The Autobiography Of The Transparent Ironist : Chapter 2
(Special Issue For International Woman's Day, March 8)

(This is Chapter 2 of my autobiography My Experiments With Irony; once again, my earlier caveats about the term 'autobiography' hold. (See my introduction to Chapter 1 below.))

I am blessed with a certain gift that many of my friends only dream of (or, more commonly, dispute its existence) : the gift of withdrawing into myself like a tortoise retreating into its shell and looking back into my past lives. Therefore, unlike them who often do not know why they think and believe what they do, I am aware, only too painfully, where my beliefs and actions ultimately spring from, the dark but not unforgotten recesses of my strange past.

I clearly remember one of these past lives of mine : I was then living in British-occupied India in the stormy decade of the 1880s when the whole country was being turned upside-down by the White Man. I belonged to a family that came from a long line of pandits, scholars who read the sacred scriptures in Sanskrit and passed them down to the next generation. It was around that time, however, that the British government passed a regulation that more and more of the natives should be made to study English instead, and that funding to the vernacular schools was to be withdrawn. Our family lived in Malda, the land of the evergreen mango trees, and the officer posted there was a young man called Nathaniel Cornwallis, a stickler for perfection, who took his service to his King and Country extremely seriously.

He came to our house one morning and ordered my mother that I was to be taken away to Calcutta where I would be given a proper English education at the Scottish Church College there. She pleaded with him that I was her only son and that he should go to the family of someone with more children, only to receive the reply that I was being specially chosen since I came from a family of Sanskrit scholars. The argument was abruptly concluded with the infuriated Cornwallis calling in his men, and I was briskly dragged away from her into his coach, smelling beautifully of some faint perfume. I looked back at my old house and saw my mother standing forlorn at the withered gate, two steady streams of cold tears slowly flowing down her emaciated cheeks.

Thus I began a new life in Calcutta : I learnt the English alphabet, and began to hear strange names that I could not initially even pronounce, Macaulay, Keats, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, and Tennyson. Every morning I would wake up and repeat to myself with the rising sun some of the great sayings of the Upanisads, and in particular one of these tat tvam asi would reverberate inside my mind the whole day.

One morning, my mother came to see me when I was in Cornwallis' office explaining to him some principles from the Dharma-Sastras, the ancient Hindu law-books. Cornwallis immediately stiffened when he saw her enter his office, and exclaimed that I was now no longer her son, I was the son of the British Empire. Every mother, he explained, must learn to make sacrifices so that the Majesty of the Great Mother, Queen Victoria, may spread throughout the world. My mother replied that she did not wish to take me away from him, but wanted to talk to me for a few minutes. We talked in fact for a long time about what had been happening in my absence in my village; my family had been evicted from its ancestral home; the local crafts were dying out; and millions were starving to death on the streets.

And before she left, my mother told me : 'Son, learn this language that they call Angrezi thoroughly. Learn it so well that when you compose an essay or a poem in it no Englishman shall ever know that it has actually come from the pen of a native. And yet, my son, learn it not simply in order to enjoy it, but also to use it like a weapon against the Englishman. Read all their books thoroughly one by one, and when you have absorbed what they say, turn these books against the Englishman.' That was my mother's parting advice to me on that cold December morning. I never saw her again; I received a note from my village three weeks later informing me that she had peacefully died in her sleep.

As for myself, I went on to master not only the language, but also the poetry, the novels, the history, and the philosophy of the Englishman. It was then that I realised that I had come to possess a unique power : English was not just a language anymore, it had also become a political weapon of defiance and resistance. Through English, I learnt about liberty, fraternity, freedom, and equality and all the great values that people in Europe were fighting and dying for. Indeed, through my mastery of English, I had become like a Trojan horse that had secretly invaded the seemingly impenetrable fortress of the British Empire, learnt all its secrets inside out, found out all of its weakest links, and was now waiting to launch a full-fledged attack on it from the within. I was now truly a son of the British Empire, but what a son I had become!

By the time I was a dying man, I was happy to see that more and more of my countrymen were learning English, and were making themselves aware of the inner contradictions of an Empire that claimed, on the one hand, to be based on the noble ideal of Humanity and was perpetuated, on the other hand, through savage brutalities inflicted daily on the natives. I died in the year 1920 just as Mahatma Gandhi was starting one of the greatest mass movements that would shake the British Empire to its very roots, an Empire whose devoted son I have always remained. And yes, I have also always remained a loving son of my dear mother whose pain at her separation from her only child I would never forget. Indeed, if there is one transparent truth that I realised in that past-life of mine, one transparent truth that I do not wish to forget in any future-life of mine, it is this : the greatest monuments of so-called human civilisation are raised on the inhuman misery of billions of silently-suffering women.