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CHAPTER III
MANOHAR MALGONKAR’S HISTORICAL NOVELS
FROM 1959-1964
(I) DISTANT DRUM:
THE STORY OF AN INDIVIDUAL’S DEVELOPMENT
Distant Drum is a creative debut of Malgonkar, which deals with all
those devices which go into the making of a readable novel. The first novel of
Malgonkar, Distant Drum, filling the atmosphere with adventures of Generals,
Brigadiers, Colonels, Captains, Lieutenants and army men of other ranks;
analyzes the thrilling aspect of Army life in India at the critical juncture in her
history, when on account of the partition, the Hindus and Muslims were
involved in communal frenzy and madness. In the words of Agarwal,
“We see before our eyes the canvas of the Indian Army unfurl
itself and we see the way the officers live, love, like and dislike
each other.” (161)
Distant Drum is Malgonkar’s first novel and as the first novel usually
does, it tells the story and experiences of the author in a veiled way. The cover
jacket of the book says:
“The 4th Satpuras were just like any other battalion of the Indian
Army, which, they used to say, was perhaps the nicest club in the
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east run by the British… Then came the war, the stunning defeats
in the east and finally the battle of Sittang Bridge”.
Distant Drum tells the story of that Army and yet it is far more than a war
book. It is a sincere attempt to depict a generation of men against challenges,
typical of the time stresses, greater than war itself: the partition of country and
the breaking of this shining reborn Army and above all the sudden wrenching
away of life-long ties. Distant Drum is indeed a story about the Indian Army,
and Perhaps, more a documentary of the 4th Satpuras, than history or fiction.
Kipling and John Masters have all written and referred to life in Indian Army in
their novels, but none has been able to give the spirit of Indian Army patterned
on the British mode. Malgonkar is unique as he has been able to create the
correct atmosphere of the Indian Army in his Distant Drum. Most critics have
extolled the novel for this quality, but the most important thing is the
presentation of transition from the British Army to Indian Army and the story of
success and self-realization of a Satpura officer. Every experience in the
battalion is calculated to bend and mould the character of an officer to an ideal
man-the eighteen months of training, the life as a ‘Burn-wart’, regimental
customs and mess etiquette, training at the military academy and devotion to
duty are all meant to process a soldier into an ideal officer. This, together with
his life in Burma and Kashmir campaigns and a desk job at Army Headquarters
moulds him into successful officer. AK Sharma opines,
“The novel has dual movement, and the story moves forward and
backward in the present-past sequences of action” (23).
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GS Amur describes the characteristic dual movement of the story in
Distant Drum in the following words,
“The novel has a double movement, one in terms of present action
and another through the past reconstructed in memory. The first, a
circular and picturesque movement covers a period of about seven
months from the middle of August 1949 to March 1950”. (47)
Amur further elaborates the significance of the second movement
thus,
“The story of Garud’s initiation into the Army and his maturity
which forms the substance of the second movement.” (52)
Malgonkar has been able to create a very realistic picture of the Indian
Army in the throes of change, marked by the second world war, the dawn of
Independence, the vivisection of nation, the departure of many British Officers
of the Indian Army, the division of Army, the quick promotion of the Indians to
the higher echelons in the army, the Kashmir war, the emergence of nation
spirit in Army, But what is most important is not the description or narration of
Army life but the human touch to a normal scene of the defence services in
Indian life.
The novel is divided into three parts and runs into 270 pages in print and
dedicated to a group of three persons- Duggie Sawhney, Pattie Som Dutt, and
Pat Totterdell- and is based on Malgonkar’s own experiences in the Indian
Army as a colonel. The novel is mainly based on his personal experience as an
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Army officer. He is able to give an inside picture of army life as he served in
the infantry, in counter intelligence, and in the Army General staff during world
war II as Lieutenant Colonel. He dwells on the thrilling aspects of Army life in
India at the critical juncture of the partition days. He has chosen to depict an
ardent soldier’s fulfillment in living up to the code honoured by the Regimental
life. To quote James Y Dayanand,
“The novel is also an initiation story as it traces the growth of its
protagonist Col Kiran Garud through a variety of his encounters
with men and situations”. (44)
Kiran, the protagonist of the novel, imbibes the ethos and discipline of
British Army, almost becomes a symbol of the Satpuras and a vague symbols of
the Army itself and its code. As in the words of Indira Bhatt,
“The novel presents on one level the Indian encounter with the
British army life style and who have accepted the British Army
code.” (90)
Distant Drum is an exposition of a story of success-a narration of the
process of self-realization of the central figure and hero-Kiran Garud. Most
critics and reviewers have referred to the novel as an “Epitaph for the British
Army”’ “a symbolic presentation of Indian characters with the British in the
Army” and Indo-British relationships at the personal level, in short a
documentation of life in the army. It is, however, something more than this- a
human story of struggle and success and final achievement of goal. GS Amur
opinion of the book is most probably based on what Malgonkar himself says,
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“The book is largely a story of the success or failure of efforts of
one of the officers of the Regiment to live up to its code.” (10)
According to the elements of code, given in some years earlier, a Satpura
officer is, first and foremost a gentleman and he is not expected to do anything
against the Regiment’s Izzat. He should always finish off his tigers. When two
of them have a bet, only one should check up and the other should take his word
always. He should never say that he does not know; on the other hand, he
should say that he ‘will find out’ because he should take his professional
responsibilities very seriously. Though the code is a wide and elastic one on
many respects, it is a rigid one too. Every Satpura Officer is expected to try to
live up to the code even though it is not always possible to succeed. Being a
blend of freedom and discipline, it is a code of honour with no scope for
“Trilling’s “morality of inertia’ where cowardice in many form is considered to
be the irredeemable sin. It is essentially secular in nature, being a study in
attitude and not being a defence of any particular culture. According to DR
Sharma,
Distant Drum is not an epitaph for the British Indian Army for
does it abound in unblinking Anglophobia’.
Though the hero of the novel admires the British officers, he also
questions their behaviour when they go wrong. In the words of a reviewer in the
Times Literary Supplement,
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“Distant Drum is the Story of how he (Kiran) applies the principles
that he inherited from the old Army to the changed conditions of
modern India.” (5)
Malgonkar explains in the guise of love-story of Kiran and Bina the
working of Army in detail after independence and makes the drab and
humdrum existence of Army entirely engrossing and absorbing, throbbing with
life by creating human situations.
The novel is divided into three parts- Regiment, Staff, and Active Sevice.
Kiran is the central figure in all three parts. Using the techniques of flashback,
Kiran focuses light on various aspects of Army life. CL Proudfoot remarks that
Malgonkar
“recaptures the atmosphere of earlier days faithfully and right
through the whole book runs the golden thread of authenticity with
never a false note.” (57)
Much of the details of Army life are projected through action and
experience of the principal characters in the novel. The action covers not only
the period from August, 1949 to March 1950, but also, on a deeper level, an
earlier period from 1938 to 1949 when Kiran rose from the rank of Second
Lieutenant to that of Lieutenant Colonel after going through the Burma-war in
1942 and winning a Military cross for exemplary devotion to duty in the field of
battle. In the words of Agarwal,
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“The post-independence changes that are invading the Indian
military cadres are glanced at in the novel against the pre -
independence focus.” (160)
There are many themes in Distant Drum- such as the Indo- British
relationship at a personal level, the theme of loyalty and friendship, the love
theme of Kiran and Bina and chiefly the all - enveloping theme of self -
realization, the initiation of hero - Kiran Garud. Kiran, the hero of the novel,
joined Army in 1938 as a second lieutenant and rose to the position of
lieutenant colonel and became the CO of battalion at Raniwada. At the time of
his joining the Army, the CO of the battalion was treated like a god,
“a tin god, perhaps only a minor sort of deity with power to control
the destinies of more than a thousand men; but all the same god.”
(77)
But he could not maintain the style of the life of his predecessors as he
was paid only half since the cost of everything had increased three times. The
type of life led by the Army people is described in the words of Sonal,
“For one thing, these people in the Army nowadays are very badly
paid; you know very badly. Then they get shunted about all over
the country to many places where they can’t take away families.
They … they can’t afford to get married… err…live comfortably.”
(80)
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It is Kiran’s experience as a Bum Wart that is a Second Lieutenant that
really introduced him to Army life. Bum-wart was considered ‘dirt and less dirt’
and they should not speak at meal times unless they were spoken to. They were
insulted at every step and given extra parades even for the slightest, real or
imaginary, irregularity. The most important thing is that no discrimination was
shown between the Indian Bum-Warts and British Bum-Warts. It was not only a
matter of hard training but also a process of cutting on down to size, making
one learn how to ‘take it’ and realize that he was one among the soldiers though
he, as on officer was entitled to a salute and to absolute obedience from those
he commanded. As an officer, he had to carry the extra burden of responsibility
because of his upbringing, education and training. That was the only difference
between an officer and the other soldiers. Second Lieutenants were put under
the charge of senior subalterns who would like them in hand and teach them the
regiment’s customs and mess etiquette. They were supposed to see that the
second Lieutenants behaved themselves properly on all occasions. Once Bertie
Howard took Kiran to task when Kiran did not show interest in playing with
Fredda on a guest night. He told him that it was not a ‘bloody funeral’ and it
was his duty to sparkle at guest nights whether he liked it or not. On another
occasion, Kiran was not allowed by Hampton to sit down and drink a lemon
squash even though he was exhausted after marching miles. Kiran was asked to
go back to the other men marching along with him and inspect their feet. When
he came back after the foot inspection, he was asked again to go and water the
mules. Watering mules took Kiran a full hour and when he walked into the
anteroom of the men for the third time, he began to curse Bull Hampton.
Like all Bum-Warts, Kiran too used to feel angry and bitter in the
beginning about the treatment given to them, but later on, he realized that it,
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“was a process which, despite all its crudeness, had been proved
through the ages to achieve splendid results and had made the
regular officers of the British Army the fine leaders of men they
were.” (80)
Kiran learnt not only ‘to take it’ in the right spirit but also ‘dish it out’. It
is a part of the proud tradition of the Army whose motto is,
“The safety, honour and welfare of your country come first.
Always and every time; The honour, welfare and comfort of the
men you command comes next. Your own care, comfort and safety
come last, always and every time.” (80)
The training under the British officers at the regiment turned Kiran a
product of the Military Academy in Dehradun, into another British officer.
Kiran’s mentality and thought process were so moulded on the pattern of
a British officer that whenever confronted with a tricky problem he would think
only on the lines of British commanding officer. Thus about the inclusion of
tanks in the TEWT for brigade exercise, Kiran thought, if Ropey or Gigrut were
in his place, they would have fitted even an unwanted squadron of tanks in the
most appropriate role and proved their professional competence. Though an
Indian at heart he hero-worshipped the British officer and was wrongly assessed
by fellow officers like Shantilas as a ‘boot licking wog’ as he was preferred to
other Indian officers. Such was Kiran’s devotion to the British Indian army
code that he did not hesitate to check and chastise Colonel Manners when he
questioned the regimental loyalty. Kiran’s experience of serving under good
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officers like Ropey Booker and Spike Ballur was the foundation for his
emergence later as a fine officer. Ropey Booker was his ideal officer who was
‘like a stern and indulgent father of the Victorian era’ and who was always
proud of his ‘officer’ and man relationship and who became with his exemplary
behavior at the end of the Burma campaign a military colossus with the
unmistakable stamp of a great commander. He neither spared his men nor failed
to give them comfort and courage when needed. These characters seem to be
drawn out of Malgonkar’s personal experiences in the British Indian army, and
the Burma campaign where he had come into contact with brilliant British
officers like General Slim and General Wingate of the Chindits.
In the eyes of Kiran, Spike Ballur could be compared to Russel Pasha
who was the Director of Military training- a dedicated infantry officer but he
also worshipped Thimmayya who looked like a General even in his swimming
trunks. For Kiran all the qualities required for a successful career of military
officer were-personality, a strong faith in a personal judgement about any king
of military problem, a good deal of swagger, three rows of ribbons which
include both the DSO and the MC, with and undeniable attribute which makes
his men respect and dread him without hating him. People like Russel Pasha,
Spike Ballur, Ropey Booker and Thimmaya seemed to have outgrown narrow
nationalism and their concern seemed to be the discipline and human problems
of service. For Kiran, an officer like Kamala Kant is fanatic and he does not
subscribe to his views. Kamala Kant’s aversion to the British and his sense of
nationalism are such that he wants the English names of the roads and houses of
regiment changed and everything British destroyed. He does not like dances in
the club because he thinks that they would make their woman immoral. He
considers aping the ways of British as nothing but a legacy of British rule and
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betrayal of our part. He brands Kiran as one who grew with the old order, which
was nothing but slavery for Indians. Kiran, however, maintains a balance
between the old order and his sense of nationalism and such is his loyalty to the
army code that he does not believe in mixing it up with politics. When the
Satpura officers are brought together for the reunion of the Satpuras, Kamala
Kant expresses resentment of having a Britisher instead of an Indian as the chief
guest. In his opinion there are two types of Britishers- swines and bloody
swines. To quote Padmanabahan,
“Malgonkar takes up the moral and ethical problem of mutual
relations of the English and Indians in the colonial Army.” (69)
The character of Kamala Kant is a study in contrast to that of Kiran
Garud. As bigoted and intolerant is the attitude of Kamala Kant so tolerant and
understanding is that of Kiran Garud who maintains a beautiful balance
between the British and Indian social customs.
Malgonkar has been able to portray faithfully the typical Indian army
officer in Kiran Garud who identifies his life so much with the army that he
treats the mess life as his second home and life in the cantonment as part and
parcel of Army life,
“Reveille, retreat, last post even the kitchen call had their own
meaning to each soldier.” (54).
Of course, there is little change in the Army mess since the time of
Kipling. Very rarely Kiran takes liberty with the traditional rules of mess life
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because of his great love for tradition though some of them are meaningless and
few are even against the spirit of his own times. As Indira Bhatt points out,
“Kiran Garud is rooted in military code and nothing can shake him
from these roots.” (46)
He simply follows the established custom of regiment in giving his
officers an account of what he had learnt in the infantry commander’s
conference at Shingargaon after a special dinner. He himself is a considerate
commanding officer. He takes Rawal Singh to task when he finds him not
wearing proper military dress and wearing perfume when in uniform. Kiran
knows every inch of his regiment and has such a sense of identification with it
that he is moved to tears when he has to leave it.
