PROPOSAL Audience Organization Current Working Group Relation to AAA Purposes

John Borneman (Princeton University) and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi (Cornell University)

(The voices of the two authors are kept separate. That of Ghassem-Fachandi is italicized. Names of persons and places have been changed to protect the anonymity of those described.)

Shortly before noon on Sunday, the Maharaja of a Saurashtrian Princely state, the last living King who ruled before the creation of an independent India, summons us, Parvis and myself. It is March 2002, time of some of the worst communal riots in central contemporary India. We are visiting as guests of his son. “Devduttji,” as I call him, teasingly, which means “servant to God” in Hindi, told us the previous evening that his father had scheduled a meeting, but shortly before the appointed time the King canceled. Now eighty-two-years-old, this Maharaja was the last ruler of this small Kingdom, a sovereignty never subject to British colonial rule. In 1947, on the initiative of the King, it ceded to the province of Gujarat, and, in 1961 to the Indian state. The family line will soon come to an end, however, as his three sons have produced only daughters, and there is no case of a female ever assuming the throne of a kingship in India. Perhaps the question of succession has already been preempted: No crowning ceremony for the eldest son is even planned after the Maharaja’s death. Thus ends a line of patrilineal descent that goes back to the 11^th Century.

We stay in the part of the palace formerly devoted to ceremonials—receiving guests, holding darbar (literally, court), musical and artistic performances, public addresses. The palace complex of approximately a square mile near the center of town consists of several separate buildings, which retain their grandeur despite being damaged by a massive earthquake in January 2001. The King occupies merely one wing of one building. Devduttji tells me, “They address the King as ‘Your Highness.’” After walking to the King’s quarters, we remove our shoes before his servants lead us into a waiting room, modestly furnished with three plain wooden chairs and two desks. The King, meanwhile, seats himself in the adjacent room, on a plain swivel chair, behind a small wooden desk with faded manila folders stacked on its various corners. The room is composed of two L-shaped corridors, with the King located at the point of the L, facing a long row of tables (also stacked with old manila folders, books, photos) and three simple chairs placed strategically in a semicircle for his audience.

My disappointment at the cancellation of yesterday’s visit is suddenly lifted as the King’s calls to meet him—just minutes before we had prepared to leave the compound. The order appears to me as a symbolic inversion of the Indian concept of hospitality, where the guest arrives unexpectedly and is treated as God, “atithi bhavan”(without a date); instead it is we, John and I, who are summoned unexpectedly. Alternately, this might be based on our misconception of what "being a guest" implies in Gujarat. Staying in the King's palace and eating food made by his servants (or, in our case, those of the Queen) means that we have been the King's guest since our arrival. Eating and lodging in one’s home is always equal to being a guest, irrespective of whether one meets the master of the house. I have often experienced this kind of hospitality in rural Gujarat: invited to dine with a local authority who then, for some reason, was indisposed and unable to actually meet me. In other words, being guest of the King does not necessarily mean having an audience with him.

The room in which we wait contains a modern photocopy and fax machine, telephones--all amenities less reminiscent of a King than of a modern academic or NGO manager. The King’s presence is guarded and our entry is well organized. I notice that he is surrounded by many helpers and assistants with different tasks and competencies. His servants are busier than I have seen in any Indian police station, post office, or other public agency that assumes the face of an executive in modern Indian society. I am accustomed to a general wasting of time: tea is served, people gossip, I am asked again and again who I am, where I come from, what I am doing in India—anything, it seems, to keep people from their official duties. Here, they all seem to work efficiently in the King’s interests, without sacrificing warmth to us strangers. Some appear to do this habitually and confidently; others, especially the younger male servants who bring chai (tea) and lemon sodas, look intimidated and move awkwardly as they try to make the King comfortable, report messages or telephone calls received, turn lights on and off, or redirect the fans to alleviate the oppressive heat.

We are finally escorted in. I play deference, John does not. I smile, fold my hands, bring them to my face, bow slightly, as is Indian custom. John remains cool and, from my Indian ethnographer’s perspective, unsubmissive. I thought this must appear strange to the King, but obviously he expects this difference, as I am younger and have less status, and John and I are, after all, not Indian. The King may have had this sudden audience planned, as he is fully informed of who we are. He is genuinely interested in us and asks serious questions, politely but directly, with no typical Indian small talk. Even if it was not planned, the suddenness of the summons underwrites his authority.

