Take Five and the mridangam of Subramania Pillai

Can a visit to India serve as the inspiration behind one of the greatest jazz standards ever recorded? We are referring to “Take Five” – the extremely well-known track recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, released in 1959. It is instantly recognizable by anyone who may not even be a jazz aficionado. “Take Five” is not named for its connection to the traditional slang for taking a break, such as “taking five,” but to denote how this number takes us away from the here and now due to its sheer rhythm and joyousness. It is because its unusual time signature was not common in jazz at that time. Herein lies the story.

In the 1950s, during the Cold War, the United States Government sponsored tours for American musicians and artists to see foreign countries – especially the newly independent ones. These countries were all perceived as potential targets of communism, and the US aimed to deter these nations from aligning with the Soviet Union by employing American art, music, culture, and movies as instruments of influence.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet consisted of four cerebral guys. Dave Brubeck himself was a pianist and a university graduate from California. Paul Desmond, the saxophone player, was also from the State of California. The bass player was Gene “Senator” Wright – the only black man in this quartet; and the drummer was Joe Morello. It was a time of great ferment in the jazz world since musicians like Bill Evans, Gil Russel, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker were thinking about expanding the frontiers of jazz to give it a solid underpinning in musical theory.

The true maverick in this quartet was Joe Morello. A violin prodigy, he was invited to perform as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, at the tender age of 9, playing the lead in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. He was set to perform with the BSO a few more times until an event occurred that caused him to drop the violin altogether. When he was fifteen, the great violin maestro Jascha Heifetz heard Joe, and invited him to spend a few hours with him. When Morello returned home from that meeting, he shocked his parents by telling them that he was quitting the violin because he believed he could never play as skillfully as Heifetz! He then took up the drums.

Morello brought to the art of drumming the same deep thought process that went into his violin playing. This is significant, because at that time, the rhythm section, consisting of bass and drums, was supposed to exist solely for the soloists to do their bit. The drummer would usually deploy brushes on the drums to mark the time. But Morello wanted to do more. Paul Desmond did not like that at all – he thought there was no more to a drummer than time keeping. Morello persisted in his thinking – as a highly accomplished classical musician he was intimately familiar with various time signatures. Jazz at that time had the basic 4/4 and nothing else, so why not try and experiment with something else?

These thoughts were fermenting in Morello’s mind when in 1958, the US State Department arranged a visit to India for the Dave Brubeck Quartet. The quartet landed in Mumbai on a hot April day. The tropical heat managed to warp his piano which led to Dave visiting a local piano store – I suspect it is Furtado’s – and witnessed four men manhandling his new piano! In Mumbai, the quartet met and jammed with the sitar player Abdul Halim Jaffar Khan, after doing a couple of gigs at the Eros Theatre. Morello heard the new time signatures of the tabalchi and his mind went into ferment.

They then flew to Madras – as it was then called – where they had one of the most spectacular encounters which shaped their music. They met the late, great Pazhani Subramania Pillai.

Subramania Pillai – PSP as he was known in those days – was the top mridangam vidwan of the day. A handsome man, immaculately dressed in white muslin shirt and starched khadi white veshti — he was known for his virtuosity, being able to play at several speeds with many complications thrown in. The Brubeck Quartet met PSP at his palatial house in the fashionable Boag Road in Thyagaraja Nagar and got to know each other.

PSP found a discerning and eager pupil in Morello, and proceeded to give him a masterclass in the intricacies of the mridangam and the kanjira, and an illustration of the tala patterns in Carnatic classical music. Morello was mesmerised. He realized that using sticks was insufficient for mastering the Carnatic tala repertoire, so he approached PSP and asked for lessons on the fundamentals of playing the mridangam. Morello subsequently adapted these techniques to playing on his drum set using his fingers instead of drumsticks.

A couple of days later, AIR arranged for their jam session to be broadcasted over Voice of America. This broadcast can still be found on YouTube and is fascinating to anyone interested in how cultures meet and fuse. The sonorous voice of Willis Conover can be heard introducing the two instruments – the mridangam and the jazz drum-set. As Philip Clark writes:

“Subramania Pillai opened proceedings with a long and elaborate solo that utilized the mridangam—a cylindrical double-sided drum—to juggle polyrhythmic patterns between his hands, which he coordinated against the bending and sliding of notes as he pressed down on the skins of his drum. As Brubeck and Morello, their ears suitably dazzled, prepared to play with Subramania Pillai, there was an unmistakable air of excited anticipation. The two percussionists set a ferocious tempo, Morello answering Subramania Pillai’s percussive jabs and scrapes by firing rhythms back, his sticks ricocheting against the wooden rims of his drums. Having already learned the significance of 2+2+2+3 for the Turkish psyche, Brubeck wanted to test how compatible the blues and Indian music could be, and the improvisation soon turned into a blues. The opening of his solo was drowned out on the recording by Morello and Subramania Pillai’s sweet thunder, but Brubeck’s piano suddenly zoomed into focus and his light-touch, spidery lines steamrolled toward orotund block chords.”

The musicians left India via Turkey, Iraq and Poland, but the idea of these time signatures was germinating in Morello’s brain. The magic of Indian music had seeped into them and on their return to the United States, the quartet put these ideas into action.

In 1958, the “Jazz Impressions from Eurasia” album carried tracks with influences from Turkish and European music. But the standout track is “Calcutta Blues”. Listening to it, you realise how quickly the quartet absorbed the essence of Indian classical music and applied it to the jazz idiom. Rather than playing one of the ragas, they selected a theme consisting of a set of base notes in sequence – and applied the principles to them. Set note progressions, staying within the selected set of notes, and so on. Morello applied his newly learnt technique on the drums and played with his hands. It is still one of the most unusual and intriguing jazz tracks of all time.

But they were far from done. They spent the following months thinking deeply about their experiences in India and the East, especially around the concept of time in music. It was intended to be a new album featuring specially composed tracks that would demonstrate the impact of different time signatures on the jazz listening experience.

When their record company heard about this, they were not pleased. It was the norm for jazz groups to play standards, or at least create something that did not challenge the public’s ear too much. But Brubeck was adamant.

The new album, “Time Out,” was released, much to the discomfort of the record company. One of the tracks used the 9/8 signature of Mozart’s “Rondo a la Turca”. The company agreed to release the album but on one condition. The Quartet had to do a more standard album based on songs from the movie “Gone With The Wind”. The track “Take Five” – which showcases Morello’s drum skills had been burnished in the tour — used the imaginative 5/4 time signature, and was reluctantly released as a single.

Initially the album tanked, confirming the worst fears of the company. But, then an audience looking for new sounds discovered “Take Five”, and it shot up the pop charts. The album took off and became a big hit, setting the stage for further experimentation on time by the Brubeck Quartet. When interviewed in 2010 by the jazz historian Naresh Fernandes, Brubeck remembered the cross-cultural encounter more than fifty years ago with fondness. A few years after Time Out came out, Sixties America discovered Ravi Shankar, and the rest is history.

Song For My Father

My father has begun talking to me.  He talks non-stop sometimes, five-six hours at a stretch, slowly and deliberately,  as would be the case when the mind is slowly fading at the ripe old age of 94.  Sometimes I have to stop him and make him drink water just so that he can rest his vocal cords.  A sip of water and he is off again.    He does not like to be interrupted – his mind is sharp enough to brush aside anything not directly related to his narrative.  I just listen. Sometimes that is easier said than done, but I curb my impatience and just let his words flow.

Sometimes it is a complaint about a sibling whose great love for him causes her to hector him endlessly about how to go about things.  He used to read PG Wodehouse voraciously as a young man, and hence refers to her as Lady Constance Keeble – the domineering, formidable sister of the dreamy and feckless Lord Emsworth in the Blandings Castle stories.  More appropriately he refers to her as Lady Adela, the equally domineering daughter of the poverty-stricken Lord Shortlands of Beevor Castle.  He always smiles when he says this, and asks me if I have read Wodehouse. For the millionth time I tell him, yes Appa I read all of them twice over, especially the Blandings Castle books because you used to tell me of how Rupert Baxter got kicked once.    He complains another siblings sermonizes to him.

I defend my siblings conduct – they are well-meaning out of deep love and concern for you Appa, and I ask him to ignore the noise. I have promised to take him to Kerala to see all his old haunts. Last week he asked me what I do for a living – the first time he has asked me in 40 years.  I explained to him how a company runs, what I do as MD, how investors behave, how I get paid, and so on. He listened, fascinated. 

Most of the time, it is reminiscences about his childhood, his growing up years, his parents, his siblings. About his ancestors whom he has knowledge of for five generations prior.   These are accompanied by some salacious detail. One of whom was prominent and reputed criminal lawyer, who went from court to court in Travancore State arguing cases and winning them and earning huge fees in the process, and established domestic consensual arrangements in each of these towns. Apparently my father met the cousins resulting from some of these arrangements at various times.   Apparently this gentleman was instrumental in convincing an enlightened British educationist A F Sealy to set up the Sealy Memorial High School in Tattamangalam which is now close to 150 years old, and where my father went to school after primary education in Raja’s High School.   

Another person two generations before, swindled some money from the temple.  The punishment was banishment from the village for 12 years to Kashi (Benares).  Until then he would have no contact with the rest of the family.  Or the daily routine of his grandfather, a combination of the common sense of an agriculturist, the Brahminical knowledge of one who lead the worship at the local Krishna temple, and the political shrewdness of a typical village politician. 

He is just letting the memories run on, like a stream of consciousness. He says he does not have long and he is trying to leave the present behind and live in the past. It makes sense when he puts it like that.

Sometimes talk turns to his days in the RSS and his views on India’s post Independence history.  He witnessed riots in Naya Bazar and Bareilly as a young man.  His education in BHU reinforced common prejudices against minorities. And yet he says he does not hate anybody.  We discuss this for hours.  We did not agree on anything but we disagreed agreeably.  He was impressed I knew so much of detail and complimented me on it.

He was responsible for me being relatively well-read.  Though a poorly paid scientist, he forked out for a subscription to TIME magazine when I was a child.  From the time I could read, he used to ask me to read the paper and the magazine.  I would have to discuss it with him.  In July 1969 he woke me very early (I was just 8) to listen to the VOA live commentary on the Moon Landing. We were in Poona at that time, in the Wellesley Road Staff Quarters of the (then) Virus Research Centre.   From October 1971 right up to January 1972,  he would wake me up at 520am. There would be a glass of egg flip (milk and a raw egg) waiting.  We would listen to the BBC South Asia Service,  to the Vishwa Bharati program compered by Gopal Krishna, for the latest on what was happening in East Pakistan.  We followed Watergate together, the Vietnam War together, the Yom Kippur War together and the Oil Shock together. He appreciates the fact that I am always reading, at this age, and I tell him - Appa this is a gift you have given me and I am so grateful.

