Introduction
Kanhaiyalal Munshi (1887–1971) is an important figure in the discursive fashioning of Gujarati identity. He is credited with popularizing the term Gujarat ni asmita, which can be translated as ‘Gujarati self-consciousness’, or being aware of one's identity as a Gujarati. This paper will analyse the trilogy of Munshi's historical novels namely Patan Ni Prabhuta (The Glory of Patan) (1916), Gujarat No Nath (The Master of Gujarat) (1917) and Rajadhiraj (The King of Kings) (1922).Footnote 1 The novels bring together action, adventure and romance in the lives of kings, ministers and warriors, dealing with, among other things, the relationship between power, ambition and nation-building. Munshi wrote these novels in the vernacular, thus strengthening both Gujarati language and its literature, creating a strong regional identity whilst simultaneously asserting nationalist aspirations.
Munshi was an active participant in the struggle for Indian independence. A lawyer in Bombay in the 1920s, Munshi was part of a legal circle that was very politically active.Footnote 2 When the Congress split into two in 1907 at Surat, Munshi, then still a student, was present and sympathized with the extremist group led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghosh.Footnote 3 He came into close contact with Annie Besant through the friendship of Jamnadas Dwarkadas, with whom he later shared the editorship of Young India in 1915. In June 1917, when Ms Besant and several of her co-workers were arrested and the All India Home Rule League was reconstituted, Munshi was part of the new Working Committee.Footnote 4 Meanwhile, Mahatma Gandhi was establishing his presence in India through the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad and concluding major victories for the Satyagraha movement in Viramgam (1915), in Champaran (1917), in Kheda (1918) and in Ahmedabad (1918). In 1918, Munshi was among the group, led by Shankarlal Banker, who campaigned to invite Gandhi to become the president of the Home Rule League, an offer that Gandhi accepted. Subsequently, at a meeting to discuss the Rowlatt Act and the possible action to be taken against it, when the opinion of the majority favoured the use of violence, Gandhi stated that he would resign and that they should choose a new president. In the second volume of his autobiography Sidha Chadhan (The Straight Climb) (1943), Munshi states that they had expected Gandhi to be led by the decision of the majority. This unforeseen assertion caused the stunned group to realise, Munshi writes, that they had only two alternatives before them, ‘either to surrender or to run away’.Footnote 5 Munshi remained active in both Congress and Home Rule League political circles for some time after this incident, but was not convinced about the efficacy of non-violence as the chief strategy for the freedom struggle. Munshi was one of the 20 members who resigned from the Congress in 1920, a group which included Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He stayed away from the Congress and from active politics for around three years, a period that he later summed up in his autobiography with the wry comment, ‘My turn to be carried away by his [Gandhi's] influence had not yet come’.Footnote 6 As the freedom movement gathered momentum, Munshi returned to the Gandhian fold, and eventually went on to hold a variety of political positions: Home Minister of Bombay (1937–1939), diplomatic envoy and trade agent to the princely state of Hyderabad (1947–1948), member of the Indian Constituent Assembly (1946–1951), Union Minister for Agriculture and Food (1950–1952) and Governor of Uttar Pradesh (1952–1957).
Different threads, such as the development of nationalism and of the idea of a nation, the rise of the middle class, the spread of literacy, the suffusion of Enlightenment ideals, especially the replacement of religion by secularism and the coming to the fore of the individual and the social, changing conceptions of time and of reality, and the development of English colonialism, have been variously tied to the rise of the novel form, and to its variants as they emerged in different colonial locations.Footnote 7 Munshi's historical trilogy is set in the kingdom of Patan, now a district of Gujarat, during the rule of the Solanki/Chaulukya dynasty (942–1299 AD).Footnote 8 The last Chaulukya king was defeated by the end of the thirteenth century by the army of Alauddin Khilji, and the kingdom became a province of the Delhi Sultanate.Footnote 9 The novels follow the ascension and rule of Siddhraj Jaisingh as king of Patan, with the Muslim invasion and conquest represented as the major threat looming on the horizon.