The life at Army Headquarters at Delhi is different from that of Regiment
at Raniwada and it tatters the cosy illusion of the monolithic and glossy officer-
like character of Kiran. At Raniwada he is the chief commanding officer and in
Delhi he is one among others working in the office. In Delhi he has no
reception, no transport, no accommodation. Life at Raniwada as the CO
pampered his ego and increased his self-importance. His experiences at the
Army headquarters deflated he ‘armour proper’ and tech him to lose his identity
in the milling crowds of self-important officers at the Army Headquarters. He
says,
“Blast Army HQ: Here in New Delhi they make you feel like a
Bum - wart all over again.” (82)
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He is unable to get co-operation from Namdar the co-ordinator, for he
himself wanted to become the SQI Border planning. Thus Kiran’s life in the
Directorate of war planning, otherwise known as the ‘Monkey House’, begins
on a note of discordance but he has a friendly guide in Man Singh who
enlightens him about everything relating to the Army Headquarters. Kiran does
not find the work in the Headquarters agreeable either to his taste or mind. As a
matter of fact, there is not such work for him to do. It seems to come in sputts
and a week would pass with only a couple of hours of work per day and then
there would be some flags and everyone would be running in circles. Kiran has
no flair for such work. Pure military concepts have to be sub-ordinated to other
possible more powerful non-viewpoint of those who are responsible for making
policy decisions. Kiran is familiar with the purely military aspects like ground,
distance and fire power which do not always rule the plans. He has been trained
to deal with tactical problems in company, a platoon, or a battalion in attack or
defence, pursuit or withdrawal and, therefore, he feels inadequate to his task in
DWP in the first few weeks. In a way it shows how things are mismanaged and
right things are not put to right use even in the Army.
Kiran has only heard previously about the bullock-cart speed of the
secretariat procedure and he now comes into direct contact with it. The aim of
the elaborate, complex procedure is no doubt a good one, that is, to combine
efficiency with speed but in practice it could achieve only indecision and delay.
It is governed by baboo logic and it is not used to avoid mistakes but to avoid
decisions. When a decision could no longer be delayed, someone else would be
made responsible for taking it. The clerks and the lower officers develop a
negative attitude of finding out reasons why something should not be done
instead of why something should be done. The procedure, is, however most
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inviolable and Kiran is take to task by Namdar for short-circuiting the
procedure for getting necessary maps without a knowledge of Namdar for
preparing an appreciation of the communication requirements of Border Region
Three as instructed by the Brigadier. It is a surprise to Kiran to know how
people like Ramdev would bring in the name of the General to snub any
opposition to any proposal they made and claim equality with their superior to
impress their juniors. It is stated by Man Singh that,
“The Government of India has transformed delay into
science…It’s absurd, that no one can do anything about it, not even
the Chief or PM” (109)
The two wars bring out the active soldier in Kiran. Though Distant Drum
is not a war novel, Malgonkar has given a graphic account of Army in action by
describing picturesquely and effectively the war in Burma and Kashmir. The
whole Burma campaign in 1941 was ill fated from the beginning. In a killing
confusion prevailing in various units, the Indian, British and Burmese troops
kept up the fighting spirit though it was a fact that they could not fight on
courage alone. In the series of defeats, Kiran proved him a much disciplined
soldier and he had a piece of luck too. He along with Hanbir Singh attacked the
enemy in which he killed a man in hand to hand fighting. This is the only
successful attack in that war which gave him a sense of fulfillment, the
crowning achievement of an infantry officer’s life. Compared to the Burma war,
the war in Kashmir front does not seem real, and interminable wasting makes
the active and energetic soldier in Kiran feel uneasy. The war in Kashmir lacks
the feeling of exhilaration that a soldier experienced in Burma. In an objective,
Professional way, a soldier could enjoy a war, like that in Burma, in spite of its
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cruelty and horror and the constant companionship of death. The final test for
commanding officer is to handle a battalion in a battle. The success in the battle
is the only acid test of the capacity of a commanding officer in a battle. The war
in Kashmir left in Kiran a vague sense of sadness. In both the wars he has taken
his job seriously with professional single-mindedness. The character of Kiran
Garud is more or less based on the stereotyped pattern of an officer’s life in the
Indian Army. The experiences of Kiran are very much akin to those to any
Indian officer of that particular period-the transitional phase from the British to
the Indian. His experiences are novel to a civilian who has little knowledge of
life in the Army. What is important is not the faithful representation of army life
but the stage by stage development of the personality and individuality of the
hero. As Indira Bhatt opines,
“Malgonkar’s portrayal of Kiran as an ideal army officer who
comes up against situations calling for compromise of his code of
honour is admirable.” (92)
The Army’s encounter with civilian values is skillfully presented through
this conflict which Kiran experiences.
Malgonkar takes the opportunity of criticizing the red-tapism of the
government and various conflicts, especially between the personal code and the
political power. This is seen in the indictment of Lala Vishnu Saran Dev, the
District Congress President who tries to beat Kiran who in turn holds on his
strict code of Army morals. Kiran’s victory over Vishnu Saran Dev is a fine
contrast to an Army officer in all respects- in dress, speech, appearance, attitude
and ideas. Professor Iyengar very aptly comments,
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“Not that army has not its black sheep too- its bastards and its
boobies. But take it all in all; the Army is a cleaner thing than a
mere political party. At least the Army has ever to be ready to
undergo ordeal by fire; and the ballot box is a much tamer affair
compared to the modern battle field.” (424)
While politely and firmly rejecting the proposal of Vishnu Saran Dev,
Kiran proves to be sincere and senior officer who dislikes pleasing everyone
and would threaten him with complaints to the higher authorities. He is not
Kamala Kant-to mix politics with army affairs. It is only people like who, with
their unbending sense of duty and loyalty to the army, are responsible for the
survival of army in the heart rending partition and sinister political onslaughts
in the period of transition from political slavery to freedom. He rather wished a
transfer from Raniwada to Delhi than to give into the political upstart and to
keep up his self-respect and individuality.
Kiran’s confrontation with Sonal, the father of Bina whom he loves very
much, accentuates the clash between the army and the civilian codes. Sonal, the
senior civil servant, ‘that Napoleon of Red Tapu, the Generalissimo of files’
Secretary in the defence Department,
“Could be an odious and contemptible figure, but one must still
hope that men like Mr. Sonal are the exceptions and not the rule.”
(206)
But Sonal thinks that his primary duty as a father is to see that his
daughter is, adequately possibly sumptuously provided for. He apprehends that
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his daughter Bina, is in love with Kiran and, according to him, a military officer
is not a suitable match for his daughter since they are, these days, ‘notoriously
rootless and impecunious, but he would not have had any objection, had Kiran
and ‘private means’ or a ‘highly paid job’ with one of their foreign firms or
with Tatas. As a father he is justified in making every effort to remove all
hurdles for finalizing a good match for his daughter. But he is not justified by
any moral standard in trying to ‘rain half a dozen careers if necessary’. For
Kiran ‘the army, the profession itself, is a great thing’ although it might be the
meanest life in the eyes of Sonal,
“My career to me is more important than anything else, more
important than your daughter.” (207)
So he sets his career at higher level than his love for Bina. As Williams
opines,
“Kiran’s love affairs with the Army prove to be the strongest
impulse of his life-stronger than love of woman or even of life
itself.” (194)
Even his love for Army is put to test when Ropey Booker offers a good
job to him. Ropey is highly respected by Kiran as an ideal military officer but it
is he who quits the Army and joins ‘ Imperial Metals’, an American concern
which is spread all over the East mining manganese and iron ore and bauxite in
India, tin and copper in Burma and Malaya. Kiran had always considered his
old general as an ideal commander, so much so, that he wishes,
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“Ropey Booker had died in the war, at the height of his glory while
still a colossus.” (250)
He wants to appoint Kiran to head their sales organization in India and
offers two thousand rupees a month in addition to generous expense account.
Ropey is of the opinion that there is no future in Army whereas there is no limit
to business which is more exciting than any other profession. He tries to
convince Kiran saying that he had done his bit of service as a soldier and that he
has liberty to join the army when there is a war again. He explains that there is
no glamour in peacetime soldiering as it is just like any government job.
Kiran’s attitude to Ropey shows his idealistic attitude,
“Well Sir, joining the Army, becoming a soldier, had been an
ambition with me. It has not been merely a means of earning a
living; it has been rather an end in itself. If they kicked me out, of
course, I’d take on any job that I would get; but of my own will, I
don’t want to leave.” (250)
He feels that he is one of the proper grounding for all Army who have
had the advantage of the proper grounding for all Army officers and it is up to
the people like him, the old guard, to mould the new postwar officer just
entering into the Army. They would be failing their duty to young new officers
and as he proudly points out to Ropey,
“We would be failing in our duty to these youngsters and to the
future Army if we were to quit. Well, it is something like these
principles that the Satpuras live by, or try to live up to.” (250)
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Kiran’s rejections of the offer show him as one who has out frown his
ideal, Ropey. This is an indicative of the maturity of Kiran who has outgrown
his ‘Calf love’ and his blind imitation of Ropey. This is an indicative of the
maturity of Kiran who has outgrown his ‘calf love’ and his blink imitation of
Ropey. Imitation is the first step but assertion and self-realization is the final.
No material temptation can shake Kiran from his idealistic adherence to duty.
Just as he could not give up his Army code for the civilian code, Kiran could
not give up his code as a human being, his permanent code of honour and love
to that of the Army. Professor Iyengar opines,
“While the army-civilian clash of codes provides the background
Kiran’s love for Bina and his friendship with Abdul Jamal form the
human foci that holds the action together.” (242)
The friendship between Kiran and Abdul has provided Kiran secular and
free from religious and racial prejudices. In the words of Padmanabhan,
“The story of Kiran and Jamal is one of model friendship
melodiously portrayed,” (102)
Both were together at the military academy and Abdul was a term junior
to Kiran. Kiran helped Abdul several times to steer him clear of the mistakes
which made his senior sub- altern of Adjutant angry with him. But it is that
affair with Medley that made them real friends. Abdul saves Kiran twice-once
in an enquiry made about Bob – Medley’s suicide when Abdul gave evidence
and cleared Kiran from any involvement in the Medley’s affairs; second time at
the time of riots in Delhi in 1947 September, when Kiran was surrounded by a
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Muslim mob and about to be assaulted, Abdul threatened to kill the mob if they
did as much as touch a hair of Kiran. It is the irony of fate that these two friends
who together participated in the Burma campaign were separated by partition
and poised to fight against each other. But his debt to Abdul is only a private
debt as there is no room in the soldier’s code to his private loyalty or debt to
Abdul. When they helped the victims of riots in Delhi they had no awareness of
their different religions. The meeting of two friends, Kiran and Abdul, after the
ceasefire of 21st December 1949 under the bushy topped tree in ‘no man’s land’
area to celebrate New Year, is not purely impulsive but a reminiscence of the
friendship between them. According to a reviewer in the ‘Times Literary
supplement’ this meeting will remain unique in military literature as a symbol
of the human element in the face of a national confrontation between two
opposite communities but the loyalties of the two friends remain unruptured. Of
course, they did not attach much importance to their meeting in the beginning
but realized subsequently the folly of displaying emotion in such a situation. To
their superiors this was a serious irregularity on Kiran’s part though not a crime,
“A soldier could not remain friendly with someone who had now
become an enemy.” (240)
Kiran could not talk with his friend frankly which indicated that his
relationship with Abdul is subjected to new values. As Padmanabhan says,
“Malgonkar has strikingly portrayed the soul - stirring conflict in
the minds of two soldier friends whose friendship is going to be
subjected to new values exerted over them with confronted
limitations.” (103)
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But this confrontation finally results in shifting Kiran to the 4th Satpuras
which enables him to finalize his family affairs asking Bina to accompany him
to Raniwada where they could enjoy every evening, hearing the drums
sounding in the distance.
Kiran’s love for Bina may be described more romantic than sentimental.
Bina loves him only for his martial qualities. When he tells her about his
rejection of an attractive and most remunerative job offered by Ropey, she feels
happy and all the more admired him for it. Kiran does not allow his love for
Bina to ride roughed over him though he could not avoid the thought of Bina
from his mind even in the Kashmir front. But I it is always subordinated to his
sense of duty and devotion to Army. Bina’s love is also pure and is not tempted
by the shining gloss of money and power of Arvind Mathur in whose company
Kiran with his military background finds it difficult to feel at home.
Thematically, Malgonkar presents two aspects in the novel ‘the Indo-
British relationship at a personal level’, and ‘the education of initiation of Kiran
Garud’. As a matter of fact through the life of Kiran Garud, ‘officer and
gentleman’, the novelist has tried to give in Distant Drum in the words of GS
Amur,
“a symbolic presentation of Indian encounter with the British
Army and its value for India.” (122)
The novelist is overtly appreciative of the British morality imparted to
the Indians through public schools. Malgonkar’s treatment of personal
relationships between the British and Indian officers is one of the most
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interesting aspects of the book. He shows nothing of the skepticism that EM
Forster has presented in his A Passage to India (1924) about the possibility of
genuine friendship between Britishers and Indians. EM Forster’s concluding
comment in his novel was: “No, not yet “and the sky said,” No, not here”.
Rudeness, wickedness, arrogance, insensitivity of the kind shown by Mrs.
Turton or by Ronny Heaslop is not seen Malgonkar’s British officers. All of
them, except Colonel Manners, show friendliness, courtesy and respect for their
Indian colleagues. Indians too, except Colonel Kamala Kant, show friendliness,
courtesy and respect for their British colleagues; they hold them in high esteem.
Despite Colonel Manners and Colonel Kamala Kant, anti-British feeling and
anti-Indian feeling at a time when Indians were struggling to wrest freedom
from their British rulers were kept at the minimum. Malgonkar’s main purpose
was to celebrate Indian ‘Army life; a life without animosity and bitterness
between the rulers and the ruled. Indians and Britishers emerge from
Malgonkar’s novel as genuine friends, friends capable of sacrifice and love for
one another.
