India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  There is simplicity everywhere, too, for rural people from all India flock into Delhi for jobs, for help, to see the sights. There are Sikhs and sleek Bengalis, Rajputs ablaze with jewelry, smart Gujaratis from the western coast, beautiful Tamils from the south, cloaked Tibetans smelling of untanned leather, clerks from Bombay smelling of aftershave, students, wandering sages, clumping soldiers in ammunition boots, black-veiled Moslem women, peasants in for the day from the scorched and desiccated Punjab plains. Endearingly they trail through their national monuments, awestruck, and the attendants intone their monologues hoping for tips, and the tourist buses line up outside the Presidential Palace, and the magicians prepare their levitations and inexplicable disappearances in the dusty ditch below the ramparts of the Red Fort.

  This is the Gandhian truth of India, expressed in Delhi chiefly by such reminders of an earthier world beyond the city limits. Though I fear I might not give up my electric typewriter without a struggle, still I am a Gandhian myself in principle, and respond easily to this suggestion of a vast Indian naïveté, stretching away from Delhi like a limitless reservoir, muddied perhaps but deeply wholesome. The Gandhian ethic is rather outmoded in India, in fact, and the Mahatma himself seems to be losing his charismatic appeal, but still I liked the inscriptions in the visitors' book at Birla House, where he died in 1948 (his body was displayed to the public on the roof, illuminated by searchlight), and where many a country pilgrim reverently pauses. “My heart heaving with emotion,” wrote P. H. Kalaskar. “Moving indeed,” thought A. K. Barat. Several people wrote “Felt happy.” One said “Most worth seeing place in Delhi,” and when, quoting from the master himself, I contributed “Truth is God,” the inevitable onlookers murmured, “Very good, very good,” nodded approvingly to each other and touched my hand in sympathy.

  Delhi is a city of basic, spontaneous emotions: greed, hate, revenge, love, pity, kindness, the murderous shot, the touch of the hand. Its very subtleties are crude: even its poverty is black and white. On the one side are the organized beggar children who, taught to murmur a few evocative words of despair like “hungry,” “baby” or “mummy,” succeed all too often in snaring the susceptible stranger. On the other are the courtly thousands of the jagghis, the shantytowns of matting, tentage and old packing cases which cling like black growths to the presence of Delhi.

  There are beggars in Delhi who are comfortably off, and people too proud to beg who possess nothing at all, not a pot or a pan, not a pair of shoes. I saw one such man, almost naked, shivering with the morning cold and obviously very ill, huddled against a lamppost in Janpath early one morning. He asked for nothing, but I felt so sorry for him, and for a moment so loved him for his suffering, that I gave him a ten-rupee note, an inconceivable amount by the standards of Indian indigence. He looked at it first in disbelief, then in ecstasy and then in a wild gratitude, and I left him throwing his hands to heaven, singing, praying and crying, still clinging to his lamppost, and sending me away, slightly weeping myself, to coffee, toast and orange juice (“You'll be sure it's chilled, won't you?”) at my hotel.

  The voice of the people, Gandhi used to say, is the voice of God. I doubt it, but I do recognize a divine element to the Indian poverty, ennobled as it is by age and sacrifice. Indians rationalize it by the concept of reincarnation, and I see it too as a halfway condition, a station of the cross. “In the next world,” I suggested to my driver after a long and exhausting journey into the country, “I'll be driving and you'll be lying on the backseat,” but he answered me with a more elemental philosophy. “In the next world,” he replied, “we'll both be lying on the backseat!” For even the inegality of Delhi, even the pathos, often has something robust to it, a patient fatalism that infuriates many modernists but is a solace to people like me. It is disguised often in Eastern mumbo-jumbo, preached about in ashrams to gullible Californians and exploited by swamis from the divine to the absurd: but it is really no more than a kindly acceptance of things as they are, supported by the sensible thesis that things are not always what they appear to be.

