VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India

By Narayani Basu

With his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, the desperate viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his seniormost Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon—or VP—giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would change the map of the world forever.
Menon was unarguably the architect of the modern Indian state. Yet startlingly little is known about this bureaucrat, patriot and visionary. In this definitive biography, Menon’s great-granddaughter, Narayani Basu, rectifies this travesty. She takes us through the highs and lows of his career, from his determination to give women the right to vote; to his strategy, at once ruthless and subtle, to get the princely states to accede to India; to his decision to join forces with the Swatantra Party; to his final relegation to relative obscurity.
Equally, the book candidly explores the man behind the public figure— his unconventional personal life and his private conflicts, which made him channel his energy into public service. Drawing from documents—scattered, unread and unresearched until now—and with unprecedented access to Menon’s papers and his taped off-the-record and explosively frank interviews—this remarkable biography of VP Menon not only covers the life and times of a man unjustly consigned to the footnotes of history but also changes our perception of how India, as we know it, came into being.

 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Feb 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9789386797698

Narayani Basu

Narayani Basu is a historian and foreign policy analyst. A graduate in history and Chinese foreign policy from the University of Delhi, she is the author of The United States and China: Competing Discourses of Regionalism in East Asia and a forthcoming monograph on the history and significance of the Kashgar Consulate in bilateral relations between India and China. She writes extensively on foreign policy for several acclaimed international journals while remaining actively involved with her parent discipline—modern Indian history. She lives in New Delhi.  

Book preview

Prologue

IT WAS THE day before he died.

He was confined to just a bedroom in his step-daughter’s house. It was in this room that he half-sat, half-lay in bed, propped up against a wall of cushions and pillows positioned to help him breathe, at least a little and a little more comfortably.

One evening, recalls my uncle, Lakshman, my mother went to check on him. V.P. Menon was, by then emaciated and ashen-faced, with the veins on his neck and temples thick with the constant effort of breathing. Premilla Menon—my grandmother and VP’s daughter-in-law—sat by his bed. It was clear to both of them that he was dying. As she sat there, he spoke, painfully and raspingly, Do you know, Precious, he said, the only thing in life that’s free is air—and I can’t even get a lungful of it. He spoke without self-pity. It was a statement of fact.

The next morning, my grandfather, Anantan—VP’s eldest son—telephoned, as he did every day, to ask after his father’s health. His stepsister, Meenakshi, answered the phone. There’s no change, she said as much to reassure herself as to reassure him. Don’t worry.

My uncle recalls how his mother took the phone from Meenakshi’s hand, If you want to see your father alive, she told her husband crisply, drop everything and come here right away.

My father didn’t hesitate, remembers Lakshman.

Anantan and his driver, taking turns, drove 780 kilometres that day, crossing Hyderabad and through to Jabalpur, without food or water—stopping only to go to the loo.

It was evening when he arrived. Not wanting to appear before his father covered in dust and sweat, he had a quick shower. VP was awake when his son entered his bedroom. There were no words exchanged between the two of them—just one long final look.

PART I

1

A Bend in the Road

THE FIRST MEMORIES, as they usually are, seem sepia-tinted and wistful. He never knew his real name until he began going to school and had to write it down in full. Until then he was always Kuttan.¹ Indeed, if you asked the grown man what he remembered most about his childhood, it was more a question of taste, of colour, of sound—the sweet explosion of ripe mangoes in his mouth under hot, blue summer skies; the squelch of mud and boyhood shouts and laughter during monsoon games of football; the warm mix of coconut oil and paan he associated with his mother. But the memory of the day he ran away from home was crystal-clear and stayed with him all through his life.

To the boy, it was a thrilling adventure. To the man, it was a fantastic tale told with a slightly incredulous laugh, as if he were amazed at the devil-may-care attitude of the child.

The darkness of night would have been edging towards an indigo dawn when he awoke. Soon, his mother would awake. Perhaps her eyes were already open. Kunjukutty Amma was a light sleeper. She had to be with seven small and very active children to look after. Kuttan did not want to disturb her or let his mother know that he would be gone long before she began preparing breakfast. He hadn’t planned on leaving but events had forced his hand. Only Chinnan knew his secret but he had trained his devoted younger brother well. Chinnan would tell no one—at least not until his family made the discovery for themselves. Moving stealthily, Kuttan rose and went to the door of his open room. The sky was brightening, the indigo edging towards gold in the east. Vappalakalam lay quiet in the first light of dawn. The estate sprawled over some acres of gently undulating land cupped in the bowl made by the necklace of hills known to that part of Malabar as the Anangan Mala. For Kuttan, the hills were home. He had spent his life racing across the slopes, hunting for wild mushrooms with his friends, or simply sitting at the top of his favourite hillock and absorbing the view of the vista below him.²

But he did not dare delay. It was a school day and it would not be long before the news of what had happened reached his father’s ears.

