“All of this happened while you were in Africa, where you were witnessing a real war. Afterwards here people would say that we had lost a whole generation of brilliant young revolutionaries and would never be able to replace them. I felt like that myself, and was cast down for many months. Intellectual advance is slow in India. I don’t have to tell you that. The landless labourer moves to the town, and his son perhaps becomes a clerk. The clerk’s son perhaps gets a higher education, and then his son becomes a doctor or a scientist. And so we grieved. It had taken generations to create that pool of revolutionary talent, and the police in a short time had destroyed the struggle and intellectual development of fifty or sixty years. It was terrible to think about.
“I will tell you what it felt like. Sometimes in a storm beautiful old trees are uprooted. You don’t know what to do. The readiest emotion is anger. You start looking for an enemy. And then you very quickly understand that anger, comforting as it is, is useless, that there is nothing or no one to be angry against. You have to find other ways of dealing with your loss. I was in that empty, unhappy mood when I heard of Kandapalli. I don’t actually think I had heard of him before. He proclaimed a new revolution. He said that the talk of the lost generation of brilliant revolutionaries was sentimental rubbish. They were not particularly brilliant or well-educated or revolutionary. If they were they would not have fallen for the foolish Lin-Piao line. No, Kandapalli said, all that had happened was that we had had the good fortune to lose a generation of half-educated, self-centred fools.
“This was wounding for me. Wolf and I had done a lot of work with the revolutionaries. We knew some of them personally. But the brutality of Kandapalli’s words made me think of certain things I had noticed but put to one side. I thought of the man who had come to the hotel to see us. He was absurdly vain. He wanted us to know how well connected he was in the world outside. When we offered him a drink he asked, pointedly, for a treble of imported whisky. In those days imported whisky was three or four times the price of Indian. He was asking for something extremely expensive, and then with something like self-satisfaction he studied our faces to see how we were reacting. I thought he was contemptible, but we of course were trained to control our faces. And of course the treble whisky was too much for him.
“I thought of that and other things, and then, from being wounded by Kandapalli’s words, I was dazzled by the brilliance and simplicity of his analysis. He proclaimed the death of the Lin-Piao line. Instead, he announced the Mass Line. Revolution was to come from below, from the village, from the people. There was to be no place in this movement for middle-class masqueraders. And — would you believe it? — out of the ruins of that earlier, false revolution he has already set going a true revolution. He has liberated large areas. He does not court publicity, unlike the earlier people.
“It was very hard for us to get to meet him. The couriers were suspicious. There was a relay of them. They wanted to have nothing to do with us. In the end we walked for many days in the forest. I thought we were going nowhere. But at last one afternoon, nearly time for us to camp for the night, we came to a small clearing in the forest. The sunlight fell beautifully on a long mud hut with a grass roof. In front there was a half-harvested mustard field. This was Kandapalli’s headquarters. One of them. After all the drama, we found a simple man. He was short and dark. A primary school teacher, without qualifications. A man from Warangal. Nobody in a town would have noticed him. Warangal is one of the hottest places in India, and when he started talking about the poor his eyes filled with tears and he trembled.”
THIS WAS HOW, in the late summer in Berlin, a new kind of emotional life came to Willie.
Sarojini said, “Every morning when you get up you must think not only of yourself but of others. Think of something that’s close to you here. Think of East Berlin, and the overgrown ruins, and the shell marks from 1945 on the walls, and the people today all looking down as they walk. Think of where you’ve been in Africa. You might want to forget poor Ana, but think of the war there. It’s going on now. Think of your house. Try to imagine Kandapalli in the forest. These are all real places with real people.”
Another day she said, “I was awful to you twenty years ago. I rebuked you too much. I was foolish. I knew very little. I had read very little. I just knew our mother’s story and I knew about our mother’s radical uncle. I know now that you were no different from Mahatma Gandhi, and couldn’t help being what you were.”
Willie said, “Oh, goodness. Gandhi — that would never have occurred to me. He’s too far away from me.”
“I thought it would surprise you. But it’s true. When he was eighteen or nineteen Gandhi came to England to study law. In London he was like a sleepwalker. He had no means of understanding the great city. He hardly knew what he was looking at. He had no idea of the architecture or the museums, no idea of the great writers and politicians who were hidden in the city of the 1890s. I don’t think he went to a play. All he could think of was his law studies and his vegetarian food and cutting his own hair. Just as Vishnu was floating on the primeval ocean of non-being, so Gandhi in London in 1890 was floating on an ocean of not-seeing and not-knowing. At the end of three years of this half-life or quarter-life he became dreadfully depressed. He felt he needed help. There was a Conservative member of parliament who had a reputation of being interested in Indians. This was the only person Gandhi felt he could turn to. He wrote to him and went to see him. He tried to explain his depression, and after a short while the M.P. said, ‘I know what your problem is. You know nothing about India. You know nothing of the history of India.’ He recommended some imperialist histories. I am not sure that Gandhi read them. He wanted practical help. He didn’t want to be told to read a history book. Don’t you feel you can see yourself a little bit in that young Gandhi?”
Willie said, “How do you know this about Gandhi and the M.P.? It was a long time ago. Who told you?”
“He wrote his autobiography in the 1920s. A remarkable book. Very simple, very fast, very honest. A book without boasting. A book so true that every young Indian or old Indian can see himself in its pages. There’s no other book like it in India. It would be a modern Indian epic if people read it. But people don’t. They feel they don’t need to. They feel they know it all. They don’t have to find out. It’s the Indian way. I didn’t even know about the autobiography. It was Wolf who first asked me whether I had read it. This was when he’d just come to the ashram at home. He was shocked when he found I didn’t know about it. I have read it two or three times now. It’s so easy to read, such a good story, that you read on and on, and then you find you haven’t been paying proper attention to all the profound things he’s been saying.”
Willie said, “I feel you’ve been lucky in Wolf.”
“There’s his other family. That’s a great help. I don’t have to be with him all the time. And he’s a good teacher. I suppose that’s one reason why we are still together. I am someone he can teach. He found out fairly soon that I had no feeling for historical time, that I couldn’t tell the difference between a hundred years and a thousand years, or two hundred years or two thousand. I knew our mother and our mother’s uncle and I had some idea of our father’s family. Beyond that everything was a blur, a primeval ocean, in which figures like Buddha and Akbar and Queen Elizabeth and the Rani of Jhansi and Marie Antoinette and Sherlock Holmes floated about and crisscrossed. Wolf told me that the most important thing about a book was its date. No point in reading a book if you didn’t know its date, didn’t know how far away or how close it was to you. The date of a book fixed it in time, and when you got to know other books and events, the dates began to give you a time scale. I can’t tell you how liberating that has been for me. When I think of our history, I no longer feel I am sinking in a timeless degradation. I see more clearly. I have an idea of the scale and sequence of things.”