This paper does not belabour the obvious point that historical fiction is as much about the present as about the past. Munshi's choice of selecting a Hindu-ruled time period over other periods of Gujarati history is not unusual, in that quite a few historical novels of the time, written in different Indian languages, follow the same pattern.Footnote 10 One prominent model for the project of constructing pre-Muslim, Hindu kingdoms as ‘the real India’ was Bankimchandra Chatterji's Anandamath (1881–1882), and Munshi's use of Jai Somnath as a rallying cry across the trilogy is reminiscent of the use of Vande Mataram in the former. Here, it is interesting to think not only about who the villain is but who the villain is not. Munshi had received an English education, was bilingual, and was an advocate in the Bombay High Court when he started writing the trilogy. In his autobiography, he admitted to being awed by British culture, by British thought and by the British way of life, and to trying to imitate all three as much as possible. This kind of confessional narrative of one's earlier weakness, narrated in a mocking tone by a now self-aware author, who has understood not just the true value of his country but also his status as a member of a colonized nation, reappears in the narratives of other Indian freedom fighters as well.Footnote 11 This is not to mock or call into question the power of such narratives in the lives of the freedom fighters, but to highlight the aspect that relationships between Indians and the British were complex and constantly negotiated. The representation of the Muslim invader, rather than of the present-day colonizer, as the primary enemy, is not a simple disinclination to represent the British textually and thereby to negotiate one's relationship with them; it also arguably reflects the inability to repudiate their hegemonic power. Ashis Nandy astutely diagnoses that ‘the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power’.Footnote 12
Munshi's work also allows an interesting insight into the politics of the reception of texts and their critical afterlife. Munshi is not the only popular author of historical fiction in Gujarati. The first historical novel, Nandshankar Tuljashankar Mehta's (1835–1905) Karan Ghelo (Crazy Karan) (published in 1868), as well as the historical romances of Jehangirshah Ardesar Taleyarkhan (1846–1923), especially Mudra Ane Kulin: Athwa Adhaarmi Sadinu Hindustan (Mudra and Kulin: Or Eighteenth Century Hindustan) (1884), were immensely popular. But Taleyarkhan is not a part of Gujarati self-consciousness the way Munshi is, which could be attributed to the fact that he was a Parsi and wrote in what was called ‘Parsi-Gujarati’. Mahatma Gandhi said of the form:
It is unfortunate that there is Parsi-Gujarati. It is confined to novels and stories of the shilling shocker style. They are meant merely for passing the idle hour . . . no reviewer of Gujarati literature can afford to ignore the existence of works which hundreds, if not thousands of Parsis and Muslims read and by which, may be, even shape part of their conduct’,
thereby distinguishing between Parsi and Muslim readers and the unmentioned Hindu readers, who are presumed to be reading more edifying works like Govardhan Ram Tripathi's Sarasvatichandra or Munshi's novels.Footnote 13 In terms of narrative style, inclusion of supernatural elements and emphasis on thrill, Munshi's historical trilogy is not different from historical romances of the shilling shocker variety. In Munshi's case, however, his personal involvement with the Congress and with the freedom struggle, as well as his being an upper-caste, educated Bhargav Brahmin, allow his work to be interpreted in rather different terms: ‘These three works, which depict Hindu Gujarat at its best, have made a strong appeal to the people of Gujarat, who, till they appeared, lacked consciousness of their heroic heritage’.Footnote 14 Munshi provides a past filled with warriors and politically shrewd tacticians to a community that lacked the marital heroes of the Rajputs and the Marathas, a community that had yet to discover its Gandhi and that would never go on to claim its Jinnah.
That Munshi has come to hold a fascination for the discursive frameworks of Hindu political thought is indicated in the way he surfaces as a reference point for L. K. Advani and Narendra Modi. Advani was the leader of the Rath Yatra movement that demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by an outbreak of intensive communal riots throughout the country. Advani's mention of Munshi among his favourite authors becomes significant when he contextualizes it: ‘When I was leading the Ayodhya movement and when it became powerful, I went to the Parliament library to re-read Munshi’.Footnote 15 Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat during the systematic killing of Muslims in the systemic violence of 2002. In 2003, following the riots, Modi chose to celebrate the independence day of the country in Patan instead of the state capital of Gandhinagar, a choice that can be seen as a homage to Munshi's recreation of a lost glorious Hindu past of Gujarat through Patan.Footnote 16
Given such appropriations, it becomes important to return to the texts in question, and open them up to alternative readings that are sensitive to their nuances and internal subversions. The strong nationalistic thrust of the texts can be problematized through an understanding of the novels’ conflicting portrayal of notions of glory, honour and nation-building. The introduction of conflict into readings of these texts is an attempt to stretch the boundaries of Gujarati identity and look differently at what it says about the meaning of being Gujarati.
Statecraft, strategy and erasing the self: Reading Patan ni Prabhuta
Patan ni Prabhuta was written as a commission for the Diwali issue of the weekly Gujarati in 1916, to be given to the readers of the magazine as the annual gift. After a short introductory chapter that mentions the historical details, Munshi's lively narrative plunges the reader straight into the heart of the action. An unidentified man and his son head towards the palace of Patan where the old king, Karnadev, lies dying, surrounded by the watchful eyes of his queen Minaldevi, who is generally mistrusted because she is an ‘outsider’, from Chandrapur in South India. After the king's death, a loyal governor will be needed for Patan since the prince, Siddhraj Jaisingh, also known as Jayadev, is only ten years old. At the same time, a Jati—a Jain monk—too appears on the political scene of Patan, eager to establish a religious regime that would unite all of Patan under Jainism. Thus, these various outsiders have arrived in Patan at a crucial moment in the destiny of its survival as a pre-eminent kingdom. The one man who seems to hold the future of the kingdom in his hands is Munjaal, the wily chief minister of Patan. Munjaal is a Chanakya-like figure—a man whom the city both adores and fears, seen as the actual force behind the throne, invincible and able to dictate the actions of the queen herself. Munjaal's introductory scene suggests that his power does not derive from valour, affluence, scholarship, religious or moral authority but from his shrewdness, his ability to think two steps ahead of his opponents and his extensive network of spies, which enables him to use his knowledge of all the things that happen inside and outside Patan as tools of manipulation and control.