It is also clear that even if the King no longer rules, he still represents, as do his sons. We were enlisted in this royal representative function on the night of our cancelled visit. Devduttji was asked to attend a performance of the Sidi Muslim community, whom people describe as one of the lowest castes (halka), descendants of African Habshi known for their effervescent, uncontrolled, and ecstatic music and dance—but he could not attend. Arab armies had brought the Habshi to South Asia as soldier-slaves. They are still recognizable by their African features. We—American and German--take Devduttji’s place. They seat us on chairs specially brought into the courtyard, while all the others stand or sit on the ground. The performers, include an elderly blind and disabled man named Suleiman, several adult women, and two young male dancers. They play and dance for about 20 minutes. We are instructed by one of the court’s servants to reward them with a fairly generous monetary gift. This gift is not merely symbolic, for it could feed many people for some months in rural Gujarat. As I stand to leave, John tries to wipe the dust off from the back of my white kurta, making it look even dirtier—obviously, the chairs are rarely used. People point to the back of my Kurta and laugh at the black lines left from the chair. Our hosts take us to some neighboring Muslim homes, where they reassure us that they safe they feel in village, and that Muslims and Hindus are really brothers. But I also sense confusion in their eyes; they have undoubtedly heard terrible things from their Muslim relatives over the last few weeks, things for which one can barely find words in Gujarati.

Devduttji had told us that the King was interested in what today’s anthropologists are doing. After having devoted considerable energy to its study, including work in the 30s at Oxford with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, he feared he had lost touch with its development. He first ascertains our reasons for being in India (Parvis is working on communalism, religiosity, and secularism in Gujarat, I merely visiting Parvis and the King’s son). He informs us that he had returned to India from his studies in England on September 1, 1939. “Do you know what happened on that day?” he queries Parvis.

“The German invasion of Poland, the beginning of World War II,” replies Parvis. Devduttji had mentioned that his father suffered fools lightly, and I could see he is pleased that we, or at least Parvis, passed his first test.

“You should read my books, of course,” I reply, hoping he would understand my irony. Parvis chuckles; the King does not let on what he thinks.

His own studies, he explains, had begun with research on the relation of caste to government. First he explored customary law, and then undertook an intense study of ritual forms, including the social history of Christianity in its various sects as practiced in Europe.

In a sense, I reply, many anthropologists, including myself, have taken up some of the themes of his first work, looking at the relation of the state to cultural forms.

Oh, he says, you moved totally away from the primitive, didn’t you? Do you still read Evans-Pritchard’s “The Nur?” he asks.

It is a classic, I say, I still use it in teaching. But more relevant, I explain, is E.P.’s work on witchcraft among the Azande, for that addresses accountability, how to account for wrongdoing and who to hold responsible. Accountability, I assert, is a major issue everywhere, and a focus of my own research. But to go back to his earlier question, I continue, there are two differences in contemporary work from the social anthropology of his age, one is a more direct concern with how the modern state’s relation shapes or tries to control local cultural process; the other is in the field of legal anthropology, and there issues of international law make the study of customary and national law more complex, changing the relation between the two.

Parvis responds to the King’s question about the difference in contemporary work by explaining that scholars today are also concerned with the effects of their research, how their statements enter into shaping public representations and understandings. No longer can we assume that what we write stands apart from the social processes we write about. Our scholarship is picked up by local discourse—and changes the form of expression, though often not in ways we predict or even might want. This, at least, is the thrust of scholarly critique of “Orientalist” scholarship.

A half hour into our talk, the King asks me of the whereabouts of the Italian guest, Enrico (whom we had met the previous evening), who apparently was to have joined us. Enrico and the King had met twenty years ago, in Bombay, and now Enrico insisted on seeing him again, though the King refused to reply to his entreaties. So Enrico turned to the son, Devduttji, to secure an audience.

Devduttji told him, I do not make his appointments, call his secretary! He won’t even necessarily see me when I want.

Enrico then played upon Devduttji’s sense of hospitality, and inability to say no, to finagle an invitation to the palace, thinking that once in residence, the King could not say no to him. He arrives the night before our audience, appropriately three hours late, a few minutes after we’d finished our dinner.