Chunangad Shankara Menon figured in Kuttan’s life as an aloof, shadowy figure of authority. He was the much-feared and deeply respected headmaster of the local school and his marriage (as the eldest of the venerable Chunangad family in the neighbouring village) into Kothakurussi’s leading clan had served to enhance his image as an upright citizen, with rigidly upright morals and a stern sense of discipline. He was a constant presence but a distant father, and at their current ages of thirteen and eleven, Kuttan and Chinnan accepted him as such. Both boys however, adored their mother. Kunjukutty Amma (or, as some knew her, Unni Madhavi) was a fiercely independent yet very practical woman. She ran the household with a velvet fist and an iron will. She had a weakness for tobacco and paan, a formidable temper (which young Kuttan inherited) and decided opinions on almost every subject under the sun.³ In Mattathodi, her word was law and not even her husband dared to cross her. Kuttan and Chinnan were her unabashed favourites. Her eldest child, Kalyanikutty, a somewhat sickly girl, was married off at the age of fifteen, leaving six of the younger ones at home. Though he was the second oldest, Kuttan retained no memories of his sister except that she had died fairly young and that too soon after her marriage. For him, his mother was all-important and from what he was to relate to his family, Kunjukutty Amma was a wonderful mother full of the stories small children love to hear and always ready to soothe fretful tears. To leave her was a wrench, but he didn’t want to think of that just yet. He had a little time before the house awoke and began the bustle of the daily morning routine and he wanted to soak in every minute.

Vappalakalam was built in the wide, warren-like style of the old tharavad (family home) and since his mother had married, it had been partitioned twice between Kunjukutty and her four other sisters. It was now divided into two large homes—Pandarakkalam, where Kuttan’s aunt lived with her family and Mattathodi, where his own family lived.⁴ Both houses were similar in size and structure with their faded terracotta-tiled roofs; their round family ponds and the canopies of jackfruit trees over the front courtyards. There was no wall between the estates, so in the evenings, family members would sit outside in the cool air listening to the wind whisper through the palm trees and watch the children play in the purple twilight.⁵

Kuttan did not know much more about the history of the family. His assessment of their status in the village was in schoolboy terms of size and strength. Mattathodi and Pandarakkalam were, for example, the biggest houses in Kothakurussi. His extended family included three English-speaking men who were all in government service. Chinnan, Chappuni and Pangunni Menon were Chunangad Shankara Menon’s brothers and they also lived on the estates when they were not away on tour across Malabar or Madras. Around them hung the aura of the Raj. They were on good terms with their English masters and Kothakurussi at least, beheld them with awe. So did their nephew. With their close-cropped hair and fluent English they were the epitome of what young Kuttan wanted to be when he grew up. However, to enter the civil services, he knew he would have to study very hard and to do that he needed to go to college, possibly in Madras. All of that was now not possible. The school had, in all likelihood, burnt down during the night but that wasn’t his fault. None of this had been his fault. He had just had enough of being insulted continuously—that, too, by a Tamilian.⁶

As someone’s earliest memory, this is both curious and deeply revealing. The story reeks of imperious defiance, an awareness of his family’s status and a kind of selfish hysteria. Considering he was the oldest son, his mother’s favourite child and ludicrously spoilt, this is not surprising. Kuttan was not a good-looking child (and would not be a good-looking man). He had a short sturdy build, slightly protuberant myopic eyes and a mop of oiled, wavy ringlets. What he lacked in looks, he more than made up for with a photogenic memory and a gift for observation, blatantly precocious in one so young.

When he was not throwing tantrums to get his own way, Kuttan’s nature was a sunny one, endearing him to his family who were quick to protect him from hurts, both real and imagined. There is another snapshot of a memory, crystal clear to both him and his devoted Chinnan.⁷ When he was six-yearsold, Kunjukutty entrusted Kuttan with the task of buying her favourite paan from the shop she preferred. Delighted with the responsibility, Kuttan dashed off across the fields, whistling to himself like the trains that snaked through the fields on the railway lines. He charged headlong into the shop, crowded at that time of day with other customers who had come in to buy their rations of kerosene, oil and salt. Heedless of the young and old alike, Kuttan shoved his way to the front of the crowd and flung his annas on the counterimperiously. My mother, he announced, would like her paan now. The jeers and taunting laughter this pronouncement provoked made his ears burn and his eyes well up. The shopkeeper, an otherwise placid man by the name of Ahmed, smirked and turned away. The insult of it all was too much to bear. Furious, weeping with rage and mortification, Kuttan fled homewards, forgetting what he had come for altogether. He rushed into his mother’s arms and sobbed out his tale of woe. Kunjukutty gently stroked his hair. Never mind, she said quietly. Never mind, dear one. Ahmed has been getting very arrogant lately. Kuttan was never sent out by himself again and Ahmed was given a severe dressing-down. The news of it gave Kuttan a rather malicious sense of victory, a peculiarly Machiavellian trait that would deepen and harden over the years. This streak would lose him friends and relatives alike in the future, breaking relationships that he did actually hold dear. For now, in his boyhood, it merely earned him the reputation of being a mama’s boy—which, rather than offending, seems to have delighted him.

