Mrinal Baithak: A son remembers

A Son Remembers -11

Stories about Ghadar , the great Indian uprising of 1857 , had obsessed my father ever since he was a child . He used to tell us how when he was staying with his grandfather at Allahabad , each night they would hear the howling of jackals coming from the park opposite their house . Matadin , their old family retainer , told him that this area used to be a thriving bazaar where after the Ghadar the British butchered many . After the massacre the whole area was razed and bulldozed and the howls we heard , came not from jackals but the unhappy souls of those that had lived here once upon a time . My father’s grandmother also told him many stories about those disturbed times . In my father grandmother had discovered an avid listener of her stories such as how her own grand father had left home after a tiff with his wife during the Ghadar , and then her grand mother’s father had rushed out to search for his missing son in law . Another source of Ghadar tales Father said , was an old watchman known as Thakur whose body trembled as he recounted hair raising stories , and his face would grow red .

In 1944 , while Father was at Bombay , his friend and admirer the Marathi writer Sham Rao nilkanth Oak presented him with a copy of Maaja Pravas by Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Varsaikar , a travelogue by a Marathi Brahmin who had witness to the Ghadar during a visit up north in 1857 . Father was enchanted by the book and wrote to his closest friend , the Hindi writer , Dr Ramvilas Sharma that he had to translate it into Hindi so friends like Dr Sharma could also read the rare memoirs of an ordinary traveler . He shared the completed manuscript of the Hindi translation with Dr Ramvilas Sharma who was equally enchanted with the first ever record of the great historic even by a simple Marathi beggar . It was published by the great art historian Rai Krishna Das’s publishing house as Mera Pravas , in 1949 , then re printed in 1963 from Lucknow under the title ‘Aankhon Dekha Ghadar’ and finally a third edition was published by Rajpal and Sons of New Delhi .

By January of 1957 Father had begun planning a trilogy on the Ghadar .

As the idea grew , Father realized that he had to do some field work and gather fresh and original material directly from the source : the villages of Awadh where most of the battles had been fought in 1857. He was , he wrote to Dr Ramvilas Sharma , getting more and more obsessed with the idea of traveling to as many villages of Awadh as he could , to tap the public memory and gather whatever stories , ballads and memories about the Ghadar that had survived . To him it would be like gathering the ashes after a loved one’s cremation , he said .

When he once discussed this with his friend , Bhagwati Sharan Singh the Director for Information and Publicity for the government of UP , he was enchanted . He urged my father to leave without losing time and promised to provide him with the basic minimum : a jeep for traveling , a district level official to take him around . In return he made Father promise that he would hand him a complete manuscript based on his field notes by September . Those could be published as a handbook during the Centenary year of the Ghadar . For his efforts , Father was told , he would receive a total amount of a thousand rupees as advance royalty . Father immediately came home and told Ba , my mother , of this proposal . Ba was happy at the thought of my father’s story gathering efforts being facilitated by a government grant that would go on to produce an additional handbook . What also pleased her was the thought that the thousand rupees Father would get as advance royalty , would considerably ease the financial pressures our joint family had been undergoing ever since Father resigned from government service . Father told Ba that his travels would be rushed and involve at least three major forays to various places . She should pack his bags accordingly . Ba had knitted a beautiful Jute bag for father’s travel things when he had traveled down south to Chennai in 1946 . The bag was taken out and found large enough for three to four changes of father’s clothes , his books and last but not the least , his precious box for Paan ( rolled betel leaves ) . On 4^th June 1957 , Father left for the first lap of his travels , to Barabanki .

Father carried no tape recorder or camera that could have facilitated his gathering of the material . We simply could not afford them and The Department of Information and Publicity did not consider providing him with any of these either . My father’s childhood friend Gyan Chandra Jain , who was then working for a Hindi daily Dainik Navjivan , presented him with a precious sheaf of foolscap paper and a few small note books for taking notes during his travels . To this cahe , Father added a few pencils , a pencil sharpener , a pen and a couple more school notebooks . His arsenal thus completed , Father left home to tour and survey the villages of Awadh . He was dressed as usual , in a simple pair of cotton Kurta Pyjama and a pair of slippers .

