NOW WE CAN BRIEFLY EXAMINE DVG’s translated adaptation of the Jack Cade episode occurring in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI, Act IV: Part II. In his introduction to the translation, DVG recounts his inspiration for writing it.
Barely days after India got freedom from colonial rule, DVG was invited to deliver a lecture in a village located about twenty miles from Bangalore. The audience found his lecture boring. The next speaker who ascended the dais made a highly provovative speech and emphasised on the need to get violent “justice.” The crowd loved it.
The whole experience made DVG pensive. This is how he described the speaker in the preface to his Jack Cade play.
Here he is. Jack Cade. Cade’s history is the story of the present era in our own country. The impulse to adapt this play welled up urgently within me. It was also made possible owing to the urging of some of my young friends.
To provide a brief historical context to the play, Jack Cade was one of the most celebrated rebels of fifteenth-century England during the regime of Henry VI. His rebellion was directed against the corrupt barons and aristocracy. Cade and his army of rebels managed to seize and vandalise the London bridge and instilled fear in Henry VI himself. Although he ultimately failed in his rebellion and died a broken man, Jack Cade remains an anarchist who met the fate he perhaps deserved notwithstanding Henry’s corrupt officials. But in the overall assessment, his rebellion and Henry’s regime itself is the classic, practical lesson — that the human condition is coloured with a million tinges of grey and is not strictly black and white.
When we juxtapose DVG’s temperament and ideals, it is but natural that Jack Cade’s story starkly resonated with him. DVG passionately hated and instintively feared agitation and anarchy. He was the man of the Golden Mean who prized stability and order in all spheres of human and national life. This was both the philosophical and pragmatic lesson that his cultural ethos had taught him. Disturbance of order was a condition tantamount to national suicide and cultural destruction.
Therefore, when he watched the slow emergence of anarchy after a decade of Independence, he began to spot Jack Cades all around: the violent demagogues, the avowed destroyers of culture and order, and their fellow travellers who were accelerating into political prominence.
The historical Jack Cade, after achieving initial victories, says in a revealing speech in Shakesepare’s play:
Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain-dealing man?... Away with him, I say! hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck... Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and, contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.
This was the precise danger that DVG foresaw in a newly-democratic India. Sadly, this dreary future that DVG feared in the 1950s became a macabre reality in 1975 with the imposition of the Emergency.
In fact, DVG himself provides an insight into the theoretical and operative aspects of all Jack Cades in such an India.
Is it good for the people of a nation who have lived under the protection of a very ancient and profound cultural tradition to abandon that tradition and to chart its future under a system of self-governance in which it has no training, much less experience?
Henry VI is one of the minor plays of Shakespeare. It has been performed only a handful of times in the last five hundred years. Given this, the fact that DVG was able to select only the Jack Cade episode shows his keen sense of nuance and knack for recognising the future.
In the next episode, we will examine DVG’s other play, Mahachunavane or general elections.
To be continued
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