“Oh, shabash!” murmured Kim, unable to contain himself, as the man slunk away.
“Well done, indeed? It is a shame and a scandal that a poor woman may not go to make prayer to her Gods except she be jostled and insulted by all the refuse of Hindustan—that she must eat gâli [abuse] as men eat ghi. But I have yet a wag left to my tongue—a word or two well spoken that serves the occasion. And still am I without my tobacco! Who is the one-eyed and luckless son of shame that has not yet prepared my pipe?”
It was hastily thrust in by a hillman, and a trickle of thick smoke from each corner of the curtains showed that peace was restored.
If Kim had walked proudly the day before, disciple of a holy man, today he paced with tenfold pride in the train of a semiroyal procession, with a recognized place under the patronage of an old lady of charming manners and infinite resource. The escort, their heads tied up native fashion, fell in on either side the cart, shuffling enormous clouds of dust.
The lama and Kim walked a little to one side; Kim chewing his stick of sugarcane, and making way for no one under the status of a priest. They could hear the old lady's tongue clack as steadily as a rice husker. She bade the escort tell her what was going on on the road; and so soon as they were clear of the parao she flung back the curtains and peered out, her veil a third across her face. Her men did not eye her directly when she addressed them, and thus the proprieties were more or less observed.
A dark, sallowish District Superintendent of Police, faultlessly uniformed, an Englishman, trotted by on a tired horse, and, seeing from her retinue what manner of person she was, chaffed her.
“O mother,” he cried, “do they do this in the zenanas? Suppose an Englishman came by and saw that thou hadst no nose?”
“What?” she shrilled back. “Thine own mother has no nose? Why say so, then, on the open road?”
It was a fair counter. The Englishman threw up his hand with the gesture of a man hit at sword-play. She laughed and nodded.
“Is this a face to tempt virtue aside?” She withdrew all her veil and stared at him.
It was by no means lovely, but as the man gathered up his reins he called it a Moon of Paradise, a Disturber of Integrity, and a few other fantastic epithets which doubled her up with mirth.
“That is a nut-cut [rogue],” she said. “All police constables are nut-cuts; but the police wallahs are the worst. Hai,my son, thou hast never learned all that since thou camest from Belait [Europe]. Who suckled thee?”
“A pahareen—a hillwoman of Dalhousie, my mother. Keep thy beauty under a shade—O Dispenser of Delights,” and he was gone.
“These be the sort”—she took a fine judicial tone, and stuffed her mouth with pan—“These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings.” Then she told a long, long tale to the world at large, of an ignorant young policeman who had disturbed some small Hill Rajah, a ninth cousin of her own, in the matter of a trivial land case, winding up with a quotation from a work by no means devotional.
Then her mood changed, and she bade one of the escort ask whether the lama would walk alongside and discuss matters of religion. So Kim dropped back into the dust and returned to his sugarcane. For an hour or more the lama's tam-o'-shanter showed like a moon through the haze; and, from all he heard, Kim gathered that the old woman wept. One of the Ooryas half apologized for his rudeness overnight, saying that he had never known his mistress of so bland a temper, and he ascribed it to the presence of the strange priest. Personally, he believed in Brahmins, though, like all natives, he was acutely aware of their cunning and their greed. Still, when Brahmins but irritated with begging demands the mother of his master's wife, and when she sent them away so angry that they cursed the whole retinue (which was the real reason of the second off-side bullock going lame, and of the pole breaking the night before), he was prepared to accept any priest of any other denomination in or out of India. To this Kim assented with wise nods, and bade the Oorya observe that the lama took no money, and that the cost of his and Kim's food would be repaid a hundred times in the good luck that would attend the caravan henceforward. He also told stories of Lahore city, and sang a song or two which made the escort laugh. As a town-mouse well acquainted with the latest songs by the most fashionable composers—they are women for the most part—Kim had a distinct advantage over men from a little fruit-village behind Saharunpore, but he let that advantage be inferred.
At noon they turned aside to eat, and the meal was good, plentiful, and well-served on plates of clean leaves, in decency, out of drift of the dust. They gave the scraps to certain beggars, that all requirements might be fulfilled, and sat down to a long, luxurious smoke. The old lady had retreated behind her curtains, but mixed most freely in the talk, her servants arguing with and contradicting her as servants do throughout the East. She compared the cool and the pines of the Kangra and Kulu hills with the dust and the mangoes of the South; she told a tale of some old local Gods at the edge of her husband's territory; she roundly abused the tobacco which she was then smoking, reviled all Brahmins, and speculated without reserve on the coming of many grandsons.
