Book excerpt | Suryavamshi: The Sun Kings of Rajasthan by Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore. And the book cover of Sandipan Deb's English translation of Tagore's Raj Kahani: Suryavamshi: The Sun Kings of Rajasthan. (Images credits: Calcutta: The Cyclopedia Publishing Company via Wikimedia Commons; and Juggernaut Books)

Bappaditya

When the husk of the rice is burnt, it smoulders for a long time and then suddenly turns into a firestorm. Similarly, after Goha passed away, over the years and decades, the anger the Bhils felt towards the Rajputs kept building quietly, little by little. Then, one day, it burst into a blaze that engulfed the forests and the Mountains.

For eight generations the Bhils had endured the cruel repression of the Rajput kings in respectful memory of Goha’s handsome visage, his boundless kindness and his indomitable courage. If a Rajput king on his way to a hunt spilt the blood of a Bhil passing by with a careless thrust of his spear, the Bhil would recall how Goha had saved an ancestor of his from a fierce tiger and wiped the blood from his chest with his own hands.

When a Rajput prince burnt an entire village just for fun and watched on in glee as it went down, the villagers thought of the time of a great famine when Goha had kept his grand palace and his barns full of grain open to his poor and helpless Bhil subjects for a whole year.

Sometimes when, because of ill luck, a battle was lost, and a cowardly Rajput prince would accuse the Bhil generals of treason and order their heads crushed, one after the other, under the feet of elephants, the soldiers of the Bhil army would wipe their tears and think – alas, once upon a time there was Maharaja Goha, who, when he went to war, took care of them like a brother, protected them like a mother and always fearlessly led his army from the front.
So much tyranny, so much humiliation – yet the innocent hearts of the Bhils remained filled with trust and loyalty to the Rajput kings for eight generations. But then, Bappaditya’s father, Nagaditya, began a ghastly reign of terror when he ascended to the throne. This heartless despot was not satisfied even after burning down the villages of his poor subjects and

looting their harvest. He captured thousands of Bhil girls and distributed them among Rajput homes as slaves. It seemed he could not get a good night’s sleep without thinking up some new cruelty. But the day Nagaditya passed a law banning the only sport the Bhils

knew – the hunting of wild animals – the dam of the Bhils’ patience finally broke.
The night before the diktat was issued had been one of pleasant dreams for Nagaditya. The day had dawned cloudy, with a cool breeze blowing and not a hint of dust anywhere. It was a very fine day for a hunt. At once the king got his elephant ready and set off for

the jungle. He took only Rajputs that day with him – hordes of them, riding their high stallions.
Under the new law, even a little Bhil boy was not permitted to accompany them. Just as a cheetah in a cage feels agitated and helpless when it spots a prey, so was the state of the Bhils’ souls as they sat cooped up in their homes on such a splendid day for a hunt. Nagaditya knew this very well, and that knowledge made his heart dance in delight.

The king rode up to the top of a mountain with his cohorts, their hunting horns creating a great racket. On other days, that thunderous din would make herds of buffaloes rush out of the waters and flee helter-skelter and cause all the birds in the forest to leave their nests and scatter into the sky. Thousands of terrified deer would lose their way and run right to where their killers were waiting for them. Sleeping lions would wake up and tigers would roar. Hunters armed with spears would go after the buffaloes, and others with swords run in search of the lions. But today, however many times Nagaditya blew his horn and however loudly his hunters yelled, no tiger roared, no bird wings fluttered and not a single deer’s hoofbeats could be heard. It seemed as if the mountain was in deep slumber. Nagaditya’s eyes turned red with fury. He told his followers: ‘Turn your horses around. These wretched Bhils have chased away all the wildlife to some other mountain. So today we will go from village to village, town to town, and hunt herds of Bhils. Those savages are in every way as lowly as animals.’

Waving its trunk and jiggling its ears, the royal elephant began moving towards the fortress of Idarpur. The golden canopy on the elephant’s back and the silver-threaded royal chair under it glittered like diamonds. All around it, the two hundred spears held aloft by the Rajput horsemen sparkled in the morning sunlight. ‘Speed up!’ ordered Nagaditya. And then, suddenly, with a deep roar that seemed to split the mountains, a huge black panther, as if it were a Bhil army commander, appeared at the mouth of the narrow pass before the tyrant, blocking the way of his elephant.

Excerpted from Abanindranath Tagore’s Raj Kahani, translated into English and adapted by Sandipan Deb as Suryavamshi: The Sun Kings of Rajasthan (Juggernaut; Rs 450)