Amit Tripuraneni

WARREN HASTINGS' BULL (excerpt)

CAN ALSO BE PURCHASED FROM FIRSTANDSECOND.COM	(The Hindi original was written by Uday Prakash and first published by India Today in its annual literary issue for 1996, pages 75-95. This translation is by Amit Tripuraneni and Robert A. Hueckstedt. Copyright © 2004 Katha Publications.) In this tale is as much history as there is salt in daal. If you try to distil the history out of it, you will get only a handful of sand or a twig of oleander. When history is mixed with dreams, reality with imagination, facts with fantasy and the past with the future, then play infuses the story, and magic is born, leading directly to a search for truth. Therefore, play and magic are as true as history itself. This story is approximately two hundred and fifty years old. What's the point, you might ask, of raising such an antique affair, especially since in the past two hundred and fifty years, the world has completely changed. These changes have been so astounding and unimaginable that two and a half centuries ago no astrologer, scientist, social theorist, philosopher, opium-eater, madman or prophet could have ever predicted them. True. After all, imagination too, has its limits, and the wings of imagination are always snipped back by the scissors of time. Otherwise, everyone would write a Bhavisya Puran, and everyone would be a prophet or Nostradamus.

CAN ALSO BE PURCHASED FROM FIRSTANDSECOND.COM

(The Hindi original was written by Uday Prakash and first published by India Today in its annual literary issue for 1996, pages 75-95. This translation is by Amit Tripuraneni and Robert A. Hueckstedt. Copyright © 2004 Katha Publications.)

In this tale is as much history as there is salt in daal. If you try to distil the history out of it, you will get only a handful of sand or a twig of oleander. When history is mixed with dreams, reality with imagination, facts with fantasy and the past with the future, then play infuses the story, and magic is born, leading directly to a search for truth. Therefore, play and magic are as true as history itself.

This story is approximately two hundred and fifty years old. What's the point, you might ask, of raising such an antique affair, especially since in the past two hundred and fifty years, the world has completely changed. These changes have been so astounding and unimaginable that two and a half centuries ago no astrologer, scientist, social theorist, philosopher, opium-eater, madman or prophet could have ever predicted them. True. After all, imagination too, has its limits, and the wings of imagination are always snipped back by the scissors of time. Otherwise, everyone would write a Bhavisya Puran, and everyone would be a prophet or Nostradamus.

But it is also true that in the past two hundred and fifty years some things haven't changed in the least. They are today just as they were then. Despite all the pundits proclaiming the end of history, history is eternally present. It is continuous. For example, read these comments by the East India Company's Lord Clive who defeated Siraj-ud Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, in the Battle of Plassey in 1757: I will just say this, that the anarchy, confusion, bribery, dishonesty, corruption and exploitation seen today in our Raj has never been seen or heard of in any other country. Suddenly, the wealthy class's unfettered worship of riches has created throughout society a frightening form of luxury and decadence. This evil has affected every member of every department. Every little servant gets his hands on as much money as possible because he wants to be like a more important servant, or an officer does the same because he knows that only wealth and power can give his life importance. It is no wonder that the people who have been given the authority to administer the Government responsibly are the very same ones who have the means to carry out this worship of wealth.

It is ironic that this authority is used not only for bribery but also for exploitation and scams. These precedents were set by people in high positions, so why should the lower classes be unsuccessful in imitating them? This disease is pandemic. It has not only taken the public administration, police and army but also the writers, artists and businessmen into its trap.

And that is the very point where a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old story becomes today's story. History regains its continuity and the lines of one of this century's great writers become immortal -- that from time immemorial to the present all over the world only one story has ever been written, and that very story is repeated again and again. Its appearance changes, its form changes, but the core remains the same.

So, to the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old story.