Since my mother passed away,  something wonderful seems to have happened between my father and myself.  She died on December 28 and her demise was expected, but not the suddenness with which it happened.  For a very long time before that, my father always gave me the clear impression that I did not measure up to his expectations either as a man or as his son. Especially since I am the eldest son and it has some meaning in a traditional Indian family context.   

I was always aware of this,am and it always rankled.  Fathers are always disappointed in their children.  Sons – especially the eldest – are always trying to live up to some ideal of filial piety and family duty, of meeting expectations, and always found wanting.  This theme is not just a cliché even though it has been played out in song, drama and cinema.   Most of the time his conversations with me would be highly transactional. Short, curt and to the point. He would never trust me with anything, and I think he honestly believed I would dodge doing the elaborate death ceremonies for my mother.

But that did not happen. I took the time to do the ritual with dedication, and continue to do them. There are 42 in all over the next one year. I do them willingly and I think he appreciates that. Perhaps my mum has changed my father’s mind about me?

He is now very old, very frail and very lonely.  He says his end is near. Earlier, I used to think I would not be as affected by the death of a parent because I am myself now advancing in years. With every monthly observance of my mother’s passing, I realize how much I miss her. In the case of my father, I thought the disapproval of me over the years would make me less affected by his passing on when it does happen. 

I am happy and sad to admit that was wrong. When he does go, I will be very sad and I will miss him. These few weeks have been wonderful for me and have also made me wistful for what might have been, for all those wasted years. We could all have been so much happier. Regrets are always pointless.

I will miss his exceptional work ethic, his discipline, his orderliness, and his devotion to doing his duty. I will miss his sound common sense. 

I am trying to spend as much time as I can with him by making weekly visits to Chennai.  Perhaps he feels he has a good son in me and that I have turned out well.  He never says anything of that sort.

All he says, “I enjoy chatting with you”.

And for that I feel profoundly blessed.

Sri Rama

One day in the late 1940s, a young student of Zoology at the venerable Benares Hindu University caught the Punjab Mail from Benares en route to his home in Bareilly.  On a whim he got off the train at Faizabad Station, and took a tonga to Ayodhya.  There he entered the Babri Masjid, the abandoned mosque, inside which some one had placed a tiny idol of Sri Rama – the Ram Lalla idol.  For him the sight of the idol was a profound experience, and it is a memory that stayed with him for the next 70 years.  That student was my father.

The sequence of events from that day to today, in terms of converting the mosque to a temple, is more Mahabharata than Ramayana.  There is a lot of discussion around how we got to this point in time, when a new temple was inaugurated by India’s Prime Minister. Or what were the machinations that preceded this moment.  The protestations of the Shankaracharyas were duly noted and set aside.  There was also the notorious meme that smacked of lese-majeste – that of the Prime Minister leading a young Rama into the temple.  Who was God and who was man, we ask. But one day the personalities involved will be gone, into the mortal dust,  and all that will be left are flickering memories digitally sustained and amplified. But they will also eventually fade. These discussions will become mere footnotes, to be pored over by scholars away from public gaze.

Centuries on, what will be left standing is a grand temple dedicated to Sri Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu, the symbol of good and righteousness and all things honourable.  The temple stands at Ayodhya, which is revered as the birthplace of this paragon.   It stands on top of the now-demolished Babri Masjid, which came down under the pickaxes of the mob on December 6 1992.  One day the memory of the sad events of December 6 1992 will be also dim and what will remain will be this magnificent edifice.

By all accounts, the outpouring of joy and piety at the new temple were something to experience.  The faithful were struck by the piety of not just fellow pilgrims but also the cops, the officials, the support staff, indeed anyone around. It was a deeply emotional moment for many, not just the few who were lucky to visit on the day of the inauguration.    

My father had been brought up on a diet of devotion to Sri Rama.  My recently deceased mother taught us siblings simple shlokas dedicated to Sri Rama when we were kids, that I remember and repeat to this day.  She would tell us the story of Rama and Lakshmana and Sita –  of the exile to the forest, the kidnapping of Sita, the battle to save Sita and the return to Ayodhyapuri.  Again and again. Usually she would tell these stories with her sitting in the middle with the three of us sitting around her.  She would have some rice, a bowl of sambar, a vegetable dish all in front of her.  She would use her hands to make a little ball of rice, sambar and vegetable and put it in each hand, and we would eat it, listening agog to the stories.  The stories would multiply in depth and scope, incorporating whatever moral lesson she wanted to impart. If us siblings were fighting, then the friendship between Rama and Lakshmana would be stressed. If filial piety was the issue, then she would tell us how Rama kept his word to his father and went into exile.  The forest stories would always be embellished by imaginary demons and animals and flowers.  Fun would be made of Shurpanaka and how Lakshmana cut off her big nose.  It is a warm memory, with the Ramayana always at the background.

For millions of Indians, such  stories of Rama are part of childhood.  Enactments of the Ramayana in schools and in villages are a part of life. These simple pleasures included witnessing the innocent Ram Lila events at maidans in small towns and big cities all over Northern India.  A huge figure representing Ravana would be built on a maidan, filled with fire-crackers.  The local lad dressed as Rama  would trot up in a chariot (housed on top of a small car or truck) and fire an imaginary arrow at the figure of Ravana.  On cue, someone would light the touch paper for the Ravana statue and the whole thing would go up in flames. 

Rama and Sita skits were part and parcel of plays in schools.  When my daughter was four years old, she took part in such a play  and she was selected to sing the opening invocation. The wonderful Mrs Aruna  Thakkar who ran the Sunflower Nursery got the Y B Chavan Auditorium in Mumbai to stage the play enacted by her 4 year old wards.  The invocation was the  “Eka Shloki Ramayanam” – the story of Ramayana in one verse. 

She walked nervously up to the edge of the stage, and with eyes searching for her grandmother in the audience, began softly but increasing in confidence, as she sang this verse.

आदौ राम तपोवनादि गमनं, हत्वा मृगं कांचनम्।

वैदीहीहरणं जटायुमरणं, सुग्रीवसंभाषणम्।।

बालीनिर्दलनं समुद्रतरणं, लंकापुरीदाहनम्।

पश्चाद् रावण कुम्भकर्ण हननम्, एतद्धि रामायणम्।।

Her grandmother wept. The combination of the innocence of a five year old singing an invocation to the Sri Rama  that she – an uneducated woman – had learnt to sing to and worship as a child, was too much. The audience erupted in applause. My little girl blinked innocently at the noise and retreated back behind the curtains.

A few years ago I was in London, about to have lunch at a nice restaurant in Jermyn Street, with someone I was meeting for the first time.  When my guest walked in, he saw the only Indian face there, and guessing it was his host,  he walked up, shook my hand and said a warm “Raam Raam Kaise hain aap”.  It turned out that this posh Oxonian had spent ten years with the Brigade of the Gurkhas in the British Army,  and knew the ways of the Nepali people. 

Among most people in Northern India, “Raam Raam” is a common greeting.  My carpenter Akhlak Khan who hails from Banaras brought an army of workmen – Hindu and Muslim – from that part of India to fit out our new home.  The common greeting to his Hindu workmen was “Raam Raam”.   

The first time I travelled outside India was to Jakarta, sometime in the early 90s, I  stepped into an Indonesia Telecom office to make a long distance call to my wife to let her know I had arrived, I looked up at the television playing in the lobby, and was surprised to find the 1980s soap opera of the Ramayana playing there, dubbed in Bahasa Indonesia, and being watched raptly by the Indonesian staff who were almost certainly Muslim.

The emotions and sentiments associated with Sri Rama are so deep and embedded in our consciousness that it did not require a new temple to make them even more real. Yet the emotions and feelings aroused by a mosque at the site of what people believed to be the birthplace of Sri Rama could never be dismissed, however muted these might have been. 

The role of the State and the role of religion have always been intertwined in India. Kings and Emperors have always drawn their power from religious sanction. Temples have been destroyed by Hindu kings at war with other Hindu kings simply to take the power of their enemies away.  The destruction of the Rashtrakuta capital of Manyakheta and all its vast Hindu temples and Sanskrit libraries by the invading armies of Emperor Rajaraja Chozha in 1007CE is a great example of this tendency.  The same kings built and endowed great temples, like the self-same Rajaraja Chozha who built several great temples like the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur which survive to this day. Later invading Islamic kings showed their piety by building great mosques to affirm divine grace that enabled them to be kings on land.  They also destroyed temples of the conquered and of this there is no doubt.  In the same breath it must also be said that  kings also endowed temples and protected monuments of their conquered peoples. Why? Real-politik, grace, tolerance, magnanimity – all of the above I suppose. Just as the destruction was intended to show intolerance, bigotry, punitive action and much worse.

The interregnum between the end of formal Islamic rule and the beginning of the modern Indian republic was occupied by the British, who largely stayed away from adding to India’s religious complexities.  But that was a mere 90 years, and that allowed the idea of separation of Church and State to be embodied into the Constitutional framework of this country.  This was necessitated by the bloodletting that accompanied Partition in 1947, that created a Muslim state on our borders but left more Muslims in a Hindu majority country as citizens of the new Republic than those who were citizens in the new Muslim state. Coping with this has been a noteworthy aspect of post-1947 politics – making Muslim Indians feel part of the new India, sometimes to the extent of appeasement to exploit them for votes, and quite a few times, of suspecting loyalty.

It is therefore no surprise that the temple unwittingly evokes the complex role Islam has played in India.  The US never had to contend with an Islamic minority when it created the Constitution.  Neither did the UK or France. In these countries, Islam is an “immigration problem” and hence presents a different set pf challenges.  In India this is not the case. Our Muslims are native Indians and they are as much part of the soil of this land as are Hindus. Most Muslims in India are Hindu converts from centuries ago, not foreign in blood.

It is here that the ideal of Sri Rama as a gentle, righteous man collides with what was done in the lead-up to the building of this temple.  

All of this has been done in the name of Sri Rama.  In one sense it is a repeat of our history before the British pause.  New rulers establish their credence and credibility with a temple or a place of worship.   The making of history is not a linear, deterministic process.  It is tortuous, accident-prone and full of surprising twists and turns,  that in retrospect look like a straight line between cause and effect, but in actuality was anything but.    

Could it be that this is the mark of a new set of rulers who wish to stamp  their presence on the land with a new temple that punctuates the transition of India?