After initially building up the stature of Munjaal, the text undercuts his power. The Jati instigates the queen against Munjaal and he is sent off to be the governor of a distant territory whilst an inefficient deputy is appointed to the high post in Patan. The authorial assertion of a long-standing relationship between Minaldevi and Munjaal is undercut for the reader when she agrees to dismiss him at the suggestion of a Jati who was hitherto unknown to her. It is only towards the end of the book that the reader can accept the validity of the narrator's previously asserted knowledge, when they recall their former intimacy before her marriage to his king. Thus, the action of the plot does not always mirror the grandness that the author ascribes to the characters, and often it is the description of the omniscient narrator and the dialogue that asserts a grandiloquence undercut by the sequence of events.
As the narrative advances, the political background becomes clearer. Gujarat, or Gurjardesa as it is called in the novels, is not a single administrative unity but a motley collection of kingdoms and principalities, including Patan, Sorath, Junagadh, Khambhat and Laat. These various small kingdoms and/or principalities are engaged in regular struggle against each other to remain independently afloat. As adjacent principalities, they share linguistic and cultural commonalities, though naturally there are differences as well, which means that narratives about a singular ‘Gujarati’ identity can be both asserted as well as contested. Once a dominant Gujarati identity has been established, it can be contrasted against other contemporary kingdoms such as Avanti, Malwa and Chittod. It is precisely such a dominant Gujarati identity that Munjaal is eager to establish.
The text locates conflict in the struggle between the Jain monk, who wants to unite Gurjardesa under Jain religion, and the Kshatriya kings and warriors, who rely on feudal rather than religious loyalties. The members of the lower classes appear mostly as servants and messengers whilst the Brahmins enjoy respect but are not in positions of control. The conflict between the Jains and the Kshatriyas is also a difference between two ways of understanding and surviving the competitive and ruthless world of eleventh-century Gujarat. The Kshatriya community uses the rhetoric of valour and glory, whilst the Jati speaks of religious fervour as the means of bringing the community together. The story makes its way through various plots, counter-plots and unexpected twists and turns until a situation arises wherein the people of the city of Patan rise against the queen and close the doors of the city to her, leaving her outside in a makeshift army camp with the young prince. Tribhuvanpal, cousin to the prince and whose parents were killed by the queen, is declared governor by the city. Tribhuvanpal does not want to usurp the throne of his cousin, and is willing for the prince to return, but has sworn an oath of revenge against the queen for the death of his parents. The desperate queen tries to win her people back and fails until she turns to Munjaal, now a prisoner in her camp, and he makes the journey to Patan to talk to Tribhuvanpal as well as to the other members of the city council.
It is in this conversation, the climatic portion of the text, that Munjaal sets out his political philosophy and outlines a possible future for Gujarat. He does not argue for the re-instatement of the queen in terms of moral necessity or of duty but instead represents it as pragmatic, as the only possible course of action if any member of the ruling council of Patan is to capitalize on the spirit of valour and patriotism that has overcome Patan's citizens. The internal conflict within the city of Patan has to be sorted out quickly so that these passionate emotions and the current willingness to fight and die for one's motherland can be harnessed to consolidate Patan's waning control over the surrounding principalities, unite them under one flag, and eventually conquer Avanti. The present emotional current had brought most of the Kshatriyas and Jains of the city together, something that Munjaal claims he had been unsuccessfully attempting to do for the past 13 years. The very same Munjaal had, for the glory of Patan, participated in a plot to keep his own sister, Hansa, imprisoned for 15 years so that she and her husband could not set up a separate kingdom, which could become a rival to the power of Patan. He had failed in his desire to bring the city to a fervent pitch as no event had occurred to rouse the citizens of the city to set aside their usual lethargic apathy and their internal prejudices. Ironically, Munjaal's arrest had been one of the factors that had caused the people of the city to lose their faith in the queen and rise up as one against her. Munjaal ultimately convinces Tribhuvanpal, Hansa's son, that one's personal revenge and oath are meaningless if they do not include the welfare of the motherland and declares: ‘In kingly administration, issues are of importance, not merely an oath . . .. In politics, has an angry person ever benefited?’Footnote 17
Statecraft is thereby defined as a strategic process aimed at the acquisition and consolidation of power, and individual subjectivity, along with religious and moral compulsions, has to be erased in order to uphold the military glory of the kingdom. All characters, irrespective of whether they use the language of valour, wealth or patriotism, are eventually won over by Munjaal, to whom regional ascendancy, which matters most, requires bringing together the passion of a mob with well thought-out policy. Both valour and religious fervour need the guidance of the strategist. Munjaal, a Jain, allies himself with the Kshatriya rulers, since his objective is a powerful Gujarat free of the Kshatriya—Jain conflict, and therefore free to concentrate on conquering other kingdoms.
