Mon Père
So many tangled roots our personalities have the social and emotional circumstances of our early years, of our parents’ lives, and, if you go back even further, of our ancestors’. In some sense, the emotion I feel these days, although never fully defined, has always been with me. It had cast its shadow upon my childhood, and it came to me then as a fear of being abandoned and unprotected. In later life, the fear lost its rawness; it became part of the larger preoccupations of a solitary adolescence. I had never analysed this fear; there had been no occasion to do so. It is only now as I write, and attempt to link disparate events and emotions, that I see the larger context to which it belongs, the long way it goes back, to a past that has grown dim in all except its broader details.
My ancestors were Khastriya (the title of the princely military order within the caste system. They are the warrior and ruling caste, in the traditional varna hierarchy.), originally from Kashmir. There were no dates for their exodus from Kashmir. We vaguely knew, by way of family lore, that the sixteenth-century Mogul invasion was one the reason for my ancestors’ migration to the foothills of Himalayas. No one, however, had any details. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone care to document, or even remember, the past was too much a part of the present to be categorized in a strict historical sense.
For centuries, my ancestors had remained wealthy landowners in the flat lands enclosed by the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. During all that time, the turbulent history of medieval India touched them little. My own knowledge of that past went only as far back as my great-great-grandfather, in the last century, but I can’t imagine my his own ancestors deviated much from the well-worn Hindu groves in which he and his own son and grandson spent their own lives: studentship, adulthood and marriage, late-middle-age detachment and then the final renunciation followed by a retreat to the Himalayas.
With India’s independence in 1947, this regulated life was unravelled with bewildering speed. My grandfather and his sons found themselves thrown into the new ruthless go-getting world of independent India with none of their old certainties intact. Successive land reform legislation undermined the family’s assets to the point where ancestral jewellery had to be pawned off to pay for the education of my father and his brothers. There was a time when neither studentship nor marriage seemed a possibility.
My father grew up knowing both a kind of feudal grandeur and shameful penury. From a life of secluded leisure, he was catapulted into the ranks of desperate millions seeking jobs under the new regime. I did not know until after my mother revealed to me how deeply marked he was by that period of difficult transition.
In time, the years of struggle were left behind. He joined Air India; he worked his way to a kind of middle-class security and equilibrium. But he never spoke about his early years. Once, in an uncharacteristic burst of nostalgia, he mentioned the caparisoned elephant he once rode in the village. On another occasion, he spoke of the time he met Jayaprakash Narayan (widely known as JP, was an freedom fighter and political leader, remembered especially for leading the opposition to Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.) in Bombay. These memories alone come to represent for me the life he had known as a child.