For seventy years our anglicised elite assumed that the administration of the Indian state would very much go along as the British ran India, with brown sahibs replacing the white ones. That process of brownification accelerated as soon as the venerable Indian National Congress lost its majority in 1990, around the time of the destruction of the Babri Masjid.  It gathered pace once Modi was elected in 2014.

The anglicised elite have all sorts of problems with the way the temple got built.  They say the archaeological evidence was sparse, that the Courts selectively interpreted this evidence, that they pronounced a verdict that seemed to satisfy the political requirements of the ruling party to get a temple there, and that the timing of the inauguration was twisted so that it effectively kickstarted an election campaign which the BJP is expected to win hands down.  

Depending on which side you are on, this temple is either a monument to majoritarianism, or the result of forces that tapped into the latent feeling among Hindus that sacred places of worship must be restored to what they were before proponents of another religion destroyed them.

The fact remains that all these events have  made real something that spoke to the beliefs and aspirations of hundreds of millions of people.  For these people, Sri Rama is a real and living presence in their lives. And a temple dedicated to Sri Rama at the site where he is supposed to have been born adds structure to their aspiration that Sri Rama will never be wiped out from their lives again.  This is a reality. It cannot be undone.

Failing to recognise this feeling is a failure of secular politics as it exists in India. 

The larger and more important need is to restore Sri Rama to the person my mother used to worship – a benign, moral, inclusive,  avatar of Vishnu who stood for all that is good and ethical about Bharata Varsha, who will stand for all Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jew, Animist.  The need is for someone to take the message of Sri Rama and restore it to our collective consciousness as Indians, not as Hindus alone.  It makes me sad that there is no one with the wisdom and intellect to undertake this task, instead of constantly asking for a return to the secular politics of the days immediately following Independence.

The Majoritarian Slur on Hindus

This is a rejoinder to an article by J Sai Deepak, a public intellectual and constitutional lawyer, that appeared in the Indian Express on June 22 2023. I can send you the article if you DM me. You can try and access it here: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/j-sai-deepak-writes-the-majoritarianism-slur-8678370/

Sai Deepak has become known for his florid prose and it takes time to cut through the thickets of verbiage.  He is a  constitutional lawyer of great learning and I take what he says seriously.  Hence his article deserves a critical reading and a response.

In his article in the Indian Express on June 22 2023, “The Majoritarian Slur”,  he says that Hindus are being gaslighted with the majoritarian slur just because they are in a majority in our system of government. 

The problem with this article starts in the very first paragraph.  His definition of a majoritarian political system is correct – it is a system in which the majority get to make the rules.  The majority could be an ideological majority (like the tussle between the Republicans and the Democrats in the US or Labour versus Conservative in the United Kingdom) or could be based on anything else that unites the beliefs of people.  It could be race or religion.

However he mixes up this political definition of majoritarianism,  with what we call majoritarian behaviour,  which refers to the tendency of a majority in a multi-cultural society to rule as though the rights of minorities do not exist. This is the behaviour of Christian majority nations in Europe right from the early Middle Ages until the mid 20^th Century in the way they dealt with their Jewish minorities, ending of course in the Holocaust.  This is how half a dozen Arab Kingdoms run their affairs today.

Majoritarian Government and Majoritarian behaviour are not the same.  However, right through the article Sai Deepak fails to make this distinction, and uses this deliberate confusion to levy the charge of gaslighting.  

India has a majoritarian government system. Our first past the post electoral system that does not have any religion-based seat reservations,  with no bar for anyone to vote other than the attainment of the age majority,  is designed to express the majority will of the people into seats in Parliament.  Modelled on the Westminster style system, sometimes aided by a supine or ineffective judiciary and a weak and docile press, this form of government is designed to act  and capable of acting decisively and forcefully based purely on gaining a simple majority in Parliament, and can pretty much effect sweeping change without tampering with the Constitution. 

This system has resulted in some very good Parliamentary actions for India, and not all of them require a majoritarian superiority. An excellent case in point  is how the minority Rao Government swept away forty years of socialism with a few pieces of legislation enacted in 1991 that were passed with a huge majority in Parliament even though the Congress was in a minority. 

More recently, the BJP-majority government legalized Aadhaar,  legitimized the disastrous demonetization, ushered in a flawed GST, altered the Constitution to change the status of Jammu and Kashmir, and changed the basis of Army recruitment  all with legislation that passed by voice vote in ten minutes or so for each of them.  These are now a fait accompli. 

Sai Deepak encourages the reader to confuse majoritarian government system (as illustrated above) with the majoritarian practices (such as what the Germans did to the Jews).  It is a nice play on words but does not stand even the first level of semantic scrutiny.  

For the first time in 900 years, all the legal residents of Bharata Varsha have a say on who will rule over them. Since 85% of these residents subscribe to some form of the Hindu faith, what we have today is Hindu majority rule.  The framers of the Constitution that Sai Deepak is supposed to have studied were a majority of Hindus.  Our national anthem, the symbolism that accompanies all state events, the symbols of state – all are Hindu in nature.  This is indisputable. Ask any Muslim.

The framers of the Constitution understood the difference between majoritarian rule and majoritarian behavior of a majority,  and put in provisions to ensure that the two never converged.  Sai Deepak probably wants these removed  or emasculated, and in fact, I refer you to his two volumes of prose in which he makes this argument.    

He bases his gaslighting charge on the following two points.

First, he says,   “to cry majoritarianism in a democracy, without making out a case of unconstitutionality, is to question the majority principle which forms the very basis of a democracy”.  

This is astonishing.  If the government of the day that enjoys a majority is to be accused of majoritarian behavior, the accusation has to be tested using the provisions of the Constitution in a court of law.  But calling out majoritarian behavior does not negate the majoritarian nature of the Constitution.  The distinction between majoritarianism as form of government and the use of the same word to describe the unreasonable behavior of a majority towards the minority has to be kept in mind, because Sai Deepak plays with this word, which can mean two things.   I think this is mere verbal sophistry, not logic.

He goes further to say that “..secondly, in the context of Bharat, ‘majoritarianism’ has become a code to insinuate ‘Hindu majoritarianism’ because obviously Hindus commit the continuing sin of existing… in a dwindling numerical majority despite the best intentions…of organized, monotheistic, iconoclastic, expansionist and colonizing world views”.  

This is a surprising statement.  Keep in mind the sophistry of Sai Deepak in using the word majoritarianism which can mean two things.  Ignoring the whining nature of some of the verbiage here,  it is not true that Hindus are in any danger of becoming a national minority.  And instead of references to “monotheistic” and “iconoclastic” why not just come right out and say that he is talking of Muslims for the most part.  And what is the basis for the insinuation that these minorities are somehow complicit in limiting the numbers of Hindus to ensure that they are in a “dwindling numerical majority”  is mischievous.  Does the lawyer who prides himself on logic have any data?

He goes further to say that “to atone for that sin, Hindus must constantly and unequivocally express contrition through the cession of cultural, political, constitutional, and ultimately physical spaces.  By not doing so, Hindus endanger the sense of safety and dignity of certain groups which pass of as “national minorities” despite being in the majority in certain states where Hindus are in the minority”.     Let us unpack this, and ignoring the high-class whining, let us just focus on the Constitution of which Sai Deepak claims to be an exponent.  I am no expert so forgive me for mistakes.

What “sin”?. The sin is in Sai Deepak’s mind and it is a sin he conjures up through the dual use of the word “majoritarianism”.   The Indian Constitution tries to protect the rights of minorities by clearing specifying that citizenship and all the benefits of citizenship are the gift of being an Indian national and not the member of a particular race, caste or religion. The State cannot make discriminatory laws and if legislatures do, this can be challenged in court.   In the national sense, Muslims and Christians get this protection in the same way that in local sense – like in Indian States like Kashmir or Meghalaya – the Hindus will get this same protection.   

He specifically talks of Kashmir – a Muslim majority state – and the right of Hindus to consider it part of Bharatavarsha.  Where is the role of the Constitution here. There is no need for anyone to legislate that Kashmir and Baluchistan (where the Hinglaj Mata Temple is situated) were once part of Bharata Varsha – the undivided India of pre-Islamic times.  It is a historical fact and hence it need not find a place in the Constitution.   

The purpose of the Constitution is establish a contract of citizenship and government, with rights and responsibilities, and some protections for specific cases. Given that India wrote a Constitution to unite a vastly diverse land into a uniform system of government,  some of these carveouts and protections are understandable if not necessary.   Within this, the State can pursue a policy of morality or indulge in immorality.  Sai Deepak knows that China has a written Constitution.  He is also aware that the Chinese have indulged in ethnic cleansing and trying to alter the genetic make up of the Uighur and Tibetan people.  I am pretty sure the Chinese Constitution speaks loftily of the rule of law and people’s rights, but the non-observance of these principles has everything to do with the majoritarian and dictatorial conduct of the Chinese Communist Party who control the Chinese state. 

Since the Indic people of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist faiths were the original inhabitants of Bharata Varsha,  how does he wish the Constitution to recognize this? Lets take an example.  Can the Constitution allow a Hindu to throw a Muslim out of a piece of land he wants just because a thousand years ago a Hindu occupied it?  Sai Deepak would be first to argue (at least I hope he does) that this violates half a dozen laws that can be traced back to principles of natural justice.  Does this make the Constitution moral by Hindu standards but otherwise immoral – which is ok because of the ancient claim of Hindus to all of Bharata Varsha?

I am not sure whether the term Constitutional Morality is clear to him.  The Constitution is merely a piece of paper. It becomes a living thing if everyone follows its rules and trust its institutions to enforce these rules – be it Parliament, the Courts, or the Executive.  Their conduct can be moral or immoral and using the Constitution to sanction immoral conduct violates not just natural justice but the very principles of Sanatana Dharma that he says he believes in. When the Constitution protects everyone, irrespective of whether they are part of a majority howsoever defined, it is behaving with morality.

Because, if he is not clear about what Constitutional Morality means, he is about to get into unsavoury company if he does not watch himself.  In the current turmoil in Israel related to the settlements on the West Bank, the Israeli courts struggle with the fact that Israel has no Constitution, only a set of Basic Laws.  Using these Laws, Israeli courts have been doing their utmost to protect the civil rights of Palestinians who live under Israeli law as occupied people without any citizenship rights, going back to principles of natural justice to protect the Palestinians.  To check the protections  Israeli courts have been extending,  Netanyahu proposed the creation of an Israeli Constitution that would enshrine the rights of Jews in the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria and give them primus inter pares status.  This would ignore the modern Israeli state which now has approximately 40% of its residents who are not Jewish and provide some legal fig-leaf to the settlers in the West Bank.  Is this moral behaviour, or mere expediency?