Incidentally, the emergence of Munjaal also marked for Munshi an emergence of a sense of Gujarati self-consciousness within his mind and, according to him, in Gujarati literary history. In Sidha Chadhan, Munshi asserts that:
But today, after twenty seven years, I can say this much that ever since I imagined Munjaal, Gujarati asmita appeared in me. In 1915, apart from a few litterateurs, Gujaratis did not have national or cultural consciousness .. . . Gujarat had no place in the political sphere . . . . There was no [sense of the] history of Gujarat . . . . In 1916, in the preface to Patan ni Prabhuta, I wrote: ‘Gujarat is a huge tree. In its roots lies the karma yoga of the Lord Shri Krishna; on its branches the buds of Dayanand and Gandhi have blossomed’. It was in trying to find the legislator of this greatness that my imagination gave birth to Munjaal Mehta. Munjaal is thus both the father and the child of my Gujarati asmita.Footnote 18
The use of the term karma yoga to refer to the actions undertaken by the divine Vishnu in his human form as Krishna is interesting, because Krishna, unlike the maryada purushottam (best or perfect human) Rama, is often represented as using stratagems for specific ends. Munshi's fascination with a Chanakya-like figure recurs repeatedly in his works, especially through Bhagwan Kautilya (Lord Kautilya) (1923) and Krishnaavatara.Footnote 19
Munjaal is certainly the heroic figure in this novel, but the text does not gloss over his ruthlessness. At one point, the unlucky Hansa, sister of Munjaal, who wasted her life away in captivity and is killed within a day of being released, declares, ‘What has this state done for me? Took away my husband, imprisoned me without a crime. Then what relationship do I have now with your state?’.Footnote 20 At the end of the novel, her son forgets his quest of vengeance for the death of that very Hansa, becomes the head of Patan's army and marries the girl he loves. The end of the novel is a happy one for the characters who are alive whereas the dead ones cease to matter in the larger scale of things. The glory of Patan, indicated by the title, can therefore be said to depend not only on the glorious actions of its people but also on the lives that have been sacrificed in trying to sustain this glory.
Garv, glory and envisioning a nation: reading Gujarat no Nath
Munshi wrote Gujarat no Nath in serialized form in the periodical Vismi Sadi (The Twentieth Century) from 1917. The argument in this paper focusses on the love story between Kaak and Manjari, the protagonists of the novel, and the possibility of reading their love story in terms of the nationalist narrative. Magnificently beautiful, extremely learned, daughter of kavikulshiromani (best among the clan of poets) Kashmiri Pundit Rudradutt, fluent in Sanskrit and fiercely proud of her Brahminical identity, Manjari is, arguably, the fictional embodiment of Munshi's conception of India.
Manjari is first found imprisoned in Khambhat by Kaak. The governor, Uda Mehta, wants to marry her and she is determined to die before being forced to marry a Jain. Kaak, and by extension the reader, overhears Manjari, before she is actually ‘seen’, and what she says establishes her sense of her pre-eminence when she compares herself to Saraswati, the goddess of learning:
I am proud of my father, my birth, my learning and my way of life . . . . Mother, our family can trace its pure, unmixed lineage from the ancient sages who sang the holy vedas and sought union with Brahma! Shall I now defile this sacred tradition by accepting your offer? And become a low-born in all my future lives? . . . Goddess Saraswati remained unmarried! Why can't I?Footnote 21
She agrees to accept Kaak's help to escape Uda's captivity only after ascertaining that he is a Brahmin and holds him in contempt for not ‘verifying her antecedents thoroughly’ before eating food cooked by her.Footnote 22 Manjari has a strong sense of her own superiority to everyone else around her, and she is quick to judge Kaak as ‘uncultured’ when she finds out that he does not understand the Sanskrit poetry that she quotes frequently.
