MALGONKAR’S
“THE DEVIL’S WIND”
The first great Indo-Anglian historical novel
P. P. MEHTA
The
field of Indo-Anglian fiction does not have many bright patches of beauty and
colour. If we want to name the stalwarts of Indo-Anglian fiction we have to
limit ourselves to Mulk Raj
Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Manohar Malgonkar.
Mulk Raj Anand (born
in 1905) published his first in 1935, R. K. Narayan’s
(born in 1906) first novel Swami and Friends came out in 1935, and Raja Rao’s (born in 1908) first novel Kanthapura
reached the reading public in 1938. Manohar Malgonkar (born in 1913) is thus eight years younger
than Anand and for years younger than Raja Rao but belongs to roughly the same
age group. Yet he is a late-comer in the field of Indo-Anglian fiction. His
first novel Distant Drum came out in 1960.
All
these four great novelists are, as we can see, contemporaries in age and publication dates – the only difference being that Malgonkar started his literary career late–late by almost a
quarter of a century. Having gate-crashed into fame he has produced six novels
so far on a variety of themes–ranging from the life of princes and the communal
blood bath of the partition days, to the history of the Mutiny of 1857.
Each
novel has its own distinguishing points but I am concerned here with his novel The
Devil’s Wind, which, in my opinion is the first significant historical
Indo-Anglian novel.
The
Devil’s Wind is Manohar Malgonkar’s sixth novel. He calls it Nana Saheb’s story, and justifiably so, because it is more the
story of Nana Saheb the last Peshwa
than of the Mutiny of 1857. In the “Author’s Note” Malgonkar
points out, “This ambiguous man and his fate have always fascinated me. I
discovered that the stories of Nana and the revolt have never been told from
the Indian point of view. This, then, is Nana’s story as I believe he might
have written it himself. It is fiction; but it takes no liberties with
verifiable facts or even with probabilities.”
The
Devil’s Wind can be considered the first perfect historical
novel of Indo-Anglian fiction. It is historical in the sense that it is based
on the most spectacular historical event in Indian history–the so-called Mutiny
of 1857. It is a historical novel in which most of the characters are actual
great men and women from the pages of history: it is a historical novel in
which the hero himself is the most important person of the history of those
turbulent days.
In
other historical novels, the backdrop is history, a few characters are
historical, but the hero and the heroine are fictitious characters who thus
give ample scope to the imaginative development of the plot. But in this novel
the central character is Dhondu Pant Nana Saheb, the last Peshwa who led
the mutinous sepoys of
But
even when no liberties are taken with events and facts, they can be taken with
the personality of the characters. And here we find our author doing his best
to vindicate the character of Nana Saheb, justify his
action, explain how certain atrocities took place in
All
these views have called Nana Saheb the arch villain
of 1857 Mutiny, “a man to frighten children with,” a man who massacred the
“entire British colony at
The
novel is divided into three parts. Part I deals with Nana’s life at Bithoor; Part II takes us to the events at
Life
at Bithoor shows the pomp and glory of the household
of the Peshwa Bajirao II,
the erstwhile overlord of the great Maratha Confederacy, “who had been deposed
by the British East India Company’s troops in 1818 and exiled from Poona to Bithoor” (Author’s Note). This peaceful and prosperous
household of Bajirao II is painted in all its splendour and dissoluteness. Bajirao’s
character has been beautifully described–rich, vacillating and dissolute
monarch. “Some of his other abnormalities were however, less privately
conducted. He would egg on his cronies to take liberties with the ladies from
the highest families in the land as though they were prostitutes brought over
from a brothel. He would sometimes let loose a score of men and women of mixed
ages in a room that was totally dark. And the story is told of how he got his
own back on one of his prominent sardars, or
noblemen, who had lured away a favourite singing
girl. He invited this nobleman, to one of these orgies in the dark. When, after
a time, Bajirao suddenly ordered lights to be brought
in, the young man discovered that he had been making love to his own mother.”