Devduttji asks the cooks to prepare another meal for the guest and then politely excuses himself for the night, leaving us to entertain Enrico. Enrico embodies an Italian stereotype of mine: the over-the-top jokester, effusive, non-stop-talker. From the start Enrico manages to irritate me by complaining about the food, “What is this?” he asks, wrinkling his nose. We exchange perfunctory information about ourselves, and Enrico seems genuinely amused, and skeptical about the fact, that Parvis is “German.” After eliciting an admission from Parvis that his father is Iranian, he exclaims, “Oh, an Irani studying Gujarati”—and he reiterates this refrain several times. I admit, it did have a certain alliterative ring to it, but his adamant refusal to acknowledge Parvis’ German descent reminds me of a certain type of European racism. I react critically. I tell Enrico that he seemed to me not Italian but British, playing upon a stereotype I suspected he held, of the cold, calculating, distant type. This attribution did work, temporarily: He stops smiling, his mouth turns down, and he says meekly, “I do not like the British.”

Parvis and I sit through his meal before retiring to our room, only to be interrupted ten minutes later by Enrico’s screech—“Oh, they told me to come here!” Enrico had in fact been directed, both by Devduttji and by Parvis himself, to the sleeping quarters opposite ours. The next day, Devduttji insists that Enrico knew precisely where he was going. Parvis is more generous than me, insisting we should be more open to Enrico’s comedic side. On second thought, he does remind me of what a “Peter Sellers in India” movie would have been like. Once Enrico joins our audience with the King, the King has to draw upon, or mediate, three sets of interests.

I tell the King I am studying religion and communalism and working in Ahmedabad. His eyes brighten and he shows immediate curiosity, telling me this is the right time for my study, even though he seems to already know much of what I subsequently tell him. Enrico, an expert on the history of Gujarat’s kingdoms, quickly enters into our discussion, turning it away from my ethnographic focus to questions of long-term continuity and change.

The King suggests we engage in a deeper discussion of why this country is becoming more violent and unstable, “I want to understand what is happening in this country.”

I tell him about my intent to study changes in communal identification of three generations of Ahmedabad residents. This comment provokes Enrico to talk at length about how the creation of the nation-state and pressures of modernity have resulted in the “loss of the whole.” He repeats several times, “I have been coming here for thirty years and each time things become worse. Much worse.” The King seems to agree with this assessment. Both talk about how Muslims have become increasingly uniform in their clothing, and separatist in their ideologies, pledging allegiance to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, instead of to India.

“But,” I reply, “there is someone else with a hand in the riots, and that is the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad-the radical Hindu nationalist political party).”

The King indicates he is disturbed by the riots and violence all over Gujarat, including attempts just days before to create anti-Muslim sentiment in his own village, a medieval town of 100,000 persons, but he is silent when I mention the VHP and this surprises me. There are more than 50 caste groups in his kingdom, and sizable Hindu, Muslim, Parsi, and Jain populations. I later learn from Devduttji that he is a close friend of Vajpayee, a former VHP member and current Prime Minister, and I subsequently regret some of my unguarded statements. I cannot help feeling that the King sees through me and knows more than he lets on.

I find it strange that overall there is little compassion for the mostly Muslim victims of the recent pogrom-like statewide violence in Gujarat. Om Ahmedabad, the epicenter of this violence, where I am engaged in research, I witnessed middle-class Hindus directly attacking Muslim residents and systematically setting fire to Muslim businesses. This violence started after the VHP called for a ”bandh” (closing of shops) following the Godhra train incident--the burning of 58 Karsevaks, ostensibly by lower caste Muslims, as they returned from Ayodhya. All Gujarati Muslim communities were subsequently targeted systematically and held responsible for an incident in one single town. Hindu groups of radically different statuses and interests, from Untouchables to Brahmins, are being united by identifying Muslims as their enemies and effacing differences among them.

The King is fully aware of the gravity of the situation and even suggests that more violence is in store, that India and Pakistan are likely to go to war, though not in his lifetime. He talks wistfully of a time when he had only Muslim servants in his quarters but became aware of that only much later. He simply didn’t notice the difference. Communal belonging didn’t matter. I suggest that Indian Muslims are made up of radically diverse groups and should not be homogenized. Enrico reacts to this with a lament about the status of Muslim women—invariably devalued--and mentions veiling. The King agrees. I point out that lower caste Hindu women also veil, and the King agrees with me also. But Enrico insists that there is one difference: Muslims are the only religious community so united in their prayers, five times daily, bowing uniformly only to Mecca. The King appears to increasingly enjoy the discussion as he has to become more active in mediating between Enrico and myself, and he completely forgets about lunch.

