Malgonkar's “The Devil’s Wind” (The first great Indo-Anglian Historical

MALGONKAR’S “THE DEVIL’S WIND”

The first great Indo-Anglian historical novel

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 Kanthapurareached 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 drop 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 Kanpur. As such it is not easy for any author to change the story of his life; the events of his life being facts of history leave little room for imaginative manipulation. That is why the reader sometimes feels the story sagging under the load of historical facts. Perhaps the choice before the author was–to add imaginative episodes and make the story a historical romance or to stick to verifiable facts. The result is, as pointed out earlier, a perfect historical novel.

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 Kanpur not because of Nana Saheb’s orders but in spite of his orders and wishes. In fact Malgonkar tries to put before us a completely different image of Nana Saheb from the conventional image put forward in the pages of history. The author prints three opinions about Nana Saheb–the British view, the French view and the American view.

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 Kanpur.” Out of this ugly creature painted by foreign writers, Malgonkar creates the picture of a true Indian patriot, a hero of the War of Independence of 1857–a refined gentleman of taste, a noble friend, thinker and philosopher, an understanding master and a man who believed in justice and fair play.

The novel is divided into three parts. Part I deals with Nana’s life at Bithoor; Part II takes us to the events at Kanpur and Part III describes the downfall and flight of Nana Saheb.

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 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?–ing 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 into the fire or shot while escaping. Even as they were retreating, our sepoys looked 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 . 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 byNana 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 drop 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.”