Father’s three day trip to Barabanki ended on 7^th June . During this period he visited the villages of Dariyabad , Bhayara , Jehangirabad , Kursi and Mahadeva . Thereafter on 8^th and 9^th June , Father toured the districts of Sultanpur and Faizabad .

The second lap began on June 15^th and lasted for three days . During this period he toured the districts of Bahraich and Gonda . Then from 26^th to 28^th june Father toured the district of Sitapur .

After visiting six districts Father returned home to Lucknow and began working on the chapters using his handwritten notes for reference . He was very excited about the material he had gathered , in particular the role played by the weakest part of the Indian society , its women . He was fascinated by the great organizational capabilities that a purdah bound Begum Hazrat Mahal had shown as a leader of the rebel forces . In a letter to his dearest friend , the great scholar Dr Ramvilas Sharma , Father wrote :

“…I wish to understand the society which was the crucible for the Ghadar , in particular the biggest social problem that stared it in face : the caste system and casteism . Even at a time when the Ghadar is challenging the system , I find the castes becoming more powerful , more rigid , in particular where the marriage system is concerned . The caste system’s intricacies make it almost impossible to trace its simple and basic contours . It feels as though we are looking at the country through a moving body of water …

Brother ! queens like Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi and Begum Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow , along with the courtesans of Kanpur , ordinary housewives in Awadh , Bundelkhand and Jagdishpur , could not have taken to streets under ordinary circumstances . Who knows what prolonged oppressions they were out to avenge . The Ghadar gave them an opportunity and almost overnight ,

turned them into aggressive Durgas lusting for battle …”

***

Many years later Once while straightening my father’s papers at home , I came across some field notes for Ghadar Ke Phool , scribbled on a sheaf of foolscap paper and a school note book . Where is the completed manuscript ? I wanted to know . Father said that he did not have either the time or the money to have his manuscript typewritten . And producing another handwritten copy for his own records would have been both tedious and time consuming . Since the State Department of Information and Publicity was keen to publish the book during the Centenary year of the Ghadar , he decided to keep forwarding the handwritten chapters one by one to the publishers to facilitate printing within the given time span . What corrections he had to make , could be made on the proofs rushed to him by the publishers . There was thus no complete manuscript available .

The notes taken down hastily in pencil by Father while he heard the tellers recount the stories , are near illegible by now . I once asked Father why he had scribbled them in pencil , Father said that he liked to watch and record the faces and gestures of the story tellers as they spoke . He had therefore perfected the art of writing without looking down at the note pads as he jotted his notes . In his experience , a pencil ran on its own , unlike a fountain pen that could suddenly run out of ink and was therefore preferable . Each time he returned , he would sit down immediately to make out a , “fair copy” in ink using those hastily penciled notes which was then rushed to the publishers . I must mention here that Father wrote a beautiful discursive hand and even if he wrote on a plain piece of paper , his lines ran without dipping down or coursing upwards . This fact must have made his proof readers happy .

On July 11^th , Father left Lucknow again and headed for the district of Rae Bareilly . He was thereafter planning to tour the districts of Unnao and Hardoi . But unusually heavy monsoon rains put paid to his plans . He was quite put out and always regretted his inability to have toured these two areas .

Meanwhile the Department of Information and Publicity that had facilitated the travels for Father , were getting restless and wanted Father to complete and hand them the manuscript for publication as soon as possible . Father sat down to write the remaining chapters on 21^st July 1957 and managed to complete the job within a month , on September 16^th . He dedicated this book to the young martyr the Raja of Chahlari , Balbhadra Singh and six hundred Hindus and Muslims who had laid their lives down to liberate their motherland from foreign occupation .

29. 9. 12 Dr Sharad Nagar