I wonder why the King nods affirmatively to many of Enrico’s points-of-view, which I would describe as an unreconstructed Dumontianism—seeing India as a whole through Brahmannical Hindu ideology. Enrico himself had studied with two experts who approached India more historically than did Dumont: Richard Eaton and Bernard Cohen. But he appears not the least interested in the subaltern or any new approach to the study of India.

John is particularly disturbed at dinner when Enrico twice puts his hand on the shoulder of Bahadur Singh, the man who waits on us, freezing him into the uncomfortable position of holding a plate of fried vegetables in front of Enrico while Enrico continues to talk. Bahadur is noticeably irritated by this move, or at least I notice the irritation, and he is only freed when I direct him to serve me instead. Even then, however, Enrico refuses to let him go immediately. When he holds Bahadur a second time, we sit there embarrassed and resigned.

Perhaps part of what the King shares with Enrico is a romanticism for former hierarchies, and the simple pleasure of being served. Democracy has upset thought not done away with the hierarchie, and that pleasure is now more complex as well as often politicized. I, in turn, when served, become nervous and my face flushes some. The King responds enthusiastically to Enrico’s idea that the modern bureaucratic state, with its usurping of former authority, such as his own, has rendered relationships impersonal and has destroyed what Enrico calls the “fiber that was India,” held together by “saband” (personal relations), united through an encompassing of the contrary. John interrupts to suggest that it is not the introduction of the state and modernity as such that can be blamed for current problems, but only this particular state. The King asks for clarification. The point is, John argues, that India and Pakistan are only one particular configuration of states dividing up South Asia, and there is no necessity in this outcome. Blaming modernity makes it appear unnecessary to identify the actual agents of change, including local Indians who ultimately decide what kind of changes to resist or accept, or how to politically carve up and administer the territory.

The King listens quietly and nods. Twice I try to give him an opportunity to dismiss us, as I notice his mouth droop and eyes go sleepy. After all, it has been over two hours of non-stop talking, and he has been expertly mediating the entire time while sustaining the tension between our positions. Often I put my hand on Enrico’s arm to stop him from talking, merely to give the King a chance to comment or pose another question, but Enrico merely pauses to catch his breath. Twice I suggest that we may be going on too long, but the King insists no. I am learning something from this. I sense his quest for knowledge and note the ironic similarity of his position to our early anthropological field workers who used to summon the natives to their tents to tell them about the world. The King, due to his status, is unable to experience life in his village directly; he must get his knowledge indirectly, from guests, books, letters—other people’s accounts.

Our discussion turns to the Shivratri, a festival celebrating the birth of Shiva, where people drink bhang, a fermented drink with hallucinatory effects. Enrico excitedly tells the King that people even make love on that day. “It is all about sexuality,” he says.

The King asks, “What do you mean, it is all about sexuality?” He claims he does not know about these aspects of the festival--although he himself has been a Hindu officiant for countless ceremonies over the years. Again, I am thinking the Kings knows more than he lets on.

“Because you never go out!” says Enrico provocatively. “You spend too much time here. You should go out!” I tell a story of how I recently experienced Shivratri in Ahmedabad: women and men touching the lingam, pouring curd over it, offering bhang as “prassad” (gift to the sacred) in Shiva temples. All this, in the prohibition state of Gujarat! One of my roommates in Ahmedabad, a devout Hindu from the countryside, was unaware, I continue, that the lingam symbolized the male sexual organ until I pointed it out to him.

The King interrupts, “You mean penis.” He admits that for a long time he, too, had not made this association. Today he expresses astonishment at his own former ignorance.

The King asks about the paradox that India has produced the Kama Sutra, a “how-to” text depicting a wide range of sexual positions, yet Indians tend to be incredibly prudish today about sex and representations of the penis. I suggest that there is something peculiar in how the objectification of sex in such visual detail produces a dreamscape that in turns requires a repression of the thing objectified. The King again asks what I mean. It is perhaps peculiar to India, I say, that the most violent and most sexual of fantasies are so completely visualized and put in the public domain, in temple sculpture, in Kathakali theatre, and now in movies, as dreamscapes. But these objectifications, like the Kama Sutra, rather than enabling people to become conscious of and deal with these realities by reflecting on them, are repressed in the everyday and divorced from the actual practice of sex and violence. Their public display does not alter, and perhaps reinforces, the prudishness of everyday behavior. In the same manner, Hindu pacifists and vegetarians can kill Muslims without feeling any contradiction with ahimsa, the doctrine of non-violence. The externalization—in ahimsa, vegetarianism, pacifism--serves as a kind of alibi, merely to contain the threatening aspects of sex and violence.