Kuttan enjoyed having the upper-hand and he didn’t mind using it to his advantage. He knew, for instance, that his brain was different from anyone else’s. It worked a little like a camera, taking snapshots of everything and anything he came across or read in a book. This earned him friends during school examinations and envy on an average day—the kind that made him gloat to himself as he walked home after school. It was only later that Kuttan would get to know the scientific term for a brain such as his and later still that he would learn that an eidetic memory is not always a gift. For now, he put it to good use in his studies, which he thoroughly enjoyed. These began with complicated Sanskrit prayers that he was taught at home, reciting words that he did not remotely understand but chanting them the loudest so that everyone could marvel at his intelligence, as the great bronzed lobam (prayer lamp) was taken around the dim corridors, leaving clouds of sweet incense in its wake.⁸

At five, his father arranged for a tutor to visit the household. It would be good preparation before the boy finally joined school. A young man from the village, a solemn earnest scholar by the name of Asan, was chosen as Kuttan’s first tutor. With him, Kuttan learnt the joy of tracing his first alphabets in the mud of his family courtyard. From here, he graduated to writing on smooth wide banana leaves and learning his first idioms and proverbs in Malayalam. He was six-years-old when he was allowed—after a year’s study—to join school. No special privileges were to be given to the headmaster’s son, declared Shankara. Kuttan would be treated as one of the other students. This didn’t sit too well with Kuttan, who was used to getting around the elders in his family with the special mix of precocious charm he reserved—with a wily guile—only for them. It was only because he genuinely adored his studies that he didn’t protest too much.⁹

Village schools were surprisingly comprehensive in terms of syllabus. You were taught a basic mix of Malayalam, Sanskrit, Vedic studies, mathematics and history. Since the British were in charge in Malabar, English had been introduced even in the most basic schools and most students graduated with a rudimentary knowledge of the language. If you were of the right caste and had the right privilege, a chance to dip deeper into the British Indian education system awaited you. The Vappala clan had both—and with Kuttan’s potential, it wouldn’t be long before he was given an opportunity to fly further from the nest. Kuttan finished primary school as a prize student. He was gifted in Malayalam, Sanskrit and mathematics and he had shown a natural inclination to study history—a subject in which many students didn’t traditionally do too well. He was also showing promising signs of being able to master the English language. So, if Shankara Menon desired to allow him to go, he was ready to graduate to the big English-medium school in Ottapalam. His mother was inordinately proud, though both parents—as upper-caste Nairs—were worried about the problems that mixing with children of other castes might bring.¹⁰ Their son, in the way of teenagers from time immemorial, worried more about the length of his hair. Upper-caste Nair boys usually wore their hair long and this dictum Kuttan had borne for a long time with great patience. The thought of presenting himself in Ottapalam with long hair filled him with horror. All three of his uncles had short hair he argued passionately—why couldn’t he? Shankara Menon stood firm for precisely three days before Kuttan got his way.

In the early 1900s, Ottapalam was a bustling railway township. A railway line had been laid some miles outside the main town in 1862 that connected it with the rest of the Madras Presidency. Trains lumbered in and out of the teeming station carrying loads of timber, coal and gold to faraway places. It was a long walk there and back every day but it was one that Kuttan regularly undertook ever since he had been allowed to walk so far from home by himself. The walk lasted two hours each way since it was some nine kilometers on foot from home but it took him across the wide empty expanses of rice and paddy fields and across the quiet ribbon of the Nila. Kuttan loved the walk, getting up extra early to leave in the mornings and returning home, often well after dark. Chinnan—with whom he had spent much of his time until now—rarely saw him and when he did, it was a Kuttan preoccupied with subjects and ideas beyond Chinnan’s ken.

Ottapalam had opened Kuttan’s eyes to a world beyond the village, a world where white and brown men walked and worked side-by-side, but one in which the whites ruled over the browns. Outside the classroom, the railway station became a haven for Kuttan. He adored the trains, spending hours just sitting on an empty bench watching trains snorting in and out, billowing steam as they went. Sometimes, he would stand near the tracks, as close as he dared, letting the wind of a passing train whistle through his hair. They fascinated him—not because of the science involved or their power but because of the stories they carried and the places they were travelling to—places he had never seen or heard of.¹¹