Though Malgonkar’s characters are very effective, they appear as types
the prototypes of officers and other ranks in the Army. His close association
with the Army life helped him to create a special dialect which is expressive of
the social life and philosophy of service officers.
Though Distant Drum has been described as a symbolic presentation of
the Indian characters with the British in the Army and its value to India, it is
mainly a story of self-realization - an individual’s growing awareness of himself
and his surroundings and the development of an assertive and practical
philosophy of life. The novel is more a record of the maturing growth of hero,
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Kiran Garud, than a simple documentary of life. It is relevant and important to
analyze the steady and gradual growth of Kiran from an inexperienced, shy and
awkward second lieutenant to a self- possessed and devoted commanding
officer of a regiment, a man who tries to live up to the code of ‘come on
Jawans, Tigers don’t live forever’. In Kiran, Malgonkar manages to show a
finished soldier and a man who, through the headway of life and experience, is
initiated in to realization of life. Thus Distant Drum can be considered not just
as an authentic picture of Army life or a conflict between the British tradition
and the Indian ideals but as a story of self-realization of the hero. Besides the
important theme of Army life and Indo-British relationship, the most relevant
one is that of initiation and the growing up of Kiran Garud, the hero. As to
quote James Y Dayanand,
“We follow the hero through his experiences, his attempts to prove
himself. This notion of maturing growth then can only occur
through encounter with experience is one of Malgonkar’s primary
themes.” (44)
It is also not too far-fetched to read a personal note, an auto-biographical
element in the novel. Having been in the Army, Malgonkar could give a very
authentic and personal account of army life with the required emphasis on the
growth and development of the central figure - the character of Kiran Garud-
who from a shy second lieutenant develops into an officer, who stands for
certain positive values in life and achieves a sense of self-realization and
success.
Kiran stands for all the values of the British Army code. The novel
presents on one level the Indian encounter with the British and also with the
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Indian officers brought up on the British Army life style and who have accepted
the British Army code. Kiran is more British than the British themselves. To
him, the army, the profession itself is the greatest thing and he cannot transgress
its code of honour. He is so well adjusted to this approach of life that he does
not even give us the impression that he faces any serious challenge-the Army
has trained him superbly and he never seems to consider the possibility of any
challenge. In the words of GS Amur,
“The Army code of honour provides him with enough stock
responses to see him through the minor crisis.” (48)
Distant Drum was dismissed as an ‘unblinking anglo-philia’, a desi
Bhowani Junction’. The comparison with Bhowani Junction appears to be not
well-founded as it relies heavily on thin fabric of common historical
background. KR Srinivasa Iyengar is emphatic in his remarks about the
comparison,
“Malgonkar is not an indigenous John Masters; nor is Distant
Drum an Indo-Anglian variation of the Anglo-Indian Bhowani
Junction. There is, on the contrary, an authentic quality about
Malgonkar and his novel that can stand scruting without reference
to the Masters’ recipe.” (425)
The experiences of Army life depicted in the novel however have a stamp
of originality, and warrant no extraneous comparisons. As HM Williams opines,
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“The story told in Distant Drum is indeed an unusual one
compared to the average Indo-English novel of the period.’ (194)
CL Proudfoot is right when he praises, “the golden thread of
authenticity” that runs through the novel with never a false note.
Far from being an “unblinking Angli-philia”, a desi Bhowani Junction,
Distant Drum is the novel of “unusual distinction” having
“racy but rather indulgent account of the Indian Army from an
officer’s point of view.” (18)
The novel recaptures, “the atmosphere of the earlier days faithfully and
right through the whole book runs the golden thread of authenticity with never a
false note.” In the texture of the basic story of a regiment that maintains the
equanimity in spite of crushing defeats and glorious victories, the author with
his masterly touch and sensitive handling, has successfully recaptured in his
book the spirit of Indian soldiers, their shortcomings, their depressions, and
their singular devotion and valour in the wake of crisis. The rigours of drill,
parade, life in barracks are not without some of the redeeming features which
add zest and spice to life and enchant the other-wise drab, humdrum existence.
It is down-to-earth real story entirely engrossing and absorbing a novel
throbbing and pulsating with sensitivity, written in fascinating and sparkling
prose.
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WORKS CITED
Amur, GS. Manohar Malgonkar - A Monograph. New Delhi: Arnold
Heinemann. 1973. Print.
Agarwal, BR and MP Sinha. Major Trends in the Post - Independence Indian
English Fiction. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2003.
Print.
Bhatt, Indira. Manohar Malgonkar - The Novelist. New Delhi: Creative
Publishers.1992. Print.
Dayanand, Y James. Manohar Malgonkar. New York: Twayne Publishers.
1974. Print.
Forster, EM. A Passage to India. Harmodsworth: Penguin Books. 1924. Print.
Iyengar, KRS. Indian Writing in English. 2nd ed. Bombay: Asia Publishing
House. 1973. Print.
Malgonkar, Manohar. Distant Drum. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. 1960. Print.
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Padmanabhan, A. The Fictional World of Manohar Malgonkar. New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2002. Print.
Proudfoot, CL. Letter to the author. Nov 1962.
Sharma, AK. The Novels of Manohar Malgonkar: A Study. Delhi. BR
Publishing House. 1995. Print.
Times Literary Supplement. May 12, 1961.
Walsh, William. The Commonwealth Literature. OUP. 1973. Print.
Williams, HM. “The Doomed Hero in the Fiction of Khushwant Singh and
Manohar Malgonkar.”Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction.
Studies in Modern Indian Fiction in English. New Delhi: Bahri
Publications Private Limited. Print.
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(2) COMBAT OF SHADOWS:
REFLECTIONS OF A HUMAN’S DESIRE AND AVERSION
Combat of Shadows, Malgonkar’s second novel, published in 1962 is a
shilling, authentic and highly exciting novel- telling the fascinating story of
Henry Winton and his colleagues, officers in the Assam tea estates who are
driven into the ruthless twilight world of high society romance, adventure and
lust. Against the background of the British officers and the Indian coolies and
politicians working for the welfare of the labour, the two shadows of desire and
aversion have been shown to be combating with each other to take possession
of the man’s soul. The title and epigraph are from ‘The Bhagwad Gita,
“Desire and aversion are two opposite shadows. Those who allow
themselves to be overcome by their struggle cannot rise to
knowledge of reality.” (Quoted from Singh ‘Indian Novel in
English’ 217)
The scene in the Assam tea gardens is at once reminiscent of the one in
Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud, but the time is almost twenty years
later when mankind was fighting a second World-War, and personal
animosities, petty jealousies and small considerations of gain and loss were
ruling the minds and impeding the understanding of problems on human level.
It is a more ambitious and integrated novel than Malgonkar’s first novel. It too
has a double theme. Amur opines,
“On personal level, it is a study in moral decay and death, on the
public level, a statement on racial encounter.” (61)
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If Distant Drum is the account of an individual’s success, the
development of noble and heroic qualities, Combat of Shadows is a striking and
true painting of an individual failure and its final realization in the life of a
coward. GS Amur has described the novel as one that,
“tells the story of Englishman’s moral disintegration and death in
the Indian soil” (60)
In Combat of Shadows, Malgonkar endeavours to bring out in brilliant
colours the east-west collision distinctly, by creating a typical English character
of colonial vintage in Henry Winton, the central figure of the novel. Henry
Winton is one such character, who belonging to the ruling race of all white
pucca sahib, considers himself born to boss over the natives. Excessively vain
and snobbish, he suffers from many weaknesses that the flesh is heir to: pride,
jealousy, lack of selfishness, compassion etc. He puts on a strong exterior in the
beginning but miserably fails at the end owing to the racial prejudice, orthodox
thinking and the lack of understanding of complex human affairs.
The action of the novel is set at the tea gardens in the north-eastern
province of Assam and novel covers a period from 1938-40, the time when the
whole was engaged in a conflagration of the magnitude history had never
before witnessed. What was going on in Assam on a smaller scale was actually
being enacted on a larger scale when mankind was fighting a second World-
War. Personal animosities, petty jealousies and small considerations of gain and
loss rule even the biggest minds, and prove obstacles in understanding the
problems that concern others.
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The novel is very much in the tradition of Kipling, Forster, Paul Scott,
and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala who have all tried to portray the Englishman, the
‘Sahib’ in India. While they have more or less, concentrated on the same
problem of imperialism in India and their inability to master the vast problems
of the land they ruled, Malgonkar has focused on the single failure and the
degenerating defeat in the life of his main character in the novel, Henry Winton.
As Kai Nicholson opines,
“Neither Kipling nor EM Forster has managed to portray the world
of isolation with similar intensity,” (210)
It is quite obvious that the plot of the novel evolves from two themes -
racial encounter and the hero’s moral decay and death. The various incidents in
the novel eventually lead up to the final point, the hero’s realization of the
moment of truth. GS Amur praises the novel as
“a saga of the moral disintegration of a European on a foreign
soil”. (76)
Amur Praises the skillful treatment of the theme which he believes
compels comparison with Conrad. Malgonkar’s narrative technique in this
novel shows competence and confident ease. His creative achievement is
evident in shaping his personal experiences with the British and the Anglo –
Indian into validly realized fiction. Srinivasa Iyengar aptly points out that the
novel’s success lies in its ‘carefully plotting and the atmospheres.’ (428) Asnani
finds the interest of the book in
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“its high pitched emotional drama which intensifies its narrative
interest.” (82)
Besides its symmetry of form, the poignant human relations depicted in
the lives of Henry Winton, Ruby Miranda and Jean reveal Malgonkar’s great
depth of understanding.
The story of the Combat of Shadows has two stages. The first part
“Prelude to Home Leave”, tells of the establishing of relationship between
Winton and the Indians. This section also deals with Winton’s special
relationship with Ruby Miranda. Another episode that brings Britishers and
Indians together, revealing their fears and prejudices, is the hunting of one-
tusked elephant. The second part is primarily concerned with Winton’s personal
relationship and especially with the dark places in the human heart which make
for unhappiness and confusion not only among individuals but also among races
and nations. In this part is revealed Winton’s moral degeneration-culminating in
his lonely death in the game cottage abandoned by Britishers, Indians and
Anglo-Indians.
Henry Winton is a junior manager of silent hill, a tea garden complete
with a factory of the Brindan tea company. Somewhat cut off from the world,
silent hill is forty-two miles from Chinar, the headquarters of the tea-district
where the resident directors of the companies live. British officers often go to
Chinar because the centre of Chinar is Highlands Club; part hotel, and part
sports club, a place for the normal relaxation of an English way of life - boating,
trout-fishing, cricket, golf, tennis, squash, clay pigeon, shooting and dancing.
Winton, nearly thirty years old, has put in five years of service and is still an
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eligible bachelor. He has begun to like his way of life and has become used to
the Highlands Club, accepting its values without questions and sharing its
taboos. At the Brindian Tea Company, Winton’s immediate boss is captain
Cockburn, the senior manager. Sir Jeffrey Dart, the resident director of Chinar,
is the highest ranking tea - man in the district. Sir Jeffrey and Lady Dart invite
Winton to spend an evening with them during the Chinar week. On their way to
Chinar, Cockburn and Winton stop at Tinapur because the road was blocked by
a landslide. At the railway station at Tinapur they attend a gala night where they
meet Ruby Miranda, an attractive Indo-Anglian girl. Winton is struck by her
“lush overflowing loneliness”. (18)
Cockburn suggests that Winton should hire her for his tea-garden and
make her his mistress
“to stop you from going crazy in that antiseptic Bungalow of
yours.” (19)
Cockburn and Winton proceed to Miss Jean Walters, daughter of Colonel
and Mrs. Walters. Winton admires the
“slender and golden limbed, long legged, cherry lipped, blue- eyed
and golden- haired beauty. “(40)
At Sir Jeffery Dart’s home, Barloe, the district commissioner, asks
Winton to take on one-tusked Tista, a rogue elephant which had killed four
villagers. Winton had shot four elephants before and was considered a good
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hunter. From this point on Ruby, Jean and the elephant play a vital role in the
life of Henry Winton in his downward drift toward moral degeneration. Henry
falls in love with Jean Walters who often takes the initiative and encourages
him to love her. They spend evenings together – even a night, in the same
cottage, talking in whispers and catching each other’s hand tightly,
“Would you like to kiss me?”
“Ye-ess”
“Why don’t you.” (63)
Henry kissed her. He had known what to except, and yet it had made him
gasp. He felt almost embarrassed by its lingering, searching intimacy.
And yet Jean turns down Henry’s proposal of marriage a few weeks later.
This disappointment makes Henry turn to Ruby Miranda. He offers her a job in
a Silent Hill school to bring her closer to him. He makes her the head-teacher,
superseding Sarkar, his present school teacher, who had matriculated at
Calcutta University. Ruby herself had received very little schooling. Her
appointment brought protest from Jugal Kishore, the labour leader. When Ruby
arrives in Silent Hill, Henry finds it difficult to keep his thoughts away from
her, dreams of her physical charms, and looks forward to the nearness of her
body. He longs for her, picturing her,
“coming in to his bungalow in this evening, ultimately setting up a
beautiful relationship like that of a fictional French mistress: the
perfect efficient school mistress during office hours, the delicious
wanton companion of non duty hours.” (76)
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Ruby begins to come to the bungalow soon after dinner, slipping through
the pantry-entrance.
