Chapter 144: Workload Management

When Sodhi had gone, Radhakrishnan poured the tea, which had gone cold, and drank it without noticing.

"Prime Minister, I have a different matter to raise, and I am afraid it is not a pleasant one."

"Please."

"I am Minister of Culture. In the last three years, that title has come to cover the following." He counted on his fingers. "The Sports Authority and the Olympic programme. The National Games and the Asian Games. The architectural commission, whose plans for the national civic blueprints are in use in eleven provinces. The Sanskrit syllabus, which is finished, and the teacher training, which is an ongoing endeavour. The cultural reformation, which I have been told is my particular care. The archaeology survey. The national museums, the libraries, the radio dramas, the folk music archive. The scholars who go to the monasteries of Tibet. The manuscripts. The temple reform you described in the House."

"It is a great deal," Ram said.

"It is too much." Radhakrishnan took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "I am sixty-two years old. I have not read a book for pleasure since 1947. I find that when I wish to think about what Indian culture is, I am unable to, because someone has come to ask me about the cost of a javelin."

Nehru laughed softly.

"I do not complain," Radhakrishnan said. "It is my own doing. I ought to have said no. But I did not, and now I find that the Ministry has grown a body I cannot feed. I propose to divide it."

"Into what?"

"Three. A Ministry of Sports, which would carry the Sports Authority, the Games, and the national teams. A Ministry of Urban Development, which would take the architectural commission, the housing standards, the town plans, and the great public buildings. A Ministry of Arts, which would take music, dance, theatre, literature, the museums, and the archaeology. Each under a junior minister of its own, with its own staff and its own budget."

"And the Ministry of Culture?"

"Would remain above them," Radhakrishnan said. "Not as a fourth ministry. As a ministry over ministries. It would set the principles: what we preserve, what we reform, what we create. It would hold the Sanskrit programme, the temple reform, the great questions of heritage and identity. The junior ministers would carry out the work and answer to me."

Nehru put down his cup. "Sarvepalli, forgive me. I admire the logic. But I do not like the shape. A ministry that sits above others is a ministry that interferes with them. It would be a sort of ministry of thought. I have seen what such things become in other countries."

"I share your worry, Jawaharlal. It is why I have asked the Prime Minister to hear me."

"Then let me ask the question directly." Nehru turned to Ram. "Why should culture stand above sports and architecture and the arts? Why not make them equal, each a cabinet portfolio of its own? If it is merely a matter of dividing work, the principle ought to be equality."

Ram did not answer at once. He looked at the neem tree in the courtyard, and when he spoke, it was quietly.

"If we were Europeans, I would agree. A French minister of the arts has two thousand years of Greece and Rome behind him, and a thousand of his own, without a break. A Chinese minister has four thousand years of continuous written tradition. They may divide their cultural work into departments, because the tradition holds itself together. It does not need a hand on it.

"We are different. We had a long pause. For eight hundred years, the courts that governed us were not ours, and the schools that taught us did not teach us. A great deal was lost, and a great deal was bent, and a great deal was hidden in the villages and the temples where no one looked.

"We are inheriting a living tradition, but that tradition has been in a coma for a long time. We are recovering it. And what is being recovered must be done with care, or it will be done badly. A Minister of Sports who knows nothing of the epics will build a stadium in the style of Berlin. A Minister of Urban Development who has never seen a stepwell will lay out a city like Manchester. A Minister of Arts who has never studied the ragas will give grants to imitators.

"There must be one mind that holds the whole together and asks, over every decision: is this ours? Is it a thing a modern India can be proud of and recognise as hers? That is not a ministry of thought, Jawaharlal. It is a ministry of memory."

Nehru said nothing. His face, which was so rarely still, had gone quiet.

"I have been reading the Doctor’s proposals for some weeks," Ram went on, "and I want to ask him something. Dr. Radhakrishnan, you wrote a line in the draft that I have been turning over. May I read it?"

"Please."

Ram took a sheet from his case. "’However much anyone may call it regressive or non-secular, India is a country whose cultural inheritance is Hindu, in the same way that America or Britain is a country whose cultural inheritance is Protestant Christian. It does not mean that every citizen is Hindu. It does not mean that any citizen is less a citizen. It means that the festivals, the calendar, the epics, the idea of dharma, the architecture of the village, the grammar of the language, rise from one source. A State that tries to forget its source loses its cohesion.’"

He looked up; Radhakrishnan had folded his hands on the desk.

