by Paul Scott
The news of the blown bridge on Reid’s flank road was certainly a poser, but I couldn’t help being rather amused because he had made the use of the flank road sound so professional and clever, and suddenly there he was in danger of losing two 3-ton lorries and a 15-cwt truck and his wireless. And he was mad as hell. I hope that my amusement didn’t sway my decision. I requested the withdrawal of the troops on that road because I felt that if the rebels had the initiative and the means to blow a bridge (a fairly harmless occupation in itself, just a matter of destroying a ton or so of brick and mortar!) a meeting of the rebels and troops whose tempers had shortened might result in the very kind of bloody affair I wanted to avoid. I know that my decision is open to question, but I made it, and stand by it, and I think it was right. If there had not then been pressure from above to use troops to the full I should certainly have left Dibrapur to stew even longer than I did. That intelligence officer, Davidson, was right when he suggested to Reid that my idea was for pacification to spread outwards from Mayapore. But Reid was jumping on hot bricks. I don’t offer this as an excuse, although perhaps I do offer it as a contributory factor to any decision of mine that I still have doubts about. When you have a man like Reid constantly at your elbow you do tend to lose your concentration. I think I would have withstood his nagging if the provincial civil authority hadn’t begun to press too. It is difficult actually to recall the real sense of urgency that arose in a few hours when reports were coming in pointing to an uprising that was getting out of hand. Anyway there was the pressure from Reid, the pressure from provincial headquarters, and the pressure of my own doubts. So I let Reid have his way about Dibrapur. His little battle there was by no means uncontrolled. I have no complaints or accusations on that score. But I don’t think it was accompanied by any special restraint, and I still believe, as I believed then, that the deaths of men, women and children in Dibrapur could have been avoided if the town had been allowed to ‘stew’ until the people themselves were of the temper (and it never took long for them to regain it) to make its realignment [and that is the proper word) just part of the day’s routine.
Perhaps it was unfair that the action of his troops in Dibrapur (of which he does not give us the benefit of any detailed description in his book) should have been the main cause of the reputation Reid had afterwards for being over-controversial in the district ‘during the current phase of pacification’. (The official jargon for ‘let’s all be friends again’.) My commissioner asked me to comment on Reid, confidentially. Complaints against any of us, civil or military, very quickly reached a high level as you know. I gave it as my opinion that Reid had at no time exceeded his duty and had been, throughout, a constant reassurance to me in the execution of my own. I added that, left to ourselves, and not ordered to make the fullest use of the means available, the force actually used might have been less and the result the same, or even better. I didn’t see why Reid should carry the can back for people who had panicked at provincial headquarters. I don’t think this comment of mine pleased anyone from the commissioner upwards. For a time I expected to be moved myself, but the luck or ill-luck of the game fixed on Reid – unless it were really true that his posting could be put down to the influence of friends of his who thought that following the death of his wife he would be happier if employed in a more active role. It is so easy – particularly when looking for a chosen scapegoat of an action you have taken part in – to hit upon a particular incident as proof that a scapegoat has been found when, in fact, the authorities have simply shrugged their shoulders, and a purely personal consideration has then stepped in and established the expected pattern of offence and punishment.
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(6) Thank you for your reply to my written comments on the transcription of our interview. Yes, I do dislike the element of ‘Yes, you did. No, I didn’t’ that all too readily rises to the surface. Reid had his attitudes and opinions and I had mine. One can’t go on for ever justifying one’s own and refuting someone else’s with any kind of passion – but I’m sorry that the points I’ve been making notes of in the past few days in answer to specific statements in Reid’s book don’t come up now except extraneously. May I take one of them, though, and kill any idea Reid might have left that Menen, the District and Sessions Judge, was predisposed towards the rebels? Menen was predisposed towards nothing except the due process of the law which he had no special faith in, God knows, but certainly recognised his sworn duty to. I’m also slightly worried about any impression that could be left of my having either been in collusion with Merrick over – or turned a blind eye to – the treatment of the Bibighar suspects. I feel I should be allowed to say something about this if you are going to publish Vidyasagar’s deposition. Vidyasagar ranks as a self-confessed lawbreaker so that’s neither here nor there.