(Page 7)
The
adoption of the heir, its difficulties, the corrupt
officers of the East India Company who had to be bribed and treated sumptuously
by Bajirao–are all well described. Then we come
across the curse that would kill any wife of Nana Saheb
(the heir apparent to the Peshwa) with whom he would
consummate his marriage. After the death of one wife the solution was a
faithful concubine Champa. But the future Peshwa must marry and produce an heir and so a girl, Kashi, was found. Nana Sahed
never consummated his marriage with her–she remained a wife in name and when in
the end they flee to Nepal, she accepted openly to become the mistress of Rana Jung Bahadur.
Tantya Topi
and Azim had become Nana Saheb’s
faithful advisers. The company’s officers went piling insults on the
Indians–they annexed Oudh, robbed the Nawab’s treasures; Zeenat Mahal the Begum of the Mughal
Emperor Bahadurshah Zaffar
and her adviser, the Mad Mullah of Fyzabad, deeply
incensed at the way the British officers treated them sowed the seeds of the
conspiracy which at last became the Mutiny of 1857.
This
part contains an interesting British General, Sir Hugh Wheeler (Hamlah), who was a very good soldier but was out of favour with the authorities because he had married an
Indian wife, Janki, and thus “turned native” One of
his children, Eliza, later on escapes with Nana Saheb
and lives as his mistress to the end. Wheeler the good soldier waits and waits
in vain for his legitimate promotion, to become the commander-in-chief.
Instead, he had to defend the white residents of Kanpur
against the rebels and fight a losing battle. He dies in the massacre when the
escaping convoy of boats is fired upon by the sepoys.
The
second part tells us the story of what happened at Kanpur.
The Mutiny had started and the white residents of Kanpur
were herded into one safe place–the Entrenchment. The Mutiny at Kanpur began on June 5, 1857. The sepoys
marched to Bithoor and induced Nana Saheb to become their Peshwa. The
indiscipline of the sepoys, lack of co-ordination,
communal distrust and the superior Enfield rifles of the British were the
causes of the failure at Kanpur. Nana Saheb, true to his promise to Sir Hugb
Wheeler, had given a prior warning and that is why the English were
ready for the attack. The siege of Kanpur dragged on
and on and indiscipline and lack of effective central Control resulted
in a number of incidents of looting, killing, etc.
“No one could have saved the Christians from mob fury and we made no attempt to do so. About three hundred of them who had taken shelter in what was known as the Mission Compound were dragged from their houses and slaughtered. Near General-ganj some Christian families had barricaded themselves in a large house. The house was set on fire and all of them burned alive. The drummers and the musicians of the various regimental bands, who were also Christians, had Congregated in a church. When a mob of sepoys surrounded them, they announced that they had decided to renounce their religion. Within the hour, they were made Muslims.” (Page 160)
At
the same time a British column under Neill and Renaud
was fast advancing to relieve Kanpur. On their way
they were looting, burning and killing entire villages. They would burn the
village and all the residents – men, women and children, who tried to escape
were shot dead. They carried with them the reign of terror.
Nana
Saheb did a lot of heart-searching during these
fateful days “My own thoughts would have shocked them. I was by no means disloyal,
for I wanted our side to come out victorious and for the victory to be quick
and total. I wanted all, or nearly all, the white men to pack up and go and
leave us in peace. And yet I did not want those in the Entrenchment to undergo
further privations and suffering.” (Page 157)
People
say truth alone triumphs but Nana Saheb wondered if
this was a correct statement. “The philosophy of the Gita
might bring solace, but not victory. The right also had to have battalions and
guns more powerful than its enemies; truth could never triumph merely because
it was the truth, not unless it had resources greater than those possessed by
untruth.”
“How
could we win when our own people were fighting against us in ever-increasing
numbers?–backing up the gains of truth, living up to a new code of conduct
revealed by a new God: Slaughter all men; take no prisoners.” (Page 172)
At
last Nana Saheb arranges a compromise formula
allowing the British defendcrs to leave by boat. The
formula was accepted by Wheeler but when all the refugee families were in boats
at Sanchaura ghat, some sepoys shouted that all white men should be killed. Nana Saheb was not on the spot and when he heard the news he at
once rushed to the spot to stop this massacre. But the sepoys
were beyond control; they were prepared to spare only women and children and
Nana Saheb had to be satisfied with that. The women
and children were taken to Bibighar where they were
later on raped or massacred after some days–a tragedy which, says Nana Saheb, was not ordered by him.
