My Father, page 5
Soon after the examinations in Ajmer, my father returned to Suwana. Once the results came out, it was time for him to look for a job. Though he would face some difficulty finding a suitable position, it is fair to say that the toughest phase of his life was now over. He would experience the usual ups and downs of life but not the kind of trials he had gone through during the first seventeen years of his life.
3
Yearning to be Part of the Freedom Movement
BEFORE I NARRATE THE more pleasant part of my father’s journey, it is necessary to digress briefly to describe the prevailing administrative system and political atmosphere in contemporary Mewar, of which Bhilwara and Suwana were constituents. As I briefly mentioned earlier, in the context of the family’s opium business, broadly speaking, the British had divided India into two parts from an administrative viewpoint: a set of provinces that they administered directly; and numerous princely states, zamindaris and jagirdaris, which they let local hereditary rulers govern under the direction and supervision of a British agent.
A governor, lieutenant governor or chief commissioner administered the provinces, depending on their size. The system was strictly hierarchical, with the authority at each level being subordinate to the one directly above. Governors, lieutenant governors and chief commissioners were answerable to the governor general, who was in turn answerable to the British government in London. The British Parliament enacted the laws governing the provinces.
Princely states, frequently referred to as just ‘states’, were in a subsidiary relationship with the British Crown, whereby they were effectively vassals of the latter. They were not to make war or engage in negotiations with other states. Larger states had their own British resident, while the smaller ones were grouped into a number of agencies, with each having a British agent as the representative of the British government.
So long as the British resident or agent approved, local hereditary rulers of the states could maintain their own laws and governance systems internally. But the residents and agents became increasingly intrusive over time. They would often decide who the prime minister of the state would be and exercise control over the administrative system through the latter. At the time the British left, there were more than 560 princely states, as well as thousands of zamindaris and jagirdaris that were in relationships similar to those of the princely states with the Crown. Altogether, the states, zamindaris and jagirdaris accounted for approximately 40 per cent of India’s land area and 23 per cent of its population.
After Independence, the Indian government created the current state of Rajasthan by amalgamating nineteen independent princely states, two chiefships and one centrally administered territory known as Ajmer-Merwara. The British government had exercised its control over these states and chiefships through its agent to the governor general, with his headquarters in Ajmer. Mewar state, also known as Udaipur state, was one of these princely states. Its ruler, known as the Maharana, and the secretariat, called the Mahakma Khas, were located in Udaipur.
Founded in the sixth century CE, Mewar was the oldest among all the princely states in India. According to the 1941 Census, it had a population of 2 million. For administrative purposes, the state was divided into sixteen districts. Each district was headed by a hakim, who was collector, superintendent of police and magistrate all rolled into one. In these capacities, he had the charge of land revenue collection, maintenance of law and order and administration of justice. Districts were sub-divided into several tehsils, each administered by a naib [assistant or deputy] hakim.
Till as late as the end of the 1930s, Mewar state had no civil or criminal procedure code. It even lacked the law of evidence. In administering justice, the hakims and naib hakims followed procedures established by practice or by what seemed convenient. Many gave judgements based on the bribes they could extract. In principle, the highest court of appeal was the mahendraj sabha (chief court), but in practice the Maharana could revise its judgment.
A handful of ministers ran the Mahakma Khas. A few clerks and orderlies assisted them. Official documents were written in the Mewari language using the Devanagari script. The ruler appointed the ministers, heads of departments and hakims from amongst the few ‘mutsaddi’ (noble) families, irrespective of their educational or other qualifications. As a result, many senior officers, including hakims, lacked the qualifications for the jobs they held.
In 1939, the British government appointed T. Vijayaraghavacharya, a former prime minister of Cochin state, as the prime minister of Mewar. He reorganized the state secretariat along modern lines. He separated the executive and judiciary. He constituted a State Civil Service and a Subordinate Civil Service. He also codified civil and criminal law and established a High Court of Judicature, which replaced the old Mahendraj Sabha. Finally, he dismissed a number of corrupt, inefficient and uneducated officers from service.
It may seem curious that despite the feelings of nationalism that I mentioned my father inculcating within himself and his friends in Suwana, I have made no reference to any organized action by the Congress to draw these young men into the freedom movement. The answer to this puzzle is that until 1938, the Congress had explicitly limited its freedom movement to the eleven provinces directly ruled by the British. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, the British had decided to give autonomy to these provinces and held elections in them in 1936. The Congress had fought elections in all eleven provinces and successfully formed the government in eight. Similar elections did not take place in the princely states because local rulers ruled them. The Congress had made a conscious decision not to extend the freedom movement to the princely states, since seeking popularly elected governments there would bring it into direct conflict with the rulers, who were not foreign. Mahatma Gandhi was particularly reluctant to bring the Congress into conflict with the princes, whom he saw as friends rather than enemies.