In his deposition he is noticeably unforthcoming about the names of his associates. So to what extent we can rely on his statement that Hari Kumar was not one of his fellow-conspirators, neither of us can judge accurately. The picture we get from Miss Manners’s journal (or rather from that short section of it which you have allowed me to see) is not in itself evidence of Kumar’s non-complicity in the kind of activities Vidyasagar engaged in, and it’s quite possible, reading the deposition, to imagine that Vidyasagar gave Merrick cause genuinely to disbelieve him during his interrogation. What worries me is that people should think I at any time, then or afterwards, knew about Merrick’s treatment of the men suspected of the rape. He admitted to me that he had ‘bent the rules’ when dealing with the suspects – in order to frighten them and get them to tell the truth, for example threatened them with caning, and in one case had even had one boy ‘prepared as if for punishment’ – I think his expression was. He volunteered this information to me on the morning following the arrests, and when Menen approached me later and said rumours were going round that the boys had been whipped I was able to say how I thought such a rumour had arisen, and that I’d already warned Merrick to ‘stop playing about’. More serious, in my opinion, was the second rumour, that they had been forced to eat beef. Merrick said he’d look into it, and he told me later that it was quite untrue, but might have been caused by a mistake made in the cells when one of the Muslim constables who was guarding them had his own meal sent in. Reid was quite right when he said that the job of suppressing the riots distracted our full attention from the boys suspected of rape and made it finally impossible to find any concrete evidence against them in connection with the assault. Menen did pursue the business of the rumours of caning and beef-eating. I gave him permission to have the boys themselves questioned on the matter. He told me that the lawyer whom he sent to talk to them reported that none of the boys, including Kumar, complained of having been either whipped or forced to eat beef. And none of them ever said anything about it to Jack Poulson, who had the job of examining them when we were preparing the political case against them. But all this time after I’m uncomfortably aware of having failed to investigate the rumours more fully. It seems pretty clear that they were ill-treated. However, I don’t think that there was actually a miscarriage of justice. Merrick was obviously acting in the heat of the moment, believing them guilty of attacking a girl he was fond of. It didn’t take long for us to realise that a charge of rape simply wouldn’t stick, but the evidence available about their political activities was sufficient for us to feel justified in seeing whether they couldn’t be dealt with under the Defence of India Rules. The case was referred to the Divisional Commissioner, and actually as high as the Governor. I’ve forgotten the details of the evidence, but it was pretty conclusive. So I still feel that the five boys first arrested were guilty of the kind of offences the rules were meant to cover. Only Kumar remains a conundrum to me. If he was treated as badly as Vidyasagar’s ‘informant’ said, why didn’t he speak out when Menen’s lawyer talked to him? Why didn’t he complain to Jack Poulson during the official examination? One can appreciate the silence of the other boys if what Vidyasagar says about pol
ice threats is true. But Kumar had already suffered – and presumably could prove it, and he was of a different calibre from the other boys surely? Perhaps the parts of Miss Manners’s journal which you haven’t shown me throw some light on this problem?
I suppose it is his silence on this subject that you have in mind when you say in your note to me that ‘Kumar was a man who felt in the end he had lost everything, even his Englishness, and could then only meet every situation – even the most painful – in silence, in the hope that out of it he would dredge back up some self-respect’.
I quite see, from what you’ve told me about your ‘reconstruction’ of Hari Kumar’s life, and from what I have read in Daphne Manners’s journal, that Kumar might indeed have reacted in this way, but if Vidyasagar’s informant was speaking the truth when he said that on the night of his arrest Kumar was caned on Merrick’s instructions ‘until he groaned’ I should still have thought Kumar would have seized the opportunity to make charges when Menen’s lawyer interviewed him and asked him point-blank whether it was true. To complain of having been unjustifiably and savagely beaten in the course of interrogation would not itself have been a betrayal of Miss Manners’s request to Kumar to ‘say nothing’. I mean, isn’t there a limit to the stiffness of any upper lip?
But then I expect my objections to your conclusions are really based on my inner unwillingness to accept the unsupported evidence of Merrick’s behaviour – or to admit my own failure to suspect it at the time. I have no comment to make on the figure you quote from ‘official’ sources that, excluding the United Provinces, there were 958 sentences of whipping after the insurrection, except to say that this was a legal punishment for people caught taking part in riots. If Kumar had been arrested during a riot he might well have been caned. I suppose what you are getting at is that this kind of punishment was ‘in the air’ and that Merrick seized an opportunity, bent the rules, and got away with it.
Having said all this I’ll now confine myself, as you request, to the larger issue – although before finally leaving behind the question of ‘Yes, I did. No, you didn’t’, I would point out – perhaps unnecessarily – that one should not confuse the uncertainty that surrounds actions and events with the ‘areas of dangerous fallibility’ that lie between doubts, decisions and actions. Taking as an example the question of the forcible feeding – it either happened or did not happen. In attempting to map the ‘dangerous area’ we are not concerned with facts the truth of which, however unascertainable now, was known to somebody at the time?.
I have thought hard about the true ‘dangerous area’ and must admit, somewhat reluctantly, that I can’t grasp the issues firmly enough to come up with anything remotely resembling a premise from which you could work. I find myself too readily back-tracking into the old condition of statement and refutation and counter-statement. For instance, taking Reid’s jejune account of the 1935 scheme for Federation – and his comment, ‘It led only to a scramble for power’, which leaves the unknowledgeable reader with the impression that we had made a handsome offer and then had to sit back and watch in dismay while the Indians proved themselves too immature either to understand the issues or to grasp their opportunity – all I can really turn my mind to are the alternative readings that show why, as statesmen, the Indians rejected Federation, and how the whole federal scheme and proposal could be seen in the light of our having offered the Indians a constitution that would only have prolonged, perhaps even perpetuated, our power and influence, if only as Imperial Arbitrators.