The King listens quietly to this explanation. I have seen this thesis often confirmed as a general structure in India. The dramatic veneration of things and persons—such as Mahatma Gandhi— alleviates the necessity to act by creating distance between leader and follower. Precisely because the ideas are in the venerated objects and holy men, they need not be enacted by oneself in everyday life. Worship absolves and substitutes for individual realization of the holy. This worship becomes as simple as cracking a coconut before the shrine. The objectified idea is always outside of and separate from you, you never have to inhabit that sacred principle.

Enrico remains silent during this exchange. Perhaps sensing that our time with the King is indeed running out, he begins to ask favors—documents on the independent states, copies of articles and books, even tourist information about places to stay on his itinerary.

At one point Enrico shows the King postcards he’d found in a flea market. He is most proud of a letter he found there from “Jawaharlal Nehru”. The King comments on the handwriting, “Are you sure this is Nehru’s handwriting?” Enrico is unperturbed. I comment that a hand-written letter of two paragraphs in which the entire second paragraph is put in quotation marks as a citation, with the name ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’ on the bottom, looks rather as if someone else simply cited Nehru. I also wonder, though I do not say, about the handwriting, which does not correspond to that of a highly educated man from the early 20^th century. The curves and letters looked much more contemporary to me than the handwriting of an educated Brahman. The King chides me gently, “Now you have spoiled his luck.”

As our collective energy finally dissipates (and hunger begins to call), the King offers a few more scattered reflections. He had met Gandhi, whom he still thinks highly of, twice. Once when Gandhi visited his kingdom. The other and last time was when Gandhi was very ill, several days before his death in Delhi. Gandhi was more important, he claims, than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first Deputy Prime Minister of India, who has been given much credit for being the sole architect of Indian unity. The contemporary Hindu nationalist movement now claims Patel as their hero. I have noticed that generally Hindus in Gujarat identify much more strongly with Patel than Gandhi today. (In the former Portuguese colony of Diu, for example, we even find a statue of Gandhi whose facial features strangely resemble Patel’s.) Though Patel was a major force in the accession of independent states into India, the Indian Kings and not Patel actually initiated these accessions. The King gives us a copy of a newspaper article from 1946 that disproves the claim that Patel was the major force behind this accession. It states that in 1946 he, as Maharaja of this kingdom and president of an extraordinary meeting of the district’s Princes and Ministers, proposed a confederation, and the organization of “popular assemblies … based on democratic principles” that would lead to accession into the “polity of India.”[1]

Having attended boarding school and the university in England, the King explains that he is not ill disposed to the British, but only once did he see a Brit make the Indian gesture of respect in greeting, "naman,” and that was at the end of the Raj.

John asks whether he has ever read his son’s Ph.D. thesis, which is in part a history of the kingdom. “I was never given it to read,” he exclaims. “I might read it one day,” he adds.

The next day we rent a car (and driver) to visit some major temples, pilgrimage and historic sites in Saurashtra, Gujarat and in Diu. There is an unsettling stillness wherever we go. The large Jain and Hindu temples of Palitana and of Dwarka are guarded by federal army officers with automatic rifles. At the Dwarka temple we even submit to metal detectors like at airports (though they ignore the beep when Parvis walks through), and the guards ask us to sign an absurd statement indicating degrees of “respect” or “belief” in Hinduism. These holy places strike me as joyless and business-like. Holy men chase after us to give us blessings—including red dots on our foreheads--and to collect remittances, which reminds me of the equally desperate chase of perfume salesmen in Macy’s in New York. Once, as I fled into an elevator, a salesman followed trying to desperately spray me, as if once perfumed by the mist, I would buy his product.

The nervousness of the state is strangely opposed to the naïve statements of locals who, wherever we go, claim that “Kathiawad is not Gujarat,” and that the incidents in Gujarat could never spread to the peninsula. Our driver, Mukeshbhai, tells us that only a few weeks ago he got this job driving our distinctively Indian, bright yellow Ambassador. It is a “Hindu car,” he says. The dashboard contains the obligatory image of a Mataji (Goddess) and a device to light incense, which he uses each morning to prepare himself spiritually for his job.