District Commissioner Barloe’s telegram that the one- tusked rogue
elephant has shown up again forces Henry to make plans to set out with his
shikari or tracker, Kistulal. He was embarking on a heady adventure, such as
comes to a hunter once in a life time. The farmed one tusker had become
something of a god to the villagers though it was known to be diabolically
cunning and revengeful. Kistulal, the shikari, had no pity for the animals. He
was proud of his profession. Unlike the villagers he was not afraid of the
elephant – god. It was his business to track an animal down and to get his
hunter within the range of a shot. He had been a shikari all his conscious life
and understood the jungle better than anyone else. Henry calls Kistulal,
“by far the best tracker in Assam ……… this fellow’s already
lame, one leg mauled by a bear; but he is still the best damned
tracker in the province.” (169)
Henry and Kistulal set out at crack of dawn. The elephant’s tracks were
already an over day old, and so they did not follow its track but decided to
move merely in the direction of the tracks. Henry carries his favorite gun, his
four-sixty-five double barreled gun and a box of twenty cartridges; Kistulal
carries no gun, late in the afternoon they reach comes over Kistulal’s face; his
perpetual grin disappears. The elephant had come unhesitatingly into the field,
huge and gray, wiggling the end of its trunk. Then it located the human scent
and charged. Henry, though nervous, raises his rifle, aiming it at the root of the
uplifted trunk, and presses the trigger but hears nothing but the cold snap of the
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hammer pin instead of the roar of the shell going off. He presses the trigger a
second time and hears another dead click. He remembered later loading two
more cartridges with the elephant barely twenty yards away. They, too, did not
work. He ran wildly with panic in his heart. Kistulal in the meanwhile was
crushed to death, stamped into the ground in a mess of mud and blood. After
walking miles and miles, Henry reached Cockburn’s bungalow, wet,
disheveled, numb with cold and fear. Cockburn gives him some hot grog and
puts him to bed. Next morning Cockburn sent one of his servants to collect the
dud cartridges that were dropped in the paddy field. Cockburn advises Henry to
make up a story rather than tell the truth,
“Well, it won’t do you a bit of good as a hunter; and it won’t do
you any good as a man – a career man, they’ll always say
damaging things; they’ll even say you got scared at the last
moment and ran away. Even the most sympathetic will always say
that you ere careless in not testing your cartridges before you went
out shooting an elephant, a known rogue – a killer.” (88-89)
The servant brought back only one of the two dud cartridges; he could
not find the other in the mingled mess of flesh and blood. Cockburn and Henry
agree to make up the following story: Henry was not at the scene of the accident
but two hundred yards away from the edge of the filed. Kistulal crossed the
field where the elephant caught him and killed him. Henry only managed to
wound the elephant with one of the cartridges. He did not follow him up and
finish him off because he wanted to report his shikari’s death. He missed his
way coming back in the dark.
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Everybody believes Henry’s story but he finds himself often in the grip
of a heady depression. Ruby Miranda visits him secretly at night and makes him
happy with her,
“flawless olive skin and counters of the harem favourite.” (97)
During one of her visits, Ruby tells Henry of her involvement with Eddie
Trevor. Eddie is in love with her and wants to marry her as soon as he gets a
job. Eddie had obtained the job of chief stockman when Jugal Kishore resigned.
His appointment led to a wave of protest from labour leaders who served a
formal notice of their intention to strike. Eddie, Henry’s rival for Ruby’s
favours, has also become the cause of a threatened strike. The strikers keep
shouting:
We want!
Jus - Tice!
Mister Trevor!
Never, never!
Winton Sahib!
Chale Jao (137)
Henry handled the tricky situation with tact and understanding; the
workers returned to work because they were afraid of the police firing. Henry,
no doubt averted the strike but the crises makes him ask for home leave
immediately.
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At the beginning of Part-II, ‘Return from Home Leave’, Henry returns
from England after eight months of leave. He is married to Jean Walters. Ruby
is given the job of housekeeper at the Highlands club. She was planning to get
married to Eddie Trevor, who was recommended for a announced before he
goes up for his training. But now at the Silent Hill, Eddie and Jean renew their
past friendship and friendship gradually turns in to sexual passion. Bitterness
and anger rise within Henry when Gauri points out Eddie and Jean at Wallach’s
Folly, lying side by side on a small blue rug spread under the branches of a tree,
“He could not bear to see what he saw, and yet he went on looking
as if spell bound; Just as he had gone on looking at the elephant
tramping down Kistulal. And what he saw now for more horrible
than the death of his Shikari ……, He felt a sudden, nervous shiver
run down his body.” (252)
At this time the elephant, the one tusker that had killed Kistulal, was
reported to be in the valley. Henry is once again asked to go after the rogue
elephant even though he does not like to do so now. Oscillating between the
extremes of confidence and despair he prepares himself for the hunting trip –
tests a box of fresh cartridges, checks his rifle. On the day, he finally locates it,
he has an accident at Wallach’s Folly and twists his ankle, and therefore cannot
walk to the jungle to shoot the elephant. Eddie Trevor wants to finish the Job.
He asks Henry to lend him his four-sixty-five and cartridges. Henry is perfectly
willing to let Eddie shoot the one-tusker,
“look, it you really want to go, I wouldn’t mind letting you have
my rifle and telling you exactly where he is going to be.”
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Oh, Mr. Winton! I shall be most grateful. Yes, I really do want to
go.” (260)
Henry plans Eddie’s murder carefully. The cards were falling just right.
He gives Eddie his big elephant gun and a box of cartridges, the very box from
which the faulty cartridges were taken earlier. The murder is full proof. Eddie
goes out for hunting with Pashuati and never comes back. He is killed by the
elephant, his body trampled and broken and gored. Sir Jeffrey later kills the
one-tusker with his own gun and cartridges. Henry is left alone; Jean leaves him
to live with her aunt at Poona. The Army does not accept him because of his
broken ankle. Ruby Miranda once again becomes Henry’s obsessions. He wants
to marry her, not simply to keep her as a mistress. When Sir Jeffrey asks Henry
to go up to the game cottage and to find out what is wrong with its artificial
moon, he thinks of the visit as an opportunity to invite Ruby Miranda to the
game cottage for a reunion. That is where he would ask her to be his wife.
Pashupati helped him to climb up the steps of the cottage. Henry asked
him to go to Miranda and bring back dinner for two. It was pitching dark. The
artificial moon blinks on and off for several seconds before it comes on.
Something was terribly wrong with it. Henry lies down after switching the
moon off and waits for Ruby Miranda and dinner. Hours later the forest was on
fire. A cold fear runs through him when he discovers even the ladder to climb
down is gone. Some one pulls out a fuse from the electric box and the artificial
moon goes out. There was a basket at the end of a rope. He pulls it up and peers
into it. It contains the shell of his four-sixty-five rifle and the sapphire and gold
ear clips he had given to Ruby Miranda,
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“And that ……. was the moment of truth…. the smell of paraffin
was strong in his nostrils, and the flames were leaping all about
him.” (289)
Sir Jeffrey, Ruby Miranda and Pashupati had planned Henry’s murder
perfectly just as he had planned Eddie’s earlier.
In this way, the story of Henry Winton forms the center and core of the
novel. He, a British tea-estate manager, is determined to make a success of his
job. It is through his character that Malgonkar has highlighted the relationship
between the Britishers and Indians and Anglo-Indians. There is deep seated fear
of failure in the nature of Henry Winton as very early in the life with the death
of his father he had experienced an economic crisis and had to give up all his
ambitions about his higher education, Oxford and Rugger. Later, as a salesman
in the used car business he ended up as a colossal figure. In the tea garden in
Assam, he was…
“desperately trying to repair the ravages ten thousand miles away
from the scene of his root, determined to make a success of himself
at all costs, living up to an altogether new sense of values aimed
exclusively at success.” (55)
Thus the motto uppermost in his mind, a philosophy which he wanted to
live up to is ‘this is no place for failures.’ However, the irony is that at the very
moment that he decided and concluded that,
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“He, Henry Winton, has chosen this life, and he was making a
success of it.” (6)
The life of Winton can be assessed on two levels, the material and
spiritual. What is success or failure is a moot point. It depends on the attitude of
the individual and his background. Considering him from the material side, he
is most probably a success where his predecessor Wallach had been a failure.
He has lived up to the reputation of a public school boy and “Pucca” Sahib and
made his career as a manager to the tea garden a success. Every forward step in
his material prosperity is a retrograde step in his spiritual life. The “Chinnar
Week” festival is yet another incident because this is where he saw Eddie
Trevor, the half-caste “Chi-Chi” breed he was so contemptuous of, who in the
end is going to be his potential rival. In the encounter between Eddie Trevor,
Ruby Miranda and Henry Winton, the author shows not only the implications of
the tragic racial situation but also the human situations of desires, prejudices,
pride and failure. If his is the pattern with the Anglo-Indians, there is the
parallel pattern with Gauri, Kistulal and Henry Winton where there is the
human situation of aversion, suspicion, contempt and failure. Thus Eddie
Trevor, the Anglo-Indian and Kistulal, the Indian are symbols of success in the
spiritual and material fields whereas Henry Winton who has the highbrow
attitude towards life ends up as a grand fiasco.
The episode of Henry’s cowardice and corruption reminds us of George
Orwell’s celebrated essay “On Shooting an Elephant” (1936) in which the real
nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic government act is
discussed. Henry’s fear of failure-his own and thereby the Whiteman’s failure is
stronger than his sense of guilt. This incident of elephant-shooting haunts him
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all his life- it becomes a sort of symbol, for the wounded animal like an insulted
Indian,
“is a deadly and cunning adversary, equally determined to seek
him out and destroy him.” (237)
The elephant also symbolizes the powerful destiny that is out to destroy
Henry. Henry’s failure to kill the elephant signifies, as SC Harrex puts it,
“his inability to come to terms with India.” (241)
If it were not for the false notion of race superiority Henry would have
owned his failure and could have saved his soul. His confrontation with the one
tusked elephant resulting in the defeat and failure is character – fate
confrontation and SC Harrex compares it to a
“kind of Lord situation in Conrad.” (24)
With Malgonkar fate is more powerful, since it is a one-tusked elephant-
Lord Ganesh, Indian itself that the Britishers have to face and then run away
from. Malgonkar makes Jugal Kishore say this very clearly,
“You’ll be running very soon, all you English men”. (113)
Malgonkar brings out here in this struggle between two individuals, the
conflict between the ruler and the ruled – the black or brown and the white and
it is significant that the period of history that is depicted in the novel is about
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1938 to 1940 when India’s freedom struggle was at its peak. To quote
Padmanabhan,
“Like Ronny Heaslop in A Passage relationships between
the English and the Indians, the only bond that he conceives is that
of the ruler and the ruled.” (59)
Kistulal’s death is, however, an accident- something which Henry
Winton has not expected, but which he has to cover up for his own survival. It
may also be considered a result of the failure of Henry Winton as a hunter
because it is his duty to check up arms and ammunitions before venturing on
the expedition. The death of Eddie, on the other hand, is a cold murder,
premeditated and preplanned - the act of a coward, a man who knew that he was
a failure when compared to Eddie Trevor. It is his sense of inadequacy and
failure both with Ruby and Jean that makes him wish to destroy Eddie Trevor.
He fails not only in the personal relations but also as a hunter. He fails
miserably to hunt the elephant and he could not do anything to get rid of the
python. Victory and triumph are on the side of Eddie as he managed to kill the
Python and would have succeeded in killing the elephant also, had not Henry
deliberately given him dummy cartridges. At every stage he is defeated and
Eddie could only with a minimum effort, gain a victory over him.
When Jugal Kishore leaves and substitute has to be appointed, Henry is
so prejudiced against Eddie that he turns down the appointment. He is,
however, made to employ him by the express orders of Sudden - a humiliation
which for Henry is difficult to accept. Racial prejudices are made to figure, to a
large extent, in Henry’s involvement with Eddie. It is because Eddie is an
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Anglo-Indian that Henry is contemptuous and callous in his attitude. This racial
prejudice also figures largely in his affair with Ruby. The story of Henry’s
relationship with Ruby is one of betrayal,
“that was how he remembered Ruby Miranda; and that was the
woman he now longed with all his being to get back to; the rare
mixture of submissiveness and surrender to oriental womanhood
with the freedom and gaiety of the west, and of course the breath –
taking figure and good looks and colouring which had been a gift
of both the east and the west.” (116)
Malgonkar’s treatment of Indo-British relationship offers a contrast to
Forster’s ‘A passage to India’. Forster, taking up the question of friendship
between the Indians and Englishmen, answers in the negative sense how the
two races were interlocked in political affairs. So in Combat of Shadows the
British are represented as ‘Sun-dried bureaucrats’ with a wide social gulf
between them and the Indians. Henry, like Ronny, believes that the British are
not to behave pleasantly to the Indians. Both are the products of the public
school system which Sahane observes,
“Created among good qualities, narrowness and a feeling of
superiority to make them blind to the value of personal
relationship.” (16)
Henry is living complacently in a “Whiteman’s world carried away by a
feeling of success and the bubble of his vanity is pricked by Ruby Miranda’s
confessions. The thought of a man like Eddie -raw, half-caste youth - as his
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rival, is intolerable to him. And the realization of failure becomes worse when
Jean, his English wife, prefers Eddie to him and finally announces that she
would like to marry Eddie. Henry has rejected the idea of marriage with Ruby
because she is an Anglo-Indian but Jean wants to leave him and marry a half
caste. This is an insult that is too hard to bear as it throws up the inherent
inveterate hatred of the ‘Colour Snob’, the ‘White Sahib’ Henry Winton. The
life of the Anglo-Indians has been dealt with some length in the novel by
Malgonkar with a sympathy and understanding which we do not find in the
writings of novelists like John Masters and Kipling.
The novel throws sufficient light on the living conditions, aspirations,
attitude and activities of Anglo-Indians and their role in the novel is important.
The railway institute at Tinapur is the centre of the life and activities of the
Anglo-Indians. There is all buzz and noise of a typical institute which has
provision for the young people to play badminton in the central hall and for the
elders to play bridge bezique, and rummy at table placed on the stage. Every
Saturday night the younger people dance while the elders sit on chairs and
watch. Galas are held once a month when the band plays till late in the night.
For those who do not dance there are games like housie and escaido and on a
gala night a rum bar is run in one of the back rooms though they do not possess
a license for it. The members of the Tinapur Railway Institute can dance any
dance from the hula to belly dance with great verve, zest, abandon and skill.
The whole thing reminds Henry of something cheap and noisy,
something unrefined and something like the romping of drunken sailors with
blind date girls in water from joints. Gala is something like ‘Chichi’ and ‘honky
tonk’ the currency of pidgin English. Anglo-Indian accent and speech are
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different from that of a Pucca-Sahib. It is true that Ango-Indians have great
difficulty with ‘th’ sound; most of them pronounce it as though it were soft ‘t’.
