(Source: The Hindu, Sunday,
July 29, 2001)
The autobiography of Nepali
politician and sometime Prime Minister B.P. Koirala is a vivid account of
personal and social turmoil and of exile and rebellion that provides acute
insights into the history and politics of the 20th Century. Formally released
in New Delhi in April, this book’s compelling themes have been made more
poignant by the recent happenings in the Kathmandu palace, says historian
RAMACHANDRA GUHA.
“EVERY man’s life,” remarked Dr.
Johnson, “should be best written by himself”. Strangely, Johnson did not carry
out his own injunction, for it was another pen, that of James Boswell, that set
out for posterity the main contours of his life. One must not unduly regret
Johnson’s failure. For one thing, it allowed Boswell to write what is still the
most widely read of all biographies. For another, the autobiography is the most
perilous of literary forms. As the French scholar Andr Maurois pointed out many
years ago, it is marked by a “deliberate forgetfulness”, a willed failure to
remember failure, a desire to omit from one’s authorised account events that
were unpleasant or that might undermine one’s reputation. The autobiography,
writes Maurois, is a genre marked by a lack of sincerity. It forgets and it
rationalises. It gives order and retrospective coherence to decisions made ad
hoc or more-or-less on the spot.
The memoirs that rationalise the
most, further notes Maurois, are those written by military men and politicians.
The General’s victories in his re-telling owe nothing to accident and impulse,
or luck: they are the product of planning and tactical skill alone. The Prime
Minister’s policies owe nothing to expediency or compromise; they are made
exclusively on the basis of ideology and principle. I have no interest in
military history myself, but the political memoirs I have read tend to confirm
Maurois’s judgment. For the most part, these are exercises in vanity and
self-justification, and the less authentic (or readable) for that.
The autobiography of the Nepali
politician and sometime Prime Minister B.P. Koirala stands as a stunning
exception to the rule. This is a remarkable document of personal and social
history, a vivid account of exile and rebellion that provides acute insights
into the history and politics of the 20th Century. Koirala’s memoirs were not
written but spoken, dictated into a microphone held by his friend and associate,
the Kathmandu lawyer Ganesh Raj Sharma. When he began the exercise, in December
1981, the politician was already in the advanced stages of throat cancer. The
transcripts remained with Sharma for years; only when Nepal renewed its
acquaintance with democracy, in the 1990s, was it deemed safe to place them
before the public. A Nepali edition appeared in 1998, published by Jagdamba
Prakashan in Lalitpur. Now, three years later, we have an English version,
translated by Kanak Mani Dixit and published by Himal Books under the title:
Atmabrittanta: Late Life Recollections.
Born in 1914, B.P. was the son of
Krishna Prasad Koirala, a poet, businessman and reformer who fought and made up
– and then fought again – with the Rana rulers of Nepal. Krishna Prasad helped
establish the town of Biratnagar in the Terai, where he made his money running
a series of customs posts. He opened a school and a hospital, and promoted the
uplift of women. He believed that girls must ride bicycles and horses and learn
to use daggers and guns – if only to keep away lecherous louts. He once
remarked that “women and men are like two wheels of a chariot and that you
needed both wheels to run the chariot”. With ideas such as these it is not
surprising that he fell foul of the Ranas, and sought exile in British India.
His son’s memoirs narrate the ups and downs of the Koirala fortunes; the
business bought by the father and sold or run into the ground; the homes
fitfully occupied by the family in the towns of Bihar and the United Provinces.
B.P. grew up in the India of the
1920s, a place and time with a plenitude of political choices. There was
Gandhi, and there was Lenin. And there was Attaturk, an appealing model for
rationalists seeking to rid their own society of tradition and custom.
Koirala chose Gandhi. After hearing
the Mahatma speak he told his father he would now join an ashram school. The
patriarch encouraged him, for he believed that the Indian National Movement
“was also our movement because the autocracy of the Ranas was supported by British
imperialists”. The boy, meanwhile, was soaking in the progressive writing of
the Indo-Gangetic plain. He read Maithili Sharan Gupt and Jai Shanker Prasad,
and above all, Premchand. Indeed, it was in Premchand’s journal Hans that B.P.
made his literary debut.
Along with the brother Matrika Prasad
Koirala, B.P. was arrested during the 1930 movment, suspected of being part of
a terrorist ring. He was, however, released for lack of evidence. The father
had, meanwhile, made up with the Ranas and gone back to Nepal. The son stayed
on in India, and turned leftwards. He read Marx, listened to Radio Moscow, and
hung about with the communists. The Assamese writer Dev Kanta Baruah (still a
honest radical then, not the craven chamcha of Indira Gandhi that he was to
later became) alerted B.P. to the exploitation of farm workers by landlords.