It is during the dawn of his teenage years, when young boys his age were being groomed for good jobs and marriages that Kuttan began to experience a restlessness that was hitherto alien to him. All his life had revolved around Vappalakalam, his mother, her stories and his friends in Kothakurussi. Now, he wanted more—but what that was, his thirteen-year-old brain could not comprehend. Soon, vendors on the platform, selling their hot, crispy vadas and their steaming earthenware cups of tea and coffee began to recognise this waif of a boy with his roving dark eyes and his close-cropped head.¹² He would be given an idli or a vada and a cup of steaming black coffee when he grew hungry. One day, a newspaper vendor gave him a copy of the Madras Mail when he grew bored with the books he always carried under his arm. It was Kuttan’s first newspaper, and he never forgot the texture of the paper and the smell of the ink. It was unlike any book he had ever read and it was full of words and names he had never heard of. Soon, the boy on the platform of the Ottapalam railway station became a well-known figure. He would have his nose stuck between the pages of the Mail, devouring articles by the dozen, reading them aloud under his breath while stumbling a little over alien words. To Kuttan’s endless fascination, no newspaper was the same from one day to the next. It was from the newspapers and journals at the station’s tiny shop that he learnt of things that he would never learn in school. He learnt of a world that existed beyond India—of the defeat of Russia by Japan. He learnt of the Anglo-Russian Convention, signed in 1907, between England and Russia, over territories in Persia, Afghanistan and Turkey and of the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria. These were names that Kuttan could barely pronounce, let alone point out on a map—but he was more interested in the details of meetings between powerful men, who signed their names on pieces of paper. These men and their pieces of paper, he learnt, could dictate the future of a country. He read of events in India, happening far away, in the east of the country. Someone called the Viceroy had ordered the province of Bengal to be split into two halves, in 1905. In response, there were calls for Swaraj and Swadeshi: for the complete independence of India with a boycott of British-manufactured goods. Kuttan stored away the questions that formed in his busy brain as he devoured newspaper after newspaper. What and who was behind this Congress Party? Why was there such hatred towards the white man, especially this Lord Curzon? Why had Bengal—wherever that was—been divided in the first place? There was no one to answer these questions for him. For now, the newspapers read like a fast-paced story, greatly appealing to the heart and mind of a young boy. All this excitement and intrigue was very far removed from Kothakurussi, and even Ottapalam.

The land Kuttan knew was a simple one, characterised by a seamless affinity with nature and a singular absence of problems. The Empire was regarded as something immutable, everlasting and beneficent. In school, Kuttan wrote many essays on the benefits of British rule in India: it seemed to be a favourite question at any level of examination. There was, of course, much to happen as yet in the Madras Presidency itself, which would change the course of regional history and politics forever. From the point of view of a young boy, though, the current times were simple. Life moved at an easy pace. Bullock carts were still a preferred means of transport but if you had a bicycle—as someone the Menons knew in Kottayam did—you were a local wonder. The most important focal points were the homestead and the temple. To read of bombs and civil war, of bloodshed and struggles for national freedom was like a fantastic fairytale, the kind his mother used to tell him and his brothers and sister at night.

Not that any of this mattered at the moment. What mattered was the fact that his headmaster, a man from Tamizh Nadu!¹³ by the name of Krishnamachari, had failed him in his school examinations for poor attendance. Most children who could afford to attend Ottapalam High School had to tramp for miles before they reached school in the morning. This, the principal knew full well but he was still not allowed to pass. To add insult to injury, the teacher—who, in Kuttan’s account of it, seemed to take an unseemly relish in haranguing a small boy—told him to go home. Stunned, Kuttan gazed speechlessly at the man standing before him. I went dizzy and I couldn’t get up. This, he took to mean that I was disrespecting him. So he threw me out of the class altogether.¹⁴

Kuttan staggered out of the classroom, tears streaking down his face. A servant from home was standing outside the gate, holding the lunch he had forgotten that morning as he raced off to school. I took the lunch from the man and I thanked him and sent him home. Instinctively, he went to the station, sitting down heavily on the nearest bench. For a long time, he merely sat there, clutching his tiffin box, gazing sightlessly at the trains lumbering in and out. I could not see anything, or hear anything. I just knew that I couldn’t go back there again.¹⁵

He felt extraordinarily sick. For a moment, he considered vomiting and then the spell passed, leaving him bathed in cold sweat and shivering on the bench. People were beginning to eye him curiously as they walked past and his friend, the newspaper vendor, was already moving towards him. Kuttan didn’t want to answer any questions, so he picked up his tiffin box and left the station, walking hurriedly and aimlessly towards the river. Kuttan had always adored the river, often walking along its course, a stick in hand to dig through the thick mud of its banks. He knew its path almost as well as he knew the back of his hand. Fishermen, sailing homewards in the evening on their slim black boats laden with silvery heaps of fish and pearly pomfret, would raise their oars in greeting at Kuttan, as he ran along the winding river bank. Even in school, he was often hauled up, as the schoolmaster, turning from the blackboard, caught sight of him, craning his head to catch a glimpse of the river as it wound across the fields. Now, no one would ever haul him up again. I sat under a tree on the riverbank and ate my food. Then I washed my hands and face in that water, and went to sleep.¹⁶

How long he slept, he did not know, but when he woke up it was dusk, and a veil of shadowy mauve was descending across the land. He couldn’t go home yet, much as he wanted to. He wanted to see his mother, to try and explain to her, but he knew he couldn’t. I remember sitting on that riverbank for hours, just watching the water flow past. Then I realised that I had to do something.¹⁷ Anyone who is remotely familiar with the bare bones of the story of VP Menon knows what he did next. The story of VP (or Kuttan, as he was known then) burning down the school at which he studied is a popular one, and with good reason. There is something of the rebellious renegade in the story which both appeals to one’s sense of drama and encourages one to dismiss it as sensational embellishment. Yet, even when one reads the story in VP’s own words, it still makes one blink incredulously at the pages.