But Eddie is an exception to it. Of course, it is not an insurmountable linguistic
hurdle as Ruby, with great and hard labour, disproves it. Henry expresses his
horror and disgust of the social life of the Anglo-Indians at the Institute,
“The atmosphere; you could have cut it with a knife; the accent
and the chalk-powder and the perfume….. Anglo Indian at Play….
Ugh” (181).
Because of his prejudice he is not able to appreciate the beauty of Ruby.
While Cockburn, another Pucca Sahib, admires the girls in the Railway
Institute. The Anglo-Indians keep up appearances and try to hide their poverty
as well as their genealogy. They think of themselves as whole English and try to
seek living kinship with the west and desperately struggle against separation
from the sahibs and further assimilation with the Indians. Kai Nicholsan opines,
“Mr. Malgonkar has, at least, described the inner conflicts of the
Eurasian and in Ruby’s ardent with to become and live as an
English woman, the reader is in a position to notice a spark of
sympathy expressed by the novelist.” (237)
The racial conflict is brought out very prominently in Henry’s
confrontation with Ruby and Eddie on the one hand, Jugal Kishore and Gauri
on the other. Henry is a failure with the Anglo-Indians and he also fails with
Indians. Henry is a failure withy the Anglo-Indians and he also fails with
Indians. Malgonkar, however, stresses on the point that Henry’s failure is due to
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the fact that he insults the feeling of a woman. The novel starts with the insult
of Gauri followed by his betrayal and rejection of Ruby’s love and Jeans
womanhood. It is significant that both Ruby and Gauri threaten to kill him in
order to take their revenge on him. During the labour strike led by Gauri and
her brother, Henry hits her brother black and blue. She gets so angry that she
looks like a hooded cobra about to strike or ‘an outraged temple goddess’ and
hisses;
“I shall kill you for this, you white monster; I shall kill you.” (139)
For this, she is also beaten in the presence of the coolies. On another
occasion, when Henry is ready to strike her before she forces him to follow her
to Wallach’s Folly, Gauri deals a blow at his manliness within the most hard
hitting, bitter and ironical terms,
“Yes, that’s all you can do, hit a woman. That’s all your
Englishman is capable of - hitting woman, when they are
themselves being hit by the Germans and their own women - folk!
Then they come here and take it out on the Indians - Indian women
and children – and think how very brave they are.” (250)
The very name Gauri is symbolical of feminine strength and power in
Hindu mythology and it seems that the novelist chooses the name with a
purpose. Both Gauri and Ruby play a very important role in the destruction of
Henry. It is also relevant to mention that Henry’s downfall starts with the
elephant hunt. The locals treat the elephant as Lord Ganesh. Henry has come
into conflict with it. In the first encounter he is able to save himself by
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sacrificing Kistulal and the second time it appears again as it persuades him to
take vengeance. It is the instrument of fate, which causes Henry’s tragedy. The
first encounter renders him morally corrupt and the second encounter proves
him to be a prefect villain. But at the times there is a feeling that the character
of Henry is not entirely that of a scoundrel. His participation and involvement
in certain incidents is something beyond his control. The death of Kistulal is
genuine accident beyond his control but it leaves him with a sense of guilt and
this is increased when with the help of Cockburn he distorts the incident and
gives it a different colouring. This is done mainly for survival, as he knows that
the truth would unleash a whole world of hostility against him. Eddie Trevor’s
death, however, is deliberated and calculated. If Kistulal’s death is the
beginning, Eddie Trevor’s death is the end. The process of moral degradation is
complete and where Henry thinks that he has succeeded, he has really failed. By
death, Eddie became a martyr and won a victory over Henry who is proved to
be a criminal. Henry’s greatest failure is that he has degraded human values.
The quality of being human and understanding one’s fellow creatures - be they
Indians, Anglo-Indians, or English is more important than any material success.
Henry is the instrument of his own nemesis and fate like the characters of
Conrad and some of his own actions hasten him to his end. Malgonkar stressed
upon Henry’s relation with Ruby who is prepared to sacrifice her love for her
childhood friend, Eddie and live at Silent Hill and consent to become the
mistress of a man like Henry, because he is her ‘passport’ to the dream world of
an English lady. She does everything he wants and all the same, she is unable to
make him propose to her. Henry remains an enigma to her. In the privacy of
green room his behavior is
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“Possessive, demanding and at the same time willing to abandon
himself completely to her, readily giving into her own passion.”
(108)
But his behaviour outside is excessively cool and formal. She is never
successful in putting Eddie out of her mind and in this respect she resembles
Victoria in “Bhowani Junction” who also could not remove Patrick from her
mind even she moved freely with savage and tried to become a Sikh. But she
has a ray of hope when Henry asks her about her family and prays,
“Oh God, Please, please make him fall in love with me; please,
please make him propose to me.” (109)
Henry however, spurns her love. It is not because he did not reciprocate
it, not even because it is not the love of a white woman, as Jean taunted him,
but through fear, because Sudden warned him not to get involved with her, fear
that his career would have ended if he had carried on as he was doing. In their
concern about their careers both Kiran Garud of Distant Drum and Henry
Winton are alike but in their endeavours to stick to it they are unlike each other.
Henry, however, realizes the mistake he has committed in the case of Ruby
when he thinks calmly of the past after Jean leaves him. It is then that he clearly
comprehends how much Ruby has sacrificed for his sake offering to give up her
world for his, asking so little giving so much. It is he who has spurned, insulted
and doubted her and her love.
Henry’s main fault is that he is not able to understand Ruby’s nature and
he has gone against his natural inclination in his rejection of Ruby. The
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breaking point for Henry comes when he, instigated by Gauri, finds Jean in the
arms of Eddie Trevor under a tree from Wallach’s Folly. He is thoroughly
shaken by the sight. The taunts of the native Gauri regarding the character of
the white lady and his impotency to react like a man further aggravates him.
On the spur of the moment, he felt like putting an end to them by shooting them
on the spot, but he stops as he realizes that he may not be able to cover them
with the gun in his hands from such a distance. His jealousy transforms him into
a cool villain and he take the first opportunity to see the end of his rival Eddie
when he offers most chivalrously to hunt the rogue elephant as he himself has
been incapacitated by a sprain in the leg. He pretends to be magnanimous by
giving hem the gun but he makes use of the opportunity to get rid of his
potential rival by giving him defective cartridges. Such cool villainy is repaid in
its coin at the end of the novel by trapping Henry in the game cottage on the
Amavasya day on the pretext of repairing the false moon and letting him burn
along with burning cottage which has been used by Henry for satisfying his sex.
When the fire spreads and no one answers to his frantic call for help, he is
shocked for find in the basket that he pulled up, the two sapphire and gold ear
clips he had given to Ruby and the hard cigar-shaped shell which he lost at the
time of Kistulal’s death. He could then perceive the hand of Sudden in this cruel
trap,
“And that, as far as Henry Winton was concerned, was the
moment of truth; bringing it with a fleeting spasm of realization,
steadying his mind and restoring cold reason as though for a quick
summing up, centering his thoughts on essentials.” (35)
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Henry is no better than the Eurasian in the novel whom he detests as half-
caste ‘chi-chi. In a way, Eddie proves to be more chivalrous, bold and
charming, more fresh, open and helpful, more idealistic, dynamic and dashing.
Jean is found to be more reasonable than Henry in her attitude towards the
Anglo-Indians. Cockburn explains that Eddie is the sort of man whom women
find irresistible and this attraction is a source of jealously for Henry who has
always behaved according to Ruby, as though he were in love with somebody
else. Jean’s decision to entertain Eddie before he leaves for war, occasions a
discussions between Henry and Jean about the English man’s attitude to an
Anglo-Indian. Jean finds nothing abnormal about entertaining Eddie who is the
first man to go to war from Silent Hill as that is what people in England are
doing about those who have volunteered to go to war. But Henry does not
accept the proposal saying:
“But this is India; it is slightly different here. Besides Sahibs don’t
go getting all social with Eurasians; here Sudden would throw a fit
he got to hear of it.” (171)
The irony is that Sudden was the father of Eddie, and Henry never knew
it till the end. In his view Anglo-Indians are different fro the Sahibs- the ruling
class – and it is not considered well bred if one is familiar with them. But Jean
holds a different opinion. She says that war makes no difference whether the
blood spilled is English, or only half-English, nor not at all English. She, on the
other hand, expresses ger gratitude to ‘our Indian boys guarding the canal’
which enabled her to join Henry at Silent Hill most safely. This attitude of Jean
is perhaps a result of the army atmosphere in which she had been brought up.
Her father served in the Indian Army and she does not feel strange when she
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refers to the Indian soldiers as ‘our boys’; it does not sound right to Henry.
Though Jean is as ‘pucca’ as Henry she likes Eddie and is ready to marry him
and leave Henry. Love crosses all racial and colour prejudices. Here Malgonkar
shows himself something different from John Master and Kipling by
spotlighting the sahib in the depravity. Cockburn, Wallach, Henry and Sudden –
nobody is an exception. They could not treat either Anglo-Indians or Indians on
equal terms or at least as human beings. They have simply used them for their
pleasure and service. Morals have no place in their dealing with them. Sudan’s
statement that they are not growing moral in the tea-garden clearly proves to
what length the so-called sahibs can do to safeguard their own interest. They are
more worried about the image of their government in India than about other
considerations and they cannot tolerate any failure on the part of their man and
any cowardly talk about the capacity of the British in the war.
In the same way, in the novels of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, we find the
theme of cultural clash of two modes of life, the Western and the Oriental. She
has depicted with discernment the impact that the West has created on the
Indian mind during the British regime. She, too, does not seem to believe that
the gulf between the Indians and the Westerners, and their cultures can be
adequately bridged, because of their inability to share emotions. According to
Jhabvala average westerner who works in the administrative services fails to
develop his heart adequately, because he remains a typical public school
product with developed physique and mind but undeveloped heart which is
solely responsible for their ignorance and bigotry towards the Indians. Combat
of Shadows has closer comparison with John Master’s Bhowani Junction, as it
presents the problem of rootlessness confronted by the Anglo-Indians. Victoria
Jones of Bhowani Junction is in an unenviable position as she fails to identify
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herself with the Hindus in spite of her favorable learning towards them. She is
also unable to find a peaceful union with the British. Similarly Ruby Miranda
too gives up her Anglo-Indian lover Eddie Trevor to fulfill her longing to
become a memsahib in the world of the British.
At the same time in Combat of Shadows, Malgonkar is more critical in
assessment of the emergence of new India and its political life during the
forties. Here Jugal Kishore, a trade union leader, serves the purpose of
Malgonkar. As in the novel Henry refuses to appoint Gauri, the niece of Jugal
as a teacher in the school, Jugal makes it a political issue by manipulating it in
the colour of racial prejudice. He contests the election and eventually wins with
a massive majority. But the irony is that the condition of the labours remains
unchanged. Malgonkar draws a complete picture of the nation in its political
and social aspects in the forties. In the words of Shankar Bhattacharya,
“The novel Combat of Shadows is a significant work, portraying in
detail chaotic period during the transition from one phase of the
Indian politics and administration to another.” (29)
Thus the novel clearly delineates that, in dealing with national
experience, Malgonkar does not remain content to be an observer only. He
sincerely attempts to point out the flaws and interprets the political and
historical events. To quote Shankar Bhattacharya,
“Malgonkar’s novels generally reflect the novelist’s dissatisfaction
with the Indian politics and the politicians.” (29)
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Another famous Indian novelist Nayantara Sahgal also shares the view of
Malgonkar. She too has no sympathy with those new leaders of our nation who
lack a firm ideal and have degenerated into Power-mongering opportunities.
The day in Shadow (1977) is a significant novel of Sahgal portraying in detail a
chaotic period during the transition of Indian politics. She, through her novel,
shows that the new minister in spite of his power in the political field cannot
bring any permanent change for the better in the country as he is more after
power and wealth.
While presenting the private world and the failure of white man in India,
Malgonkar has portrayed the weaknesses of Anglo-Indians and their virtues
also. Unlike John Masters and Kipling, he is able to depict their anxieties and
conflicts in such a manner that they are able to attract sympathy. This is
rendered possible because he has focused on the weaknesses of sahibs. The
sahibs are not paragons of virtue. The basic emotions and feelings like jealousy,
envy, anger, revenge, love and ambition are all common in any race or religion.
As in Distant Drum, there are various themes in the novel - the theme of
racial conflict, big-game hunting, the search for identity, and what is most
striking and important is the personal relationship, the combat of human values
and essentially the failure of an individual who is engaged in the Combat of
Shadows without realizing the truth. Combat of Shadows presents a panoramic
view of various types of human relationships but it finally shows the failure not
just of Henry Winton but of any man who cheats himself and lives in a false
world of moral depravity. In the words of Padmanabhan,
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“Apart from being an excellent work of art, the novel is also a
social document wherein the political image is marked by jealousy
and vendetta”. (61)
Therefore, it can be considered both as a sociological and a moral
allegory. The picture of wild Assam Hills, tea gardens, dreadful forests, is just
thrilling and in tune with the general atmosphere of the novel where
“passions rage, attitudes clash and wars are made aware of the
diverse background….the racial antagonism, the global holocaust
of the war.” (Iyengar 428)
But the end of the novel has been after described as melodramatic and
much too pat in the nature of poetic justice. The end of Henry in the forest fire
is a serious flaw of the otherwise well-contrived plot, as it is not only
melodramatic but also unnecessary from the artistic point of view. Malgonkar
can also be accused of distorting history to suit his convenience, for he has
failed to do justice to the spirit of Indian politicians of the period under stress.
He has recreated,
“the past in the light of present, and the attitude of the novelist is
determined by his prejudices more than his balanced appraisal of
the history of the period.” (Singh 49)
But the success of the book lies in his high pitched emotional drama
which intensifies its narrative interest, subtly suggestive phrases which make
whole scenes blaze or bleed with life, phrases, under-statements and even
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gestures though quite few acquire sinister significance as the story proceeds.
Another quality of the book is that it is neither crazy nor a plan-less contraption.
There is hardly any incident that the reader’s imagination refuses to believe.