The
columns led by Neill and Renaud, leaving the stories
of cruelty, death and desolation in their wake, advanced towards Kanpur. The battle of Fattepur
was lost by the sepoys. British atrocities were
equally brutal. “Then our men saw something else: a village being sacked with
military thoroughness and its women dishonoured. Fattepur, by being in the vicinity of the place where our
troops had offered battle, had its fate sealed. They saw it being cordoned off
and set on fire. Those who tried to escape, even women and children, were
thrown back into the fire or shot while escaping. Even as they were retreating,
our sepoys looked back in horror and swore vengeance.
If that was what the white man did to his victims, it was up to them to wreak a
similar vengeance.” (Page 202)
The
battle of the Pandu River put a finish to Indian
resistance. The British flag once more flew over Kanpur.
Again Nana Saheb the objective thinker thinks, “Satichaura and Bibighar are
monuments to our brutality. Look and be ashamed,” the world will forever
admonish us. “This is what you have done; this is you are capable of.” (Page
207)
“One
can find excuses, but excuses cannot make facts vanish. They will remain with
us for ever, like spectres, jeering at us and tormenting
us. If Daryaganj and the other villages had not been
burned down as guilty villages, Satichaura might
never have happened; and if Fattepur had not been
destroyed merely as a follow-through to a victorious military action, Bibighar might never have happened” (Page 207)
Now
flight was the only alternative left for Nana Sahab.
He buried some of his immense treasure in a well at Bithoor
an then took his family and dependants in a boat announcing that he was going
to drown himself–taking the jal-samadhi. A
few miles down stream Nana Saheb left the boat and
went to take refuge in Nizam Ali’s house in Akbarpur. Here he found Nizam
Ali’s wife torturing and crucifying Eliza, the daughter of Sir Hugh Wheeler. He
killed this woman and took Eliza with him.
The
deserting troops met Nana Saheb again but Nana Saheb lost battle after battle. Tantya
Topi and Rani of Jhansi took Gwalior. Then
followed catastrophic events–the fall of Delhi, the fall of Kanpur;
etc. Even the guerilla tactics followed by Nana Saheb
did not bear much fruit. And so Nana Saheb became a
hunted man with a fabulous price of one lakh rupees
on his head.
Nana
Saheb escaped to Nepal and in his negotiations with
the Prime Minister of Nepal, Rana Jung Bahadur, he had to lose his wife Kashibai,
who voluntarily became Rana Jung Bahadur’s
mistress She tells Nana Saheb, “I want to be a woman,
not merely a repressed freak. I want to live, to become a mother, to experience
physical love, violent, abandoned. I want to be in the great king’s court, not
in a hermitage. I am past twenty and what else was there for me but the
prospect of lifelong abstinence, to die before I ever learned to live? And,
above all, I did not want to be the cause of my husband’s death.” (Page 259)
We
are here reminded of how Prince Abhay’s mother in The
Princes leaves India to follow her lover to Pakistan and to become a woman.
The rest of the story is simple. Nana Saheb lived
like a recluse in the Terai forest of Nepal for
fourteen years. Here he found peace.
“The
ability to find pleasure in the simpler things of life heightened, the horizons
of the mind contracted, and ambition shrivelled and
died, unmourned. Eliza and I were like some symbolic
couple, like Rama and Sita during their exile,
finding total fulfilment in one another and hankering
for nothing which we could not find in our own surroundings.
“This
surely was Nirvana, a state of being freed from the coils of life. Once again
there was a woman to love and a child to address me as father. As the leader of
this small herd, I led a richer, more satisfying life than I had as the master
of the Wada at Bithoor or as the Emperor’s
short-lived Peshwa.” (Page 272)
But
after fourteen years he had to leave Nepal. He goes to the bank of the Ganges
to perform Sraddha ceremony for his adoptive father Bajirao II. The faithful ptiest Kashi Ram Pande recognises him and takes him round the changed scenes of Kanpur. Jayaji Scindia of Gwalior managed to
smuggle Nana Saheb out of India to Mecca and then to
Constantinople. Misfortune had made him a philosopher who takes every
misfortune philosophically.