I found an empty liquor bottle on the banks of the river. It gave me an idea. I didn’t bother to think about it, or even about the consequences. I just wanted that Tamilian to pay for what he had done. I went to the shop and I told Ahmed that I wanted some kerosene oil and a matchbox. My mother would send the money later.¹⁸ Thus armed, Kuttan walked back to his school. He never remembered the walk, or the thoughts that ran through his mind. However, he did remember the act of pouring the kerosene indiscriminately over the floor and lighting the match which would set it gloriously on fire. Then I ran and I didn’t look back.¹⁹

There are two versions of this story. One is the one above, which was told several times by VP—once to Chinnan, once to Harry Hodson and once to Leonard Mosley. The other has Pangunni Menon’s (VP’s paternal uncle and Shankara Menon’s eldest brother) youngest brother, P. Appunni Menon, assisting VP in setting the school on fire. This is a story that has come down through the Pangunni Menon family tree, and was recounted to the author by Dev Vijayan, Pangunni’s great-grandson. The story about his (VP’s) flight from Ottapalam was mentioned often, since it involved my grandfather’s brother as well. Apparently, they owned some money at the local tea shop and when questioned about it took offence. Why did a debt at the local tea shop lead to VP and Appunni Menon setting a school on fire? Here, it doesn’t quite add up, admitted Vijayan.²⁰ What is true is that, for whatever reason, VP did not leave town alone. Certainly the school was set on fire, but with VP, went Appunni Menon.

The first morning train would be due into Ottapalam station in a few hours. To catch it, he needed to leave immediately. Kuttan turned away from the door and looked over at his mother and his siblings, sleeping peacefully on the floor. He had had time through the night to realise the enormity of what he had done and the shame that he would bring to his family, once they heard what had happened and who was responsible. It is remarkable, though, that despite this comprehension, he still believed that he had done the right thing. There was no space for such a school, and such teachers there … I didn’t know what I would do now, but the confidence of youth is sometimes stupid. I just knew I wanted to leave.²¹ Outside, in the courtyard, the cockerel began to crow.

I had watched those trains coming in and out of the station so many times. I knew their schedules and even their names but now that I was about to actually get onto one of them, I was terrified.²² There was a train coming in, but it was an unfamiliar one marked with numbers that Kuttan did not recognise. He watched the crowd on the platform swell. Many people seemed to be waiting for this particular train. Getting up, he merged with the crowd and allowed himself to be swept onboard. It was packed with many standing in the corridors between compartments. The train smelt of sweat and dirt and the din of the wheels and the raised voices of passengers made Kuttan’s head spin. Eventually, I managed to push my way to the back of the train, where there was just room for one person. I sat down there and I waited.²³ As the train steamed out of the station, Kuttan watched Ottapalam, and his closest link with home, recede into the distance. He had done it. He had managed to leave—he had even set his school on fire. I remember thinking that it must have turned to ashes by now. Then I remember feeling terrified in case my father and uncles came after me and thrashed me for what I had done. He also thought inescapably of his mother. I wondered whether she was crying, whether Chinnan had told them the truth. Then I fretted about the fact that I did not have a ticket. Maybe I would be arrested!²⁴ Though he was with Appunni, Kuttan had never travelled anywhere without adult supervision. To be on a train to an unknown destination and to have not so much as a change of clothes with him and no money to pay for food or board, would have been rather too much for a thirteen-year-old to process. Instead he began to watch the countryside, dappled in shades of green and yellow, flash past.

Even as a man, Kuttan remembered the stops on that first train journey. That train went from Ottapalam to Lakkidi, and then Parali and then onto Olavakkode. We went through a tunnel at Walayar and then we stopped at Pothanoor.²⁵ Still the train continued onward, its engine whistling occasionally. A boy with snacks came out to have a breath of air, and found me sitting by myself. I was lucky he didn’t call the ticket-collector. Instead he gave me some tea and snacks. I could barely speak, I was so hungry, but I asked him where the train was going.²⁶

It was bound for Kolar.

2

Kolar

TO THOSE WHO knew Kolar, it was anything but a promised land. The sun was harsh; the soil dry and studded with hard, unyielding rock and there was little by way of natural vegetation. Geographically speaking, it was a dot on the map of Mysore. The legend of Kolar was rather more expansive, reaching as far back into history as the Indus Civilisation. The gold from these mines was said to have found its way to ports across the world—from Asia to Europe to Africa. The great historian Pliny had written about the wonders to be found in Kolar and the use of gold in Roman trade. Ancient dynasties like the Guptas, the Pallavas and the Cheras had tapped into it for their currency reserves. Even so, it was rumoured that the true potential of the Kolar gold mines had never been discovered. It was only when the English arrived in Mysore, in 1799, that the technicalities involved in surveying the topography of the kingdom and demarcating its boundaries began. But it would still be another century of painstaking advances in cartography and geological studies before the legend of Kolar would become a reality.