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
(1908–)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French social anthropologist, was born in Brussels and studied at the Sorbonne. In the mid-1930s he did field research on the Indians of Brazil. He taught at the New School for Social Research during Hitler's occupation of France. He traveled to the Indian subcontinent in the late 1940s, before he became the pioneer of postwar anthropology with such books as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and The Savage Mind (1962). His intellectual autobiography, Tristes Tropiques (1955), presents a melancholy vision of old societies clumsily making themselves over in the image of Europe. “The first thing we see,” he wrote, “as we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.” He brought an ironic sense of history to India, which he saw as a “very old tapestry” with “exquisite and faded colors” which has been “worn threadbare by long use and tirelessly darned.”
from TRISTES TROPIQUES
Originally a fishing village, then, as a result of the English colonial presence, a small port and trading center, Karachi had been promoted to the rank of capital in 1947. In the long avenues of the former compound, lined by collective or individual barracklike structures—the latter, private residences of officials or officers—each one standing separately in its patch of dusty vegetation, hordes of refugees slept out in the open and were leading a wretched existence on the pavement, bloody with the spittle of betel chewers, while the Parsee millionaires were busy building Babylonian palaces for western businessmen. For months on end, from dawn till dusk, a procession of men and women in rags filed past (in Moslem countries, the segregation of women is not so much a religious practice as a mark of bourgeois prestige, and the poorest members of the community are not even entitled to have a sex), each carrying a basket full of newly mixed concrete, which he or she tipped into the shuttering, before going back, without a pause, to the mixers to reload for another round. Each wing was in use almost before it was finished, since a room with board could be let at more per day than a woman worker earned in a month; in this way, the cost of building a luxury hotel could be regained in nine months. So, the work had to be done quickly, and the foremen were not much concerned about whether the different blocks were all exactly in line. There had probably been no change since the days when the Satraps compelled slaves to pour mud and pile up bricks for the building of their rickety palaces; the line of women basket carriers, silhouetted against the sky on top of the scaffolding, could indeed have served as a model for the friezes on one of those palaces.
Cut off from native life (which in this desert was itself an artificial effect of colonization) by a few miles made impassable by an intolerable monsoon-like, but never resolved, humi
dity, and even more so by the fear of dysentery (“Karachi tummy”), a community of businessmen, industrialists and diplomats languished in the heat and boredom of these bare cement cells which served as bedrooms and which seemed to be designed in this way not only for reasons of economy but still more to facilitate the process of disinfection that took place each time one of them was vacated by the human specimen who had been immobilized there for a few weeks or months. And my memory at once leapfrogs over another three thousand kilometers to link this picture with another, connected with the temple of the goddess Kali, the oldest and most revered sanctuary in Calcutta. On the banks of a stagnant pond, and in an atmosphere redolent with that mixture of physical deformity and fierce commercial exploitation in which the popular religious life of India is conducted, not far from bazaars overflowing with pious color plates and painted plaster divinities, stands the “Rest House,” the modern shelter built by the religious organizers to house the pilgrims. It is a long cement hall, divided into two parts, one for the men and the other for the women, and each lined with platforms, also made of bare cement, intended for use as beds. I was asked to admire the gutters and the water-cocks. As soon as the human cargo has got up and been dispatched to its devotions, during which it begs for the healing of its ulcers, cankers, scabs and running sores, the whole building is washed out by means of hoses so that the stalls are clean and fresh for the next batch of pilgrims. Nowhere, perhaps, except in concentration camps, have human beings been so completely identified with butcher's meat.
However, this was not meant as anything more than a temporary lodging. A little further on, at Narrayanganj, the jute workers earn their living inside a gigantic spider's web formed by whitish fibers hanging from the walls and floating in the air. They then go home to the “coolie lines,” brick troughs with neither light nor flooring, and each occupied by six or eight individuals; they are arranged in rows of little streets with surface drains running down the middle, which are flooded thrice daily to clear away the dirt. Social progress is now tending to replace this kind of dwelling by “workers' quarters,” prisons in which two or three workers share a cell three meters by four. There are walls all around, and the entrance gates are guarded by armed policemen. The communal kitchens and eating quarters are bare cement rooms, which can be swilled out and where each individual lights his fire and squats on the ground to eat in the dark.
Once, during my first teaching post in the Landes area, I had visited poultry yards specially adapted for the cramming of geese: each bird was confined to a narrow box and reduced to the status of a mere digestive tube. In this Indian setting, the situation was the same, apart from two differences: instead of geese, it was men and women I was looking at, and instead of being fattened up, they were, if anything, being slimmed down. But in both instances, the breeder only allowed his charges one form of activity, which was desirable in the case of the geese, and inevitable in the case of the Indians. The dark and airless cubicles were suited neither for rest, leisure nor love. They were mere points of connection with the communal sewer, and they corresponded to a conception of human life as being reducible to the pure exercise of the excretory functions.