"I wrote that, Prime Minister, after a good deal of thought. I am a Hindu, and I am also a philosopher, and I should like to say that I am an honest man. I think it is true. The Americans do not call themselves a Protestant country. They put it into their Constitution that the State may not favour a church. But if you look at what they do, the Sundays, the Thanksgiving, the oath on the Bible, the whole shape of their civic year, it is Protestant to its bones. They do not say it. They do not need to. It is simply what they are.

"We are in a harder position, because we have had to say it aloud, after a Partition made by people who insisted that religion and nation were the same thing. I do not say that. I say only that a country which pretends it has no inheritance is a country that has forgotten what it is made of. And we have seen, very recently, what happens to a country that forgets."

The room was quiet. The reference to Partition lay between them like a stone.

Nehru said slowly, "I do not disagree with a word of the history, Sarvepalli. I only..." He stopped. "I only wonder how we say it in a Constitution that promises equality to everyone."

"We do not say it in the Constitution," Ram said gently. "We say it in the calendar. In the schools. In the way we build. In what a child learns on the first day. The Constitution protects every man’s right to believe what he wishes. It does not command anyone to forget where he came from." He paused. "I know that it pains you, Jawaharlal. It goes against much of what you have believed since you were a young man. I will tell you honestly what I have come to think. I doubt that the pure principle of secularism, as the French or the Americans understand it, can ever be adopted in India. Not because we are unwilling, but because the soil is wrong.

"The Indian way is not to separate the sacred from the civic. It is to include. Every faith in India has been given a place at the table, and every one has left a mark on the table. What we may become is something new: a country that honours all its faiths because it is secure in one of them. I do not know whether that is secularism. But I think it is more likely to last."

Nehru looked at him for a long time, and when he answered, he spoke in the tone of a man who has decided to be honest with himself.

"I think you may be right, Ram. I do not like it. But I think you may be right." A faint smile touched his lips. "Sarvepalli, you may have your three ministries."

"Thank you, Jawaharlal."

"I shall hold you to your word that they will not become a ministry of thought."

"I shall hold myself to it."

Ram set down the sheet. "Doctor, I have a request. I want you to name the three junior ministers. And I want you to staff the new Ministry of Culture. You will need people who can hold the whole picture in their heads. Scholars, not politicians."

Radhakrishnan took a pad and a pencil, and wrote for a minute without a word.

"For Sports, Professor Sodhi, if he will take it. There is no better man in India for it, and he has built the thing already. For Arts, I propose Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. She revived the handloom movement and founded half the craft institutions in the country. She understands that a weaver and a dancer are doing the same work. For Urban Development, Shri N.V. Gadgil, who has run the Works and Housing department of Bombay and understands a municipal budget." He paused. "And for the Ministry of Culture itself, a small council. Dr. Sunitikumar Chatterji, the linguist. Dr. Vasudeva Agrawala, the art historian. Rukmini Devi Arundale, who has been trying for fifteen years to bring Bharatanatyam back from the temple courtyards to the stage. Dr. Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, for literature.

"Send the proposal across; I will clear it at once." Ram smiled.

"Prime Minister." Radhakrishnan hesitated. "May I say one more thing?"

"Please."

"I have been a teacher all my life. I did not enter politics. I was pushed into it. I find, now, that I do not regret it, but I should like it to be said that I never wanted power. I wanted a classroom." His voice was soft. "If I am to carry this ministry, I will carry it as a teacher would. I shall tell the truth, and I shall expect to be asked to resign if I am wrong."

"I do not expect you to be wrong, Doctor."

"I expect it every day. It keeps me careful."

Mahanadi Valley and the Damodar

October 1950

The first of the new power came on a night in October, and nobody in the village of Remed noticed until morning.

It was a small thing. The temporary transmission line from the Hirakud construction site had been strung along the new road in September, wooden poles with a single copper wire, and for three weeks it had carried nothing but a faint hum. On the twelfth, the Resettlement Authority’s engineer, a sunburnt Bengali named Sengupta (no relation to the Bureau’s man), threw a switch in a corrugated shed. Eleven miles away, in the colony of Hirakud Nagar, a single electric bulb came on over the door of the school.

Old Subhadra Behera, the woman who had refused to leave her house for three months, was sitting on her verandah with a pot of rice when it happened. She looked up and saw a pale yellow glow where the dark had been. She did not say anything. She set the pot aside, got to her feet, and walked slowly across the colony to the school, and stood under the light for some time with her face tilted.

"It does not flicker," she said to the schoolmaster, who had come out in his shirt-sleeves.

"No, mataji. It will burn all night."

"The oil lamp has to be trimmed."

"This one does not."

She said nothing for a while. Then she remarked, "My husband would have thought it was a miracle. I think it is only wire." But she stayed there until the moon was high.

