Robbing Hood’s Tame Adventures

The Confession of Sultana Daku is cast in the form of a long letter by the dacoit,now lodged in Haldwani jail,to his four-year-old son on the night before his hanging. Narrated to one Samuel Pearce,a commanding officer of his majesty’s forces,it’s interspersed with journal entries over the years by Pearce himself.

The story is set in the early years of the last century,in the north Indian,British-governed area that was known as the United Provinces. We learn of Sultana’s forebears,belonging to the bhantu tribe and thus dubbed criminal in nature by the authorities. The self-proclaimed code for such a tribal is to “steal when he can,rob when he cannot and kill when necessary”.

The young Sultana finds himself sequestered in a tribal enclave tended to by missionaries of the Salvation Army. With his head full of the deeds of his father and grandfather,it is a matter of time before he cuts loose,which he does when inadvertently identified as the killer of a missionary. After a mock-heroic trip to Delhi for the durbar of King George V,and almost making away with his crown,begin the exploits that will make Sultana’s name echo in village squares: the ransacking of the houses of banias; the looting of jewellery at wedding ceremonies; the burning down of police stations; and the distribution of ill-gotten gains to the less well-off.

Sultana touches time and again on the notion that one’s caste is one’s cage: to break the iron bars of social norms would be well-nigh impossible. This,then,excuses his crimes. Fatalistic and superstitious,Saraf’s Sultana is a character who comes across as curiously flat because he’s not given to self-questioning. There’s a weakening of this stance when he wonders about the future of his son,but this is a case of too little,too late.

The members of Sultana’s gang,too,are predictable cutouts,from callow youth to traitorous seconds-in-command. As opposite poles to Sultana and his men,we have Pearce,whose only function here is to keep up with Sultana’s exploits,and Freddy Young,a police officer entrusted with the task of stamping out such gangs. Again,there’s no fleshing out of these two beyond their obvious roles — even Jim Corbett,in his walk-on part,is quite bloodless. (Perfunctory,too,not to mention a tad artless,are the attempts to link Sultana’s exploits with Mahatma Gandhi’s fledgling civil disobedience movement.)

The Confession of Sultana Daku,then,is a detailed but half-realised attempt at getting into the head of a man whose myth has endured. It’s not as flat as a film-poster,but it’s not substantial enough to satisfy,either.