Govardhan's Travels, page 1
ANAND
Govardhan’s Travels
Translated by Gita Krishnankutty
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Footnotes
Prologue
Chapter 16
Chapter 23
Chapter 34
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 90
Chapter 101
Chapter 104
Epilogue
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
GOVARDHAN’S TRAVELS
P. Sachidanandan was born in 1936 in Kerala. His first book, Aalkkoottam (The Crowd) was published in 1970. With no formal training in language, he developed his own literary dialect, which suited the themes he selected for his stories over the years. His works traverse mythology, history and contemporary realities and dwell on the mechanism of power and the deprivation and injustice in society.
He has written nine novels, forty short stories, two plays and two major philosophical works apart from numerous articles on contemporary topics.
Gita Krishnankutty has translated the novels and short stories of several Malayalam writers including M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Lalithambika Antharjanam, N. P. Mohammad, Paul Zacharia and M. Mukundan. She lives in Chennai.
Prologue
Not even the most casual visitor to the courts of the mofussil towns of north India could fail to notice one of its features: the vast compounds that stretch around the court buildings with hordes of people camped under trees the English had planted there years before to chase the heat away. Old people, women and children, surrounded by mats and durries, tin trunks, bundles of clothes and makeshift kitchens. You will also see the ramshackle bazaars that have grown alongside these habitats in shanties and shacks. You can easily make out that these people have come from far-flung villages to camp in these compounds while they await the dispensation of justice and that they have come prepared with relatives, friends and witnesses to help them. Take a closer look at their faces and you might be excused for wondering if they have been camping in these places since the time of Warren Hastings or Dalhousie.
In the last few years, I have had to visit courts in many large and small towns as part of my official duties and have never been able to go past these people milling around the grounds without noticing them. As courts began to be established with the evolution of the notions of law and justice, large numbers of people who hoped for justice and waited for it to be dispensed gathered alongside them. As massive buildings, files and lawyers multiplied to serve the needs of the courts, bazaars sprouted around the dwellings of those who came to seek justice. Eating places to feed them, clothes shops to replace their tattered garments, barber shops to shear their growing hair, dentists to extract their rotting teeth, cobblers to take care of their corn-infested feet, palmists to sell them hope, itinerant musicians and acrobats to entertain them…I felt as though these human habitations and bazaars that had mushroomed around the courthouses had woven a pattern of perpetuity into the prolonged wait for justice in the same way as buildings and files had gradually institutionalized the system of dispensing justice. Considered from another viewpoint, did our cities themselves not grow out of the interminable conflict between those whose rights had been violated and those who violated them?
Some time ago I wrote a short story that touched on these matters. It was about an old man who came to court with his little son, carrying all the meagre savings he had in a wallet, to file a plaint against a zamindar who had snatched away from him the tiny piece of land that was his family’s sole means of survival. Once he had paid the lawyer’s fees, he found that the money left was not enough to even bribe the lawyer’s clerk. The old man wandered around the bazaar holding the child’s hand, uncertain of what to do. He was soon trying to assuage the child’s hunger and thirst. Then he began to buy little household objects that his family had been yearning to possess for years. In the end, having spent everything he had, he went back to the village, the plaint still in his hand!
However, the images of the people in the compounds of the courts that I had by now started to call court-basties stayed with me. I could not push them away by writing a story. The look in their eyes, of a remoteness that defied both hope and despair, continued to haunt me. Time seemed to stand still in these court-basties, stagnating around them. Ancient colonial buildings with wide arches, massive pilastered walls and corniced pillars, high ceilings that harboured the dust of centuries, fans that, suspended from long rods, groaned perpetually, judges seated in dingy rooms, straining their eyes to read the verdicts, stooping clerks who seemed strangers to death, petitioners swimming through a sea of death: these courts transported me not only into the notorious inertia of the Indian legal system but also into the mind of an ancient India devoid of a sense of time and history.