Koirala was impressed by Marxist theory, but less so by Communist politics. He
could not accept the Communist Party of India’s view that the national movement
“was nothing, that it was being masterminded by the British themselves, and
that Gandhi was an unknowing agent of the British.”
It was at about this time that the
Nepali radical made the acquaintance of that other oscillator between Gandhi
and Marx, Jayaprakash Narayan. “I was greatly impressed by him,” writes
Koirala: “he did not use sophisticated language and exhibited a simple
personality.” B.P. also befriended Acharya Narendra Dev and Ram Manohar Lohia.
He was studying at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), a hotbed of the Congress
Socialists. Like them, and like Jawaharlal Nehru, he thought of going to Spain
to fight on the Republican side in the civil war.
After graduating from BHU, Koirala
tried his hand at law, and also worked as a labour organiser in north Bihar. He
was arrested for inciting workers, but quickly released. He was “out” only for
a little while, for he got caught up in the Quit India movement. He was now
lodged in Bankipur Jail, where one of his colleagues was Dr. Rajendra Prasad.
They engaged in friendly but vigorous debate; Rajen babu on the side of
spiritualism, the Nepali on behalf of scientific socialism.
Koirala was released in 1945, and
began plotting a successful return to his native land. The War was over, and
Indian independence seemed imminent. The formation of an interim government led
by Nehru in September 1946 encouraged the Nepali exiles to think seriously of
fighting for democracy themselves. Their country had for a century been in the
control of Ranas. This lineage of aristocrats owned the land, controlled the
army, monopolised the top administrative jobs and manipulated the hereditary
monarch. As the historian Aniruddh Gupta has written, “the survival of the Rana
rule mainly depended on his capacity to suppress the growth of political awakening
in the country”. The most effective way of retaining control was to deny the
privileges of higher education to commoners.
To get himself a college degree, the
ambitious young Nepali had necessarily to travel to India. With education came
political radicalism. By the 1940s, were plenty of young men like the Koirala
brothers, who believed (to quote an emigr journal) that “the salvation of the
Nepalese lies in struggle”, that “to hope for reforms from the Ranas is like
hoping for milk from a dry cow”. On January 25, 1947, these men established the
Nepali National Congress, with the help of funds from a handful of disgruntled
Ranas. In March of that year, B.P’s younger brother Girija Prasad helped
instigate a strike of jute mill workers in Biratnagar. B.P. crossed over to
help. He was arrested, and taken with his fellow agitators to Kathmandu, a
long, slow walk across the hills. It took three weeks to get to the capital,
the prisoners’ march attracting much attention and helping to radicalise the
peasants whose villages lay en route.
The Koiralas were kept in a Kathmandu
bungalow. Letters to the Rana Prime Minister by Gandhi, Rajendra Prasad and
others helped bring about an early release. B.P. went back to India, and began
looking for arms to storm Kathmandu. He tells a lovely story, possibly
embroidered, of how he journeyed to Calcutta in the last week of January 1948,
to buy arms. He made contact with an arms dealer, and at 6 p.m. on January 30
was met on a Calcutta street corner by a stranger who passed on a parcel and
vanished. The parcel was to be passed on in turn to a dissident Rana named
Basanta Shumshere, who was to throw its contents at his assembled kinsmen in
Nepal. As Koirala waited, the grenades wrapped in a hand towel, “from the radio
of a cigarette and paan vendor nearby I heard the news – Gandhi has died.” The
Rana arrived: the bundle was handed over. B.P. came back to his boarding house
and wept through the night in remorse. In time, he was consoled by the words of
Ho Chi Minh: “Whatever may be my disagreements with Gandhi, we are all his
products. Wherever there is a struggle, he has given his support and moral
leadership. Even as someone who believes in violence, I can say that we are all
his progeny.”
The story has a tame ending: the Rana
entrusted with the job was too scared to set off the grenades. So later in 1948
B.P. entered Kathmandu himself, disguised as a pandit. He made contact with
other democrats, but was found out and put once more in jail. The conditions
were awful. Fetters were fixed on his feet, and “a blacksmith was brought from
outside to do the job. He had to hammer vertically in order to fix the fetters,
but in order not to hurt my foot in case the hammer slipped, he was striking at
a slant. Once, the hammer did slip and struck the stone on which the fetters
rested. At that, the officer who was standing next to me scolded the
blacksmith, ‘Careful! You might break the slab!’ The blacksmith replied, ‘I was
aiming at the foot but it slipped and hit the stone. If his bone is broken it
will mend, but will you give me money for this broken piece of stone?’ Such
harsh words serve to illustrate the attitude of my jailers.”
