslems’. ‘Hindu states,’ he concluded, ‘are centres of Hindu power’ and naturally, therefore, would become instrumental in the realisation of Hindu nationhood—not democratic assemblies or notions of secular government. Meanwhile, if not spirited support, the princes certainly provided a degree of encouragement to Savarkar and his supporters—several Hindu Mahasabha meetings were hosted in their states, including in highly advanced Mysore and Baroda, and the organisation found ample support among the orthodox in princely territory, where British influence was less direct and feudal power more sustained.

  What, however, were the chances of the princes uniting around Savarkar’s vision? They certainly did possess networks of blood and kinship that could, in theory, link them. Travancore in Kerala ‘belonged’ to Lord Padmanabhaswamy—a deity whose idol was made of salagram stones from Nepal. The Maratha dynasty in Baroda shared political roots not only with the rulers of Indore and Gwalior in the centre and north but also with the descendants of Shivaji’s house who survived in Tamil Nadu. Mysore was ruled by Kannadigas, who eagerly sought Rajput brides. To this combination could also be added senior Indian statesmen of the time who thought the Congress vision of India a disaster, and were equally willing, therefore, to consider an alternative plan. As late as July 1947, for instance, the redoubtable statesman, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer (who considered Gandhi a ‘dangerous sex maniac’ and Jawaharlal Nehru ‘unstable’) was convinced that if power went to the Congress, ‘civil war … within six months’ was inevitable, culminating in the division of India between ‘half a dozen principalities’—and Sir C.P. was considered ‘one of the cleverest men in India’.

  In reality though, most Indian rajahs were more interested in sustaining their decadent lifestyles and reaffirming loyalty to the Raj than in plotting grand designs for India’s independence. Many of them were known not for their virile nationalism but for their boudoir passions. They certainly owned 40 per cent of Indian territory, but over 454 of the 565-odd states were made of less than 1,000 square metres; only a few dozen collected revenues over 10 lakh, and even fewer owned armies that deserved the name. The greatest of the states, Hyderabad, was inconveniently Islamic, while Kashmir, held by Dogra Rajputs, was majority Muslim. Add to this mass agitations within the states, encouraged by the Congress, and the heady picture of brave princes rising to inaugurate an age of Hindutva looked hopelessly remote.

  In the end, history didn’t quite play out in the way Savarkar and his confederates theorised. Nehru proved perfectly stable, the Hindutva cause was damaged after Gandhi’s murder, while Sardar Patel integrated most principalities with the carrot of money and status and the stick of armed intervention. Despite obituaries and shrill prophecies of danger, India became a secular democracy, and not a Hindu rashtra. And, in perhaps what might have caused the father of Hindutva to recoil in horror, it was not the Nepali dynasty of Savarkar’s ‘academical’ premise that soared to power in New Delhi. Instead, another family emerged to play a formidable role in shaping India’s destiny: one bearing those very names—Nehru and Gandhi—that he viewed with such intense antipathy. What Savarkar envisioned in 1940 was a ‘Future Emperor of
India’; what India got in a decade instead was a people’s constitution, defended by men and women who brooked no kings and shunned all empires.

  THE CHAMPION OF TUTICORIN

  When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Madras in 1915, among those seeking a private audience with him was a man called V.O. Chidambaram Pillai. Gandhi, already a hero after his political work in South Africa, had several demands on his time and suggested, therefore, a quick meeting. His correspondent was not pleased. ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote back dryly, ‘that my conversation … will take more than the allotted “a few minutes”.’ Cloaking sarcasm as an apology for ‘having intruded upon your precious time’, Pillai grandly withdrew his request. Now it was the Mahatma’s turn to be puzzled. He insisted on seeing the man, making equally sarcastic amends by requesting his time at 6 a.m. ‘I cannot reach your place before 6.30 a.m.,’ Pillai declared, but finally, they did meet: the champion of Tuticorin and the Mahatma-in-waiting.

  What ensued was a long and somewhat frustrating exchange between the two leaders—one whose political career was on the ascendant and the other who not only found his best years behind him but was also penniless. Sympathising with the man’s predicament, Gandhi offered to help Pillai with money, and the latter readily accepted. But the amount was a long time coming. ‘Don’t you know at least approximately the total amount given… by your friend?’ asked Pillai at one point. ‘If you know it, can you not send me that amount or a major portion of it… so that it may be useful to me in my present difficult circumstances?’ ‘Not yet,’ snapped the Mahatma abruptly. In the end, it took about a year, but ‘Sriman Gandhi’, as the former called him, did succeed in arranging 347 for Pillai, who was not only delighted by this satisfactory end to their strange, chequered exchange but also somewhat lighter of debt.