After Kaak frees her, he brings her to the house of the older couple, Tribhuvanpal and Prasanna, where the latter tries to convince Manjari to marry Kaak. In her imagination Manjari is married to Kalidasa and Parashuram and she permits only those quasi-mythological heroes to claim her as equal and ‘rule’ over her. With reference to these husbands of her imagination, the former is a Sanskrit poet whilst the latter is, oxymoronically, a Brahmin warrior, considered to be an avatar of Vishnu. These heroes embody in themselves aspects central to Bharatvarsha, the Vedic past that is reconstructed within nationalist narratives as the golden past of an Indian nation. Manjari is content to remain in this glorified ideal of a lost past, ruing the loss of cultural and Brahminical values in the present, and disdaining any further association with it. As she grandly declares to Prasanna: ‘You may think I am mad, Deviji! But to me the so-called real world of yours is an illusion, and only my own world is real! I can see my world clearly, and I can feel its reality’.Footnote 23
The impracticality of this insistent refusal lies in the fact that the homeless and poor Manjari is not an advantageous match by worldly standards and is in danger of capture any day. The death of her father has robbed her of a visible protector and she will be treated as public property until she gets married and acquires the protection of a husband. This desire to willingly remain in the past and overlook the dangerous present, specifically one that is humiliating, is arguably a re-enactment of the way in which Munshi's writing negotiates with the realities of colonialism. In this manner, she, like the author, finds solace in past glory for present dependence. The fact that in the course of the novel Manjari has to make certain compromises with her vision of her own self and of the world around her and has to rationalize certain ideals makes her similarity to the nation even more evident. The adjective used almost constantly for Manjari throughout the text is garv, which cannot be translated simply as ‘pride’, as garv lacks the negative connotations of pride. Manjari's pride in her birth, her heritage and her culture is a pride shared by the narrator. Other characters in the novel may see her as insignificant or incomprehensible, but the text itself does not undercut her pride in any way apart from her eventual ‘submission’ to the worthy hero.
It is inevitable for Manjari to fall in love with Kaak since, if she symbolizes the nation, he represents the future available to that nation. Kaak represents Munshi's conceptualization of a heroic figure before Gandhi came to dominate, initially the nationalist scene and later, Munshi's ideology. This pre-Gandhian heroic ideal understands and utilizes violence well. Like Parashuram, though he is a Brahmin, born in the ‘highest’ clan, he chooses to become a soldier by profession since he realizes this is the only way to acquire power and glory rapidly in the ‘modern’ world. Like Munjaal, Kaak's chief merit is his cunning, though the other characters repeatedly emphasize his courage. Kaak's merit often arises from his being in the right place at the right time or to the inferiority of his opponent rather than to any innate ability in him.Footnote 24 When Kaak encounters Uda Mehta, the rich governor of Khambhat, he is irritated at Uda's tendency to talk sweetly to someone whilst plotting against them and unable to hide his true feelings of hostility and disdain, thus displaying political naïveté. As with Patan ni Prabhuta, it is authorial intervention that establishes Kaak's power. Kaak is glorious and heroic because the other characters declare him to be so, because he emerges victorious in all the situations that he encounters, whether by merit or otherwise, and because Manjaari falls in love with him.
Kaak's superiority does not come to the fore in any physical or mental battle, but in a clandestine meeting called by Kirtidev, a deputy of Malwa, to discuss the future of Patan and Malawa in the face of possible Muslim invasion. Kirtidev fears that the dispute between Patan and Malawa, which is only temporarily averted, will prevent their being united against the Muslim invader, but his foresight is pitted against the cunning of Munjaal, since the latter is determined that Patan shall not bend to Malawa for long, and will keep perpetuating conflict between the two kingdoms. Kirtidev's solution, that kingdoms voluntarily give up internal conflict, is not politically feasible and it is here that Kaak takes over, by outlining his vision of an ‘India’ united under one ruler and providing the men of Patan with an alternative political system:
The type of unity that Kirtidev is trying to achieve in our country—has it ever been achieved before? Will it ever be achieved? . . . Go and tell Munjaal Mehta that Gujarat will not become strong by constant feuding. Whenever we defeat a king, we should merge his territory with our own and appoint a governor to rule over it . . . . Go tell Jayadev Maharaja that what we need are our own, strong governors—and not unreliable vassal states or regional satraps! . . . Most of the men there were awed by Kaak's bold, new ideas. The more thoughtful amongst them felt as if a mental block had been removed from their thinking, and wondered whether a new political philosophy was beginning to take shape.Footnote 25
It is Kaak's ability to formulate and outline this vision that makes the first favourable impression on Manjari, whilst it also allows Munshi to reiterate the idea that it was the failure of ‘India’ to unite that led to the success of the Muslim invasion. Munjaal's dream of conquest, of valour and warriors strategically bound together by the politician in times of fervour, is extended by Kaak to include administrative responsibility beyond the conquest. The time for Kalidasa and Parashuram is past since poets can no longer represent this world nor warriors rule it. The true hero of the age is Kaak since he is able to understand the demands of this world and organize its institutions around them. What Kaak is envisioning is not just a powerful Gujarati kingdom, but a Gujarat-led administrative unity that would absorb principalities and appoint administrative heads, rather than demanding tribute of the indigenous rulers—he is envisioning a nation rather than a kingdom. Kaak's vision of unity, like the colonizer's, is based on the use of violence and on the ability to control that which is conquered through further, administrative violence.
Interestingly, just as the peaceful methods advocated by Kirtidev are dismissed as naïve, Munshi's initial reaction to non-violence was to similarly dismiss it as naïve. When the All-India Home Rule League met in 1918, under Gandhi as President, to decide a suitable reaction to the Rowlatt Act, Munshi had prepared a speech favouring the use of violence: ‘Certain minds shrink from aggressive action, as if it were a sin. They turn away from the delight of battle, look upon it as monstrous . . . . Violence which brings us in conflict with the rulers may be inexpedient for a race circumscribed as ours; but that violence is to be per se is not politics.’Footnote 26 The attempt to upstage Gandhi and sound the death knell of non-violence was not successful. Kaak's rhetoric triumphs over Manjari, but Munshi was unable to carry out a similar coup over Gandhi.