In the end, constitutions have to protect individuals first, and then groups. It has to stop a majoritarian government from practicing majoritarianism in governance because it disenfranchises the rights of citizens who are not from the majoritarian identity.   While this could work in the national sense, what about Manipur or Meghalaya?

Sai Deepak can choose from several Constitutional models to draft a new one for India.  He could pick the “Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich“ as a model – this is the Enabling Act of 1933 which the Reichstag passed (after intimidation by the Nazi Party) to bypass the Reichstag and proceed with organised antisemitism.   Or the 1961 South African Constitution which converted the former Dominion into a Republic and institutionalised apartheid.  Closer home, the Iranian Constitution, which recognises that all temporal authority is subservient to the spiritual, and constitutes a Supreme Council consisting of religious leaders to whom the elected President and legislatures report.

I prefer to think that Sai Deepak dashed this off in his customary style to satisfy the op-ed requirements of his career as an emerging public intellectual. He has chosen to highlight the many ways in which secular governments have leaned too far in favour of minorities to win votes. I agree with him on that. But these are aberrations that can be corrected either by recourse to courts or to the ballot box.

Gitopadesam

A  dance performance by a young danseuse Mahati Kannan, who even to my uneducated eye looks like quite an accomplished artiste and who deserves to go far,  is not the place where one gets a spiritual impulse. Usually it is quite the contrary. May be it was her expressive eyes and the wonderful emoting through her abhinaya.  But when she performed her interpretation of the Gitopadesam, I was struck. 

I sat there thinking of the sequence of events that began with Arjuna standing still at the head of his mighty army, filled with self-doubt and refusing to fight.  His charioteer, Krishna, counsels him by telling him that all this is part of his duty as a man.  When still not convinced, Krishna shows Arjuna who he really is – the Supreme Omniscient Being – and tells him to put his faith in God and do his duty.  Arjuna realises that his presence on the battlefield is part of his destiny, and that the fratricide he is about to commit is his duty on earth.

Of course everyone knows this.  But I was so moved by the dance performance itself that this morning I sat down and went through an online resource that hosts the entire Gita and explains it verse by verse.  I found myself entranced.  I suppose seminal texts like the Gita offer something to everyone;  it is not a question of finding what you are looking for, but one of being found by the knowledge in the text, as though there is an omniscient someone who guides the hand that turns the pages.    

So turn the pages I did…..

I am no expert on the Gita but it seems to me that the essence of the Gita is Karma Yoga.  The path to salvation is by doing your duty as a man, and not shirking your responsibilities to yourself, your family, your work place and to your community, and doing so in a  righteous and moral manner.  As we know, it is easier to do the right thing after you know what is the right thing to do, and the latter is always the hard part.

We will pick this up at the point in the Gita, where Arjuna has expressed his anguish to his friend and companion Krishna.  Krishna begins to counsel Arjuna and lets Arjuna know that Krishna is no ordinary man.

All of us have had our Arjuna moment figuratively speaking, and I have of late had more than  my fair share of them.  We are at a crossroads or simply, we are on the path we have chosen for ourselves, and we wonder what is the point of it.  Things appear hopeless and unproductive.  Luck seems to have deserted us.  Should I just give up? 

The Gita says that it is my duty to stand and fight.  To not do so, is not my Dharma, and I am not doing my duty as a man.  But fight with vigour, with all your senses, with every inch of your being.

Reading this, I was reminded of this wonderful Kural (no 620):

தெய்வத்தான் ஆகா தெனினும் முயற்சிதன்
மெய்வருத்தக் கூலி தரும்.

Theyvaththaan Aakaa Theninum Muyarsidhan
Meyvaruththak Kooli Tharum.

Loosely translated, it means that even what the Gods cannot give you, utmost striving can bring to fruition.  Selflessness is the key.  To which Krishna adds one more dimension, to have your faith in God at the back of your mind while you work selflessly.  For the Gita says

यं यं वापि स्मरन्भावं त्यजत्यन्ते कलेवरम् |

तं तमेवैति कौन्तेय सदा तद्भावभावित: || 6|| 

Chapter 8 Verse 6

yaṁ yaṁ vāpi smaran bhāvaṁ tyajatyante kalevaram

taṁ tam evaiti kaunteya sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ

Whatever one remembers upon giving up the body at the time of death, O son of Kunti, one attains that state, being always absorbed in such contemplation.

The reference to the thought in your mind at the time of death  does not mean that one should think of God only at the time of death but that one must imagine that this very moment is the moment of death, and at that time, what a man has to do is to do his duty selflessly, with his mind on God.  

The poet T S Eliot, who had read much of the Gita, said as much in “The Dry Salvages”

“ “on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death”—that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others…”

In the next verse, Krishna says

तस्मात्सर्वेषु कालेषु मामनुस्मर युध्य च |

मय्यर्पितमनोबुद्धिर्मामेवैष्यस्यसंशयम् || 7||

tasmāt sarveṣhu kāleṣhu mām anusmara yudhya cha

mayyarpita-mano-buddhir mām evaiṣhyasyasanśhayam

Therefore, always remember Me and do your duty and fight. With mind and intellect surrendered to Me, you will definitely attain Me; of this, there is no doubt.

The commentary by Swami Muktananda says,

“As a warrior, Arjuna must fight; that is his duty. However, the Lord says to Arjuna that even in the middle of a battle, one should remember God. The same message is for everyone—be it farmers, engineers, doctors, students, homemakers, or any other professional.

People often disregard their worldly duties and responsibilities with the pretext of leading a spiritual life. On the other hand, some give an excuse of their worldly engagements for not practicing spirituality. They perceive that both material and spiritual goals; cannot be pursued concurrently. But Shree Krishna’s message in this verse defies all these myths and can sanctify our entire life.”

Arjuna receives these lessons but asks Krishna to show him the Cosmic self that he says he really is – that Krishna is not a man or a human, he is something beyond. 

So Krishna shows Arjuna his Cosmic Self. Time stands still and one can imagine that Arjuna is confronted with a sight so immense and so all-encompassing, that he is not just awed by frightened.     What he sees his described as follows:

दिवि सूर्यसहस्रस्य भवेद्युगपदुत्थिता |

यदि भा: सदृशी सा स्याद्भासस्तस्य महात्मन: || 12||

divi sūrya-sahasrasya bhaved yugapad utthitā

yadi bhāḥ sadṛiśhī sā syād bhāsas tasya mahātmanaḥ

If a thousand suns were to blaze forth together in the sky, they would not match the splendor of that great form.

Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who lead the creation of the bomb at Los Alamos, was deeply interested in Hindu philosophy, and had read and absorbed the Gita.  When he witnessed the first explosion, this verse went through his head, and the subsequent recounting of the Los Alamos project by Robert Jungk has the title “Brighter than a thousand suns”.

Arjuna is now filled with wonder and fear, and asks Krishna who he really is.  Krishna replies as follows.

कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो

लोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्त: |

ऋतेऽपि त्वां न भविष्यन्ति सर्वे

येऽवस्थिता: प्रत्यनीकेषु योधा: || 32||

kālo ’smi loka-kṣhaya-kṛit pravṛiddho

lokān samāhartum iha pravṛittaḥ

ṛite ’pi tvāṁ na bhaviṣhyanti sarve

ye ’vasthitāḥ pratyanīkeṣhu yodhāḥ

I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds. Even without you, the warriors arrayed in the opposing army shall cease to exist.

It is a lesson in humility for Arjuna, for daring to presume that fate of the Kaurava Army was in his hands. No, says Krishna, they will be dead, not just because that is what happens to all of us – it is because Dharma has already decided their fate, and it is your task, Arjuna, to wield your mighty sword and your mace, and do your duty as a man. 

I find nothing here that is incompatible with the credo of “Invictus”.   I am indeed the Captain of my Fate and the Master of my Soul.  As long as I am doing my worldly duty as a man, a husband, a father, a brother, a member of society, I am indeed in charge of myself.   My head is bloody but unbowed, but I have to remember I am fine as long as I stay on the path of righteousness.

Memories of an airline ticket stub

This is not an airline stub, it is a time machine.

It is one of those old fashioned cardboard tickets printed in small type, with a magnetic stripe on the top, roughly 6 inches cross and three inches wide, designed to fit into the inside jacket pocket of a business traveller so that it can be whipped out at the business class counter,  sandwiched between the pages of a passport, with panache and elan.  It was before the days of iPhones,  QR codes and mobile boarding passes but every bit as hip and with it.  This one was issued by Air France in Singapore.  “Ceci est votre recu, non-valable pour transport”, it says : This is your receipt, not valid for travel.  

I found the stub inside a book I had perhaps not opened for many years and it began to bring back memories.

We used to live in a lovely old bungalow on 9 Redwood Avenue in Singapore, surrounded by a small lawn on four sides.  We used to call it our estate.  I had planted a frangipani tree, and there were four banana trees at the back of the house – we discovered very soon that banana trees are considered bad luck or hosts of evil spirits by some Chinese communities and we used to get black looks from the old amah from the house at the back.   My wife used to work for JPMorgan handling exotic financial products like credit derivatives and the like.  I worked for a smallish niche American technology company that specialized in fault-tolerant computing used in telecommunications. 

My job, however, was in Paris.  I was leading a small team of engineers from the company. and we were working with Alcatel, the telecommunications giant, to build a product for the GSM mobile networks which were exploding across the world.  Every week or ten days I would do the fourteen hour trip from Singapore to Paris and return to Singapore for two or three days. 

According to the stub, I left Singapore on the 19^th of August 1997, and that further, I spent the next eight days in Paris.  And that instead of returning direct to Singapore, I took a few days off and diverted via India. Now why.

I remembered that that was the year mother would celebrate her birthday at our ancestral village Payyalore in Palakkad District in Kerala with a religious ceremony, as she would turn sixty.

On August 27^th I took the day flight from Charles de Gaulle to Mumbai.  It was the day my good friend Ramesh was getting married.  Our small circle of friends had all assumed that he was never going to marry, but he did find a girl in the company that he fell in love with.  He had not invited any of us.  I wanted to wish him, so I picked up the credit-card activated telephone that used to be ubiquitous on club class seats on airlines at that time and called his number. I remember speaking to his mother who was absolutely surprised I was making a call from an aeroplane while flying.  

We landed close to midnight. I had booked a room at the (then) nearby Leela Kempinski Hotel. The next day, I took a Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Coimbatore.  My brother in law and his newly wedded wife were alone at their house by the airport – their parents were actually visiting us in Singapore. So the two lovebirds came to pick me up.  I was very happy to be there but I am sure they were enjoying a lot of “us time” until I showed up.  We talked, played cards and went out to a local restaurant in the evening.