Similarly – again taking Reid’s comments as a kind of basic ‘norm’ – one could write at length demolishing his casual inference that the Cripps Mission of 1942 failed because of Indian intransigence, or counter-state – equally casually and briefly and inaccurately – that this was a typical Churchillian move, made to dress the window and make friends and influence people abroad after the defeat in Asia, but which amounted in itself to no more than a grudging repetition of old promises and even older reservations.
And that’s not what we’re after, is it? Even though one is so tempted to cut away at the foundations of Brigadier Reid’s apparently unshakeable foursquare little edifice of simple cause and simple effect in order to redress the balance and present the obverse, and just as inaccurate, picture of a tyrannical and imperialistic power grinding the faces of its coloured subjects in the dust.
In fact we are not at all after the blow-by-blow account of the politics that led to the action. Actually any one man would be incapable of giving such an account – if he confined himself to the blows. There were so many blows he would spend more than his lifetime recording them. To make the preparation of any account a reasonable task he would have to adopt an attitude towards the available material, The action of such an attitude is rather like that of a sieve. Only what is relevant to the attitude gets through. The rest gets thrown away. The real relevance and truth of what gets through the mesh then depends on the relevance and truth of the attitude, doesn’t it? If one agrees with that one is at once back on the ground of personal preference – even prejudice – which may or may not have anything to do with ‘truth’, so-called.
Anyway, let me imagine (as you helpfully suggested in your note) that I am about to embark on a history of the British-Indian relationship. I would have to adopt an attitude to the mass of material confronting me. What would it be?
I think it would be as simple – childlike almost – as this: I would take as my premise that the Indians wanted to be free, and that we also wished this, but that they had wanted to be free for just that much longer than we had felt or agreed that they should be; that given this situation the conflict arose partly as a result of the lack of synchronisation of the timing of the two wishes, but also because this, in time, developed into a lack of synchronisation of the wishes themselves. Being human, the longer the Indians were denied freedom the more they wanted to be free on their own terms, and the more they wanted to be free on their own terms the more we – also being human – insisted that they must initially acquire freedom on ours. The longer this conflict continued, the more abstruse the terms of likely agreement became on either side. It was then a question of the greater morality outlasting and outweighing the lesser. Which was why, of course, in the end the Indians won.
Having put it in those simple words (and they form a mesh you could sift an enormous lot of detailed evidence through), I am reminded of what you said during our interview about ‘the moral drift of history’, and see how perhaps the impetus behind that drift stems in the main from our consciences, and that the dangerous area is the natural place for our consciences to work in, with or without us, usually without. The trouble is that the word dangerous always suggests something slightly sinister, as though there were an unbreakable connection at source between ‘danger’ and ‘wrong’. ‘Danger’ does have this connotation, but I suppose it doesn’t if we remember we only use the word to convey our fear of the personal consequences, the danger we’d be in ourselves if we followed our consciences all the time.
I remember that during our talk you referred to the ‘beat’ and the ‘pause’ and I think described these as the unrecorded moments of history. I wish I could relate this theory to a particular event in my life and see how I came out on the right side rather than the wrong, or that I could relate it to an event in Reid’s. But even in attempting to relate it, I’m back again in the world of describable events. And when I attempt to relate the theory to all the events in the lives of all the people who were connected with the action – however directly or remotely – my mind simply won’t take in the complex of emotions and ambitions and reactions that led, say, to any one of the single actions that was part of the general describable pattern. Perhaps though, the mind can respond to a sense of a cumulative, impersonal justice? The kind of justice whose importance lies not only in the course apparently and overwhelmingly taken, but in its exposure of the dangers that still lie ahead, threatening to divert the drift once more?
III
(Appendix to ‘Civil and Military’)
A Deposition by S. V. Vidyasagar
In my sixteenth year I was plucked in the matriculation and left the Mayapore Government Higher School with the reproaches of my parents and no prospects to a career. For nearly twelve months I was living a life of shame and wickedness, going with loose women and impairing my health. So bad did I become that my father turned me out of the house. My mother secretly gave me rupees one hundred which she had saved from the household expenses over many months. I regret that even this token of affection and motherly trust I squandered on drink and fornication. For many weeks I was at death’s door in my squalid surroundings but upon recovery I was still only taking notice of girls and liquor. Many times I was praying for guidance and self-discipline, but only I had to see a pretty girl and at once I was following her and making immoral suggestions in front of everybody, so that my reputation was badly compromised and no decent person would come close to me, unless they were boys of my own kind whose parents were having nothing to do with them or not knowing that they were acting in this way until their neighbours or friends pointed it out.