It is this pre-eminently successful and shrewd Kaak who is rejected at the end of the novel, thus setting the stage for the darker concluding book of the trilogy. Gujarat no Nath begins in a way similar to Patan ni Prabhuta, with two unidentified men riding to Patan. One of them is Kaak, whereas the other, known as Krishnadev, remains in the background and comes to the fore only towards the end of the novel. The charmingly roguish Krishnadev is actually Ra'Khengar, the prince of Junagadh, descendent of the Yadav king Krishna, who will become the central character in Rajadhiraj and who is set up as not just more valiant than Jayadev, but also as a better ruler. He wins the heart of Ranak, a young girl whom Jayadev is desperate to marry. Whilst Ra'Khengar humiliates the king of Patan by eloping with his intended bride, he also manages to win the admiration and respect of Kaak. Though Kaak recognizes Khengar as superior to Jayadev, he refuses the former's offer of becoming the chief minister of Junagadh. Khengar points out to Kaak that his valour and Kaak's shrewdness can make Junagadh the most powerful kingdom not just in Gujarat but in all of India. Kaak acknowledges this to be true, but refuses on the grounds that he swore his first oath of loyalty to Tribhuvanpaal, who is a native of Patan and took him to Jayadev, so that he could be useful to the king. The reward that Kaak gets for this loyalty is banishment from Patan to his home town of Laat. His strategic and physical successes as well as the suggestion of his friendship with Ra'Khengar go against him as the king feels, ‘There is no room for a second Munjaal Mehta in my life . . . . If he stays here, I will become a plaything in his hands. Or else, one day, I will pick up my sword and cut off his head’.Footnote 27 The second book of the trilogy ends with Kaak, Kirtidev and Krishnadev heading back to their homes, all three preparing for the battles that they foresee in the future. It is to these decisive battles that Munshi will return with Rajadhiraj in 1922.
Subversion, sorrow and building a nation: reading Rajadhiraj
Rajadhiraj means ‘King of kings’, which was a title that the kings of different kingdoms aspired to. The book opens 15 years after the events of the second book, with Kaak, now governor of Laat, receiving urgent summons from three people—Jayadev, the king of Patan, Ra'Khengar, the king of Junagadh and Leeladevi, Jayadev's wife, former princess of Laat and now the chief queen of the kingdom. Each party wants Kaak on their side in the upcoming battle between Patan and Junagadh, the battle at the heart of the book. Leaving Manjari and his children in Laat, Kaak sets out for Patan, determined to help Khengar as much as possible without breaking his oath of loyalty to Jayadev. A battle is in the offing as a dissatisfied Jayadev is seized with the desire to win back ‘his’ Ranak, Ra'Khengar's wife, who has now been the queen of Junagadh for 15 years and is worshipped by its people. He takes her assent for granted and thinks that their marriage will mark the end of his feeling of incompleteness. Patan, along with its allies, surrounds the fort of Junagadh and begins to cut off its supply of food whilst the king tries to work out a diplomatic arrangement under which Ranak will be handed over to him without a war, since he is unsure of how she will react if Khengar is killed in action. Khengar considers the possibility of effecting a compromise with Jayadev to spare his subjects the misery they are undergoing. But Ranak refuses to consider compromise since it does not suit the valour of her ‘Ra’ to compromise and the subjects will, according to her, live and die with their king. Here, the religious compulsions of kingship (Rajdharma), which would mean putting the interest of the subjects above one's own, are undercut by the socio-cultural discourse of valour. Ultimately, he is able to save neither himself nor his subjects from the onslaught of a militarily superior enemy.
Kaak's oath of loyalty to Jayadev, and his insistence on keeping it, thus emerge as problematic from the very outset of the text, and change the tone of the trilogy considerably. In Gujarat no Nath Jayadev was learning his first political lessons and his temper tantrums and petulant dismissal of Kaak could be attributed to his youth and inexperience. But by the time Rajadhiraj opens he is a cruel king, who regularly rains misery on that portion of Junagadh which he has already conquered and who wishes to possess the wife of another, through force if necessary. And yet Kaak, a friend of Ra'Khengar, who has twice refused the latter's offer to become the chief minister of Junagadh, declares even before he leaves Laat that, ‘as long as I can get what I want done and am alive, Junagadh will fall and Sorath (Saurashtra) will become what Laat is today’—a principality of Patan like Laat.Footnote 28 Kaak's justification of this position is the same as in the previous book, in that he reiterates his old plan of a nation united under one king and claims that if Jayadev had made him chief minister, or been more competent, this dream would have come true. At the same time, this position becomes more ambiguous now and is difficult to defend as heroic, as the stakes are different, and making Junagadh subservient to Patan is no longer only about nation-building. Kaak continues to win victories for Jayadev and remain his vassal, in spite of his extreme anger and defiance when he discovers that the king entered Khengar's house whilst the battle was on, killed his two young sons, abducted the widowed Ranak and is now trying to forcibly marry her. To prevent this, Kaak beats up Jayadev, the man who is his king and imprisons him whilst waiting for Munjaal to come and take charge of the situation, but at the end of the book follows the very same Jayadev in his victory procession as supreme commander of his army and watches him inaugurate the new temple built in Laat for Lord Somnath. Notions of valour, cultural pride and a strong religious identity are subverted and turned on their head as the trilogy ends with the celebration of a cruel and incompetent king identified as rajadhiraj, praying to the same god whose name had served as a rallying cry in the earlier books.