By the time Kuttan and Appunni arrived in Kolar, in the summer of 1906, the discovery of gold—in quantities beyond anyone’s wildest imagination—had transformed Kolar. The mines were now powered by the impressive Sivasamudram Dam, built at the turn of the century—the first hydroelectric project in the country. A new colonial settlement sprang up on the outskirts of the mines, complete with bungalows, clubhouses and gymkhanas. The coolie lines on the outskirts of this settlement were inhabited by Indians—many of whom worked for their British sahibs and memsahibs as well.²⁷ It was the closest thing to a city that many had ever seen—although full of soot, dirt and noise. To Kuttan, stepping off the snorting, smoke-belching train that had brought him from Bangarapet (the nearest township) to Kolar, it was the beginning of a new adventure. I had heard of the goldfields in Kolar. I knew I needed money to eat. That was the only thought in my head—how to fill my stomach.²⁸ He could speak a smattering of English but he was desperately afraid to try and speak it. He tried Malayalam and the little Tamil he knew, before someone took pity on him and directed him towards the main town.

Kuttan was to forget the name of the man who interviewed him but he never forgot his first encounter with a representative of the Raj. Unlike the arrogant Englishman of folklore, this man accepted him at face value. It was the first time that he had to reveal his name to an outsider. He had never been called anything except Kuttan—but in Ottapalam High School, his teacher had called him VP. So, in response to the Englishman’s question, Kuttan replied in broken, heavily accented English, My name VP. Well then, VP, said the Englishman, cheerfully tossing a bag of coins on the desk between them, Welcome to your new life.²⁹

It didn’t take Kuttan long to discover what the Englishman meant. For mineworkers, the legend of Kolar’s might was not to be trifled with. In 1897, a deadly rock-fall and landslide inside the Mysore Mine had killed upwards of fifty workers, injuring hundreds more. In January 1906, the wicker roof of one of the mining cages caught fire killing six workers and injuring ten others. Sickness was a constant spectre—cholera, dysentery, malaria, asthma and lung cancer raged through the coolie settlements, picking off those who survived the horrors of the underground. When dusk fell, workers would stumble out of the mines and their work-stations and many would turn their faces toward the local liquor shops or gambling dens even though wives and children waited for them at home. The sky was perennially contaminated by smoke billowing from the tall brick chimneys that dotted the fields. The horizon was marred by a huge contraption with rotating wheels on top—he would learn later that this was the great lift that conveyed men from the surface of the earth to its bowels. The mines rumbled all day long, with the occasional explosion—dynamite blasting through rock—shaking the earth and showering the debris and dust on workers in the adjacent narrow passes. Temperatures raged up to 157 degrees Fahrenheit. The ore was hauled to the shafts in bamboo baskets. Loading and unloading was carried out by bullock carts. The piles of ore brought to the surface would then be carried by coolies to stations where young boys—of whom Kuttan was one—were given the task of separating the gold ore from the barren black rock or gold from the dust in the mills.

It was a world away from the one he had known. Physical labour was unknown to him. Now, he was lifting heavy baskets of soil onto his head, sifting through sharp rock pieces which cut his fingers in his search for gold in the dirty pans. There would be other disillusionments in store. I was shattered beyond belief when I found out that you did not get to keep any of the gold you mined for the British.³⁰ Instead, he was paid a daily wage of two annas. In those days, sixteen annas made a rupee, but with two rupees Kuttan could afford two meals a day and a tiffin of idlis and tea.

Just when he began to dream of leaving Kolar is unclear, but the man would remember, I never intended on staying there more than I could help to or afford.³¹ It was easier said than done. The simple act of leaving was a complicated tangle if you were a mineworker in Kolar. A plain steel band, stamped with a number was clamped around the wrist of each worker in Kolar. The band never came off and one couldn’t remove it either—you were literally tied to the mines. More importantly, as an intermediate worker, he was earning more money than when he started, some of which he saved and the rest he sent home to his mother. Five years in Kolar had seen change come to Vappalakalam and had taught VP³² to realise—with perverse bitterness—that no one was coming to rescue him. Shankara Menon was dead, taken ill with a mysterious fever following a particularly bad monsoon in 1908. With their father gone, the family was surviving on the goodwill of Kunjukutty’s brothers and the money which VP’s work was earning him in Kolar. Kalyani had died in childbirth a year ago as well, leaving their mother stoic despite the double blow of the death of her husband and her daughter in quick succession. Chinnan was studying to go to medical college in Madras. He wanted to practice ayurveda, as he shyly informed his elder brother.³³ Meanwhile, there was Madhavi and the other two younger siblings to think of. And there was more bad news; Kunjukutty’s eyes were failing. She was still a fiercely independent woman and she hated any acknowledgement of what she deemed her failing, but it was clear that with the onset of old age, she would most definitely go blind. More than ever, I longed to get out of that hell, but I could not … To me, it was more than enough punishment for what I had done.³⁴ Kolar taught VP hard lessons during the years he worked here. It taught him to be thrifty when he was at an age when young men are often extravagant. It taught him to compartmentalise his emotions into separate, watertight boxes—a trait that would be both a blessing and a curse in his later years.