The blacksmith visited the prisoner
twice a day, to remove and put on his fetters before and after his meals. The
British jails he had been in, writes Koirala, were a model of decency and
cleanliness in comparison. To draw attention to his condition, B.P. went on a
fast, which stretched on for nearly four weeks. He was then freed, and trekked
once more into India. It was now June 1949. After a hasty medical check-up, the
exile began planning his return. In April 1950, the coming together of two
factions created a brand new party named the Nepali Congress. Then, in
November, King Tribhuvan fled to India. The struggle accelerated. A band of
Nepali Congressmen stormed a treasury in Birganj. A tractor dressed up as a
tank – by covering its sides with metal sheets – forced its way into the
governor’s garrison in the key town of Biratnagar.
Meanwhile, the Ranas in Kathmandu
were growing nervous. King Tribhuvan’s flight, remarks Aniruddh Gupta in his
book
Politics in Nepal, “not only dealt an
irreparable blow to Rana prestige, it made the people anxious about the safety
of their Monarch whom they regarded as a divine being.” From his exile, the
King published an appeal for reconciliation. The Indian Government convened a
conference in Delhi, after which Tribhuvan returned with honour to his capital,
and put in place a coalition of the Ranas and the Nepali Congress. The union was
uncertain from the start, plagued by mutual suspicion (it seems in this respect
to have been much like the coalition between the Indian National Congress and
the Muslim League in Delhi in 1946-47.) B.P. was Home Minister, but had to
resign after his policemen fired on a students’ demonstration. The Government
fell, to be replaced by another with Matrika Prasad Koirala as the head.
A revealing aspect of these memoirs
is the bitter rivalry between the Koirala brothers. One was cautious, the other
hot-headed. One was a moderate monarchist, the other a republican. Their
disagreements were political and they were personal. B.P. even alleges that his
brother once tried to bump him off. Jayaprakash Narayan tried, without success,
to effect a reconciliation. Eventually the Nepali Congress split into two
parties, one for each brother.
In 1955, King Tribhuvan was succeeded
by his son Mahendra, a man of greater ambition and resolve. The politicians
were dismissed to the margins, with powers centralised in the hands of the
monarch. After half-a-decade of rule of puppet Prime Ministers, the King was
forced to call a general election in 1959, Nepal’s first. The Nepali Congress
swept the polls, winning 74 out of 109 seats. B.P. took office as Prime
Minister. He stayed in the job for 18 months, visiting India and China on state
visits, and consorting with Nikita Khruschev at the United Nations. King
Mahendra was resentful of Koirala’s popularity within and (especially) outside
Nepal. Late in 1960, the King organised a coup, sending his royal guards to
arrest the Prime Minister and put him in jail. Mahendra was being pushed by the
landed aristocracy to act before the Congress put in place radical land
reforms. And, like monarchs everywhere, he had a congenital suspicion of democracy.
While his brother was in jail,
Matrika Prasad went off as King Mahendra’s Ambassador to the United States. His
family was fearful that B.P. would be bumped off, thus to meet the fate of the
independent-minded Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Jawaharlal
Nehru sent a message of reassurance through Koirala’s sister. Nehru’s “level of
personal interest,” remarks B.P. was “a source of great and reliable moral
support for us prisoners who were so suddenly isolated.”
In 1965, with B.P. in jail, the
Oxford University Press published a book called Heroes and Builders of Nepal.
The author, the civil servant and diplomat Rishikesh Shaha, began his narrative
with Janaka and Buddha and ended it with Tribhuvan and Mahendra, paying his
dues en route to the great medieval warrior-kings such as Pratap Malla and
Prithvinarayan Shah. The last chapter, titled “The Dawn of Democracy in Nepal”,
is a paean to the monarchy. The ending of Rana autocracy is attributed solely
to Tribhuvan: “never before had there been a king who staked his life and
throne to secure the liberty of his subjects”. Mahendra is praised for his
“successful foreign policy” and his “work on national construction”, “his
leadership and personality,” it is said, “have aroused a deep awareness of
national purpose.”
Given its author’s position and the
timing of its publication, the book makes no mention of the Nepali Congress or
of that hero and builder of modern Nepal: B.P. Koirala. It would be interesting
to know if B.P. read Shaha’s book. Alas, his memoirs do not say. In any case,
the narrative of the Atmabrittanta perceptibly flags after Koirala’s arrest.