Rajadhiraj also changes the setting of the novels, opening up not just the canvas of the trilogy but also challenging the centrality of Patan to the narrative. The plot unfolds in different geographical locations and the city of Patan does not appear even once in the novel, though there are frequent references to it. Nor is Junagadh Jayadev's only battle. The other opponent that Jayadev faces but does not even bother about is Revapal, the leader of the guerrilla rebels at Laat. With the king busy at Junagadh and Kaak away to help him, Revapal resurrects the old rebellion against Patan to secure the lost independence of Laat. Mention of insurrection in Laat had been made in both the earlier books and Tribhuvanpal in the first book and Kaak in the second book had been sent to contain it. However, both these books were set in Patan and the point of view taken was also Patan-centric. Patan operated as the centre of power and its right to assert its authority was never juxtaposed with alternative voices from the smaller centres that it controlled. In Rajadhiraj, those subaltern concerns are represented and voiced for the first time.
The rebellion in Laat also presents an alternative picture of Kaak, as it is shown that some of his countrymen consider him guilty of treason and ‘the hired servant of the foreign Patan’, who ‘sold himself and Laat’.Footnote 29 When Kaak points out that the idea of independence is a chimera, Revapal asserts that it is ‘better to die for a chimera than live a traitor to one's country’.Footnote 30 The sentiment is definitely nationalistic, but here Munshi voices it through those whose aspirations to independence have been crushed by other, also nationalistic formulations. Like Khengar, Revapal is fighting a lost cause since smaller kingdoms can no longer aspire to independence.
Rajadhiraj is pre-occupied with figures doomed to defeat and/or pointless death, and with sorrow. The figure of Hansa in Patan ni Prabhuta represented one victim of this violence, but was forgotten by the end of the text. Rajadhiraj, on the other hand, turns beloved characters either into victims, like Khengar and Ranak, or into oppressors, no matter how unwilling, like Kaak, and focuses on their misery. Both Ranak and Manjari die, the former as a Sati and the latter dying of starvation whilst holding out the fort of Laat against the local rebels. For Ranak, committing Sati is a means of escaping the persecution of Jayadev, just as Manjari had been willing to kill herself than be forced into an unwanted marriage in Gujarat no Nath. Munshi does not directly question the practice of Sati in the text, and a divinity is attributed to Ranak right from the beginning of the novel, foreshadowing her eventual death. This may be so because the legend of Ranak and Ra'Khengar had been a part of Gujarati folklore and imagination before Munshi, and one of his earliest memories is bursting into tears whilst watching a play on the tragic end of this couple.Footnote 31 When mystical portents reveal that the end is near, Khengar is momentarily afraid but Kaak reminds him that to be afraid of death is to insult the sacrifice and faith of the Sati, thereby undercutting his masculinity in order to uphold the power of the ‘divine feminine’. This rhetoric of divinity, however, is meaningless in the context of the questionable nature of the glory that the two women are trying to uphold, namely the glory of their husbands and of the kingdom that they represent.
Manjari's death is significant in that it also signifies the passing away of Bharatvarsha, the Vedic notion of nation that she embodies. In this context, Ranak's death, and the textual deification of her Sati, then becomes a means of reclaiming the cultural and religious superiority of the values of that very same Bharatvarsha. The text claims moral victory for Ra'Khengar and Ranak, mainly through repeated assertions of their religious superiority and in the promise of eternal fame, as opposed to their political and existential defeat. However, the replication of Ranak's death through Manjari's death complicates a simplistic reading of voluntary death as heroic. Manjari's garv, which enjoyed authorial approval earlier, now becomes the reason for her pointless death. When one takes into account the fact that the rebel insurrection at Laat is also represented as a fight for independence, Manjari's resistance against it appears neither meaningful nor glorious. Both Kaak and Manjari lose the moral authority that they had earlier accumulated, and her death, as well as Kaak's march in Jayadev's victory procession at the end of the novel, proclaims the paucity of concepts like honour and glory.
