CHAPTER 32
As Cartwright was leaving his bungalow, after a ceremonial send off by his personals staff, one of them handed him a thick envelope which contained several sheets of closely written manuscript. The servant said that a visitor had delivered the letter and vanished before he could be questioned. The manuscript turned out to be a long letter that carried an illegible signature at the end. But as he read through the first page it became clear that it was a letter from Maan Singh. He read it eagerly.”
Dear Sir,
I know you would be surprised to receive this letter, but for various reasons it was imperative that I write to you. So I am asking a trusted friend to smuggle this letter out, (yes, such things are possible even in British prison!) Up to this point I have said nothing about my own conduct in the whole proceedings – I was too distracted by the events to think coherently. But now I am in a calmer frame of mind and can see the whole matter in a more detached way. The time has come therefore to speak. I feel I owe an explanation, not only to myself and all those who took part in this matter with me, but most of all to you. After all, you risked your career to stand up for what you believed to the truth, and I am therefore obliged, not just to thank you, but also to give you my side of the story.
A host of emotions passed through my mind when I saw you advancing towards me on that fateful night. I had never thought I would be required to kill a person in cold blood-least of all a person who placed himself so totally at my disposal. Yes sir, when you came to disarm, me, I saw trust and faith in your eyes. You seemed so sure that I would not fire, that it seemed a shame, a terrible betrayal of our common humanity to fire on you. I had persuaded myself that I hated the British, but at that moment I saw a fellow human being before me, and how could I then hate you.
I realise now that by not firing I was betraying the cause that meant so much to me. I was betraying my friends who had risked their lives to come so far in this business. I was betraying months of careful planning and scheming. Perhaps I was even betraying my country. But at that precise moment when I should have acted all I could think of was the unspeakable wrongness of taking a life, of killing in cold blood. There is no cause, however great, that would justify the killing of a person who has done you no wrong. What I then felt instinctively. I now believe consciously to be the most fundamental of all truths.
Life is full of ironies. I, who started out on this path because I did not agree with Gandhi, have now become a Gandhian. The Mahatma knows the soul of India much better than those who oppose him. He knows that at bottom we abhor violence and bloodshed, that to nurture permanent hatreds is not in our blood, and that a vein of compassion, a reverence for all form of life; runs though us. Indians can be roused to random violence, but to sustain a political campaign on hate alone would be impossible in India. All this was earlier obscure to me, but it is now clear as daylight. Prison life gives one the leisure to think and analyse and I no longer feel any remorse for what I did.
Some would ascribe all this soul-searching to our so called incapacity for practical action. They blame our religion, our culture, our intractable individualism for our political failures. Perhaps they are right. It is true that the best amongst us have often ignored politics and pursued spiritual glory. Our motto has been-what shall it profit a man if he gain the kingdom of the world but lose his soul. We have saved our souls but lost the kingdom of this world.
But all this is going to change and for this I give thinks to the British Raj. I accept none of the claims made by its apologists. It has drained our country of wealth, starved our people, destroyed our native industries, and its racial arrogance has been almost harder to bear than all the indignities heaped upon us by previous conquerors. But all its crimes and follies are redeemed by one supreme fact. The irony is – this fact is merely a bye product, a completely fortuitous consequence of British rule. But then history is full of such ironies.
For centuries India has been a nation divided against itself. The distinctions of caste and cred, of regional and local loyalties, differences in language and religion, have kept us apart and our rulers have exploited these differences. But slumbering deep within the depths of our being, blind and inchoate, but nonetheless powerful, has been the desire for unity. The struggle against the British have brought these feelings to the surface. Today the Bengali fights alongside the Tamil against the common enemy. And by creating an over-arching dispensation, by putting in place the apparatus and instruments of an all-powerful state, the Raj has shown us our own true destiny, could we but reclaim it.
And reclaim it we will, if not today, then tomorrow, for now we know how the instruments of a modern state are fashioned.
Even the racial arrogance, insufferable though it is, has had one positive result. It has united the best elements in our society against the British rule. If the British had adopted our customs, married our women and settled down to being Indians, as so many earlier conquerors had done, there would have been no freedom movement and no feeling of nationhood. By despising us the British have made us realise that we are one people.
But enough of politics. It was never my intention to harangue you about the iniquities of British rule, but my feelings got the better of me. In my haste to run down the British Raj, I had overlooked one of its greatest achievements, that it has produced men like you and Bains Sahib, high-minded men, men of faith and conviction who have served this country better than any one of us could have done. The legacy of these men will endue forever.
I remain,
Yours faithfully
Mansingh.