By the end of the month, a hundred and forty houses in Hirakud Nagar had light. A small flour mill, run by a motor the size of a dustbin, was grinding wheat in the market. In the dispensary, the nurse had a refrigerator for vaccines. The children of the colony, who had never had a lamp that did not smoke, did their lessons at the school after dark, in a long room with six bulbs and a blackboard, and the headmaster stopped trying to send them home.

Four hundred miles to the north, on the dry, sandy plain below the Aravallis, Kurien’s tractors had been at work for six weeks.

The village of Bhatiyani, in the Jaisalmer district, had not had a good well since the monsoon failed in 1939. Its three hundred families drew water from a tank four miles away, carried in brass pots on women’s heads, and in a bad year, from a puddle in the bed of a dry river. At the edge of the village stood the ruin of an old stepwell, a great square hole in the earth with stone stairs descending sixty feet to a floor of sand, dug by a Rajput queen in the fourteenth century. It had silted up in the 1880s. Nobody had touched it since.

In September, a team of the Public Works Department arrived with a Soviet crawler tractor and a dozen labourers, and began to dig. The villagers watched with suspicion. On the fourth day, the tractor struck a hard layer of clay, and an engineer on the bank called to stop. A young woman of the village, Gulab Bai, who had come with her mother to watch, said in a clear voice, "There was a channel."

The engineer looked at her.

"My grandmother used to say that the water came in from the north, through a stone drain, when the rains were good. It went under the old temple. She said that when she was a girl, you could hear it."

The engineer was a Madrasi, and he spoke no Rajasthani. But he had an interpreter, and the interpreter, after some talk, led him across the dune to the ruined temple. There, under a mound of sand, the labourers found a stone lintel, and beyond it, a covered drain, lined with dressed slabs, running north toward a low line of hills. It had not carried water in sixty years. But it was whole.

They cleared it in a week. In the first week of October, a thunderstorm broke over the Aravallis, forty miles north, and a thin sheet of brown water ran down the dry nullah and into the drain. The labourers had been told to wait. They stood on the edge of the stepwell at dusk, a hundred and fifty of them, villagers and workmen together, and watched the first trickle slide down the stone channel and into the pit.

It took four hours to fill the lowest step. Then the second. Then, when the moon came up, the water stood eight feet deep, black and still and smelling of rain.

An old man, very old, with a white turban and a face like a walnut, was led to the edge of the steps by his granddaughter. He knelt, put his hand in the water, and brought a little to his lips.

"It is sweet," he said. He sat back on his heels and looked at the people around him, and for a moment, he looked like a man deciding whether to speak. Then he said quietly, "My father told me about this well. I did not believe him."

Gulab Bai, who had told the engineer about the channel, was crying openly. Her mother held her and said nothing.

By the end of October, the Public Works Department had restored eleven stepwells in the district, dug fourteen new tanks, and laid the first of thirty miles of feeder channels. In the Mahanadi delta, the first embankments of the new flood-control scheme were going up, and the Soviet tractors that moved the earth sounded, from a distance, like a long, steady heartbeat.

At Bhilai, a line of Soviet blast furnaces stood half-built beneath a cloud of red dust, and the Indian apprentices at the foot of the scaffolding sang a Sanskrit song of the Rigveda as they worked, because it kept the rhythm of the hammers. And on the Damodar, at a place where the river ran through a narrow gorge, the first concrete of the first of four dams was poured on a Sunday afternoon, with no ceremony, by men who had been told to be careful.

In the evenings, in every village that had a radio, the broadcast began at half past six.

"Namaskar," said a calm voice in forty languages. "This is All India Radio. For the next fifteen minutes, we shall talk about money. What it is. Where it comes from. And why a man who lends a rupee to his Republic may, in a few years, find that he is a shareholder in a refinery."

On a verandah in a village outside Muzaffarpur, a labourer who could not read sat with his daughter, who could, and listened. When the voice explained that the Urja Bond could be bought at the post office for ten rupees, he turned to the girl.

"Ten rupees," he said. "That is two days’ wages."

"Baba," she said, "they say you can take it back after a year."

"They say."

"The teacher says they have not broken a promise so far."

He thought about it for a long time. The lamp flickered on the wall, and somewhere in the dark a cow shifted. Then he said slowly, "Tomorrow I will look at the post office."

He did not buy the bond that week. But he went to look. And in the second week, with six rupees saved and four borrowed from his brother, he bought a certificate and carried it home folded in a cloth, and showed it to his daughter, who read it aloud to him twice before he put it away.

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All the best wishes to everyone for Dhanteras today.