The next day my parents arrived by the mid-morning flight from Chennai.  I met them at the airport in a hired Toyota Qualis. It was a pleasant two hour drive through what was supposed to be a national highway to a village called Pallasana where my father’s cousin brother and his family lived.  They were farmers – proper ones, not the kind who build a mansion in the middle of a piece of land.   It was an old style Kerala village house with a sloping tiled roof.  The ablutions were to be done at an outhouse in the garden at the back.  The gentleman who lived there and his wife were simple people, without much education, and full of the goodness of heart. They had a few acres of land on which they grew rice. There was a son, who was finishing a degree at the local college and a daughter for whom they were seeking a groom. 

My father had grown up close to the area and as a child, used to come to this village to see his cousins.  The village boasted an ancient temple on the banks of a lake. The village Brahmins lived along with the upper caste Malayalis in one small straight lane, and a narrow road lead to the temple, past the ubiquitous rubbish dump that increasingly had lots of plastic waste.  I switched to Kerala wear – mundu and shirt. My father, just 66 at that time, and his cousin stripped off to their underwear and swam in the lake while I watched (I cannot swim).  Then in wet clothes, we went to the temple for a darshan. 

My father’s cousin took me to the rice fields he owned. His son was not going to be a farmer and he was a little sad that he would be the last in the line to till the ancestral land.  It was a cloudy day after the rain, the fields were rich and verdant and the air redolent with the smell of growing rice and petrichor.  We talked about how he keeps his produce for home use separate from the crop for sale – he was practicing organic farming without calling it that,  he had a sense that all these chemicals were not good for us in the long run. I was amazed to listen to this kind of talk.

We sat that evening in the courtyard of the house, the sound of crickets all around us and in the near distance, the sound of bells and worship at the temple. I sat on the floor with them enjoying my father and his cousin reminisce about their childhood. I was clearly an object of some interest because I had flown in from Paris but was sitting on the floor in veshti and shirt talking to them in Tamil.   They asked me to mentor their son and also to take good photographs of their daughter using my SLR for prospective grooms to look at. 

The next day we woke early and drove to Payyalore Village which was about 30 kilometres away towards the south.   The village itself has a prominent Agraharam about 600 meters long, a dusty road with an old Krishna temple at one end and a rather green pond at the other end. Some of the houses were old style sloping tiled houses and one or two had been converted to concrete structures.  My late grandfather’s home was now the village post office. The one almost at the end of the road belonged to someone very close to our family – we called him Appai uncle for short.  He and my father were friends and had known each other for many years.

The  birthday celebrations were taking place at the Krishna temple followed by lunch for as many people as we could manage.  First we visited the old Perattikavu Bhagavathy temple nearby. Then my father and I sat inside the sanctum sanctorum of the Krishna temple and participated in a homam.  Accompanied by an army of priests, we recited the Purusa Suktam, one of the most profound prayers in the Hindu worship ritual,  and repeated it eleven times.  My father was very happy that I knew the verses by heart and he told me so. My mother watched with pride.  After the religious functions were done – which lasted some three hours –  fifty people from the village had a proper sit-down “sadya”  paid for by my father and arranged by Appai uncle. A long and tiring day. 

The following day my parents and I went to Guruvayur and Vaikom temples.  When we returned to Pallasana, I took the necessary pictures of the daughter and promised to hand over the developed film to my father’s cousin. 

That afternoon they drove me to the local bus stand so that I could catch a bus to Coimbatore.  My father’s cousin and his wife  also came to see me off.  It was one of those old style Kerala State Transport buses with open windows and thinly-cushioned seats. It was just about to leave so I scrambled on board and sat at a window seat.  And there the most inexplicable thing happened.

My father’s cousin’s wife broke into helpless uncontrollable tears. She sobbed, holding my hand. She kept saying, look how far this child has come. Look how far he has come.

I reached Coimbatore at night.  The next day I caught an Indian Airlines flight to Chennai and that evening, I took the red-eye to Singapore. 

For most of my life I had lived under my father’s disapproving glare and this time, I had clicked with them.  After I left my parents quickly fell out of love with me as they usually did, and all of this was forgotten as my father found something else to disapprove about me. 

Maybe this is why I have always remembered this trip. I have never forgotten the lady’s tears, and have always cherished them for what they meant to her, and hence to me. She knew that I was trying to be a good son.

Island Ghetto

This was submitted to the management of the condo where I live for the inaugural house magazine.  They thought it was a little too out there and rejected it.  So here it is, in all its subversive glory.

We returned to Mumbai after a couple of decades outside the country, to find that the housing societies where the middle class lived, that struggled cheek by jowl with low income flats and the labour hutments and chawls, have been replaced by urban ghettos. In the days gone by, only South Bombay had these wonderful apartment buildings  with art-deco names redolent of the Raj – like Persepolis and Iris.  The old business families (who had their money in one of the Swiss cantons),  and the young thrusters who manned the ramparts in Citibank, Hindustan Lever and other multinationals lived in these apartment complexes. In reality South Bombay was a lonely outpost of the United States, hemmed in by the sea on one end on this benighted island and the locals on the other. Their highly westernized social life and their love lives were all lived within this crowded square mile. Their inhabitants had to perforce cross the dangerous territories of Mahim and Bandra and Andheri to get to Santa Cruz where the Bombay-New York flight awaited them. And they did the transit with trepidation, sometimes holding their nose (which they had to as they approached the Mahim Creek).  Difficult to get in and hard to leave.  A ghetto in every sense of the term.

When we returned, we found that the SoBo Ghetto had been surpassed by these new island ghettos situated in those parts of Bombay the old SoBo-ite would dare not be seen in for fear of social death.  These ghettos were in areas once ruled by some gangster or the other,  some of them legendary for their violence and their control over local politics.  At one time, gangs of Hindu and Muslim hooligans fought each other on the streets in these places. A prominent local gangster was notorious for the number of elections he won while in prison.  Signs of old wealth were all over the place – the textile mills on which Bombay’s many fortunes were made dotted the landscape, shuttered after a doctor turned trade unionist forced them to close down over a strike. The harassed SoBo elite who owned these mills heaved a huge sigh of relief and waited patiently, living no doubt on fresh air and money squirrelled away with the gnomes of Zurich,  for the day when a government pressed for land to accommodate its middle class would enable these mills to be sold for their land value.  And when that day came, some thirty years later,  the land passed into the hands of yet another cohort of the new elite, who bought the land and decided to turn them into island ghettos. This time with guards and walls!

Bombay, after all, was a set of islands, criss-crossed by sea inlets and waterways.  Once upon a time each of these islands had a different feel and ethos and some of them were distinctly for the colonial elite. When the waterways were filled in the brown faces moved in, while the white faces slowly retreated to their clubs and bungalows;  emerging  during the day to step into an office every morning  in Ballard Estate replete in cotton suit and sola topee, nod to Mr Iyer who did the typing and to Mr Srinivasan the accountant, to his spacious office with a huge ceiling fan revolving lazily on the ceiling, and proceed to conduct business based on the rent-seeking that marked the colonial enterprise. Paper. Medicines.  Books. Textiles. Machinery for the railways.  Or even banking – at the Chartered Bank of India, China and Australia,  or at the Mercantile Bank. In the evening, retire to the club and ask the bearah to bring a gin and tonic juldee juldee.

These new island ghettos of the 21^st century are nothing if not salubrious. Of course, a uniformed guard stands at the gate and demands to see proof of residence. This being India, on the third day after you move in, he greets you with a big smile and waves you in. All other lesser mortals have to fill in a chit and get the sahab or memsaab you are visiting to sign it.  Outside the ghetto, the roads are lined with debris – if not the smelly stuff of the morning ablutions. Men and women hurry along in clothes purchased in Dadar Market for a song. What passes for a pavement is filled with vendors selling daily needs.  Vehicles dodge past double-parked vehicles.  And the street itself is lined with the usual set of shops. Fancy Goods. The local liquor shop. Medical. Plastics. Provisions. People jostle past each other as Bombay struggles to make a living without any help or support of anything other than the sweat of their brow.

Inside the ghetto, it is magic.  Manicured lawns appear on the left. Little children in the latest from Tarte Tatin  or Gap Kids run on the lawn playing football or cricket. Other children dart around furiously on their little push-scooters, maids in tow trying to keep a hold on the kid while maintaining the conversation on their mobile phones with loved ones back in Bharat. Burra Sahibs in khaki shorts and polo shirts walk about, no doubt discussing the latest new buyout deal or reveling in the self-respect that a new, resurgent India now makes them feel. Shapely women in fashionable gym-tights head to the fitness centre or the heated pool.  Old men walk slowly talking of the good old days. Old ladies sit in the deck chairs on the upper deck, talking fondly of their grandchildren.  Mixed gatherings of parents try to boast about their children while not boasting about their children.  Water is plentiful.  There is no shortage of power.  And if you wanted to top up on your bread and eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast, why, there is a superette in the basement! Need that freshly dry-cleaned suit to notch up yet another conquest on the corporate bedpost? There is a laundry!  Everything is digital these days yaar but sometimes these maids nah want some cash – so there is an ATM!  On Saturday nights the young centurions and their centurionettes can visit other centurions and centurionettes, sashaying across in their finest, free to drink as much they want without worrying about the drive back home.

Too cynical? Perhaps, but all this is true. What is also true is that this being India, a real community tends to form. Births and weddings are celebrated together.  Deaths are condoled together. Festivals are celebrated in the lawns.  During the pandemic real efforts were made to ensure essential supplies reached the ghetto. Friendships are formed and there has been a building romance or three. There are divorces, sadly.  And the parties are harmless fun most of the time. Bollywood songs are belted out either by one of the larks in the building or by a wannabe lark aided and abetted by alcohol. 

All these ghettos – these islands really – are linked to each other by the new pathways of Whatsapp and Facebook, establishing connections between other similar ghettos and their denizens.  Along with the textile mills the Hindu Muslim riots are gone (or so we hope) from these areas, and the entire local community now revolves around the buying power of these ghettos – whether for house-help, drivers, security guards, or for local commerce.  There is a renewal taking place in these communities. The local gangster who ruled the community through the chawls in which millworkers lived, has enabled the sale of that whole complex to augur the arrival of yet another ghetto in its place for the more of the upper middle class. Perhaps this is how it should be.

