I slept through the midnight of Freedom. That should be no surprise for, being in the first decade of my life, I had grown up singing Kayav Shree Gauri on school day mornings.

The benign Monarchy which ruled the blessed nine districts of the old Mysore State had made sure that we did not feel the yoke of imperialism. I believe much the same was the case with the Cochin and Travancore States and Nizam’s Hyderabad State.

Nevertheless it seemed that there was a second ‘Freedom’ to be got, from the Monarchy so the people’s representatives could begin to rule. But then all of us wherever we were had come under the spell of Gandhi. And the death of Gandhi in 1948 stands out as the most vivid memory of the time.Two Freedoms and a man.

It is a palimpsest on which things are written and wiped out, rocking back and forth, across that most memorable period of Indian history...

Somehow in the hinterland, I was living in ‘Independence Day’ completely bypassed us. May be it was because, I lived then in the resurgent Hindu heartland that spawned the Hindu Maha Sabha – Shimoga. Come to think of it, Shimoga has always been a political cauldron. Lohia’s socialism for instance found its most fertile soil in Shimoga.

But at that time, the time of independence there was an encapsulated concentrated confrontation in that little town of the extremes – Hindutva, the red saffron versus the Khadi of the freedom fighters. 

Heat of the times

I have felt the heat of both.The saffron admonishing me if I spoke out of turn.The white looking down upon me because I was the son of a liquor dealer. My memory not unnaturally then does not focus on that midnight.

My tryst came a little later. It came searing into relationships just a year later in 1948 with the assassination of Gandhi. I stood outside the Mahila Samaja waiting for my mother who was its Secretary almost illiterate when she had arrived but who had with a vengeance completed the Rashtra Basha in Hindi (obviously a freedom movement fall out).

I had come to tell her of Gandhi’s death when a Muslim boy as innocent as me cockily kicked me around exulting in the death of Gandhi. Moments later we were both rolling in the dust entwined in hatred...  the poor fellow did not know then that Gandhi was killed by a Hindu.

I was sent off in true Gurukula style to a Brahmin’s house  quite understandably because my mother had six children in quick succession and had to hold the home front and also double as a businesswoman, for father was out most of the month in pursuit of an ever expanding toddy empire always travelling in charcoal buses as he was the very personification of frugality for himself (the seats near the fire were the cheapest!).

Thus loaded with a single parent responsibility, she found that the eldest born– ‘me’ – was too much trouble while the rest of the five were as the saying goes ‘no problem’.

So I did my ascetic Guru Seva of cleaning his home, making the 5 am coffee for his family and taking every admonishment including the one that led me directly into the camp of Godse. For you see, through the year of Freedom and mine of servitude, I had not realised that he was an ardent member of the RSS.

This surfaced suddenly at the murder of Gandhi. Those days and evenings were agog with discourses on the smuggled defence statement of Godse which was proscribed. I don’t know how much of it was genuine.

But my teacher with burning eyes looked like Godse himself while reading it. There was no way I could overcome the hatred I felt for a set of people who gloated in the death of a man who had come to Shimoga with his wife some time ago and had planted two coconut trees in front of the National Lodge. The fading photographs still hung on those trees. And I had grown up with those trees and those faces.

I had been forced into the RSS by my teacher and hated its regimentation too and so finally broke with the fiery-eyed teacher and the RSS. Almost immediately, in defiance as it were I joined the RSD the Congress counterpart of RSS then. (The RSS throws long shadows.They unearthed that early stint and doggedly pursued me into the 80s, 40 years later!)

The second Freedom had arrived in 1948. A young boy had climbed the pipelines of the Mysore Palace and hoisted the tricolor in place of the Ganda Bherunda, the Palace flag of the two headed eagle. He was our local hero.The RSD in Shimoga gave him a tremendous welcome. A hero to me too. Imagine daring all those palace guards and reckless of life climbing all the way up to the palace tower...

But suddenly the taste on the tongue had turned sandy. People in Shimoga took to streets demanding prohibition – the next target after the dethroning of the Raja and my father was an excise contractor.They coined a cute slogan on him punning on his paunch!

It wasn’t very cute then. Menacing boys hung around corners whenever I escorted my sister to the school. Street fights were set up because in those days there wasn’t any immediate confrontation. Rather like arranged duels we negotiated time and the venue.

The irony was that the final ‘duel' was also a derring do. A whole lot of noise but no action. Both sides jumped at the first possibility of compromise. One day, the inevitable happened. Father and mother were away in Tirupathi.

We were largely a frolicking group of kids having fun in the yard in the front of our house where the toddy carrying lorries, mixing tubs, buffalo skins for holding toddy lay around with a huge attendance of red eyed flies. I haven’t seen those flies again in my life. I have a feeling they were merely house flies with an almighty hangover!

Sloganeering

I don’t think my parents had any idea of the foment around the country at the time otherwise I doubt whether they would have left us and gone. The distant drums began around four in the afternoon. Crowds came surging across the main lane (too small to be called a road) and small by-lanes around the house.

The slogans were unmistakable.  Vande Mataram, Jai Hind, ‘Mahatma  Gandhi ki jai.  And then suddenly the purpose rent through the air – Hai Hai to Father. In a moment the house was besieged. The crowd – of black hair, flashing teeth and white clothes – was all around. At the doors, windows, lawns, at the gates and beyond on the – field. The field. That was where all the lorries were in the garage. They over ran the field and emptied out all the tubs and stormed the closed garages to set fire to the lorries...

For us, the child minds, fear was unknown. But there was a step sister much older than us who had acted all on a sudden. I will never forget her act. She stood firmly defiant with her back to the garage door and gave the crowd as good as she got. One person against the surging mass. We hid behind metal window grills and watched. It speaks for the decency of the crowd of those days that no one, but no one, moved a step closer to her.  And yet....

One must understand the fervour — the sheer maddening exuberance of expectation – of that period to realize the possibilities.That crowd, all dressed in white, shouting slogans, was as far away from Gandhiji’s non-violence and as close to violence as the mass mind, that unpredictable entity, could take them. That sister of mine hardly into her twenties may not have fully realized how close to disaster she was.

There she stood with her arms spread out against the doors of the Garage for what seemed a whole age. I don’t know what would have happened but for a pure Hindi cinema event, as Hindi cinema as the stalling of the mob frenzy by a mere girl. The police jeep arrived.The Coorgs are among the most unique race in this country.

They have been our major contribution to the defence forces for they share with the Sikhs the quality of courage and transparency of character. And the handsome man who stepped out of that jeep was one of the best of that race.

We did not know him before that day. And after that day our family had found in him and his family the most steadfast friends down the years. Prohibition came to Shimoga in 1948 throwing father out of business, a business which was in his blood.  There was no way he could start something else. So we moved to Bangalore. Shimoga had become the lost writing on the Palimpsest like Cicero’s De Republica.