As far as the people of the princely states were concerned, the direct cause of their misery originated in the exploitative policies of their immediate rulers rather than the British government, even though the local royalty ruled under the overall supervision of the latter. In the provinces and territories that the British directly ruled, the British Parliament enacted all the laws. But in the princely states, local kings and maharajas exercised that power. As such, popular movements in the princely states had been directed against the local rulers – focusing on issues such as land taxes, forced labour and misgovernment – rather than against the British. The role of the national freedom movement in the princely states was indirect, limited to imparting greater legitimacy to the local movements. These movements sought redress of the same grievances from local rulers in the princely states that the Congress did from the British government in the provinces and territories directly under it. A good example of local movements against rulers in Mewar was the Bijolia Kisan Movement from 1897 to 1941. Waged against excessive land taxes, forced labour and other excesses of the local rulers, this movement gave rise to leaders who later founded Mewar Praja Mandal, the organization that brought the region directly into the national freedom movement during its last phase. As I noted earlier, where rulers were just and good to the people, as in the case of Banera, no such local movement existed.
A turning point in the history of participation in the national movement by people from the princely states came in 1938. At its convention at Haripur in Orissa that year, the Congress modified its stance with respect to local movements in princely states. It adopted a resolution calling upon the subjects to launch their movements for responsible governments in their respective states. The resolution explicitly forbade the subjects from launching these movements under the name of the Congress, however. Therefore, the freedom movements in the princely states, which began in 1938, were launched under the auspices of Praja Mandals or Praja Parishads (people’s associations).
No sooner had the Congress opened the door than the people in Mewar formed the Mewar Praja Mandal, with the objective of establishing a responsible government in the state. The founder of the organization was Manikya Lal Verma, a charismatic leader who had played a pivotal role in the famous Bijolia Kisan Movement. Later, after Independence, he went on to serve as a member of the Constituent Assembly of India and as prime minister of the United State of Rajasthan (USR), which was formed by merging Mewar with the other southern and southeastern princely states of Rajputana in April 1948. My father would later directly connect with Verma and edit the official weekly newspaper of the Mewar Praja Mandal just prior to the formation of the USR. But that episode is still a few years away from where I must now resume his story.
With a high school diploma in hand, my father thought that his life would be smooth henceforth. But the turnaround, which did happen eventually, took some more time. He sent out numerous letters to well-wishers to secure a job that would be to his liking and would also pay a satisfactory salary, but those attempts came out a cropper. He was keen on a desk job where he could apply his intellect as well as his good command over the English language, a skill rather scarce in Mewar in those days. But the only offer that came his way was for a primary schoolteacher, which did not interest him. That was the job many students in Banera who could not go beyond middle school eventually did. Father was looking for something more challenging.
At the same time, given his financial condition and the responsibility of a family that he had, he needed to find something that would pay a decent salary. Therefore, when a rich but distant relative offered him a job in a cloth shop manned by his son in Ajmer, he accepted it. Assuming that the relative would offer him a fair deal, and thinking that it would be impolite to ask him what salary he would be paid, he did not ask anything about the job. He went off to Ajmer and began working at the shop. A week into the job, he finally decided to ask his relative’s son the terms of his employment. He was told he would be paid Rs 10 per month. That was well below my father’s expectation. Therefore, he immediately quit the job and left Ajmer.
From Ajmer, Father came to Udaipur and once again began searching for a job, possibly with the princely state of Mewar. Luckily, the warden at Jain Hostel was fond of him and let him stay free of charge. Given my father’s meagre financial resources, this was a big help. After some inquiries, Father found out that the office of the accountant general had a vacancy for a clerk with a command over the English language. This was clearly the kind of job he wanted, so he approached the accountant general. Unfortunately, the accountant general not only lacked the qualifications for his own job, he was also rude and arrogant. When Father finally got an audience with him and enquired about the position, the accountant general denied that such a vacancy existed in his office. Disappointed, Father left the office, only to learn later that the accountant general had lied to him and had had the vacancy filled by someone else.
Father was now experiencing first-hand what nepotism and patronage, practised by the Mewar government, did to ordinary citizens who had the qualifications for employment but lacked family connections. But he soon got indirect help from an unlikely quarter. The British government had recently forced the Maharana to replace an uneducated feudal lord with a retired district judge from United Provinces as the Chief Justice of the Chief Court. The Chief Court and its subordinate courts did not have a single employee with even workable knowledge of English. Therefore, when my father approached this Chief Justice, who owed nothing to the Maharana, he advised him to work in his office pro bono till a vacancy opened.
My father saw this as a lifeline of sorts and began working with the Chief Justice. He prepared summaries of the files at the court, positively impressing the Chief Justice with his skills. But, uncertain about how long it might take for a vacancy to open up at the court, he also kept exploring other job opportunities on the side. He soon landed an offer to work with a well-known historian in Ajmer. Because the prospects of a paid position in the Chief Court remained uncertain and he felt embarrassed about living in Jain Hostel free of charge for an entire month, he decided to accept the offer. He went to the Chief Justice and explained to him his predicament. The Chief Justice understood, and immediately relieved him of his duties, but told him to leave his home address with the peshkar (court clerk) before leaving office.