It is perhaps not wise to be too Marxist or too Scandinavian about the existence of these ghettos. There is no civic requirement for a social conscience, only a moral one.  One should not ignore the fact that the residents of these ghettos power businesses, run banks and companies,  raise capital and provide services.  All of which helps the economy and employs those not in the ghetto.  And the beauty about Bombay – unlike places like Sao Paolo for instance – is that everyone is aspirational.  And this is the kind of city where one can be aspirational regardless of who you are and where you come from. I remember taking an Emirates flight and they sent a car to pick me up at night. The driver greeted me and told me his name was Deepak.  I asked him where he was from and he mentioned a place in Tamil Nadu that is known for its barren land and perennial lack of water.  The conversation switched to Tamil.  I asked him how long he has been in Bombay. He said something like 20 years. This is deivalogam (God’s own world), he said  – if you are prepared to work, you will eat.

So let’s raise a glass  to this particular ghetto. A warm and pleasant island, full of community spirit, where men are men and women are beautiful, and it’s an English summer’s day all year long.

Tienanmen Square Redux

In this essay I comment on “Tienanmen Papers” by Vijay Gokhale.  Mr Gokhale was India’s top diplomat, serving as Foreign Secretary until his retirement in February 2020. He served three stints in China, ending up as Ambassador, and has the distinction of also serving as India’s top diplomat in Taiwan (as head of the India-Taiwan Association in Taipei that serves as India’s unofficial embassy).  

Vijay Gokhale’s “Tienanmen Papers”  is a wonderful read. It shows the depth of understanding Indian diplomats have of the People’s Republic and the undercurrents of Chinese politics.  They have a level of expertise as good as the best western commentators when it comes to China. This is good to know and augurs well for India. 

In his book, Gokhale states that the death and destruction on the night of June 3 is highly exaggerated and nowhere on the scale that has been reported by the Western Press.   Accounts in the Western media stated that thousands of students were run over by tanks and massacred by PLA troops on the night of June 3. While he will not be drawn into comparisons of scale, and he is not hewing to the official Chinese line, he believes it was not as big as reported.  Western diplomats and their media chose to see and hear what they wanted to see and hear, he says, and hence would believe any account without cross-verification. He accuses journalists of the same crime.

Why these conclusions need to be taken seriously is because of his impressive credentials and his scholarship.   Gokhale was a junior foreign service officer in the Indian Embassy in Beijing in 1988-89 when these events took place. He was lucky enough to be allotted diplomatic accommodation at the Qijiayuan Diplomatic Enclave, with a balcony that opened on Chang’An Avenue.  If you step out of the Enclave and walk  west on Chang’An Avenue, you will reach Tiananmen Square in a couple of kilometres.  This gave him a ring-side view as events unfolded. His fluency in written and spoken Putonghua meant he could follow what was said and written at that time.  He supplements his first-hand accounts with deep scholarship on Chinese history,  and he helps explain the chain of events that led up to this seminal punctuation point in Chinese politics.  He says he had to wait until he retired as India’s top diplomat to write this book and one can understand why.

He correctly observes that during any kind of turmoil, rumours and innuendo fly around and it is the job of serious diplomats to winnow the chaff and wait for verified facts to emerge.  This, he says, American and British diplomats failed to do and their media doubled down on it.  He quotes specific cables sent by the US Embassy back to the State Department and now unclassified,  and contrasts them with the reality of what was actually happening. 

American and British commentators, as observed, chose to see these events through tinted glasses.  The result is that the liberal West thinks in terms of Chinese human rights. As he points out, after the dust had settled down,  none of these liberal views were a factor in subsequent hard-headed American economic and strategic diplomacy with respect to China. 

His description of events over the previous decade that culminated in Tienanmen is masterly. The spark of the student protests, as we know, was the death of Hu Yaobang in April 1989.  Hu Yaobang was the man handpicked by Deng Xiao Ping to succeed Hua Guofeng as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the most powerful of positions in the Party and hence the State.  Hua was the man chosen by Mao as his successor.  Getting rid of Hua was essential to Deng’s vision of getting rid of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution,  modernising China’s economy and bringing China into the 20th century.  Deng was always very clear that nothing or nobody could compromise the supremacy of the Communist Party. For him, the Party was everything. Within the broad supervision of the Party, Deng wanted to introduce economic pragmatism which involved liberalisation. However over the years Hu started to talk of political liberalisation instead of focusing on economic liberalisation, and this message was heard by youth who were anyway unhappy with lack of opportunity. As a result Hu was ruthlessly removed from his post of General Secretary by Deng in 1987.  And his death in 1989 caused youth to come out on to the streets and squares in Beijing to mourn someone who seemed to advocate for change. 

Deng had Hu Yaobang replaced by Zhao Ziyang as General Secretary of the Party in the belief that Zhao would also keep the focus on economic liberalisation without compromising on the hold of the Party.  However Zhao Ziyang had his Prime Minister Li Peng, who was supposed to handle the economics agenda for Deng, to contend with in a power struggle. 

The power struggle lead to a number of missteps and miscommunications on the real intent of the Party which were misread by Western observers and diplomats as an unraveling of the one Party state.  It led to the embarrassing situation in the middle of May 1989, when the head of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev was supposed to visit Beijing to end thirty years of rivalry and bad blood with the Chinese. It was one of Deng Xiaoping’s personal objectives and he was going to meet and talk to Gorbachev to rejuvenate relations between the two Communist giants.  Tienanmen Square and most of central Beijing was reduced a squalid mass of students squatting there. Instead of being swept to Zhongnanhai via the grand Chang’An Avenue, Gorbachev had to be taken via a bunch of back roads.  It was hugely embarrassing for the Chinese and for Deng in particular. 

From then on, Deng asserted his authority.  He had Zhao pushed aside, and got the party elders to pick the relatively unknown and colourless Jiang Zemin (from the Shanghai unit of the Party) to become the General Secretary. Zhao was later dismissed and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.  Li Peng was punished for his powerplay by being denied the big job of General Secretary.  Martial Law was declared on May 20 and all demonstrations were banned. The troops surrounding Beijing entered the city and moved towards the Forbidden City.   The Army slowly and relatively peacefully, cleared Beijing of the students.  Most of the moderate students, who did not want to topple the government but were making simple demands like more jobs and more opportunities, had anyway been side lined by extreme radicals, who were attacking the Party and its leaders with personal remarks.

This was observed by Gokhale and Indian embassy staffers when they drove around the city on May 24 after the initial clean-up had taken place.  They noted that Radio Beijing had started referring to Deng as “Chairman Deng” and they took this as a sign that the Party had reasserted control, and informed New Delhi as such. They did not believe the Chinese Government was going to fall. By the time the night of June 3 arrived, only the Tienanmen Square had students. According to Gokhale, there was some firing, and in other parts of Beijing, clashes between students and the troops. Indian Embassy officials saw a line of destroyed PLA armoured personnel carriers, and assumed there must have been some fightback or perhaps a clash between PLA troops.  

Without hazarding numbers or estimates, he does not believe the killings were on a scale shown in the documentary “The Gate of Heavenly Peace”  or in any of the documents and books written in the years since.   If there had been, he implies, he would have seen it.  He dismisses the “Statue Of Liberty” erected out of plastic material facing the Heavenly Gate, and does not refer to the famous man in front of the tank. 

As we know, the real significance of the events of April and May 1989, culminating in whatever happened on Tienanmen Square on the night of June 3^rd, is that cemented in place the trade-off that the Chinese have lived with since then.  Since that day, the Chinese GDP went up from US$500bn to US$14trn today. Per capita incomes are approaching middle-income levels at around US$12,500 per annum.  The Chinese have the ability to travel freely, get wealthy, enjoy their money and their lives. Gone are the drab days of the 1980s – even in 1993 I could see ten bicycle lanes on the wide Chang’An Avenue and two car lanes. Today you cannot spot a bicycle on Chang’An Avenue. 

But there is no political liberty.  Given that the Chinese Government drew a curtain of lead on the entire happening, there is no possibility that any truth will emerge. Even the heartfelt observances in Hong Kong have been snuffed out.  The relentless march of Xi Jingping to take on the mantle of Mao and Deng means that there is no chance of any form of coming to terms. 

Democracy, human rights, individual freedoms – these are values that underpin the way the West sees itself ever since the end of World War II, and chooses to judge the rest of the world on these benchmarks.  These are indeed universal values and everyone is entitled to choose his leader, enjoy his individual freedoms and have his basic rights to life, liberty and property protected.  But other societies need not see things the same way.  In post 1991 China, as long as individual economic liberties coincide with the objectives of the State, there is no conflict. But there can be no political liberty for individuals because the Party will never give up control.

The Chinese people have had a long and unhappy history ever since the humiliations began in 1840 at the hands of the opium-selling British.  Since 1979 they have made huge advances towards education, opportunity and economic freedom of a kind that is unprecedented.  The way ahead is going to be harder. Geopolitics and financial mismanagement may limit the rate at which wealth increases.  An aging society will impose additional care costs on younger people. Will this lead to rising dissatisfaction, and a fresh push for a greater say in how the State is run?

After all Chinese youth activism is not new.  They go back to May 4 1919, when Chinese youth burst into the streets protesting the supine manner in which the Republic of China acquiesced to the handover of German colonies on the Chinese mainland to Japan as part of the Versailles peace settlement. 

What about his claim that the disturbances were not as bad as CNN and the NYT made them out to be?  It could well be so. But as he implies, the real confrontation is what took place between April 15 1989 (when the mourning for Hu Yaobang’s demise began) to May 20 1989 (when martial law was declared).  There was a genuine demand for political freedoms of a limited nature.  These demands were amplified beyond their original intent due of a power struggle within the Party, in which Zhao and his allies were fully complicit in leading the West to believe that a fundamental reworking of the Chinese state was underway. This was music to Western ears in the context of what was happening in the USSR at the same time. There was a genuine danger that the Party could lose control.  And once Deng stepped in and took charge, the Party reasserted supremacy.  And that, he says, is how things will stay.

Indian Islam and British Colonial Rule in India

This is an abbreviated version of a longish paper I wrote recently on this subject. If you would like to read the paper please email me on ravir1208@gmail.com and I will be glad to mail you a copy.

The terms Deoband and Barelwi have come to be associated with militant Islam, thanks to the Taliban and to several violent incidents in India and Pakistan. In India, the recent incident in Udaipur was blamed on two individuals who claimed affiliation with the Barelwis and also were visitors to the Dargah at Ajmer.  Given that  in the days before 1947, the Muslim League advocated for and successfully partitioned India on the basis of religion, there were always going to be elements in India who consider Indian Muslims to be fifth-columnists for Pakistan at worst or working to bring Islamic law to India.

Hindu nationalism in India is not new, and it can be dated back to the assumption of British Crown rule in 1858. But it has gained steam in the last thirty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1991, as evidenced by the rise of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP).  This force is here to stay.  The Hindu nationalist message of the Hindu Mahasabha was similar to that of the Muslim League – Hindus and Muslims are two nations.