Stories of lakhs of men and women who, thanks to personal enmity or the greed of informers, were incarcerated in jails and condemned to live in them, deprived of the chance to ever see the light of day again, who gave birth to children and died in that darkness were spawned not only by human rights activists who sprang up after the dark days of the Emergency in the seventies but also by the Henry Stracheys, Thomas Munros and Colonel Walkers who worked for the East India Company in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Lakhs of pending cases requiring the examination of millions of witnesses who had to be dragged into the towns from distant villages; judges who did not know the languages the witnesses spoke and were dependent upon wily interpreters; corrupt court officials and court rules that, instead of extending justice to those who needed it, actually prompted them to shun the courts; justice that was auctioned--to this day, time seems to have frozen into this picture Munro drew of Bengal in the nineteenth century. (A judge of the Supreme Court suggested recently that courts need not accept more than a certain number of petitions, somewhat like hotels that put up boards saying ‘no vacancy’ on their doors!) Would the great Bhartrihari have passed through these still and timeless fields before he wrote: kalo na yato vayameva yata1 and bhogana bhukto vayameva bhukta?2 Or does our world, in which justice and injustice have become so entangled that we can no longer distinguish between them, a world which sees no compulsion to differentiate right from wrong or light from darkness, give a new interpretation to the couplets written by this poet-king who renounced the world to become a mendicant?
This need not be true. The past, which permeates and co-exists with our mythology, history and literature and lives so comfortably with the present does not have to be a casual visitor to us. I thought I could seek it out in these court -basties and indeed, I felt I did--for a society in whose heart the fire of justice does not burn is certain to lose all sense of time!
I speak of these courts only as an example. The problem is not that of the courts alone. And the solution, as many of our human rights activists seem to believe, does not lie in the hands of a bunch of lawyers. Courts which sway from one side to the other depending upon the eloquence of lawyers are not really that different from the arenas of olden days where professionals were employed to conduct cockfights and sword fights in order to settle disputes between contending parties. Nor is it only in the courts of justice that the innocent are punished repeatedly. Kings who go to war in order to establish their suzerainty, avatars and prophets who do battle to impose their versions of ethical codes, revolutionaries who swear by ideologies, modern militant outfits that wear the now fashionable garb of cultural and ethnic identities: all of them believe in one thing--the way to prove their correctness is to wield their weapons on the innocent. Each of them, keeping their private goal in mind, passes judgement on the rest of the world. Messiahs and preachers define right and wrong in terms of revelations, revolutionaries according to the tenets of their political ideologies. The success of the few experiments he conducted is the sole criterion for the scientist to proclaim a theory. For the mathematician, everything comes back to the balancing of equations. The judge restricts all that he deals with to the vocabulary of the law, the linguist to the intricacies of grammar, the poet to the propriety of his metaphors, the musician to the arrangement of notes and the artist to the proportions of figures. As for the injustice and cruelty meted out to human beings, everything--from revelations to ideologies, from scientific theories to laws, grammar, metaphors or musical notes--silently condones or accepts them, provides them rationale and respectability.
Walking this path, I do not remember exactly when I arrived at Bharatendu’s Andher Nagari. This work, described as a light farce, moved me deeply. Every commodity--wheat flour, rice, dal, firewood, salt, ghee, sugar--is sold in the ‘fair’ markets of the city of Andher Nagari at a rupee a seer. When a man brings the complaint to Choupat Raja, the king of the city, that Kallu’s wall collapsed and killed his goat, Choupat Raja first sentences the wall to death. When the minister points out that there is a flaw in this judgement, the king sentences Kallu, who owns the wall, to death, then the mason who built the wall, the chunewala who mixed the mortar for it, the bhishti who poured out water for mixing the mortar, the kasai who sold the goat-skin water bag to the bhishti, the shepherd who sold the kasai a big goat, and finally, the town kotwal who, while patrolling the town, diverted the shepherd’s attention, causing him to sell a big goat instead of a small one. However, the noose did not fit the kotwal’s neck, so Govardhan, a passer-by, was finally led to the gallows because his neck happened to fit the noose!
Bharatendu Harishchandra, who lived a hundred and fifty years before our time, stands apart from all the writers of his period by virtue of this work alone. As an artist, he must have known that realism was only one of the many ways of understanding reality, which is why he created such a frighteningly absurd situation to illustrate the cruelty and irrationality of all systems of justice. But why, after having shown that the farcical situation he had created was the actual face of reality, did he suddenly deviate and end his play by using a ruse to release Govardhan from the injustice that faced him? Although he lived only thirty-five years, this brilliant and widely-travelled writer who had learnt many languages and literatures, involved himself consciously in social and political activities and edited a journal, must certainly have come to realize that there is no escape, no freedom, for the Govardhans of this world.