The eight years in Sundarijal jail are quickly glossed over. The text ends with
his release and exile to India.
The printed book could have done with
an editorial epilogue on Koirala’s later life which, as always, was chockful of
incident and controversy. Exiled once more to India, he prepared his comrades
in the Nepali Congress for a fresh round of armed struggle. Thirty-five of his
young followers perished in one encounter, wiped out by the Nepali army while
taking shelter in a cave. In 1976, Koirala himself returned to his country,
sensing perhaps that he had not long to live. He was immediately arrested, and
made a remarkable speech at his trial where he defended armed rebellion. In
these last years in Nepal, he also supervised a transition in his party’s
leadership, before dying of cancer in July 1982.
B.P. Koirala came of age while in
exile in India. He first went to prison fighting for the freedom of a country
not his own. He struck close friendships with Indian politicians. Jayaprakash
Narayan and Jawaharlal Nehru were to him like big brothers. But after his
return to Nepal, India itself reappeared as Big Brother. As Home Minister and Prime
Minister, writes Koirala, he had to fight against three forces: the royal
palace, the land- holding elite, and India. Nehru might have been kind and
polite, but his government deeply resented Koirala’s independent foreign
policy. The Indian ambassador in Kathmandu “believed that he was even greater
than the King”. One envoy, C.P.N. Singh, so readily threw his weight around
that Koirala was constrained to tell a press conference in Benares that “the
Indian ambassador wishes that our country be like his district board, and he
regards himself as chairman of that district board”. Once, in New York, V. K.
Krishna Menon asked Koirala, a sovereign Prime Minister himself, to accompany
him to the airport to receive Nehru, a gesture that would tell all the world that
Nepal wished to be seen as a client state of India. Naturally he declined, but
the wound festered: 20 years later he mentioned the incident in his memoirs, as
an example of how “they (the Indians) just did not understand clean diplomacy.”
B. P. Koirala’s Atmabrittanta was
formally released in New Delhi in April 2001. Its themes are compelling anyway,
but have been made more poignant by the recent happenings in the Kathmandu
palace. The book now enjoys a more than ordinary resonance, speaking as it does
of the remarkable hold of the monarchy in the popular imagination, of the
fragility of Nepal’s democracy, of the endemic hostility towards India, and of
the desperate inequality in the countryside. (The rise of the Maoists is a
consequence of the failures of previous regimes to more effectively carry out
the land reforms that Koirala had called for.) And the Prime Minister of Nepal
at the time of this great tragedy was none other than the leader of the
Biratnagar strikers of 1947, B.P’s younger brother Girija. Koirala’s memoirs
should be read for its insights into Nepali politics. It should be read for
what it tells us about India and Indians. It should be read as a moving
testament of one who was caught, on the right side, in the great (and
unfinished) battle of the modern world, that between autocracy and democracy.
And it should be read for its literary qualities. For B.P. was one of his
country’s finest writers as well as its most prominent political rebel. His
works include six novels, two collections of short stories, and hundreds of
essays. As the critic C.K. Lal points out, B.P. was a literary innovator,
perhaps the first Nepali writer to sensitively portray women and to look
towards local dialect rather than Sanskrit for his inspiration. “It is baffling,”
writes Lal, “that no writer in Nepal to date has been able to reach the depth
of mind of characters in a story the way B.P. did.”
As for the Atmabrittanta, even in
this English version it sparkles. The book is rich in descriptions of scenes
and people closely and penetratingly observed. I read, with a flash of self-
recognition, these remarks on Kathmandu’s intellectuals: “They love to
highlight unimportant matters … They are big on discussion, but do not give a
paisa of support”. And again: “Whoever came (to India) from Kathmandu in those
days used to arrive with a great air of mystery, as if they alone were carrying
the heavy burden of revolution.”
The narrative glows with images both
precise and illuminating. Here is Koirala on one of the many places he was
obliged to call home: “The jailer led me to my place of incarceration. There
was no light other than one smoky lantern with a weak flame. I was led into a
cell, but I could not see anything. There was a bedstead made of wood so
unseasoned that it looked like it would drip water; half the room had bluish
algae on the walls. This much I could see. The ceiling was very low, and
because it had been newly plastered the cement was still wet. The walls were
cold and damp. They put my rug on the ground.”