Rajadhiraj first appeared in Gujarat, a new periodical launched in 1922 and edited by Munshi. It was rendered immediately familiar to readers by being the sequel to the successful Gujarat no Nath, and was one of the attractions of the first edition of Gujarat. In his editorial, Munshi recorded the objectives of the new publication:
The new feelings and ideas emerging in the world and in India have caused new hopes and activities to appear in Gujarat. Attempts to bring the identity of our literature and our culture into bloom are being made everywhere; and the result of this identity in that in language and emotion, in art and society a cultural self-consciousness appears to have been ignited . . . . Gujaratis can say today that our life appears distinct to us. Gujarat's history, behavioural practices and thought are separate from others, clearer. The self-sacrifice of Gujarati youth, the character of Gujarati women, the courage of Gujarati subjects, (and) the life and teachings of Gujarat's Gandhi are unique, and are becoming more distinctive, and that is why its cultural self-consciousness is not imaginary, but real; and hence the attempt to express it in fiction is not illusory but necessary.Footnote 32
The Gujarati identity that Munshi asserts so strongly in this editorial can be problematized when one considers that the same issue of Gujarat marked the beginning of Rajadhiraj, in which self-sacrifice and courage are the features of those characters who lose physical or moral battles, the two heroines who display different forms of ‘character’ die unnecessary deaths and the ultimate victor wins a violent battle only through military superiority, in direct contradiction to Gandhi's ‘distinctive teachings’.
Conclusion
The trilogy was immediately successful among Gujarati readers and the sequels were eagerly awaited, as demonstrated by the following excerpt from a letter written to Munshi and quoted by him in his Preface to the 1981 reprint:
When you rained the seas of misfortune on Manjari we could tolerate it. But that was because of our hope that you will send Kaak on time and would drench everyone in huge waves of happiness. But you turned out to be even more heartless than Yamraj . . . You do not have even a drop of kindness in you.Footnote 33
The excessively sentimental language used here is quite similar in tone to the language of the novels, in which both agony and exultation are represented fervently and in detail. At the same time, the letter highlights the extensive emotional engagement that people had with these books. Patan ni Prabhuta appeared in fourteen editions up to 1999, when it went into a reprint. The second edition of Gujarat no Nath came out in 1921 and the twenty-fifth edition appeared in 2005. Rajadhiraj has also gone through eight editions from 1922 to 2005.
In Imagined Communities, Anderson argues for the pivotal role played by books and newspapers, as products of print capitalism, in the construction of the nation as an imagined community, emerging initially in Creole communities of the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then in Europe between 1820 and 1920. The bilingual intelligentsia in colonial states ‘had access, inside the classroom and outside, to models of nation, nation-ness, and nationalism distilled from the turbulent, chaotic experiences of more than a century of American and European history. These models, in turn, helped to give shape to a thousand inchoate dreams’.Footnote 34 Partha Chatterjee responds to this thus: ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’.Footnote 35 Chatterjee develops the argument that anticolonial nationalism restricts colonial control of the inner domain of the spiritual, and then fashions within that domain ‘a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western’.Footnote 36 In Munshi's work, the past offers a comfortably distant setting in which to create and showcase such a lost spiritual superiority, developed in opposition to the material domain, wherein the superiority of Western civilization had to be acknowledged.
Munshi's trilogy participates in the project of nationalism through its recreation of a Hindu-ruled past, its fashioning of Gurjardesa and its reiteration of the idea that internal conflict rendered it vulnerable to Muslim conquest. At the same time, textually both Gujarat and India remain a collection of kingdoms rather than cohesive unities. A ‘united India’ never emerges, whereas the ‘united Gujarat’ that emerges is subverted when the ruthlessness that lies at the heart of the process of the institutionalization of kingdoms comes to the fore in the concluding book of the trilogy.
One of the most interesting aspects of the text is that the eventual victory of Patan establishes it as the most powerful kingdom of Gujarat, and the Gurjardesa that comes into being by the end of the trilogy ruled by one king, is a quasi-nation as much as a region or a kingdom.Footnote 37 There is therefore an interesting slippage in the ways in which nation and region are conceptualized, a slippage that is also discernible in different writings in Indian languages of the time, which imagine being Indian through and alongside being Gujarati, being Bengali, being Punjabi and so on. This slippage opens up interesting questions for historical writing, such as how does one write region and nation at the same time?Footnote 38 It must be kept in mind that Munshi's participation in the freedom struggle was also ambivalent at the time. Whilst being fascinated by the mass appeal exerted by Gandhi, Munshi was attempting to negotiate and come to terms with Gandhi's use of non-violence as a strategy of the freedom struggle, which was contrary to all that he had earlier read, thought, learnt and understood about nationalism. The trilogy therefore also marks these negotiations, as reflected through the questions of strategy, loyalty and different ways of conceptualizing a nation, that recur through the texts and are resolved differently at different points. Patan is ultimately victorious, but the nature of that victory is undercut forcibly and directly, so that a reading of the books as simply reinforcing a singular notion of Gujarati identity becomes impossible. What the trilogy brings to light is the constructed nature of formations of Gujarati identity, and highlights fissures and contingencies rather than seamlessness and continuity.
