A time to tell it all
By Manohar Malgonkar

IS there anyone who does not have a story which has to await its time to be told? Let’s face it. All of us have done things in life which we would not care to be made public till the time was ripe.

If, for instance, you had sheltered a high-profile BJP leader during Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’, you would not have cared to publicise it for years and years and then, lo and behold, in 1998 you could actually make a boast of it!

Or again, when Minoo Masani called some of us to meet Sheikh Abdullah to listen to the Sheikh’s solution of the Kashmir problem, we were aware that we were being reported on by the police, because the Sheikh had suddenly become persona non grata. On my own I would not have spoken of that meeting or its consensus that Sheikh Abdullah should have been enlisted as an Ally not imprisoned and distrusted.

Or the jolt of relief I experienced at being waved through the Customs clutching Satanic Verses camouflaged only by the removal of its scarlet dust jacket.

I cannot think of a better example than that of Vinayakrao Savarkar, as written in his book about his life as a convict in the Cellular Jail in the Andamans. In this maximum security prison of the Raj with its disciplines enforced with inhuman rigidity, Savarkar had set up a system of receiving news reports from the outside world, of sending out messages of his own to India, and of circulating information to the other inmates. But in the course of telling us how he did it, he stops short at giving the secret of the most effective system he had devised of passing on bits of news to the other prisoners — just in case he had need to put it into use again.

The British were still ruling India when Savarkar’s book came out. To be sure they had stopped sending political prisoners to the Andamans. But could they be trusted not to start the practice again?

That was why Savarkar held from revealing his ultimate device for breaking the prison’s news blackout and censorship. The time had not yet come.

The story which I am now about to tell did not entail the breaking of laws of unjust or repressive regimes. I was roped into doing something only technically unprofessional, but that was all. Someone else wanted my help and took it for granted that I would not deny it on ethical grounds. OK, it was not quite straightforward, but the degree of impropriety was so slight as not to leave behind an awareness of wrongdoing, let alone guilt.

In fact, I had not given it a thought for more than 28 years, when a book I happened to be reading reminded me of it.

It is quite a remarkable book, written by a scholar of formidable credentials, Simon Winchester, "a tale of Murder, Insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to which he has given the title, The Professor and the Madman.

The professor of the story, James Murray, is one of its two protagonists — (yes, on the authority of one of the numerous quotations from the OED in the book I am assured that the word protagonist can be used in the plural.) This Dr Murray, who was actually the Editor of the OED, first won recognition as an authority on the history of the English language by the fact that the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had invited him to contribute an essay to their forthcoming edition.

Ho! — I said to myself as I read that bit. But that is something I myself have done: Contributed an essay to the current edition of the Encyclopaedia. The difference here is that I was not myself "invited" by the editors to write that article, and alas, it does not even appear under my name.

Nonetheless it is written by me, and that is what this story is about.

On July 16, 1971, a car rolled up to my porch. In it were two men whom I had never met before but I instantly recognised one of them because he was a well-known Marathi writer whose photograph I had often seen in newspapers and magazines, Ranjeet Desai. His companion, it turned out, was a friend of his who lived in Belgaum an hour’s drive away, and who had offered to drive Desai over.

Ranjeet Desai had shot into fame in the late sixties because of the spectacular success of his novel, Swami — an alltime best seller. Swami was a historical novel about one of the Peshwa rulers of Pune, Madhavrao, and the success of Swamihad encouraged him to write his mammoth, two-volume novel on the life of the legendary hero of Maharashtra, Shivaji, to which he gave the title, Shriman Yogi. On this, his very first visit to my house, Desai brought the two volumes of Shriman Yogi as a present for me, and it is from the date of his inscription on the title page of its first volume that I am so certain of the date of that visit.

Ranjeet Desai had influential friends among the political leaders of Maharashtra, notably Yeshwantrao Chavan and Balasaheb Desai, both of whom had been, at one time or the other, Maharashtra’s chief ministers, and the gossip was that he had been given all possible official backing for writing a major novel about Maharashtra’s own hero. But in Maharashtra writing a book about Shivaji is like a Frenchman writing yet another book on Napoleon. Shivaji in Maharashtra is just too well-known for anyone to be interested in a new novel on his life, because already something like a thousand biographies, novels and appreciations of Shivaji must be already in print.

There is another perfectly valid reason why a serious, well-researched and full biography of Shivaji will not only badly but is sure to get its author in trouble. Shivaji’s stature and image is so fixated in public imagination in Maharashtra that, any departure from it, however honestly presented, will just not be tolerated, and might even cause riots. I have myself been pressured to write a life of Shivaji in English, but have not attempted to do so for that very reason. He can only be shown as a heroic personality with no contradictions of character at all, as someone who did everything from the most patriotic of motives, never for self, indeed that he was both secular as well as democratic centuries before either word or concept was invented.

Anyhow, for whatever reason, Shriman Yogi had been something of a disappointment for its author. But the official ballyhoo that had accompanied its publication had been impressive. And perhaps that was the reason why the Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in far away America may have decided that the author of this major work on Shivaji was the right person to contribute an essay on Shivaji for the forthcoming edition of the EB.

Ranjeet Desai, living in his village of Kowad received an invitation from America, asking for an essay of 1500 words on Shivaji for inclusion in the EB.

A decision, both logical and right, but (alas) impracticable. While Ranjeet Desai had done extensive and close research on Shivaji’s life for writing his ambitious novel on it, there was no way he could himself have written the essay that the EB had asked for. He did all his writing in the Marathi language. Admittedly he knew English, too, but not well enough to write it for publication.

He had heard of me, someone with a Marathi name who wrote books in English, and thought of seeking my help to translate his essay into English. He had written out those 1500 words for me to translate.

I think it is well known that doing a faithful as well as elegant translation is a most difficult task. So I did not use Desai’s essay as a basis for the one wrote on my own — As it happens, I, too, have pretentions of being a historian, but then to write fifteen hundred words on Shivaji’s life you don’t need to be a historian — even a schoolboy can do it.

In itself, it was a small enough thing, taking a few hours of my time. By saying yes, I made a lifelong friend — a man of many talents who also believed in a sort of freemasonry among authors. He had just taken it for granted that I would not have said no. I am glad that I lived up to his image of me.