The climax, with all its credibility, familiarity and thrill together, keeps
haunting the reader’s mind for hours and days after he has read it. As AK
Sharma points out,
“On the superficial level, it is a novel of just adventure, romance
and lust. But on deeper level, it is a study in illusion or Maya, in
which most of the human beings are fated to live.” (26)
Malgonkar has thus shown how the English man’s prejudice and hatred
against Indians disintegrate the white man and ultimately bring nemesis to him.
Henry’s relations with Jugal Kishore, Eddie, with Ruby and with the one tusked
elephant are all inter-woven neatly and they form a composite design which is
instrumental in bringing about his fail and cruel death. Indra Bhatt points out,
“Instead of life-enhancing relationships based on love, friendship,
compassion and sympathy, Henry allows himself to be led by the
ghostly shadows of prejudice, colour-consciousness, arrogance and
jealousy”. (103)
The novel is unique in a sense, for Malgonkar has an Englishman as his
central figure and has delineated him skillfully, making him an anti-hero. In his
portrait of Henry – Winton, it is cultural and racial conflict at its most
complexes that Malgonkar has dealt with. As HM Williams opines,
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“Combat of Shadows is a Novel that tackles the EM Forster’s
subject of a Britisher’s alienation from the Indians and the
corruption of the British by Imperialism and their own hatred and
ignorance of India.” (103)
It must be emphasized that Malgonkar here makes a strong indictment of
the British by projecting their hatred and ignorance of India, an attitude which
conflicts with the necessities of their own existence in the country. To quote
Indra Bhatt,
‘It is clear that Combat of Shadows depicts not only the internal
conflicts of desires but even more strongly, the external racial
conflicts.” (103)
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WORKS CITED
Agarwal BR and MP Sinha. Major in the Post-Independence Indian English
fiction. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2003. Print.
Asnani, M Shyam. A Study of the Novels of Manohar Malgonkar. The Literary
Half - yearly. 1975. Print.
Amur, GS. Manohar Malgonkar. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. 1972. Print.
Bhatt, Indira. Manohar Malgonkar. The Novelist. Delhi: Creative Publishers..
1992.
Bhattacharya, Shankar.Manohar Malgonkar. The Study of his Mind and Art.
New Delhi: Creative Books. 1994. Print.
Harrex, HC. The Fire and the Offering Vol- I. Calcutta: Writers workshop.
1977. Print.
Iyengar, KRS. Indian writing in English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.
1973. Print.
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Malgonkar, Manohar. Combat of Shadows. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. 1968.
Print.
Nicholson, Kai. A Presentation of Social Problems in Indo - Anglian and The
Anglo - Indian Novel. Bombay: Jaico Publishing House. 1972. Print.
Padmanabhan, A. The fictional World of Manohar Malgonkar.New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2002. Print.
Singh, Ram Sewak. An Essay on Manohar Malgonkar in the Indian Literature.
New Delhi: March 1970. Print.
---. Indian Novel in English. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann Publishers. 1977.
Print.
Sharma, AK. The Novels of Manohar Malgonkar: A Study. Delhi: BR
Publishing Corporation. 1995. Print.
Williams, HM. Galaxy of Indian Writings in English. Delhi: Akshat. 1987.
Print.
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(3) THE PRINCES:
FICTIONALIZING HISTORY
The Princes, published in 1963, is Malgonkar’s most successful novel. It
offers an absorbing account of princely life in India. Its success at home and
abroad, no doubt, is due to his skill as a story teller and the fertility of his
imagination. The Princes, viewed from certain perspective, may be regarded
both a document of contemporary history and as a work of conscious literary
art. It is part fact, part fiction. The book is replete with the events of princely
passions and personal tragedy, political history transmuted into realistic fiction.
It traces the history of the princes and shows how in the changed context of the
country of the princes and shows how in the changed context of the country
they had to fight a losing battle against the upsurge of democracy. It is a novel
in which the social and political developments of native states of India are
outlined against the background of the private life, glamour and tragedies of
Indian princes. Malgonkar knows the princes with the intimacy of first hand
knowledge. He knows their weakness and also their noble traits. That is why
this great novel is a very sympathetic picture of Indian princes so far drawn in
the pages of literature. Princes have been known for leading a luxurious life of
licensed debauchery and reckless waste at the cost of their subjects and no
writer has cared to see the good traits of at least some of these princes.
Malgonkar does exactly that and shows how the novel continues a harmonious
bleeding of social and political history of pre-independence Indian and post-
independence India vis-à-vis the native state rulers.
The novel evokes a vivid picture of partition days in India when the
aristocratic rulers of the princely states were put to untold suffering and
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hardship owning to the changing political scene. The rulers initially thought that
their interest would be safeguarded and promoted by the verbal assurance and
announcements of the British crown, but later they were disillusioned when the
British left them in the lurch, exposed to the whims and fancies of new
governing class. The title of the novel is actually a pointer to these rulers in
general and not to one single prince of Begwad whose life - story forms the
subject matter.
For a great many of Malgonkar’s readers, the pleasure he principally
offers is similar to that which the treatment of historical subjects in fiction and
on television provides today. It is the pleasure from the insight and
understanding he shows in his interpretation of historical conflicts, from his
ability to penetrate to the human reality underlying these conflicts and the
opposition of historical forces, and from the way he contrives and the
opposition of historical forces, and from the way he contrives to fuse in the
creation of his fictional characters, their personal characteristics with features
and qualities that make them representative figures of their times. One of the
most interesting features of The Princes is the fact that it is the portrayal of the
recent past and of which Lukas calls the “present as history”. It offers an
absorbing account of princely life in India. To quote James Y Dayanand,
“It is regarded as the most authentic novel of the predicament of
the princes, and is probably the most widely – read novel abroad.”
(Journal of Commonwealth Literature 21-28)
Grandson of the prime minister of popular Indian State, Malgonkar could
observe from inside the princely ways, their vanities and peculiarities. Here
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Malgonkar encounters the problem of fusion of art and history in fiction. The
historical consciousness of the novelist, present subtly in his earlier works,
comes to the fire in this novel and achieves cohesion with the fictional
technique. Malgonkar wants to uphold the thoughts and ideas of somewhat
tightly knot social group, the aristocratic world of the princes in India.
Malgonkar’s knowledge of the real princes combines with his creative
imagination to produce composite portraits with a sufficient amount of
camouflage. He has chosen an ordinary educated man, to be the last prince of
an imaginary state Begwad which is already in the process of disintegration of
the class; they emerge in the process as individuals. The novel is not a mere
historical record from within but the human exploration of an extincting race.
Malgonkar has nevertheless a clear perception of history in the making.
He was a participant - observer like EM Forster of a momentous phase in Indian
history. The Princes could be appropriately compared with EM Forster’s Hill of
Devi for its refreshing authenticity. Forster, who served in his younger days as a
private secretary to Sir Tuko Ji Rao III of Dewas State Senior, comments that
“the parallels in the Princes and his own experience are numerous
and heart rendering. (Quoted in On Author and Books, The
Literary Half - Yearly 99).
William Walsh praises it as,
“a more perceptive, a more personal and stricken on of the
withering of the princes’ hypocritical family lives, their
concubines, their tiger hunts and their political stunt to preserve
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their throne even at the cost of national integrity and independence
in the novel present an inside view of the princes. It gives the much
- needed documentation of a fascinating piece of social history.”
On one level, the novel presents in fictional terms the central drama of
contemporary history - of recent Indian history of the decline and fall of 565
princely states - in which the principal players were the British, the princes and
the Congress party. The characters are modeled on real people, incidents closely
resembles real events. When the British left India in 1947, these 565 states were
closely integrated into the Indian Union within a matter of months. Malgonkar,
the novelist, was a witness to this brief but dramatic chapter of history, and he
treats just that the student of history would like to know-what kind of people
were these ruling princes? How did they treat each other? What did they think
of British and of the Congress party – often extending his observations to
relationships inadequately documented elsewhere? On another level, it is the
story of His Highness Maharaja of the clan of the Bedars, Hiroji the fourth,
knight commander of the star of India, of his palace, tiger hunts, queens and
concubines, and above all, of his son, Abhay, who goes through ceremonies of
initiation and maturing and ceases to be a boy. Both the themes of Indian
Independence and of growing up of a prince interweave and find their fullest
expression in The Princes. Truth is skillfully interwoven with fiction; the
growth of nationalism and the decline of the princely way of India are
interwoven with the growth of a prince. In the interweaving of elements there is
increasing complication but no petty mechanical balancing. The world of the
Maharaja was crumbling as the world of young prince was born. Here we have
two opposite worlds or way of life and characters who oscillate between them:
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“He was the Maharaja with almost absolute power over five
hundred thousand people; I was his heir. Imperceptibly the certain
thickened and suddenly we were no longer merely a father and a
son, but a Maharaja and his successor …. I could not altogether
push away the awful thought that he was someone who would have
to die before I could come into my own …… within ten years of
encounter with my father, the state of Begwad was merged with
the vast totality of India. My father just missed being the last
Maharaja of Begwad. I was the last, and it fell to me to sign that
doleful document known as the Instrument of Merger, surrendering
all power as the ruler.” (23-24)
Perhaps one way of understanding what Malgonkar has done in The
Princes, as a preparation for assessing his achievement, is to concentrate in the
first place on his raw material that is, the historical facts on which the story of
The Princes is based. The historical content supplies the spine of its narrative
and the center of its interests. The novel evokes a contemporary recent period.
He is writing of events that took place in India between 1938 and 1958, the
years just before and after independence. When one considers the Princes in its
entirety and Malgonkar’s activities during these years as a professional big
game hunter proficiently tracking tigers for Indian princes, it is immediately
apparent that he has drawn upon his own personal experiences.
A historical record gives a brief summary of the events of the period. At
the time of transfer of power from Britain to India and Pakistan in 1947, the
only big question which remained to be resolved before August 15th, was the
future of 565 princely states, occupying two fifths of the land of the country and
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containing one hundred million people, just under a quarter of India’s total
population. On August 15, when British paramountcy was to lapse, what would
be the situation? Would the states become independent units even though they
had never enjoyed this status? Would the British Government had over
authority to their successors-India and Pakistani Governments? Or would the
princes decide whether they would continue as semi-independent states or join
either of the two Dominions? Most of the states were situated within or
adjoining Indian Territory. The Indian government naturally expected that the
princes would accede to the Indian union. A small number of princes, with
encouragement from political advisors, wanted to declare them independents,
but a large number of princes were undecided.
The British government in their statement of February 20th, 1947,
undertook not to hand over paramountcy to any government of British India. In
their view, on the lapse of paramountcy political arrangements between states
and crown would be brought to an end. If nothing was done before August 15 to
prepare for the situation, the result would be political chaos. Lord Mountbatten,
the Viceroy, persuasively urged the rulers a solution in nature of a compromise
between those who claimed that the states would become independent and those
who contended that paramountcy must pass to the success of governments. He
urged the princes to sign a document called Instrument of Accession thereby
surrendering to one or another of the new dominions their control over defence,
external affairs and communications.
On June 25th, 1947, a ‘States Department’ was created to deal with all
matters of common concern with the states, especially formulation of
agreements covering their immediate relations after the transfer of power.
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Sardar Patel and VP Menon, who took over this Department, evolved a scheme
for the integration of the states. The department pressed for accession before
August 15th with the direct and personal assistance of Lord Mountbatten. On
July 5th, VP Menon issued a statement in the name of Sardar Patel. It appealed
to the rulers to accede to Indians only on three subjects – defence, foreign
affairs and communications- and to come into the Indian union. July 25th was
fixed for a conference with the princes. On that fateful day, Lord Mountbatten
addressed the chamber of princes as crown representatives. Lord Mountbatten
made it clear that the offer made by the Congress was most generous. It urged
the princes to sign the Instrument of Accession before August 15. He would be
unable to mediate between them and the Congress after August 15. This was the
last chance. Lord Mountbatten continued,
“The states are theoretically free to link their future with whatever
dominion they may care …… May I point out that there are certain
geographical compulsions which can not be evaded? Out of
something like 565 states, the majority are inevitably linked
geographically with the dominion of India ……. Remember that
the day of the transfer of power is very close at hand, and if you
are prepared to come, you must come before 15th August. I have no
doubt that this is in the best interest of the states …… you cannot
run away from the Dominion government which is your neighbour
any more than you can run away from the subjects for whose
welfare you are responsible”. (Hudson: The Great Divide 373-374)
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The Nawab of Bhopal refused to attend the meeting. The Nawab had
headed groups of rulers who opposed accession calling themselves the third
force.
When the day for the transfer of power arrived, August 15th, 1947 -
barely three weeks after this masterly and momentous speech, everyone except
Junagadh, Kashmir and Hyderabad had signed “The Instrument of Accession’.
The Nawab of Bhopal’s ‘Third Force’ came to ruin. Later these three states too
joined India. The political and constitutional chaos that might have followed the
lapse of paramountcy had been averted. The Menon-Patel-Mountbatten team
succeeded in integrating 565 Indian states in less than three weeks. August 15th
1947, marked the end of the British Raj and the beginning of free India and
Pakistan.
What was true of most of the princes and their states is also true of his
Highness, the Maharaja of the clan of the Bedars, Hiroji the fourth, knight
commander of the star of India, and his son, the narrator of The Princes, his
Highness the Maharaja of Begwad, Abhayraj Bedar III. No Matter how
Malgonkar may have altered or condensed specific details, The Princes is
without doubt the fictional treatment of the plight of the princes who
disappeared from history. The Puars of Dewas Senior and Chhatrapatis of
Kolhapur shed a good deal of light of Malgonkar’s treatment of his raw
material in The Princes. What Malgonkar has done is to take the authenticated
facts of the state of Dewas senior, its Maharaja, and his son, and camouflage
them through the transforming power of novelistic imagination. In his hands,
facts become fiction. Perhaps this reshaping of fact into fiction can be clarified
by pointing to some examples. Malgonkar transformed his Highness Sir Tukoji
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Rao III, KCSI Maharaja of Dewas senior in to his Highness Sir Hiroji, the
fourth, KCSI Maharaja of Begwad, and his son Maharaja Vikram Sinha Rao,
later called Chhatrapatti Shahji in to Abhayraj Bedar III. There are, no doubt,
discrepancies in detail between fact and fiction but in essentials history looks
remarkably like fiction. Both Tukoji and Hiroji had feuds with Brahmin priests
regarding their caste status, financial troubles because of reckless spending and
difficulties with their wives. Chhatrapati Shah Ji Maharaja and Abhayraj, on the
other hand, have some similarities also - both were educated by English tutors,
both went to college, both made concessions to the rising tide of democracy in
their states, and both became officers in the British Army during the Second
world War.
