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King
was Singh
 A couple of years ago, William Dalrymple, in some interviews given
prior to the publication of The Last Mughal, set the cat among the
pigeons by comparing the popular historian in the western world with
what was the case in India. He said that while in the West, you had
historians like Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson engaged in popular
history, writing biographies of interesting and intriguing
characters or coming up with a historical perspective on
contemporary events in regular columns, historians in India weren’t
doing that. Indian historians descended on Dalrymple like a tonne of
bricks and insisted that appropriate and relevant work in
India was indeed going on. The debate, like several such, generated
more heat than light and wasn’t exactly settled.
This is not to say that Navtej Sarna’s Exile belongs to that genre
of writing history in anaccessible way (which perhaps also implies
historical themes handled in English, more journalistic than
academic, and brought out by a big publishing house, out in
paperback very soon). Sarna does not even make such a claim. In his
note, he admits that he has pushed the boundaries of fact and merged
it with fiction, if only, as he says, to “reach for the edges of
Duleep Singh’s story… pushing available facts towards the realm of
fiction, but pushing them gently, so as not to distort them”. To the
author’s credit, he does it well, and fulfils, at least in some
measure, the need for taking on a subject with a deep historical
resonance, appeal and context. In a system like ours, obsessive
about dates and heroes as far as history went, The Exile is an
interesting attempt to look at the life of Duleep Singh, the
youngest of Ma haraja Ranjit Singh’s “acknowledged sons”, who at the
age of 11 was the last Maharaja of Punjab. Duleep didn’t really know
his father well, he was almost doubtful of his paternity, in this
novel, and exhausted by the inheritance which hedescribes as
“crushing”.
 As
the young Duleep Singh is taken by the British and sent off to live
in the UK as a “country squire” (not before converting him to
Christianity), the novel tries to detail his life through, apart
from himself, four contemporaries — his ADC, his mother’s maid, his
British guardian and his “trusted” chief of staff, who is by
self-admission, fascinated by his “talent for misfortune”. The
details and the narrative that emerge are rich and make good reading
because of the five pairs of eyes that take you through the tragedy
of
Punjab as it splintered after Ranjit Singh’s death. Even the account
of the maidservant, the charming and ambitious Mangla, details an
important segment of Indian life in the 19th century. It is almost
Mantoesque, with descriptions of Lahore, Hira Mandi, the
punkahwallahs, the kanjarkhana, and the deep desire of a girl there
to escape the gullies and bazaars and make it to higher quarters.
The Exile deals with much more than just the estrangement of a
failed prince from
Punjab,
who found both his father’s legacy and the hostile circumstances
unbearable. Duleep Singh dies a lonely man, broken and miserable in
the novel, in a nondescript hotel in
Paris. However, for all the loneliness in the end, Duleep Singh’s is
a crowded exile, which perhaps makes it even more difficult to cope
with. He describes how those who baptised him used water from the
Ganga
“to add a holy dimension of the river for me”. Duleep does trust his
new extended family for a while — on church visits and gossip
sessions in the sun with them — but soon enough the truth about
Dalhousie’s devious plans sinks in, of people who took away all his
possessions, including the Koh-i-Noor, with a pension purportedly to
buy his rights and his soul.
Duleep tries to give up his (deeply unfulfilling) second life and
makes an attempt to regain his identity by reconverting to Sikhism.
He meets his mother (Bibiji) in her final days and describes his
fascinating visits to
Buckingham Palace and being allowed to hold the Koh-i-Noor in his
hands. Duleep loses her, as she dies soon after, and he undertakes a
voyage to immerse her ashes in India. It is a voyage that ends
dramatically in Duleep’s discovery of a second love — a
half-Abyssinian girl with a “saintly” demeanour, an act very much
the subject of ridicule for his English guardians.
There is an excerpt from Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile in the
beginning, which Poignantly ends with how “the achievements of exile
are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind
forever”.
But The Exile doesn’t see Duleep Singh “achieving” or doing very
much, he is pretty much tossed about by circumstances. It can also
be seen as a parable for the misery and dilemma of the numerous
princely families the British dealt with. The royals, desperate to
maintain their status and wealth, were eventually stripped of it all
and pensioned off by the British. It left behind a royalty with
crumbling memories and nostalgia for a riyaasat that they had lost
but they thought they could vaguely stake claim to. The exile within
is what the book deals most with, imaginatively.
Excerpts from The Exile
Does it matter where one dies, in which country, which land? Does it
matter at all if the last breath is drawn among your own people,
friends and lovers, or among strangers, or completely alone? If you
have not lived at home, perhaps there is no cause to die there.
And what is home? Where I was born, or where I lived all my life? Do
I call
Punjab
my home, or
England? If I had a choice, where would I want my bones to become
dust, and would it matter?
I
know these things mattered to my mother. Bibiji. Beautiful Jindan,
ruined by the same fate as I
When I met my mother in
Calcutta, after our separation of fourteen years, before she decided
to come with me to England, her only wish was to pass her remaining
days at some holy place on the banks of the Ganges. She would never
have been at peace if I had let her bones lie in England, far away
from the land of her ancestors. That is why I had to do what I did,
carry her back across the seas, let the few fistfuls of her
burnt-out remains flow into the Godavari. I could not immerse her
ashes in the
Ganges
or the Sutlej.
And there is the memory of the light filtering through the filigree
of marble on to the floor of the haveli, making patterns that I
would step on and imagine myself dressed in a gown woven with light.
I wondered then how the light came to us from so far away, how the
sun rose and set. I’d asked Mangla once, and she had said, ‘Ask the
Angrez and he’ll tell you his race controls it all.’ Or perhaps this
never happened, perhaps it is only a false memory and I imagine this
because the British certainly were to control all my days and
nights, all my stars. My life, such as it was.
From the window of Bibiji’s chamber the tall minarets of the
Badshahi Mosque were clearly visible. When they fought each other
for the throne after my father’s death, guns were mounted on those
minarets and cannonballs flew over Hazuribagh and crashed into the
Akbari gate. There was so much killing, Bibiji said, that rivers of
blood flowed from the fort to the bazaar below and the people of
Lahore
covered their ears with their hands and shut their eyes and lowered
their heads and waited, on their knees, for the nightmare to pass.
Nobody will understand why I am dying like this, alone, in this
small hotel room, in a beautiful but strange city, from where I can
see only the edge of a narrow cobbled street below and a thin strip
of sky. The buildings across the street seem close enough to touch.
Why am I here, denied all the
wide open spaces of my life . . . the wheat fields that stretched
away into the distance below the Lahore fort, the rolling
countryside of Elveden?
Courtesy:
Indian Express
8 October 2008
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