As the months and years passed, he acquired new responsibilities and no time for old emotions. He was sending home more than half his salary, keeping the bare minimum for himself. Death was a very real possibility and poverty was a constant companion. The soft edges of spoilt boyhood were now tempered with an icy, stoic practicality that would stay with him for the rest of his life. By 1911, he was eighteen years old and had worked in Kolar for five years. Appunni had not been so lucky. He stayed on at Kolar, famously emptied a spittoon on his British supervisor’s head, and thus voluntarily curtailing his career, came back home penniless and with a family to support!³⁵ VP, meanwhile, sported a new moustache, a close-cropped head of hair and a fresh spurt of confidence. He might not be able to run away from Kolar but that would not stop him from trying to find a way out in the foreseeable future. It seemed Providence was on his side when, one day, he found that two vacancies had been posted for work in the mines—as a clerk and a contracted overseer.³⁶

VP had never supervised anything except for the bullocks on the Vappala homestead. Nor did he have the matriculation certificate that both jobs required. It says much about his growing sense of (rather outrageous) self-worth that he applied for both vacancies. As before, his interviewer was an Englishman who was both taken aback and impressed by VP’s bold initiative. He waved away VP’s confession that he lacked a matriculation certificate. A piece of paper does not ensure your ability, he remarked. It was the first time anyone had ever told VP that—and he would never forget the words. He had always been taught that to get anywhere—whether it was to manage a country or manage your own life—you needed a scrap of paper. Now, here was a man telling him a certificate of education was precisely that: a mere piece of paper. Perhaps it was the expression of shock on VP’s face, perhaps it was something else—but the Englishman leaned forward, his eyes fixed on VP’s. Which post would you rather have? he asked. My mind went blank for just a second. But then I did not hesitate. VP wanted to be an overseer. The Englishman laughed, A clerk is tedious work, no doubt, but there’s more security in it. There’s still hope of a promotion further down the line too. However, confidence stood determinedly against caution. VP had heard too many stories of wealth waiting to be made to agree to the position of just a simple clerk. Eventually the man smiled. Here, he said handing over a leather bag of coins, hire yourself a gang of coolies and put them to work. A commission from the quota of gold they bring to you is yours to keep. The harder you work them, the more you’ll make. Let me see what you can do. As the delighted VP hurried to the door, the man’s voice stopped him in his tracks, "Don’t work them too hard. You might kill them instead."³⁷

Supervising a gang of grown men—all of them older than he—was very different to guiding a pair of placid bullocks. However, VP learnt that if he tackled them with humour and fairness he could make men older than himself listen and work well. He took his lunch breaks, not with the other overseers, but with the men he commanded, sharing their burnt dosas and watery sambhar. For the first few weeks, this was a method that worked splendidly. The men responded better to an Indian overseer, and they were grateful to have someone who seemed to understand their problems. They brought up gold by the ingot for VP and his quota began to leapfrog ahead of any other overseer in the fields. Soon, he was earning nearly a thousand rupees a week. He could now afford to send home enough to send all his brothers to school and college, and to take care of his sister’s coming-of-age ceremony. But somewhere in the middle of that first year of his overseership, trouble began.³⁸

The monsoons in Kolar were usually the most difficult time of the year. The rains were torrential, driving down in great sheets, which turned the ground to slush and the trees blazing with green. Along with the rains came mosquitoes and with them malaria and cholera. As man after man succumbed to the raging epidemics, VP resolved that any man who fell sick under his charge would have increased rations and sick leave—with pay. It was a fine thought, telling equally of the idealism of his youth, and his strong desire to be liked and to do the right thing. The men were grateful at first—and then began taking full advantage of his inexperience. After the rains passed, leaving cloudy humidity in their wake, VP’s workers began to shirk. They would often slip down to the third level of the mine, where it was cooler than anywhere above ground. Sleeping off a night of drink in these dim passages became a favourite pastime and it wasn’t long before the quota of gold—so impressive initially—began to fall. VP noticed the slip long before anyone else but he sought to cover it up, bridging the gap in the quota of gold with his own savings in cash. Soon, he was heavily in debt to the management and in hourly dread of being unceremoniously sacked. It was a sharp decline in his fortunes—one brought on quite unnecessarily by himself. He would never delegate work again, preferring to do everything himself in case he was cheated. This was a quality that was to remain stamped on his future career. As a strategy, it was inevitably flawed. For now, it signalled the end of his temporary prosperity. At the end of the financial quarter that summer, VP was summoned to the very offices in which he had given his first interview. The same Englishman who had been so cheerful was present yet again—and this time he was neither cheerful nor pleasant. I told you not to be a damn fool, Menon, he barked, Your game here is up. Reaching into the drawer beneath the table he took out an envelope and tossed it onto the table between them, Take this, he said curtly, and get out.³⁹