  But pathos, yes. Delhi is the capital of the losing streak. It is the metropolis of the crossed wire, the missed appointment, the puncture, the wrong number. Every day's paper in Delhi brings news of some new failure, in diplomacy, in economics, in sport: when India's women entered the world table-tennis tournament during my stay in Delhi, not only were they all beaten but one actually failed to turn up for the match. I was pursued in the city by a persistent and not unattractive Rajput businessman. I thought him rather suave as I fended him off, in his well-cut check suit and his trendy ties, confident of manner, worldly of discourse: but one day I caught sight of him hors de combat, so to speak, muffled in a threadbare overcoat and riding a battered motor scooter back to his suburban home—and suddenly saw him, far more endearingly if he did but know it, as he really was, smallish, poorish, struggling and true.

  He dropped me in the end anyway, perhaps because I developed an unsightly boil in my nose—men seldom send roses to girls with red noses. The side of my face swelled up like a huge bunion, and I was half red and half white, and sniffly and sad and sorry for myself. In this condition, self-consciously, I continued my investigations, and at first I was touched by the tact with which Indians in the streets pretended not to notice. After a day or two, though, I realized that the truth was more affecting still. They really did not notice. They thought my face quite normal. For what is a passing grotesquerie, in a land of deformities?

  “Certainly,” said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions, “by all means, these are all very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend an important meeting this afternoon—you will excuse me I hope?—but I will leave all these little matters with our good Mrs. Gupta and all will be taken care of. I will telephone you with the answers myself without fail—or if not I myself, then Mrs. Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass—it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs. Gupta will take care of everything. But mark my words, you will find the spiritual aspects of our city the most rewarding. Remember the River Ganges! As a student of history, you will find that I am right! Ha ha! Another cup of tea? You have time?”

  Even he would agree, though, that the spiritual aspect is hardly predominant in New Delhi, the headquarters of the Indian government and the seat of Indian sovereignty—the newest and largest of Delhi's successive capitals. This was built by the British, and despite one or two sententious symbolisms and nauseating texts—“Liberty Will Not Descend to a People, A People Must Raise Themselves to Liberty”—it is a frank and indeed noble memorial to their own imperial Raj. It is not anomalous even now. For one thing it was built in a hybrid style of East and West, to take care of all historical contingencies, and for another, Britishness is far from dead in Delhi. Delhi gentlemen, especially of the sporting classes, are stupendously British still. Delhi social events can be infinitely more English than Ascot or Lords. The following scrambled-names puzzle appeared recently in a Delhi magazine: LIWL EFFEY (a comedian); UALNIJ YHLXEU (a zoologist); ARMY SHES (a pianist); HIIPPLL LLEGAADU (a historian). Only two classes of people on earth could solve this riddle without reference books: Britons of a certain age, Indians of a certain class.

  Besides, the grand ensemble of New Delhi, the Presidential Palace flanked by the two wings of the Secretariat, has adapted easily to the republican style. It was the greatest single artifact of the British Empire, perhaps its principal work of art, and there are men still alive in Delhi who spent all their working lives building it. I met one, a rich and venerable Sikh contractor, and he recalled the great work with immense pride, and spoke affectionately of its English architects, and said it never once occurred to him to suppose, during all the ye
ars he worked upon it, that an Indian would ever be sitting in the halls of the Viceroy's Lodge.

  Seen early on a misty morning from far down the ceremonial mall, Rajpath, New Delhi is undeniably majestic—neither Roman, its architects said, nor British, nor Indian, but imperial. Then its self-consciousness (for its mixture of styles is very contrived) is blurred by haze and distance and by the stir of awakening Delhi—the civil servants with their bulging briefcases, the multitudinous peons, the pompous early-morning policemen, the women sweepers elegant in primary colors, the minister perhaps (if it is not too early) in his chauffeur-driven, Indian-built limousine, the stocky Gurkha sentries at the palace gates, the first eager tourists from the Oberoi Intercontinental, the entertainer with his dancing monkeys, the snake charmer with his acolyte children, the public barber on the pavement outside Parliament, the women preparing their washing beside the ornamental pools, the man in khaki who, approaching you fiercely across the formal gardens, asks if you would care for a cold drink.