It was the time when the dregs of the Mughal line sat on the throne -- cowardly, indebted, decadent, fearful princes and kings who were kings by name alone. On the other hand, Hindu Rajahs and Muslim Nawabs distributed wealth and rank to the women of their ever-increasing harems, to their durbar's courtesans and dancers, to their own family members and to their sycophants, while their revenue agents and collectors of usury frightened the hard-working farmers out of their homes, villages and fields. There were the brave, rapacious, glorious and ambitious Marathas, Rajputs, Sikhs and rulers of the Deccan who were usually either warring against each other or plundering their own poor subjects. In addition, from the Western lands across the seas came the trading companies -- the Dutch, French, Portuguese and English. The people who worked in those companies -- the white officers, their aids and peons, whose skin was so fair that it was whiter and rosier than the skin of the whitest man of our land, and who called this country `The Wonder That Is India' -- looked at it with stunned, wide-opened, amazed eyes.

It was at that very time that this tale took place.

Warren Hastings, who in the early 1770s quickly rose in the ranks of the British East India Company's Governor of Bengal, at that time was still in his youth. Which means that we are somewhere between 1750 and 1770.

Though Warren Hastings had much foresight and was a very capable governor, these activities of his raised doubts about his capabilities in the minds of the members of the East India Company's Court of Directors in England, and because of those doubts they sent Halwell and Strachey to spy on him. In their secret report Halwell and Strachey wrote that Governor-General Warren Hastings spent his evenings in the garden with a native girl named Chokhi. Strachey once saw him use a peacock quill to paint Chokhi's naked breasts with colours extracted from dhak, rose, oleander, red ochre, sandal, and lime. He gave all kinds of jewellery to that black and ugly girl. Halwell had seen them have intercourse while swinging on a swing tied to the branch of a mango tree in the garden. He wrote that it seemed they were giving a demonstration of that famous Indian book written during the Gupta Dynasty, Vatsyayana's Kamasutra.

Strachey reported that everyone working in the bungalow knew the nature of the relationship between Chokhi and Governor Hastings, but they attributed no particular significance to it because almost every British officer had his own native mistresses. Those who did not would either take a girl by force or go to the brothels. Halwell wrote that the Officers of the Company suffered no scarcity in this matter because there was a class of Hindoostanees who wanted to get rich in the shortest possible time. They were more slavish than the slaves of ancient Rome. They were usually upper caste. They ate beef, spoke English, wore European clothes and considered all of Hindoostan's old traditions mere superstitions. Except for their race and the colour of their skin, they were English in every other respect.

In this context Halwell quoted the French Director-General Dupleix: `They are our very own enslaved shadows. They will be the ones who will run the entire administration in India for us. When we leave India and return to Europe, then these very enslaved shadows of ours will rule in our place. And in that way our rule in India will continue.'

After some time the official spies sent London an `Extremely Confidential' report that contained background information on Chokhi. According to this report, in 1757 in the Battle of Plassey, while Lord Clive had successfully defeated Bengal's Nawab Siraj-ud Daulah, due to his betrayal by Mir Jafar and Rai Durlabh, there were two generals, Mir Madan and Mohan Lal who, in spite of all temptations, maintained their loyalty toward Siraj-ud Daulah and their homeland Bengal till their last breath. Only when both had been slain on the battleground by a ruse did the Company's army obtain its victory. Later, Mir Jafar and Rai Durlabh got the entire family of the martyr Mohan Lal exterminated. Only a three-year-old girl was saved somehow by the presence of mind of a low-caste maidservant.

Later that widowed maidservant married a nutt, a street acrobat, and raised the girl herself. The girl learned all the arts and tricks of the jugglers. That is the girl who now works as maidservant in the Governor-General's bungalow. Her name is Chokhi. In reality she is not a juggler but the daughter of Mohan Lal, the brave and faithful general of Nawab Siraj-ud Daulah. At the end of that confidential report it was written that that fact was discovered only after months of research and analysis, and it was certain that not even Chokhi herself was aware of it.

What an irony. Mohan Lal, killed by trickery while fighting Lord Clive's British army in the Battle of Plassey, had a daughter Chokhi who, by a twist of fate, was working as maidservant in the bungalow of the Governor-General of the East India Company, with whom she played Radha-Krishna. Whose victory was this, the Company's or Bengal's, Hastings' or Chokhi's?

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