VP left Kolar with even less than what he had come with and several bitterly learnt lessons. In the envelope, there were two hundred rupee notes and a letter recommending him for a clerical job in a tobacco firm in Bangalore. This was the Imperial Tobacco Company (later to be known as ITC). His grandson, Lakshman, remembers, During his lunch breaks, he used to eat his tiffin and rest under the shade of a jackfruit tree across the road from the factory. There was obviously something in the serenity of the place in which he rested that several decades later, he was to buy the large plot of land on which the jackfruit tree stood and build a house which was to become his home in the years of his retirement. Fittingly, he called his house, ‘Shelter’. His much loved step-grandson, Vivek Misra, lives there today.⁴⁰

On Kolar, VP kept no diaries. The letters to Chinnan are the only ones that mention his life in the mines. Already a proud young man and never one who took criticism well, he saw no reason why he should dwell on what he perceived to be his own fault at losing a great opportunity. Indeed, if this biographer has dwelt rather expansively on VP’s experiences in the harrowing minefields of Kolar, it is because they were to shape not only his work ethic, but also his emotional life.

Even, in the later years of his VP never talked about his time in Kolar. Indeed, when pressed to describe what it was like to live and work in Kolar, at the height of Mysore’s Gold Rush, VP could find only one word to sum it up—narakam.

Quite simply: hell.

This entire tale survives because of a rare moment of post-prandial expansiveness, over a glass of his favourite Scotch shared with a fascinated Leonard Mosley.

VP’s journey northwards, to Delhi was to begin around this time. Here again, it seemed to be a subject he preferred not to talk about. However, Harry Hodson recalls VP telling him that he had been offered a job teaching English in a small Muslim state. There is one little condition, they told him, You will have to become a Mussulman. The agnostic young Menon thought this no fatal obstacle, until he learnt that virtually the only requirement for conversion was circumcision: permanent amputation for a temporary job he thought too high a price.⁴¹ Leonard Mosley and Kuttishankara Menon, VP’s nephew, were both told by VP that he went to Bombay after Bangalore. According to Chinnan, VP took a four-day long journey to Bombay.⁴² With no idea of what he was going to do in this new city, an exhausted VP fell asleep on the pavement at the Gateway of India. When he woke up, he found no one nearby,⁴³ Chinnan would recall. He also discovered, to his horror, that someone had stolen whatever little money he was carrying. His gold ear-drop, too, had gone … He felt like weeping.⁴⁴ Weeping wouldn’t solve anything though. VP began walking aimlessly through the crowded streets, until finally, he came across a fellow Malayali, selling towels outside Victoria Terminus. The two fell into conversation, and eventually became good friends. Thus, Pangunni started the small business of selling towels on the streets of Bombay, thanks to the kindness of that street-hawker.⁴⁵ Determined not to spend his life selling towels on the streets of Bombay, VP found a job clerking in an office in Bombay. And although the job paid him a pittance it was a leg up from being a hawker on the streets. Leonard Mosley takes up this story in The Last Days of the British Raj. Years later, once more on the verge of starvation, Menon had borrowed sufficient money to take the train back to Malabar and was on his way to the station when an Englishman he had met while clerking in Bombay crossed the road to greet him. He was head of the Home Department in Delhi. When he heard of Menon’s plight, he got him a job in the department and encouraged him to study at night school.⁴⁶

The most significant milestones of the young VP’s life had now been crossed: Kolar and Delhi.

3

Glad City

VP MENON WAS twenty one years old when he stepped off a train for the second time in his life. It was April 1914 and his latest journey had delivered him to Delhi, the doorstep of the Raj in India. He had travelled from the bustle of Bombay to the regal colonnades of the new capital, clutching a canvas bag containing all his possessions and a letter from a friend of his erstwhile employer. The name of this gentleman does not survive, but VP remembered him as the head of the Home Department in Delhi. The letter recommended VP as a typist in the Home Department, a subordinate position in a venerable administrative structure. In itself, the letter—on the basis of which he was subsequently hired—was no anomaly. Non-covenanted civil service officers (simply put, those who had not sat for the civil service examinations) were regularly employed by the Government of India, based on recommendation rather than examination. The commonplace Class II official—clerks, chaprasis, jamedars, and daftries (peons)—was hired on the basis of influence and connection, rather than any kind of merit or stability. All one really required was a modicum of English and/or Urdu. Salaries went as high as seventy five rupees (for a head clerk), and touched a low of twenty five rupees (for a peon). Then as today, government posts were much sought after. They held the promise of prestige, the prospect of power, the lure of financial stability and the comfort of a pension once one retired at the respectable age of 55. Understandably, there was always high and rather vicious competition