I sat in my room for days together and talked to Bharatendu Harishchandra. Since our subject transcended time, the gap of a century and a half that lay between us did not intrude upon us. He was a much greater scholar than I and had written much more than I had ever done. But this did not stand between us either. After all, what we were discussing was beyond the realm of scholarship, something concerning the ordinary lives of ordinary people. One day, he at last accepted my pleas. In the solitude of the night, he got up and walked out through the frozen darkness to the stone-walled prison in Andher Nagari, the city ruled by Choupat Raja, Resident Sahib and Jailer Sahib. Once there, he flung the gates open. Govardhan, who was squatting on the stone-paved floor of his cell, got up and stumbled out on unsteady feet. He was not free. The noose, far more terrible than prison walls, still hung above his neck. While time stood still, hosts of people from mythology, history, literature and society came from either side of the road and joined him.
And thus began Govardhan’s travels.
1
Govardhan did not recognize the man who emerged from the darkness outside and walked down the torch-lit corridor. There had been no one like this man among the sepoys or darogas he had seen the last two days. With his long, flowing hair and bright eyes he had a saintly grace that transcended the charm of youth. One by one, the sentries stood up as he approached. When he reached Govardhan’s cell, the guard bent down, slid back the bolts and threw the door wide open.
Govardhan had stopped weeping because his eyes had gone dry. He had persuaded himself to accept the death sentence--a royal command completely devoid of logic that no one in their right senses could possibly accept--as the dispensation of fate. He would go to the gallows the next morning sure of not having committed any offence, his innocence attested by everyone. Since a goat passing that way had been trapped under the debris and killed when Kallu’s wall collapsed, someone had to be hanged--this was what the sentries who felt kindly towards him had told him on the way here, in an attempt to console him.
Govardhan got up from the cold stone floor. Except for a square of light that moved with every flicker of the torch, the cell was so dark that even the walls were not visible. Hunger gnawed at Govardhan’s skeletal frame. Later, fear overcame hunger. He felt as if he was deep in the jaws of darkness. He could not see a thing. And he had nothing to do except what the sentries told him to do. They were telling him to come out now.
When he came out and stood in front of the visitor, Govardhan’s eyes turned involuntarily to the man’s feet. The man did not say anything. He lifted his right hand and indicated the way out of the prison.
Govardhan failed to understand what the gesture implied and wondered whether he was being taken to the gallows. What difference did it make? And what could he do, anyway? However, when he stepped out into the bitter cold of the night, winding his shawl close around his neck, no one followed him—neither the sentries nor the saint-like man.
He was alone, he and the darkness.
2
Bharatendu Harishchandra walked restlessly around the study on the first floor of his sprawling bungalow, raising a hand now and then to smooth down his long hair, his eyes agonized. Although he was still in his thirties, the man looked about seventy.
It is certainly an unusual experience for a writer to set one of his characters free. However, Bharatendu’s problem reached out beyond the limits of literature. For he had not freed his character from the prison he had incarcerated him in but from the tip of his pen. Govardhan was still a convict and the death sentence hung over him. No matter what he did with his newly-acquired freedom, this would remain unchanged. If his condition were to alter, if he were to return to the street from which he had come, Bharatendu would have to continue writing his play. But he had not done this. Instead, he had severed his ties with Govardhan!
Why had he set out in the middle of the night? Everything had looked different the day before. He had been writing a farce on the absurdities of justice practised by Choupat Raja in Andher Nagari and had been enjoying it hugely. His pen had been preparing to summon the mahant to devise a ruse that would save poor Govardhan from the gallows and hang the raja instead. It was then that he had suddenly gotten stuck at the dialogue of a sentry. It would be gross injustice if no one was hanged for the crime of killing the goat that had fallen under the debris, the sentry had said.
All day Bharatendu had wrestled with the knot of that sentence. As he walked through the garden of freshly-bloomed flowers, the mellow sunlight of the month of Magha felt as unendurable as the fierce heat of summer. Except for Bharatendu himself, and a few chieftains who spent their time between gardens and dancing girls, were not all the ordinary people of the country in some way Govardhans awaiting punishment for crimes they had not committed? People who wandered around carrying on their heads the weight of the sentence that each of them had been condemned to, people who had lost their hopes, their way, destined to end their lives one day with a noose around their necks? Bharatendu gasped for breath as if the rope was tightening around his own neck. The entertaining play he had been writing was changing shape on the manuscript he had before him and turning into a frightening tragedy. No, although it would be justice to make the mahant play a trick and free this man, it would not reflect reality. What was the duty of a writer—to make sure that justice prevailed, or to depict reality? Was it not injustice to forsake reality?