Nevertheless, Hiroji and Abhayraj are not historical persons but creatures
of imagination. In The Princes Malgonkar recreates an historical situation,
places historical characters in it, and describes how they behaved. The novel
brings to life in very human dimensions the turbulent before and after
independence. Malgonkar does not tamper with the situation. The documented
facts, the dates, the conferences between the princes and the viceroys, the privy
purses and so forth are carefully handled without compromising history for the
sake of history at hand. The atmosphere of India is realized in masterly fashion.
While dealing with the historical situation of 565 princely states, Malgonkar
does not make departure from the factuality of history. The Princely states were
ceded to India in return for a few prerequisites and privy purses. The rulers
must have signed the instruments of accession and then signed the instruments
of merger, which resulted in the merger of small states into a larger federation
of states. All were finally swallowed into the belly of India. Malgonkar takes no
liberties with these and other facts connected with the princely states.
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The Princes can be summarized briefly. The scene is Begwad, a small
princely state in the Deccan plateau ruled by a Maharaja who upholds the status
quo,
“There will always be Begwad, and there will always be Bedar
ruling it - as long as the Sun and the Moon go around”. (13)
So he declared in the first scene his son Abhay, the heir apparent, in
1936, when the tides of nationalists’ feeling, anti-British and anti - royal were
sweeping over India. The first scene in which Maharaja and the son, Abhay,
confront each other is in the sense, the whole novel in miniature. We are
introduced in this scene to a situation that is to be remedied, a conflict to be
decided, and the themes to be developed. Abhay, not quite eighteen-year-old,
sympathizes with the nationalists; his father who lived in a world of his own,
remote from the twentieth century, has nothing but contempt for the nationalists
who, under the leadership of Gandhi, were conducting campaigns for complete
independence of India. Within ten years after this encounter the princely states
were no more; they were merged with the independent India. Abhay tells the
story of these ten years in first person,
“The map was red and yellow. The red was for the British India;
the yellow for the Indian of the princes…. For more than hundred
years, the red and the yellow had remained exactly as they were.
Then the British left, and in no time at all, the red had overrun the
yellow and colored the entire map in uniform orange. The princely
states were no more. We were the princes; no one mourned over
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our passing …… I realize that it could not have been otherwise,
and yet I cannot rid myself of a purely selfish sense of loss”. (13)
The novel opens with the Maharaja and his son Abhay at logger-heads.
The son delights in taunting his father on the latter’s proposal of some changes
in the constitution to satisfy the political department. He knows that it is just an
eye-wash measure. The father’s sole intention and cherished aim of life is to
preserve the integrity of the state at any cost. He says,
“But I would prefer the British to the Gandhities any day, so that
the integrity of our state is preserved for all times. It is more
important than anything else, more important than our lives: yours
and mine” (16)
The son, however, doubts openly whether they could separate the destiny
of Begwad from the rest of India. The angry father unable to put up with his
son’s audacity suspects his descent. A cold parting follows after a bitter
exchange of words. While the father is exposed as the reactionary, tyrannical
and arrogant, the son appears to be a bit more realistic and critical of his
father’s reckless disregard for the feelings of others. But the core of Abhay’s
personality reveals this same yearning as that of his father for the old order. The
son here takes great pleasure in contradicting the father, thus dramatizing his
own inner conflict. He later comments,
“I myself went a long way towards sharing his (Father’s) views
and values as far as our state were concerned. Indeed it seems to
me that with the passing of the years, I have come to identify
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myself more and more with those values, with the result that today
I feel myself as a spokesman for whatever the princely order once
stood for.” (18)
The son has finally come full circle in identifying himself with his
father’s hopes of false security. The state of Begwad was merged with the vast
totality of India within ten years of their argument and the prince had to sign
doleful document, the instrument of merger surrendering all his powers as a
ruler.
The imperial theme has inspired many authors to portray the glory of
feudal past but not many writers have been able to portray the inner story – the
inner life, the conflict within of a prince caught in an age of change and crisis.
Mulk Raj Anand’s ‘Private life of an Indian Prince’ E.M Forster’s ‘hill of Devi’
attempt at a depiction of princely Indian but has not been able to portray the
human story of the princes.
Malgonkar perhaps has an edge over other writers as he had quite a long
and deep association with the princes. We are aware of the genesis of the novel
from what he states in ‘The literary Guild Review’. He raced through the book
working for twelve hours a day and finished it exactly in forty-nine days,
“For that time I was a prince (an ex-prince if you will and,
indulging a whim, I made my hero rule his state for just that many
days.” (Quoted from Amur 79)
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He explains that perhaps in Dussera procession in Gwalior when he was
only five years old or another occasion, that is, in the coronation ceremony of
the heir apparent in Indore. In his interview with Prof. Dayananda, Malgonkar
spoke about his long and close contact with the princes:
“My Grandfather was the Prime Minister in one of the bigger
states in India and I grew up knowing the princely ways, knowing
their peculiarities, knowing the little things that they did different
from other people, and knowing their little vanities. But the contact
grew when I started my profession as a big-game hunter, and my
clients were the most moneyed one could think of, were American
millionaires of Indian princes and one of them offered me to write
the history of his family and their attitudes and with their
peculiarities to be able to write a book about the princes” (95)
A further proof of his intimate knowledge of the princely life can be
noticed in two of his straight histories - Puars of Dewas Senior and
Chhatrapatis of Kolhapur. With such a long, deep, and intimate association
with the princes, it is but just that Malgonkar was enabled to delineate the
princely life most strikingly and authentically from within The Princes. EM
Forster paid him a rich tribute:
“I have just finished The Princes and should like to thank you for
it. It interested me both in its account and because I am involved -
as far as an English man can be in its subject matter. I happen to
have been in touch with a small Maratha state Dewas Senior
during the years of its dissolution. The parallels are numerous and
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heart - rending. I am so glad that you have got down a record.
Otherwise all would be forgotten” (Quoted from Amur 78)
The Princes gives a bold, vivid, and precise picture of the last phase of
the princely state of India. It gives a representative picture of almost all the
princely states. Malgonkar has taken care to make it clear at several places in
the novel:
“What was happening in Begwad was happening everywhere else,
in Padmakoshal and in most Indian States.” (287)
Though a close resemblance can be seen between the characters in the
novel and real people, between the incidents in the novel and real events,
Malgonkar is able to camouflage the real people by creating imaginary
characters and he takes no liberties with the historical facts connected with the
princely states. Though there are many differences, the characters of Hiroji and
Abhay appear to be moulded on Sir Tuko Ji Rao Ji, KCS Maharaja of Dewas
state senior and son Maharaja Vikramsimharao respectively.
Hiroji Maharaja stands as the symbol of Princely India which is “feudal,
barbaric, impervious’ and at the same time ‘a repository of Indian tradition and
culture’ and he represents the old crumbling world. He is aged, reactionary and
taboo-ridden whereas, Abhay his son, the only heir to the throne of Begwad, is
young, progressive and righteous. If Hiroji represents one extreme of absolute
feudal powers, Kanakchand signifies the other extreme of democratic and
nationalist forces pledged to see the end of feudalism and bring in Freedom. In
between, the character of Abhay is found alienating himself from both the
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extremes and accepting situations in their natural order of the present but unable
to have the future he likes.
The first chapter constitutes the novel in miniature presenting the
problems that are going to be solved in the course of the novel. Hiroji and
Abhay are poles apart in several matters, especially in political matters. In the
first chapter, there is Abhay, not quite eighteen, in the last year of his college,
bubbling with enthusiasm and idealism under the influence of a liberal
education. He revolts against his father openly till he is forced to leave. His
father proposes to raise the number of members of his council from three to six,
one of whom is to be selected by him among a panel of five manes suggested
by the other five. The council has no power to discuss his privy purse except to
increase it and he always has veto power. Both father and son take extremely
opposite stands regarding the nationalist’s movement. Hiroji has nothing but
contempt for the nationalists, who are according to him, ‘goondas’ led by
lawyers and traders. As far as he is concerned they just don’t exit. In the
opinion of Hiroji the nationalists are the worst enemies because they are out to
grab the powers by subverting the loyalty of the people towards their rulers,
which even the British were not capable of doing. According to him, the
national movement is but a fight between the nationalist and the British were
not capable of doing. According to him, the national movement is a fight
between the nationalists and the British, and in this fight, the British would be
weakened and turn to the princes for help because they are afraid of
nationalists. He any way prefers the integrity of his state for all times and
returns it to the Bedars, for it is more important than anything else, more
important than their lives.
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But Abhay has sympathy for the nationalists and condemns all his
father’s political views. He considers princes to be ‘jest of history’ and is
convinced of inevitability of disappearance of the princely states form the map
of India. Somehow, he is unable to rise from a purely selfish sense of loss and
often catches himself longing for those old days. The suddenness with which
the change takes place stuns him as it does other princes. It is the only irritating
point in the great drama of the emergence of India as a republic after the
integration of states that causes a lot discontentment and disappointment in
Abhay.
On more than one occasion the reactionary nature of Hiroji can be
observed. He is against the spread of education because he feels that there will
be a greater danger if education is put in the hands of all and sundry. He
believes that education is responsible for all the trouble of the British in India.
His opposition to the construction of dam over the valley of Bulwara, which is
symbol of progress and prosperity, exposes nothing but his stark reactionary
attitude. His is a word of,
“silk turbans and egret plumes and brocade robes and velvet
slippers and the glittering life,” (11)
which is remote from the twentieth century. He is a maharaja with absolute
powers over five hundred thousand people of the Begwad State and Abhay is
his only heir. Hiroji, the Maharaja, is royal every inch and full of princely
instincts. The medieval is sure all around him.
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“He stood tall and powerful and handsome in his robe of rose and
pea-green brocade and the purple silver-worn slippers and the
purple three-cornered pagri of the Bedars. Even the costume of
long ago and the vulgar chains of pearls and diamonds did not
make him look as though he were dressed up for a part in a play.”
(30)
He keeps up the past glory of the old world. The past glory of royalty can
be seen at the banquet on Dussera, the most important festival in all Maratha
states. Hiroji’s prayerful trounce to the Goddess Ambica on Dussera for Her
protection in the ensuing campaign for wars – though it is unthinkable to have
such campaigns in twentieth century – is in keeping with old world tradition.
His boisterous and noisy religion and fasts, his lavish parties and dinners, his
costly tiger hunts and duck shoots and crocodile hunts, his concubines and
colourful costumes, authentically presented only to intensify the picture of the
princely India. The Bhils and the Ramoshis and Jamadarkahana at Patalpet have
added something mystic and aerie to the gothic and primitive medieval
atmosphere of the princely India in the novel. Hiroji’s offer of the Mahapuja
and the gift to twenty cows to the Brahims at the failure of Crips Mission,
another Mahapuja for grand son; the Bhils desire to set a Churrail on
Kanakchand, the absence of the princes at the marriage of princes who was
known as ‘a daughter of marks’ and ‘girl with a white foot’, and many more
such things heighten the superstitious nature of the atmosphere of the novel. It
does not, however, means that the novel does not reflect modern facilities like
motorcars, railways and other amenities.
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In matters of money and expenditure, one finds that Abhay could not see
eye to eye with his father for whom money is only to be spent and honour is
more important than money. Hiroji does not hesitate to pay twenty thousand
rupees to Amina, one of his concubines. He is prepared to spend thirty thousand
rupees on a tiger hunt in honour of Northwick, who is supposed to be the future
Governer General, and purchase a new ‘Rolls’ even though people have to walk
in the street without shoes. He has brought the financial affairs of the state to
such a sorry pass that the political department desires to appoint a committee of
enquiry. Of course, the committee is never appointed as the British would not
like to make a fuss about a prince who has been loyal to them in the context of
the wide spread national movement.
The tyranniacal attitude of Hiroji is not acceptable to Abhay. Hiroji flogs
Kanakchand in public and tries to suppress the national movement in his state
by introducing more repressive measures than in British India. He believes that
order can be maintained only by baton and whip and exemplary punishments.
The Maharani holds an entirely different opinion in this regard. She bursts out,
“Punishment, punishment! Is that all you can think of? You and
your father? Punishment is such a primitive way of resolving
matters.” (82)
The youthful Abhay could not accept his father’s cruel treatment of his
mother. According to him, all the good qualities of Hiroji are overshadowed by
his open infidelity to his mother and his infatuation for his concubines. In a way
his family background seems to be responsible for the wayward behaviour of
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Abhay. Only later in life, Abhay is able to understand how even the loveliest of
women can make themselves hateful to men.
Hiroji and Maharani hold the opinion that marriage in the case of princes
is not a private affair but a matter of duty. They dissuade Abhay from his
attempt to marry Minnie. Malgonkar comments on the system of marriage in
the princely families. Of course, it is not something different from what is
obtaining in the other strata of society. The Maharani most forcibly brings out
the most miserable situation of the princesses in the case of marriage. They are
not allowed to see the face of their husbands even in the ceremony of marriage.
As a matter of fact, it appears as though she accepts her marriage a failure; she
does not hold opinion against the traditional marriage. For youthful Abhay, the
whole thing seems that it is not the tradition that is at fault but the people who
are to follow it. If the people do not have basic human understanding, any
marriage, traditional or non-traditional, old or modern, breaks on rocks. In the
case of Abhay love appears to flow out of marriage.
Hiroji has never shown him weak, cowardly, and womanly. The one
thing he hates in himself and in others is squealing and breaking down like a
woman. He advises Abhay not to squeal at least when he is not alone. This is
not to say that Hiroji has no human tenderness and delicacy. He tells his son
that a man life has to come across many a whipping in his life. But he does not
make a show of it and if he suffers any agony, he weeps when he is alone.