  Then the power of India, looming above these dusty complexities, is unmistakable: not only created but instinctive, sensed by its foreign rulers as by its indigenous, and aloof to history's permutations. Of all the world's countries, India is the most truly prodigious, and this quality of astonishment displays itself afresh every day as the sun comes up in Delhi. Five hundred and eighty million people, three hundred languages, provinces from the Himalayan to the equatorial, cities as vast as Bombay and Calcutta, villages so lost in time that no map marks them, nuclear scientists and aboriginal hillmen, industrialists of incalculable wealth and dying beggars sprawled on railway platforms, three or four great cultures, myriad religions, pilgrims from across the world, politicians sunk in graft, the Grand Trunk Road marching to Peshawar, the temples of Madras gleaming in the sun, an inexhaustible history, an incomprehensible social system, an unfathomable repository of human resource, misery, ambiguity, vitality and confusion—all this, the colossal corpus of India, invests, sprawls around, infuses, elevates, inspires and very nearly overwhelms New Delhi.

  Searching for a corrective to such cosmic visions, I thought I would investigate the roots or guts of New Delhi, instead of contemplating its tremendous aura, so I inveigled my way not into the State Hallroom or the Durbar Hall but into the kitchens of the Presidential Palace, by way of an obliging aide-de-camp and a compliant housekeeper (for as dubious flunkies repeatedly murmured as I made my way downstairs, “It is not allowed to visitors”). At first I thought I had succeeded in finding humanity among that majesty, for the way to the kitchens passed through a labyrinth of homely offices, workshops and storerooms and cupboards, supervised by smiling and apparently contented domestics. Here were the Pot Cleaners, scouring their big copper pans. Here were the Linen Keepers, standing guard on their pillowslips. Here were the Washing Up Men, ankle deep in suds themselves, and here the Bakers invited me to taste the morning's loaf. I felt I was passing through some living exhibition of Indian Crafts, diligent, chaste and obliging.

  But even before I entered the kitchen proper, a clanking and grand aroma brought me back to the realities of New Delhi, for in the palace of Rashtrapati Bhavan, Downstairs is scarcely less consequential than Up. These kitchens are imperial institutions themselves, half Western, half Eastern, colossal in scale, lordly in pretension. Armies of cooks seemed to be laboring there. Foods of a dozen cuisines seemed to be in preparation. Batteries of aged electric ovens hummed and whirred. There were squadrons of deep freezers and battalions of chopping boards and armories of steel choppers. The cooks and their underlings bowed to me as I passed, but not obsequiously. It was with condescension that they greeted me, one by one along the preparation tables, and when at last I reached the sizzling center of that underworld, I felt myself to be more truly at a crossroad of the empires than anywhere else in Delhi—for there, just around the corner from the English ovens of the viceroys, they were smoking over charcoal braziers, scented with wheat grain, the aromatic yellow pomfrets that were a grand delicacy of the Moghuls.

  So even in the kitchens power presides, in a traditional, ample sense. Delhi is full of it, for this republic, which came to office in a loincloth, rules in a gaudier uniform. Nehru said that modern Western civilization was ersatz, living by ersatz values, eating ersatz food: but the ruling classes of Delhi, the politicians, the businessmen, the military, have mostly adopted those values without shame. Gandhi said that his India would have “the smallest possible army,” but Delhi is one of the most military of all capitals: when I looked up some friends in the Delhi telephone book, I found that under the name Khanna there were four generals, an air commodore, twelve colonels, a group captain, twelve majors, three wing commanders, four captains, one commander, three lieutenant commanders and a lieutenant.

  Nor is Delhi's display just a façade or a bluff. India often seems to outsiders a crippled country, emaciated by poverty and emasculated by philosophy, but it is only a half-truth. We are told that half India's population is undernourished and three quarters illiterate: that leaves nearly 180 million people who are well fed and literate. The Indian gross national product is the tenth largest on earth. The armies of India are very strong and are largely equipped from Indian factories. I went one day to the Delhi Industrial Fair, housed in a series of modernist ziggurats directly across the street from the gateway of the ruined city Purana Qila, and there I discovered that India makes not only warships, railway engines and aircraft, but Carbicle Grinders too, Lapping Machines and Micro-Fog Lubricators (“I'll take that one,” said I flippantly, pointing to an electric transformer as big as a cottage, “please send it to my hotel”—and diligently the salesman took out his order form).