Exile, jail, exile again; life
underground and life as the Prime Minister of his people: only Nelson Mandela
among modern statesmen could so completely have known the highs and the lows of
politics. But even Mandela was not attacked by his fellow freedom fighters.
This book has a fascinating account of a demonstration orchestrated against
Koirala by his brother Matrika Prasad. He was due to speak at the town of
Palpa. But the dissidents were determined to keep him out: “Murderer! Go back!
was the slogan they used, but I insisted on entering the town. It was quite a
climb to get up there, and the road was difficult. Along the road, they had
tied bones and skeletons on bamboo poles, and had put up bamboo barriers across
the path. They threw stones at us, tried to hit me from the trail-side, and
also tried to splatter me with black paint … The copper and bronze gaagri put
out for my arrival had all been damaged, as were the welcome arches”. His
associates were suitably intimidated, but Koirala insisted on going ahead with
the public meeting, working through the night to organise it. The meeting, in
the end, was successful. In the crowd to hear Koirala speak was the wandering
American ornithologist, S. Dillon Ripley.
B.P. provides a superb, if chilling,
description of the lifestyle of those celebrated fighters for the world’s poor,
the Chinese Communists. In Beijing, Mao Zedong and Chou En-Lai stayed in
lakeside palaces in the former emperor’s grounds, their dwellings marked by
great marble staircases and wall-to-wall carpeting. “The grandeur amidst which
the Chinese leaders were living”, remarks Koirala, “could not have been matched
by any ruler of a capitalist state”. The visitor was allowed to joy ride in
Mao’s personal train, with its well-appointed bedroom and its porcelain
bath-tub. Koirala, like China’s Chairman, spent his time watching the
countryside from the living room, this a large hall with glass walls and a
glass roof, with “a library, a table for playing cards, a chessboard, and
waiters serving tea. Also, a sofa and revolving chairs.”
Reading B.P. Koirala’s memoirs, I was
struck by the parallels between his life and Nehru’s. Both were democratic
socialists who learnt much from Gandhi and a little from Marx. Both had fathers
who were strong-minded and authoritative, self-made men who made a great deal
of money and had a political orientation besides. The sons both became traitors
to their class. Their own political choices exposed them to poverty and
oppression. Nonetheless, both enjoyed the ceremony of power: the bowing and
scraping at state visits and the meetings at the U.N.. Both were truly
charismatic figures who towered over their colleagues. B.P’s description of the
1959 elections in this book recalls the role played by Nehru in the Indian
elections of 1952. Victory for the party candidate was assured only after
Koirala or Nehru had descended from the air to speak. Each constituency had, so
to say, to be sanctified by a speech by the Great Leader. Their names got their
party into power, but once in office, both were hemmed in by more cautious men
on their own side. The programmes of economic and social justice that they were
in principle committed to never seriously took effect. (Nehru might well have
written, as Koirala does here, that “real and effective support I did not get
from my own party”.) And in either case, politics became a kind of family
business: Nehru’s daughter and grandson, and Koirala’s elder and younger
brother, also held office as Prime Minister of their country.
To this already extensive list one
must add: both Koirala and Nehru had developed literary sensibilities, their
political obligations coming in the way of their secondary careers as writers.
But there are some notable divergences as well. Koirala appears to have had a
more satisfactory married life. His experience of jail was certainly more
painful. And his experience of power was more fleeting. Nehru, writes this
book’s translator wistfully, “survived and led India for 17 years after its
independence. Fate would not extend a similar privilege to B.P. Koirala, and
even as his co-equals settled down to enjoy the fruits of post-colonial India,
B.P.’s fight for his people was just beginning. Ahead lay years more of
imprisonment and in exile.”
One is tempted to say: politics’ loss
has been literature’s gain. Nehru himself wrote a fine work of autobiography.
It was published in 1936, when he had years in jail ahead of him. That book is
persuasive because it is the testament of a rebel. Nehru did not write at all
of his years in office: perhaps because he was too busy, or perhaps because he
knew that any such account would necessarily have to be evasive and
euphemistic. Now had B.P. Koirala been Prime Minister from (say) 1952 to 1967
Nepal might today have been a more contented society. But we would then have
been denied these extraordinary memoirs, this nearly unique combination of
political candour and literary elegance.
(I am deeply grateful to C. K. Lal
for his help and advice in the writing of this article.)
Ramachandra Guha is a writer and
historian based in Bangalore. His books include Environmentalism: A Global
History; Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India and An
Anthropologist Among Marxists and Other Essays. He is also the editor of the
newly released Picador Book of Cricket. E-mail him at ramguha@vsnl.com
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