Abhay has always regarded Hiroji as one who is more at home with the past
than with the present and interested in the failure though he also cannot avoid
nostalgically looking back at the past. He is unable to make his father realize
the hard facts of the times as Hiroji never tried to listen to him and he is never
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free from day dreaming about winning back past glory, and so he does not like
to lift the white flag between him and his father and disturb his peace of mind.
Abhay praises his father for his extraordinary courage and personality. Hiroji is
“some kind of superman born several decades too late to be
understood and appreciated by ordinary men and women, that he
was a giant caught in the snare of contemporary values but trying
to be true to the values of the lost world.” (53)
According to Abhay, the most salient features of the character of his
father, Hiroji, are his contagious high spirits; his pride in his heritage, his
misplaced kindness, his courage, his devotion to his values. The disdain for
danger, coolness under stress, readiness for taking any responsibility and his
stubborn and almost stupid refusal to bend under pressure mark the heroic
stature of Hiroji. His replacing of the flag of Praja Mandal by the state flag on
the administrstive building with dignity and poise is really a great and heroic act
of sheer physical courage. When his sense of values is found to be anachronistic
in the country, he goes unarmed and alone after a wounded tiger and gets
himself killed. Before his death he uses to contemplate the verse from ‘Gita’,
“‘I am rich and well born’. Who else is equal to me? I will
sacrifice. I will give; in that I shall rejoice.” (300)
He feels sorry for Abhay for he has lost the opportunity of the great
feeling of being a king and a part of the unbroken past. He does not want to
come in the way of Abhay when he is trying to salvage the situation as much as
possible and agrees to hand the government over to the elected representatives.
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Shrewd as he is, he could grasp fully the cunningness behind the promises
given by nationalists at the time of accession. He explains to Abhay that the
ruling party would take over the administration on one pretext or another as it is
a matter of interpretation how the promises of nationalists should be viewed.
Strange it is for such a man not to be able to understand the gravity and
magnitude of the national movement.
In the character of Abhay, we have a new type of prince, emerging from
the new developments and circumstances in the country. Malgonkar seems to
suggest that an enlightened prince like Abhay can be a substitute of the old
feudal Hiroji. It is true that one finds Abhay clashing with his father in several
ways besides the confrontation described in the first chapter of the novel,
Abhay has several other clashes with his father over the death of his pet Ram
Cannonball. Then his father took this opportunity to initiate Abhay into life by
asking him to grow into a true man by not showing his suffering in public.
Abhay, as a boy, feels offended when he suspects his mother’s relations with
Abdul Jan, the palace officer. But he considers Minnie as a symbol of the first
encounter in the war of sex and treats his first day with her as,
“a day of growing up, of coming of age, almost discovering
myself.” (143)
His father did not approve of his marriage with Minnie. The way in
which Hiroji gets out of the tangle of Minnie’s affair with the help of his chief
minister Lala Hari Kishore shows Hiroji’s act and understanding of the world
around him. Another clash with his father he has is about his involvement in
war. His participation in war serves not only as a maturing influence enabling
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him to understand the hard facts of life and death, love and hatred, the need of
the present moment and desire of the distant future; but also gives an
opportunity to get greater insight into his father’s personality. By observing his
officer in the war, Tony Skyes, who was also his rival in love, Abhay is able to
realize the real character of the prince. The war has helped him to grow up to
broaden his vision, and acquire a civilized tolerance for human frailties and he
has learned to free his mind from the petty loyalties of his childhood and youth.
Although Abhay’s character seems to be a striking contrast to his father’s
he is not altogether free from his father’s influence. His father figure always
hovers over the horizon of his vision. Even from his childhood he has attempted
to get appreciation of his father though there are always some occasions when
he wishes for the death of his father. He is fully aware of the backwardness of
Begwad and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of his father to bring progress
and prosperity to the state. He, however, comes back in the fold. Abhay’s
attitude towards his mother is not only conservative but also compassionate. He
finds something pathetically heroic about Maharani’s attempt to break the shell
of conventions, but the traditionalist in him overhelms the rationalist and he
could not condemn the action of his mother in eloping with Abdulla Jan. The
older he grows the more deeply rooted he becomes in the abstract values of the
princes. As an individual, he can pardon his mother because he knows that his
own life is in morass of guilt, but not as one who is the custodian of the family
prestige.
There is no doubt archetypal ambivalence, inconstancy and confusion of
values in the character of Abhay. It is not something absurd because it is in
keeping wit the basic artistic design of the novel. He is conceived to represent
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the princely order like his father but with a difference. His exposure to liberal
education, war, city, politics, and a love affair with an Anglo-Indian girl
mutually makes the reader think of Abhay as a rebel against the old order and
tradition. He can, however, never be rebel in the real sense of the word, as he is
never out of the magic circle of his class, the princes. That Abhay is an
extension of his father is proved in so many ways- the repetition of the flogging
incident, the beginning and closing of the novel in the same room with tiger
skins and choosing of the pistol from a pair. His education in the college at
Agra only secures him future in the princely code. War helps him come closer
to his father and satisfy his love for adventure. His affair with Minnie is nothing
strange for a prince. As a youth, he drew away from his father because he could
not feel normal in his presence. As he grows older he begins to realize that there
is outrain of formality rising between himself and his father and they are no
longer father and son but the Maharaja and his heir,
“In his presence I could not altogether push away the awful
thought that he was some who should have to die before I could
come into my own.” (22)
However, his father’s hold on Abhay has never slackened and it can be
seen at every stage in the life of Abhay. In the words of Padmanabhan,
“His depiction of their relationship is masterly as it is also a
reflection of the conflict between the outdated princely traditions
and modern democratic values.”
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Abhay shares with his father the love for riding and hunting; he is not
different from his father in making extra-marital relations. He is also possessed
by a desire to save the State. The irony is that he has desired that at the time
when the princely states were vanishing from the map of India. Agarwal opines,
“We can see him becoming more like his father in his amorous
involvements and in his cuckolding of his own wife, the admirable
Kamla. He frankly admits to be a spokesman for whatever the
princely order once stood for.” (144)
Both father and son have failed to estimate the political situation. If
Hiroji does not succeed in gauging the political situation correctly before the
accession, Abhay could not grasp the cunningness behind the promises given by
the nationalists at that time. When his father’s character is maligned by
Kanakchand and others of Praja Mandal, he feels insulted and finds him going
a long way towards sharing his father’s views and values,
“Indeed it seems to me that with the passing of the years, I have
come to identify myself more and more with those values, with the
results that today I feel myself spokesman for whatever the
princely order once stood for.” (18)
Malgonkar enforces the theme of the likeness between the two princes by
repeating the substance of the scene of horsewhipping of Kanakchand. As in the
first of the incidents, the Maharaja whipped Kanakchand, a poor untouchable
student, for cheating and wearing the white cap of the nationalists of the
Ashokraj. More than ten years after in a scene set very near the end of the
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novel, Abhay whips with a riding rope the same Kanakchand, now a minister in
the new administration at same school which is now called The New National
High School. At the same time, as in the words of Prasad,
“It also points out the impotent rage of the hero, who having lost in
the historical flux, flatters his ego with a trivial outburst which he
takes to be an act of vendetta against the new order.” (6)
Malgonkar manages a moving effect in which our memories of the first
incident mingle with our impression of the second. This revenge is also a trait
of the royal instinct. With this act of revenge, the process of his identification
with the old order becomes complete.
Thus, The Princes is a classic in more than one way. It portrays
effectively not only the struggles of the princes to retain their position, and the
ardent aspiration of the old Maharaja but also the emerging world of the young
prince Abhay; not only the conflict between the nationalists and Britishers but
also the clash between the Britishers and the princes. Though it seems to glorify
the princes, it is not blind to their weaknesses. Nor does it fail to recognize the
establishment of the supremacy of the historical forces to change over the
forces of stagnation, reaction and superstition. In this lies the greatness of
Malgonkar who is able to picture before us with his novelistic imagination the
princely India in its disintegration with all its glory and grandeur, inherent
follies and foibles, without resorting to any stylistic tricks and eccentricities. He
has deftly managed both the double movement and double vision and
successfully humanized his highly authentical, historical and intractable raw
material in The Princes. If the magnificence of the conception of the Princes
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gives it a rare distinction in Indian-English fiction, the artistic skill with which
Malgonkar executed the novel has enabled him to rub shoulders with the
greatest masters of the art of fiction.
But it is to be remembered, while Malgonkar has the historian’s
perspective, he also has the artist’s insight and the two blend beautifully to give
his novel a truly artistic design. Malgonkar’s distinctive characteristic is his
confident portrayal of the tensions between individual and the socio-historical
forces of the time. As Indira Bhatt opines,
“Malgonkar makes his mark by his strong sense of history and of
the tensions between the individual and the historical forces of the
time.” (126)
In his attempt to find an artistic fusion of history and fiction, Malgonkar
is aware that his faultless history may standout glaringly defying all attempts at
being done into a novel. He has ably overcome this problem by drawing his
characters into the vortex of experience with the intense quest for fulfillment.
To quote Padmanabhan,
“In this connection it must be said that the story can exist even if
the whole Indian political history is removed from it.” (84)
The title of the novel The Princes is different from the titles of other
novels of Malgonkar. It is plain and direct, unlike others which are descriptive
and symbolical. Malgonkar seems to sugest from his title that the novel deals
entirely with princes and that it is a direct narrative of the life of princely India.
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It is a fine artistic and dramatic document of human passions, feelings and
emotions in conflict with the world outside the inner world, with the changing
times. The novel takes a panoramic view of the life of princes on a larger
canvas. Palace life, school life, primitive life, domestic life, sport, hunting,
horse riding, intrigue, demagoguery, romance, promiscuity, extra-marital sex,
concubines, adventures, and violence keep crowding in narrative till the very
end but this does not in any way, exasperate the reader. Malgonkar’s knowledge
of the private life of Indian princes is as intimate as it is superb. Every detail,
good or bad, of the life of Indian princes has been artistically used by the author
in depicting before us the palace life and the background of Indian princes. One
finds the princes with their jewellery, their drinks, with their concubines, and
with their utter disregard for the welfare of the people in the pages of
Malgonkar. The background is faithful as well as realistic, and almost sounds
like an eye-witness account. Every character has a touch of authenticity and
seems almost drawn from life.
The general impression created by novel is that princes, despite their
glaring and obnoxious defects, were not the embodiments of evil as has been
depicted by Anand in The Private Life of an Indian Prince, and by Dewan
Jarmani Das in The Maharaja. On the contrary, they are much better than the
petty politicians of that time. The Princes clearly intends to stress the positive
erstwhile rulers, many prowess and physical dexterity (The Maharaja is the best
marksman and the son an excellent sportsman honoured with a high war
decoration) generosity for guests, chivalry (Abhay gives up his mistress- a
blonde Anglo - Indian, when she is found entertaining another lover more than
him), strategic intelligence, charity (Abhay writes an essay for Kanakchand, an
untouchable classmate, and thus enables him to win regular scholarship for his
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education), family loyalty, respect for ancient customs and valour. The adverse
side of their characters is also depicted with equal amount of honesty and
fidelity. The father and son embody innumerable human weaknesses: wildness,
temper, sensuality. They are vindictive, violent and fierce and commit adultery.
But the one remarkable point in their favour is that they are essentially men of
action and passion but not of intellect and contemplation. On the other hand,
Indian politicians of the age have been caricatured. They are coward, cunning
and immoderate. The Princes is compared rather favourably with The Private
Life of an Indian Prince and The Maharaja, for, the author with his
characteristic touch of authenticity and objectivity, does not caricature the lives
of the princes by,
“highlighting the perversities and their private life nor does he
whitewash their tyranny and debauchery by the acts of
suppression”. (Amur 84)
Malgonkar’s forte is his unique and powerful grip of the narrative.
Without resorting to stylistic tricks or eccentricities, he narrates in a very
translucent style the events in the young’s prince’s life and recreates the Indian
background in the Jungles, New Delhi, Shimla, quite brilliantly and vividly. He
is free from rancour and free from the intense party spirit of politically
committed novelists,
“he is free from caricature and exaggeration, self pity, posturing
and assuming of attitudes.” (Williams 174)
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Thus, The Princes can safely claim to be a milestone in the Indian fiction.
It stands out as a great novel of an age that is gone by and an epoch that has
ended. Marshall, A Best has rightly called it
“the most thoughtful and perhaps most distinguished work.” (826)
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WORKS CITED
Amur, GS. Manohar Malgonkar- A Monograph.New Delhi: Arnold
Heinemann. 1973. Print.
---. Manohar Malgonkar. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann. India. 1973. Print.
Agarwal, BR and MP Sinha. Major Trends in the Post- Independence Indian
English Fiction. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2003.
Print.
Bhatt, Indira. Manohar Malgonka r- The Novelist. New Delhi: Creative
Publishers.1992. Print.
Best, A Marshall. Manohar Malgonkar: Contemporary Novelists. ed. James
Vinson. London: St. James Press. 1973. Print.
Dayanand, Y James. Manohar Malgonkar. New York: Twayne Publishers.
1974. Print.
---. Manohar Malgonkar. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1974. Print.
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---. On Author and Books, An interview with Manohar Malgonkar. The Literary
Half - Yearly. 16 July 1955. Print.
Hodson, HV. The Great Divide. New York: Atheneum. 1971. Print.
Malgonkar, Manohar. The Princes. Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. 1963. Print.
Padmanabhan, A. The Fictional World of Manohar Malgonkar. New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers and Distributors. 2002. Print.
Prasad, SS. The Prince and the Commoners: An Analysis of Indo-Anglian
Novelists’ Attitude Towards the Feudal Rulers.”Indian English Fiction:
Readings and Reflections,” ed. Dr. Gajendra Kumar, U.D. Ahuja. New
Delhi: Sarup & Sons. 2004. Print.
Walsh, William. Natraj and the Packet of Saffron’, The Indian Novel in
English, Readings in Commonwealth Literature.London: Clarendon
Press. 1973. Print.
Williams, HM. Studies in Modern Indian Fiction in English, Vol –II. Calcutta:
Writers Workshop. Print.
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