The Indian National Congress that lead the Independence movement believed in a composite nationalism based on India being the home of all Indians regardless of religion.  They were staunchly opposed by the Muslim League who voiced the two nation theory right from 1930 onwards, resulting in the formal claim for Pakistan in March 1940.  The Muslim League was always loyal to the British Crown, and their unwavering view was that if the British leave, they have to split the country rather than leave India’s Muslims to the Hindu hordes.

They were also opposed by the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS who wanted a Hindu nation, were equal votaries of the two nation theory, and who essentially sat out most of the Independence movement due to this basic disagreement with the Congress.

But did the Muslim League truly represent all shades of Muslim opinion? And were all Muslims loyal to the British to a fault, to ensure the British would protect them from Hindu nationalism?  

The upper-class Muslims in India were the first to be affected by the increasing military and political might of the British. The decline of Muslim political power in India was precipitous following the death of Aurangzeb, and nearly complete by 1764. It took a few more decades until 1803 for the last rites to be performed.

The Muslim angst at this loss was directed towards the British. As early as 1730,  a Muslim thinker and preacher, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, was indoctrinated into the concepts of the extreme form Islam in Medina that first surfaced in the 13^th century. He was taught these concepts by a preacher of Indian origin, and his fellow student was another fiery young man, Muhammad al-Wahhab.

Al-Wahhab internalised these extreme interpretations and helped the Al-Saud tribe conquer most of Arabia, and where they hold power today, and where Al-Wahhab is revered.  Waliullah returned to India and taught his Indian Muslim students to purify themselves and wage holy war against the British at a Madrassah in Delhi that was very prestigious amongst the Muslim elite.  

His mantle was taken up by another student, Syed Ahmad. In 1803 when the Mughal Emperor signed away what little power he had in exchange for a pension from the East India Company, he was enraged. He tried to interest a local warrior to wage war but that person was a freebooter. He then preached and taught the Wahhabi message of unrelenting holy war against the British, quite unnoticed by the Company, and helping found the Wahhabi hub in Sadiqpore, in Patna.

After a pilgrimage to Mecca, he launched the first of such Holy Wars – against the Sikhs. He was killed in battle in 1830.  Since then his disciples launched several such actions against the British while all the while expanding the Wahhabi presence in India via a network of cells operating independently of each other. Some of these were nipped in the bud thanks to alert Company officials, who by 1840 were aware of “Hindustanee Fanatics” operating in India. 

As Muslims became increasingly marginalised, thanks to the switch to English in education and administration, the intensity of the Wahhabi angst increased.  In 1857 the Mutiny broke out, lead by upper caste Hindu sepoys. Attempts to convert this into jihad failed but the Wahhabi Muslims fought the British hard along with their Hindu counterparts. Thanks to a lucky arrest in Patna of the entire Wahhabi leadership, the Wahhabi cells did not participate in the Mutiny – if they had, the outcome for the British would have been far worse.  The Mutiny ended with the British cleansing Delhi of its Muslims and regarding Muslims with suspicion everywhere. 

At this juncture, the Wahhabis from Delhi made a crucial switch. The remaining Wahhabi leaders in Delhi understood that violent action was neither feasible nor productive given the extreme repression of the Muslims by the British. Muslim rule was never going to return. So they chose a town north-east of Delhi called Deoband, and there they established a school called the Deoband Dar-Ul-Uloom where they taught young Muslims how to live an Islamic life and the basics of modernity. They abandoned violence and focused on purification while retaining their basic premise – that the British should leave India. 

The Wahhabis in Patna continued to be active but now disconnected from their former Delhi counterparts.  Their paramilitary activity continued in a low-key manner until 1871. Two high-profile assassinations by these Wahhabis – one of the Chief Justice of Bengal and another of the Viceroy Lord Mayo – lead to a crackdown on the Wahhabis and most of them were sentenced to very long terms in the Andaman prisons. The Wahhabi headquarters in Patna was demolished and converted into a public garden.

As we know, after 1857, the Hindu revival began as Hindus occupied almost all administrative positions offered by the British.  Indians started to get co-opted into decision-making councils.  The Deoband school started to develop a reputation for their views on religious matters and by the last quarter of the 19^th century, was considered second only to the famed Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

The Deobandi leaders now made an important and seminal pronouncement. They instructed their followers to collaborate and co-operate with the Hindus in the mission to rid India of the British. All of this was long before any formal independence movement began.  Though the Indian National Congress was founded around this time, it was just a talking shop for Indians loyal to Empire. It was not until Tilak in the late 1890s that the Congress started to talk of self-government. Independence was much later.

From here on this remained the philosophy of the Deobandis – work with Hindus to rid India of colonial rule. And when the Congress started to espouse the cause of self-government, the Deobandis were with them every inch of way.  Predictably this caused a reaction amongst the orthodox Muslims.  The Barelwi Sunni movement launched in the late 19^th century. While they had religious differences with the Deobandis, the biggest point of divergence was they believed Muslims were a separate nation and could not co-exist with the Hindu majority. They were loyal to the British Crown on the basis that the Christians were people of the Book.  Well before the Muslim League began to talk of two nations, the Barelwis were ahead of them by twenty years. These developments coincided with the first all Indian census which showed how much of a minority the Muslims were.  And, it coincided with the launch of modern Western style education for Muslims in Aligarh by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. 

The turn of the century saw the formal establishment of the Muslim League, with the now anglicised elite from the Aligarh school in its ranks, who warned the British that in any future political dispensation the Muslims deserved an out-sized carveout.  This demand took the form of reserved electorates to start with, and then progressed on to the two state formulation. Loyalty to the Crown was the foremost consideration.

The political battleground in India from the Jallianwala Bagh killings is often reduced to the byplay between the Congress and the Jinnah-lead Muslim League. We also hear of Savarkar, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS.  What we do not hear about is the complete support the Deobandis gave to Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress through and through, and championed the cause of Hindu Muslim unity. As we know the communal situation frayed through the 1920s. As the Hindu Muslim estrangement grew, the League and the Barelwis acted in tandem – the League consisting of the anglicised Muslim upper class and the Barelwis addressed the uneducated Muslim lower classes.  

After the wreckage of the Round Table Conferences had been cleared, and after another round of Civil Disobedience (with the Deobandis in lockstep with the Congress),  the Government of India Act 1935 was passed and that lead to elections in the provinces. The electorate in total consisted of 30 million people pre-selected on the basis of education and property.  The Congress won a resounding victory overall with Deobandi support. The League, supported by the Barelwis, finished a very poor second. The Congress refused (rightly) to accommodate the League in government, which Jinnah took as a personal affront. 

In 1939, the Congress resigned the ministries to protest the British decision to commit India to war without any promise of self-government or independence in return for support.  And in 1942 the Congress announced the Quit India Movement. Though it was supposed to be non-violent, it was actually (in Lord Linlithgow’s words) the most serious challenge to British rule since 1857.  In both decisions the Deobandis supported the Congress. In both cases the Muslim League was quick to rush into the breach and promise eternal loyalty and support to the British, supported by the Barelwis. In retrospect both these decisions were blunders, because it evacuated the public space and allowed Jinnah a free hand, and the violence of the Quit India movement did not endear the Congress leadership to the British who were fighting for survival. 

Driven by American pressure and domestic compulsions, the British freed all the Congress leaders in 1944 and started to move India towards some form of self-rule – the stated objective of the Attlee Government that took power in October 1945.  In 1946 elections were held in British India – roughly 50% of the country; the other 50% under the Princely states sat them out. The election was conducted on the basis of reserved seats for Muslims where only Muslim candidates could stand.  The Muslim League captured nearly all these reserved seats, giving them 423 seats in contrast to the Congress’s 923 seats. Pakistan was now a reality. 

Right through, the Deobandis kept the faith in favour of composite nationalism and unity between Hindus and Muslims.  They believed they were Indians first as Muslims had been buried in Indian soil for centuries.  Their belief system was compatible with their basic belief in Islamic purification – that India was a country in which two nations lived and each of them had the right and duty to peaceful co-existence. 

When Partition was hurried through, it was not a day of happiness for the Deobandis. By this time the Deobandis had split into a Pakistani entity who started to go back to the Wahhabism that the Deobandis had abandoned some 80 years before.

Correcting these misconceptions is essential to the future of India, which has a large minority of Muslims for whom India is their home.  The constant suspicion that Muslims do not deserve to be Indian because the Muslim League forced the creation of Pakistan is unfair to our fellow citizens. Islam needs to address genuine problems within its followers in terms of education, attainment and opportunity.  Islamic terrorism has given the whole religion a bad name. The religion needs to modernize further and complete its transition to the modern era. Threatening violence in the name of religion is wrong – whether it is Muslim or Hindu.  If Muslim leaders pull their kids out of secular schools it hurts those kids and feeds into the narrative of the right wing. Moving today’s Indian Muslims more into the mainstream is the function of not just the Indian state but also of Muslim thought leaders with Hindu support.  And this is why it is important that we all understand the past.      

Ukraine, Finland and Mannerheim

The parallels between Finland and Ukraine are uncanny.   Both countries were part of Russia. Both of them broke off from the Russian Empire in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Both of them suffered civil war as a result. And both of them fought on the side of the Nazis in the Second World War. 

The similarities end there. The single biggest factor that differentiated Finland from Ukraine was essentially the leadership of one man. Field Marshal Gustav Mannerheim. Now forgotten everywhere except in Finland, it was this man’s hand on the wheel from 1918 to 1945 that saw Finland fight off the communist threat not once, but thrice.

Finland is a very young nation. Until 1809 it was part of the powerful Swedish Empire which dominated Northern Europe especially around the Baltic Sea.  Towards the East was the rising Russian Empire, with its relatively new capital in St Petersburg. In 1808 war broke out between the two Empires and ended in a Swedish defeat.  Finland was the prize for the Russians – a dirt-poor country, hard to live in, and the source of cheap labour for wealthy Swedes.

Now the Russian Tsar did something very wise. He made Finland a semi-autonomous part of the Russian Empire and called it a Grand Duchy.  The Tsar became the Grand Duke of Finland, and he appointed a Russian Governor General.  But the local language of education and administration continued to be Swedish and Finnish – with local noblemen very often speaking no Finnish at all.  Finns could move to Russia, and find employment or join the Russian Armed Forces. 

One such person who went to Russia to find a living was Carl Gustav Mannerheim. Born in 1867, he came from a genteel but impoverished Finnish noble family who were more Swedish than Finnish.  He managed to get into the best cavalry school in St Petersburg and when he graduated in 1887, he joined the Chevalier Guard Regiment, the Praetorian Guard for the Tsar himself – the smartest, fittest, most attractive unit in the Russian Army.

