Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [82]
Devgad had resisted the Grand Mughal’s designs for inclusion only because of the Raja’s unswerving hatred of all Sunni Muslims. He had himself been raised in the palace of a Shia king. His father, though devoutly Hindu, was the King’s subedar, a kind of fort commander, who took to calling himself a king. It was a small, obscure fort and efficiently run; hearing no objection from the Shia overlord so long as he remained loyal and productive, he, his wife and the boy’s tutors taught his son to be a king.
The text that was pounded into him by his tutor was the Sanskrit classic, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the Art of State-Craft. In deference to his concept of patriotism, the young Jadav Singh struck the coins of his realm in Sanskrit, not Persian. From Kautilya, he learned the art of survival in a ruthless but elegant age: the weaker king, in order to survive, must seek the protection of the more powerful, or he must strike an alliance with his equals, or he must retire behind fortified walls and wait him out. If defeated, he accepts the most humiliating terms, suffers silently, then plots his revenge. Defeat and humiliation, and the thirst for vengeance, he learned from the fate of his father.
When the young and intolerant Aurangzeb, the Great Mughal, had defeated the Shias, he proved to be less forgiving of heretics and infidels than any of the five previous emperors in the hundred and seventy-five years of his illustrious lineage. Even minor forts were cleansed of subversive elements. He installed Hasan Beg, the father of the current vassal-nawab, Haider Beg, to take over the Coromandel Coast of Roopconda, and to kill or drive from power all Shia sultans, and to expel all Hindus from positions of assumed power. Jadav Singh’s father had been turned out of the fort, humiliated. The son had sworn revenge and had carried the pledge forward to the Nawab’s son, and to the Grand Mughal himself.
Raja Jadav Singh had not come down from Devgad to witness an English factor’s punishment, though he never forgot the expression of disbelief on the pale firangi face just before the sword came down on the stately triangle of pinched flesh. Months later he confided to Hannah that in the moment before Tringham’s grimy white shirtfront exploded into glistening scarlet, he understood something about the firangi arrogance, which enabled even flawed, pathetic little men like Tringham to dream of plundering lands they did not know, and did not hate. They really didn’t think that laws applied to them. They tried to walk the world like gods, without armies or servants or gold to protect them, and without the principle of vengeance to ennoble them.
That day, Jadav Singh, exercising the eccentric right of a holy man, had stepped in front of the washerman’s donkey upon which the poor, accommodating but denosed Tringham was forced to ride backward, and whispered into his ear, “Turn your hate into action, friend. Join the enemies of your enemies. Avenge this day!”
The Raja’s reason for billeting himself in disguise in the nearby fort of Panpur (the seat of a vassal who, after the slaughter of his sons and the enslavement of his three wives, had fled Roopconda for the protection of the Raja) was to harass the firangi trade in the weakly defended coastal outposts of Fort St. Sebastian and New Salem, to stir up resentment against the Company and thus, eventually, diminish the revenue the firangi paid the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb.
The Panpur vassal had proven himself loyal and reckless, capable of sufficient vengeance to recommend him as a subedar. While Higginbottham plotted only the death of Gabriel Legge, Raja Jadav Singh had been waiting in Panpur fort, almost within sight of Fort St. George, for just the right moment to