Mukeshbhai confides in me in Gujarati that the previous driver of our Hindu indHHcar, Salim, was Muslim. In one of the first days of the recent riots, Salim was to drive a marriage party of a Patel family (a dominant Gujarati Hindu community) from the kingdom to Ahmedabad. On the way, a crowd identified him as Muslim, yanked him out of the car, and set him on fire. The Hindu passengers, says Mukeshbhai, identified the driver as Muslim and then, in their fright, fled.

On our return to the Palace, one of the King’s higher ranking servants, a retired military officer who was also a friend of Salim’s, offers a slightly different version of the events: After the car had been stopped, the Hindu marriage party was told to leave the car. The driver claimed also to be Hindu, but the crowd nonetheless demanded to see his license, which he said he had forgotten. One member of the marriage party, now standing alongside the car, gave an order to the driver, “Salim, don’t forget to lock the car.” This mistake--uttering the name “Salim”--identified the driver as Muslim, upon which the crowd closed upon and torched him. In any case, this servant confirmed that the marriage party fled and returned home without driver or car, claiming the driver had abandoned them. Only a threat to the marriage party from other local Hindus five days later produced their clarification of the fate of the driver and the abandoned car.

After a week of travels, we stay in the palace again on our return to Ahmedabad. It is by chance the evening before her Highness’s birthday, and the following morning we are told that she is expecting us. A servant leads us to the Maharani’s quarters. We remove our shoes and enter her room. There, seated on a large sofa, she asks us to sit on the chairs on her two sides. When talk turned to the recent riots, she blames the politicians “from all political parties” and expresses horror and concern about the ongoing violence. Apparently she had been informed that after our audience we would return to Ahmedabad; she strenuously objects. “Too dangerous,” she insists, “you must stay. At least you are safe here.” John thanks her for the offer, but says we must reach Ahmedabad before the Hindu holiday, Holi. He then performs a small ceremony, as instructed by the local tailor, to make an offer to the Mahrani for her birthday. He circles her head with the offering (a thank you note and small amount of cash), wishes her well on her birthday, and then is supposed to drop the offering at her feet. But a modern end table separates her person from John, forcing him to kneel a distance from her, and then to reach over the top of the table before dropping the gift, as he was told, at her feet. She smiles gracefully and looks pleased at his attempt to perform the ceremony.

The King and Queen and their whole staffs then seemed to conspire to keep us there. The driver refuses to go if the head servant does not come along. The head servant needs permission from the King, who is suffering from vertigo and barely able to lift his head—hence not to be disturbed. We insist the King be woken to ask his permission--which he grants. Then the driver needs permission from the owner of the taxi, who is reluctant to approve the trip because of rumors of violence on the roads (and, needless to say, the experience of Salim’s murder). It takes three hours to get this straightened out. We finally leave, but not before fetching two thick six-foot bamboo poles, instruments to presumably beat off mobs that might attack us. Along the route, in small towns and even along the major highway in a well-to-do-section of Ahmedabad, we see the debris of the previous two weeks: gutted busses and cars, overturned trucks, the frames of burnt homes and businesses. In less than a month of violence, some 100,000 people, nearly all Muslim, had become refugees within Gujarat. Thousands were killed. We ask the head servant how many people might support a return to rule by the Raj. Only the poor, he says, for they feel most neglected by the political class. These poor still comprise half of the population.

After we arrive, without incident, in Ahmedabad, we meet with two of Parvis’ friends, Dalits, members of the former Untouchable Caste, who had, since Independence, achieved some measure of personal success. Shyamalbhai had become a professor of education, Ashok a bank manager. When I tell the very articulate Ashok, a thirty-two year old bank manager, that Parvis and I were writing this short article on our audience with the King, he became angry at us, as if disturbed by injuries he could not forget, “Why are you writing about a dead man? The King is dead! You’d learn more from talking to a rickshawalla on the street in front of your house!”

[1]Staff Correspondent, “Confederation of Kathiawar States to be Formed: Rulers Appoint Committee to Formulate Scheme,” The Times of India, Bombay, 13 July, 1946.

Audience with the Maharaja of a Saurashtrian Princely State