To serve in the Russian Army one needed to be fluent in Russian, which Carl Gustav was. And as a smart Chevalier Guard, he was part of the Russian elite and the toast of St Petersburg society.  Tiring of his largely ceremonial duties, he volunteered to serve with a cavalry unit in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, in which he learnt a number of lessons from the Japanese.

In 1905, he volunteered to lead a small Russian spying expedition across Central Asia into China, accompanying the French linguist and sinologist Paul Pelliot who acted as his cover, to map the area and study the state of the Chinese Army.  He learnt Chinese, met the Dalai Lama, and stumbled on the caves at Dunhuang – but did nothing about them. His companion Paul Pelliot stopped, as had Aurel Stein a year before, and Pelliot gained fame as the man who brought the Silk Road manuscripts to the Western world. 

He came back to St Petersburg with a successful expedition behind him and regaled the Tsar with stories of his adventures.  He gained promotion to Major General.  This was Tsar Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894, and had a reputation for being quite dim and obtuse. 

When he came to the throne, Tsar Nicholas made the mistake of trying to Russify Finland by banning the Finnish language and forcing all Finns to learn Russian. Disaffection against the Russians started to grow in Mannerheim’s homeland.  And elsewhere in Russia, feelings against the Tsar were increasing fueled by the disastrous defeat Russia suffered against the Japanese. It lead to the 1905 Revolution.

When the Great War began in 1914, Mannerheim commanded divisions of the Russian Army in Poland that were facing the Austrians. Mannerheim did very well, scoring some spectacular successes against the Austrians. The Tsar was pleased and he was promoted to General.  Elsewhere the war was going very badly for the Russians. The Tsar then made the mistake of assuming personal command of the army. That simply made him the target of the resentments of Russian troops fighting against superior German forces.

The Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, and Mannerheim realised that being a General in the Russian Army of the Tsar was not wise. He was in St Petersburg when the army mutinied, and he had the narrowest of escapes from the Bolsheviks.    He made his way to Finland.  Finland, meanwhile, was split between the Finnish Socialists (or Reds) and the anti communist Whites. The Red included the Russian garrisons in Finland. The Red were allied to the Bolsheviks and wanted a closer embrace with the new Soviet movement. The Whites were Finnish nationalists who wanted independence. A civil war broke out.

Mannerheim took charge of the Finnish White Armies, and lead them to victory against the Reds. Finland became an independent nation, a republic, for the first time in its history in 1920. Mannerheim continued on in Finland, but he was now at odds with the Socialists who were half the electorate and remembered his brutal tactics in several of the battles he won in the Civil War.  He was slipping out of national life, when in 1939 tensions arose with the Soviet Union.

The casus belli was the proximity of the Finnish border in the Karelian Peninsula to Leningrad (formerly St Petersburg).  It was just 35 miles of flat country. Though the Soviets had concluded the infamous pact with Germany in August 1939, Stalin did not trust Hitler (he did not trust anyone for that matter).  Stalin knew that the Finns had a lot of affinity with the Germans and pondered whether the Wehrmacht would, with or without Finnish support, attack Leningrad via the Karelian Peninsula. It would be a short cut.

Mannerheim had all along been warning the Finnish President that the Soviets will attack Finland at some point due to this very issue. He had advocated taking St Petersburg when the Soviet Union was weak but the Finnish leadership would not approve. Now he was being proved right.

On November 30 1939  the Soviet Army attacked Finland, expecting to overrun the country within ten days and welcome a new Soviet Socialist Republic to the USSR.  Mannerheim assumed charge of the Finnish Armed Forces that very day. It was a mismatch made for the ages. Finland had barely 100,000 men at arms out of her total population of 3.5 million. There was no anti-tank weaponry, artillery, mortars or guns worth the name. The Finnish Air Force was a joke. Mannerheim was not discouraged. He had two advantages the Soviets did not have – his part-time soldiery were men of the woods, used to the cold, very hardy and naturals on skis. And they knew the terrain.

And so began one of the most unequal wars in history. The Soviets won, but some 400,000 Soviet soldiers lay dead and wounded and some 3500 Soviet tanks and 500 Soviet aircraft were destroyed.  The Finns lost 70,000 dead and wounded, 25 tanks and 60 aircraft.  It was a brutal conflict.  The Finnish sniper Simo Hayha notched up some 500 kills, lying prone covered by snow and picking off clumsy Soviet soldiers at 1500 yards.  They also invented the Molotov cocktail – so called because when Soviet aircraft bombed Helsinki, Vyacheslav Molotov – the Soviet Foreign Minister – claimed that they were just dropping food packets.  So here are some cocktails Mr Molotov, they seemed to be saying. The tactics against heavy armour of the Soviets was low-tech but inspired.  Finnish troops would scuttle through to the advancing tank and plant a Molotov cocktail on the tank tracks. Finnish riflemen would walk up as close as possible to a Soviet tank, and shoot right into the driver’s  sight of the tank, killing the driver.

Mannerheim was a pragmatist. He was getting some aid from Sweden but no one wanted to get involved against the Russians. He realised that the war would have to end in a way that the Soviets would get some of what they want but leave the Finns alone. It was approaching March. The spring thaw would begin, negating the weather advantage. Second, the Soviet Army had learnt their lesson, and had begun to co-ordinate artillery, tank, infantry and air support to overwhelm the Finnish line. The Finns had started to fall back as their lack of numbers began to tell. And despite promises of British and French help, not much was going to materialize – and no one wanted to take on the Soviet Union. 

Stalin was also keen to reach a settlement. He made a crucial concession – he would not insist on full occupation of Finland. This “police action” had now taken up a third of his armed forces, and forced seasoned generals like Marshal Voroshilov into retirement.  

The Swedes opened a back-channel with the Soviet Union.  While the Finns did their best to hold the Soviet Armies in check,  a Finnish delegation made its way to Moscow where they were met by Molotov.  On Stalin’s orders, he asked the Finns to give up nearly 18% of their territory – the Karelian peninsula and the northern port of Petsamo (which had anyway been occupied by the Soviet Union at the start of the war).  The Finns were appalled. 

While negotiations were going on, the Soviet Army surged forward against heroic Finnish resistance. The Mannerheim line – a set of Finnish defences near Leningrad where the Soviets had been held for nearly three months – was breached by the Soviets and tank divisions started to roll forward towards Helsinki.

Mannerheim immediately advised the Finnish President to sign. He told the President that defeating the Soviet Union was now impossible. The Finns did not have the numbers. The Red Army had absorbed the harsh lessons from the war and had completely revamped tactics. It was now a disciplined force.  A full-scale military defeat was very much on the cards. 

On March 11 1940 a cease-fire took effect. The Finns arose from their trenches, and along with Finnish civilians living in the Karel, they made their way back to the new border.  Stalin kept his end of the bargain. Finland ceded the northern port of Petsamo, and the entire Eastern Karelian peninsula that included the historic Finnish town of Viipuri – now the Russian town of Vyborg. 

Stalin, of course, knew that one day Germany and the USSR might be at war, and that at that time, Finland might side with the Germans. But there was no war yet. Inevitably, the Germans broke their pact with the USSR and attacked.  As soon as hostilities began, the Germans reached out to Finland to ask if they would join them in the assault. Mannerheim was only too willing but with some stringent conditions. One – it was not an alliance, they were co-aggressors. Two – no anti-semitism.

A much modernized and re-armed Finnish Army invaded the Soviet Union in August 1941 and retook at the lands they had lost in 1939. They stopped outside Leningrad but did not move further inland, and did not join in the siege. Germany made representations to woo Finland closer into the German embrace, including a surprise visit by Adolf Hitler himself to greet Mannerheim on his 75^th birthday. 

Ever alive to the military situation, Mannerheim watched as the German war machine began to falter. In May 1943 he noted the defeat of German armour in the Battle of Kursk. The Soviet Army was beginning to counter-attack with vigour and the lifting of the 900-day siege of Leningrad was imminent. In January 1944 Soviet forces broke through to Leningrad, relieving the siege. The Germans were in retreat.

By this time, the Allies had also declared war on Finland and in fact, the RAF had mounted a raid on Petsamo. Churchill wrote privately to Mannerheim regretting that war had to be declared on a German ally because he held Mannerheim in high esteem.  In return Mannerheim ensured all British subjects in Finland were safe and respectfully escorted back home via Sweden.

Finland soon began discussing peace terms with the USSR but abandoned these talks as they found the terms too onerous.But before the peace talks began, Mannerheim wrote directly to Hitler, asking him to understand that he had a duty to Finland and appreciating the fact that the “Germans in Finland were certainly not the representatives of foreign despotism but helpers and brothers-in-arms…nothing whatsoever happened that could have induced us to consider the German troops intruders or oppressors.”

In June 1944, the Soviet Union attacked the Finnish positions. This time, with concentrated combined artillery and tank assaults, they rapidly pushed the Finns back and re-occupied Petsamo and Viipuri (Vyborg).  The Finns were not done – getting Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons from the Wehrmacht they fought Soviet tanks in fierce engagements.  War raged on in July and August.  By then the Soviets were throwing the Germans back in Eastern Europe and heading for the main prize – Berlin.  Mannerheim judged this to be the right time for peace talks, assumed the Presidency of Finland, and sued for peace.

The peace terms came into effect in September 1944. Essentially, Finland was to disarm, cede all territories occupied in 1941, pay reparations and throw the Germans out of Finland. The Germans left relatively peacefully except in northern Finland. Henceforth Finland was to foreswear any alliances against the Soviet Union.   There was no talk of occupation.

The deal struck then is still in effect today. There was talk of Mannerheim and other Finnish leaders being indicted for war crimes at Nuremberg but this did not last. Even the peace terms, in retrospect, were quite generous.

So why Stalin was so generous?

It appeared that Stalin really liked the old man.  He knew Mannerheim had served in the Russian Armies, still wore all the medals from the Tsar with pride, and still had a portrait of the Tsar in his home, which he saluted on the Tsar’s birthday.  He also knew that Mannerheim spoke fluent Russian (his Finnish remained rusty to the end).  He liked (and was equally upset by) Mannerheim’s inspired defence of his homeland. He trusted Mannerheim to maintain neutrality. In fact it was Stalin who told the victorious Allies that Mannerheim was not to be arraigned in the Nuremberg trials. He had committed no crime – just mounted a passionate and principled defence of his homeland. And who could blame him for that.

Once Finland was safe, a tired Mannerheim died in March 1946.