Bhilwara was on the way to Ajmer from Udaipur, so Father thought that he would make use of the opportunity to visit home in Suwana. After spending a couple of days there, he was ready to leave for Ajmer. Because he planned to take an early morning train to Ajmer from Bhilwara, he decided to spend the day before the journey at a hostel in Bhilwara. At the hostel, he happened to meet a gentleman who had just been transferred to Bhilwara to serve as a reader in the office of the hakim. As luck would have it, Father missed the train to Ajmer the next morning and had to return to the hostel. His next option was a train to Ajmer at 5.30 p.m. An hour before he was to leave for the railway station, however, the gentleman he had met the previous evening came looking for him. He told him that the hakim had received orders from the Chief Justice in Udaipur appointing my father as the ahalmad (clerk) in the court of the naib hakim in Mandal, a tehsil in Bhilwara district. Father went immediately to see the hakim, who refused to even look at him. After waiting for half an hour, when my father decided to give up and got up to leave, the hakim curtly told him to go and take up the position in Mandal.
At last, my father’s search for a suitable job had a happy ending. Next morning, on 15 August 1938, he left for Mandal instead of Ajmer and took charge of his job. He was only seventeen years old at the time and had to fill the shoes of a middle-aged man with twenty-five years of experience. He knew nothing about the job, which led the naib hakim to complain to the Chief Justice in Udaipur. Having observed him first-hand during the few days that he had worked in his office, the Chief Justice was confident that my father had it in him to do the job. He wrote back to the naib hakim that it was his duty to train the young man. That was the end of the matter.
I may narrate here an incident that illustrates graphically how degenerate the system of justice in the state of Mewar had become around this time. Soon after my father joined as a clerk in Mandal, a hakim was appointed in Bhilwara. He replaced the man who had received the order from the Chief Justice appointing my father as a clerk in Mandal. Both he and his predecessor had limited schooling and lacked qualifications for the job. But they had the blessings of the Maharana. This new hakim was, additionally, a thoroughly corrupt man. He would not let go of any opportunity to amass personal wealth and would use the power of his office without hesitation towards this end.
On one occasion, the hakim got an individual arrested when the latter was in the midst of the twelve-day period of mourning following his mother’s death. The accusation levelled against the accused was that in the letters he had sent to his friends and relatives informing them of the death of his mother, he had stated that she had left for ‘deolok’ (heaven). The hakim contended that only the Maharana and his courtiers were entitled to the use of the term ‘deolok’ when describing the death of a family member. He did not release the man until he had coughed up fifty rupees, a rather hefty sum for an ordinary citizen in those days. Luckily, real justice was served two years later, when T. Vijayaraghavacharya, appointed as the prime minister by the Maharana under pressure from the British, dismissed the hakim along with half a dozen other senior officials of doubtful integrity.
The naib hakim of Mandal was a law graduate and a sincere, honest and hardworking man. But being unconnected to the Maharana, he too became the object of harassment by the hakim of Bhilwara soon after the latter was appointed. The naib hakim requested the Mewar government to transfer him out of Bhilwara. The government granted the request and my father had another boss. This one had the blessings of the Maharana. Therefore, he was immune to harassment by the hakim.
By this time, my father had learned his job well. Taking advantage of this fact, the new happy-go-lucky naib hakim left the administration of the court entirely to him. That gave my father the opportunity to run the affairs of the court, ranging from taking down statements to keeping records to writing judgments. He got to deal with all aspects of civil as well as criminal cases. He enjoyed the work immensely and got an opportunity to read books on law so that he could take well-informed decisions. His experience and his reading came in handy later on, when he decided to do a degree in law.
The following three or four years saw my father grow professionally, with promotions coming his way, though with frequent transfers from one town to another. He had scarcely completed a year in Mandal when he was promoted to the position of nazir and sent to the District Court of Rajnagar, later renamed Rajsamand after the beautiful lake of the same name. Then, in October 1940, he was appointed as reader in the court of a magistrate in Kapasan. After another three months, in January 1941, he moved to Bhilwara as reader in the court of the first-class magistrate there. That too lasted only five months, and he was moved to Chittor.
In the meantime, in January 1941, my father’s first child, my oldest sister, Premlata, arrived even before he had reached twenty years of age. This was not unusual in those days. His own father had had his first child at an even younger age. In the following eleven years, my parents would have another five children, of whom all but one would survive and would go on to lead rich lives. Only the second child, a boy born in November 1942, would die of pneumonia at the tender age of ten months. I would be the last of their six children, arriving in 1952. The first two of my siblings would be sisters and the next two brothers. With a gap of just two years between the successive boys, we three brothers would grow up with a great sense of camaraderie.
The first year of my father’s appointment in the Mewar government, 1938, had coincided with the formation of the Mewar Praja Mandal. Keen on joining the freedom movement when the opportunity came, he closely followed its activities. Upon its formation, the organization launched a movement for the establishment of a responsible government in the state. That led the Mewar government to immediately ban it and exile its leader, Manikya Lal Verma. It also went on to arrest the workers of the Praja Mandal in the major towns, such as Udaipur, Bhilwara, Chittor and Nathdwara. My father was in Mandal at the time and had maintained close contact with the local workers of the organization. Clandestinely, he would even get banned weekly newspapers from Ajmer. The newspapers carried information on the arrests that had been happening in the various towns of Mewar.