Alas, poor Orient! In Dacca, that secretive city, I visited various middle-class households. Some were as luxurious as the antique shops on Third Avenue in New York; others, belonging to comfortably off people, were as full of cane pedestal tables, fringed tea-cloths and china as a suburban villa in Bois Colombes. Some, in the old style, were like our poorest peasant cottages, and the cooking was done on a stove of beaten earth, at the far end of a muddy little courtyard. On the other hand, there were three-roomed flats for well-to-do young married couples in buildings indistinguishable from the low-priced blocks put up, as part of the postwar reconstruction, at Châtillon-sur-Seine or Givors, except that in Dacca the rooms were made of bare cement (as was the washroom, with its single tap), and as scantily furnished as a little girl's bedroom. Squatting on the concrete floor, in the dim light of a single bulb hanging by its flex from the ceiling, I once—oh, Arabian Nights!—ate a dinner full of succulent ancestral savors, picking up the food with my fingers: first, Khichuri, rice and the small lentils which are called pulses in English, and the multicolored varieties of which can be seen standing in sackfuls in the markets. Then nimkorma, broiled chicken; chingri cari, an oily fruity stew of giant shrimps, and another stew with hard-boiled eggs called dimer tak, accompanied by cucumber sauce, shosha; finally the dessert, firni, made of rice and milk.
I was the guest of a young teacher; also present were his brother-in-law, who acted as butler, a maid, a baby, and lastly my host's wife who was in process of being emancipated from purdah. She was like a silent, frightened doe, but, in order to underline her recent liberation, her husband showered sarcastic remarks on her, with a tactlessness which embarrassed me as much as it did her. Since I was an anthropologist, he made her bring out her personal underwear from a modest little chest of drawers, so that I could note the different items. With a little encouragement he would have made her undress in front of me, so anxious was he to prove his esteem for western ways, of which he knew nothing.
I could thus see, taking shape before my very eyes, an Asia characterized by workers' dwellings and cheap blocks of flats. This Asia of the future, which rejects all forms of exoticism, may link up again, after an eclipse of five thousand years, with that dreary yet efficient style of life which the Asiatics perhaps invented in 3000 BC. It subsequently moved across the earth's surface, making a temporary halt in the New World, so that we tend to think of it as being specifically American; but then, as early as 1850, it resumed its advance westwards, reaching first Japan and now at last its place of origin, after going right round the world.
In the valley of the Indus, I wandered among the austere remains of the oldest Oriental culture, which have managed to withstand the passing of the centuries, sand, floods, saltpeter and Aryan invasions: Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, hardened outcrops of bricks and shards. These ancient settlements present a disconcerting spectacle. The streets are all perfectly straight and intersect each other at right angles; there are workers' districts, in which all the dwellings are identical, industrial workshops for the grinding of grain, the casting and engraving of metals and the manufacture of clay goblets, fragments of which lie strewn on the ground; municipal granaries which occupy several blocks (as we might be tempted to say, making a transposition in time and space); public baths, water pipes and sewers; and solid but unattractive residential districts. No monuments or large pieces of sculpture, but, at a depth of between ten and twenty yards, flimsy trinkets and precious jewels, indicative of an art devoid of mystery and uninspired by any deep faith, and intended merely to satisfy the ostentatiousness and sensuality of the rich. The complex as a whole reminds the visitor of the advantages and defects of a large modern city; it foreshadows those more advanced forms of western civilization, of which the United States of America today provides a model, even for Europe.
It is tempting to imagine that, after four or five thousand years of history, the wheel has come full circle—that the urban, industrial, bourgeois civilization first begun in the towns of the Indus valley was not so very different, in its underlying inspiration, from that which was destined to reach its peak on the other side of the Atlantic, after a prolonged period of involution in the European chrysalis. When the Old World was still young, it was already anticipating the features of the New.
I therefore mistrust superficial contrasts and the apparently picturesque; they may not be lasting. What we call the exotic expresses an inequality of rhythm, which can be significant over a few centuries and temporarily obscure destinies which might well have remained united or parallel, like those of Alexander and the Greek kings on the banks of the Jumna, the Scythian and Parthian empires, the Roman naval expeditions to the coasts of Vietnam and the cosmopolitan courts of the Mogol emperors. When we cross the Mediterranean by plane in the direction of Egypt, we are surprised at first by the
somber symphony of colors formed by the brownish-green of the palm groves, the green of the water—which we finally feel justified in describing as eau-de-Nil—the yellowish-grey sand and the purple mud; and even more than by the landscape, we are surprised by the plan of the villages as seen from the air: they sprawl beyond their boundaries and present that intricate and untidy arrangement of houses and little streets which is the sign of the Orient. Here we seem to have the opposite of the New World which, whether Spanish or Anglo-Saxon, and in the sixteenth century as well as the twentieth, shows a marked preference for geometrical layouts.
After Egypt, the flight over Arabia offers a series of variations on a single theme—the desert. First of all, rocks like ruined, red-brick castles emerge from the opalescent sand; elsewhere intricate designs, like the tracery of tree branches—or even more like seaweed or crystals—made by the paradoxical behavior of the wadis which, instead of bringing their waters together in a single stream, branch outwards into tiny rivulets. Further on, the ground seems to have been trampled by some monstrous beast, which has done its best to press it dry with furious stampings.
How delicately colored are the sands! The desert takes on flesh tints: peach-bloom, mother-of-pearl, the iridescence of raw fish. At Aqaba, the water, although beneficent, reflects the pitilessly hard blue of the sky, while the uninhabitable rocky ranges shade off into soft pearly greys.
India in Mind Page 14