“This
pale world is not mine. The vivid colours of my land
and the profound silence of the Ganges are somehow closer to me than my
surroundings. And yet I do not yearn to go back. I have crossed the Ganges for
the last time. The embers I carry are for warmth on this oasis halt, not for
fanning into another sacred fire, but I know they will last me through the
night.” (Pages 302-303)
The
story reveals Malgonkar’s love for dramatising situations. He makes the story of Kanpur colourful and human–the
torture of Eliza and her sorrows as also her dramatic rescue by Nana Saheb. The curse on the Peshwa
adds a touch of mystery to the fate of this star-crossed hero. Sir Hugh (Hamiah) with his love for Indian things seems to remind us
of the Indian Nabobs, concubines, Malabar massage,
spirited women, faithful men and spies make a dramatic pageant in the pages of The
Devil’s Wind.
But
more than all this, more mysterious and more refined than all these, is the
hero Nana Sabeb. The Devil’s Wind is his story
and here Malgonkar wants to set the historical record
straight by presenting the true image as he thinks it to be, of Nana Saheb. Here we find him not a fiend, not a cruel, brutal
murderer, not the arch-villain of the Mutiny but a refined sensitive gentleman
who is kind to his friends, who is generous to a fault and who takes a
sympathetic and objective view of the whole crisis.
“What
happened in Meerut frightened me and made me realise
that, for me, the issues were not altogether clear cut. I could not, in my own
mind, separate the national struggle from personal involvements. I was on
intimate terms with many British and Eurasian families, and it was well-known
that I had more friends among the whites than among my own kind. This was
because, owing to my princely lineage, my own people tended to treat me with
excessive formality; the British, with certain reservations, treated me as one
of themselves. Could I now stand by and watch the men and women who had sung
and danced and laughed in my house slaughtered by howling mobs? They had done
no harm to me, or indeed to India. Why should they have to be sacrificed for
all the wrongs piled up by the East India Company over a hundred years?” (Page
115)
“I
had created a snug little niche for myself as a man of wealth and learning,
respected among his own people, who yet preferred the society of the British,
for whom he kept open house; cultivated and tolerant if somewhat eccentric,
since, even though he served meat and wine to his guest and sat at table with
them, never ate with them nor accepted return hospitality; the Indian potentate
who was free with his carriages and lavish with his brandy, who prided himself
on the number and variety of dancing-girls in his employ as well as upon the
rare specimens of wild animals in his private zoo. Apart from my own retainers,
Englishmen were the only people I had any intimate contact with. I did not wish
them ill.” (Page 116)
But
fate willed that this refined gentleman should be turned into an arch-villain.
“And after that I was able to work out the answer. It was that my being blown
up into a “monster of ferocity” was a deliberate act. Our revolt had thrown up
a surfeit of British heroes but no villains to balance them against and they
needed villainy of the requisite magnitude to serve as a backdrop for heroism.
How hollow would Havelock’s victories have seemed if I, Nana Saheb, had not been their principal objective.” (Page 241)
Like
all other heroes of Malgonkar, Nana Saheb is also a good loser and he finds “Sermons in
stones–and good in everything.” Misfortune does the steps of this star-crossed
humanist but he takes everything philosophically whether it is a defeat in a
battle or the loss of his wife or the treachery of a friend. The emerging image
of Nana Saheb tells us: “And right enough, when
freedom came, India acclaimed Nana Saheb as a hero
and raised a memorial to him, at Bithoor, which bears
this inscription:
Knowing
the dangers
He
embraced a revolt
His
sacrifice shall light our path
Like
an eternal flame.” (Author’s note)
The
story moves slowly; it has a limited number of dialogues and numerous interior
monologues and descriptions. As Prof. Amur has put
it, “In the last analysis! The Devil’s Wind is more history than
novel.”