  Power corrupts, of course, and in India it corrupts on a grand scale. At the top, the whisper of nepotism or opportunism repeatedly approaches Central Government itself. At the bottom, graft harasses the street hawkers of the city, who can scarcely afford the protection money demanded by the police. Even the stranger to Delhi feels the rot: in the arrogant petty official declining to look up from his newspaper, in the stifling addiction to red tape and precedent, in the affectations and snobberies which, as they thrive in Washington's Georgetown, flourish here too in the districts south of Rajpath.

  As it happens, I am rather an addict of power. I do not much enjoy submitting to it or even exerting it, but I do like observing it. I like the aesthetics of it, colored as they so often are by pageantry and history. I am everybody's patriot, and love to see the flags flying over palace or parliament, Westminster or Quai d'Orsay. I am very ready to be moved by the emanations of power in Delhi—the sun setting behind the Red Fort, the grand mass of New Delhi seen across the dun plateau or the ceremony of Beating Retreat on Vijay Chowk, when a dozen military bands pluck at the heart with the Last Post and “Abide with Me.”

  Nobody cries more easily than I do, when the bugle sounds or the flag comes down, but somehow I do not respond to the old magic in India. The British, rationalizing their own love of imperial pomp, used to claim that it was necessary to retain the respect of Asiatics. It availed them nothing, though, against the “half-naked fakir,” as Churchill called Gandhi, and now too the magnificence of Delhi seems paradoxically detached from India. How remote the great ensigns which, enormously billowing above their embassies in the diplomatic enclave, testify to the presence of the plenipotentiaries! How irrelevant the posturings of the grandees, hosts and guests alike, the Polish defense minister greeted by epauletted generals, the Prince of Wales inevitably winning his polo match, the resident Congress party spokesman puffed up at one press conference, the visiting minister of national reorientation condescending at the next.

  And most detached of all seems the unimaginable bureaucracy of Delhi, battening upon the capital—a power sucker, feeding upon its own consequence or sustained intravenously by interdepartmental memoranda, triplicate applications, copies and comments and addenda and references to precedent—a monstrous behemoth of authority, slumped immovable among its fil
es and tea trays. Much of it is concerned not with practical reality at all but with hypotheses or dogma. Forty government editors are engaged in producing the collected works of Gandhi, down to the last pensée—they have got to volume fifty-four. Hundreds more are concerned with plans, for there was never a capital like Delhi for planners—the Multilevel Planning Section, the Plan Coordination Division, the Plan Information Unit, the Social Planning Unit, the Project Appraisal Unit, the Socio-Economic Research Unit, the Program Evaluation Organization, the National Sample Survey Organization, the National Survey Organization, the Central Statistical Organization. Big Brother is everywhere, with a slide rule, a clipboard and a warning in small print. “This map,” says one Delhi tourist publication severely, “is published for tourists as a master guide and not as legal tender ”—and there, in its mixture of the interfering, the pedantic, the unnecessary and the absurd, speaks the true voice of Indian officialdom.

  But this is an essential part of the Indian mystery, always has been, probably always will be. Delhi is too old to care anyway, and takes the system as it comes. Which viceroy or president had he most enjoyed serving, I asked one antediluvian retainer at Rashtrapati Bhavan. He shrugged his shoulders with an almost perceptible creak. “I serve the government,” he said. “It is all the same to me.” With this indifference in mind I went that afternoon to a murder trial which, to much publicity, was proceeding then in the New District Court, a kind of permanent bad dream in concrete in the northern part of the city—filthy, cramped, dark and suffocatingly overcrowded. Here authority was at its most immediate and most awful. The case concerned the alleged murder of a well-known south-of-Rajpath lady by her husband, a fashionable eye surgeon, assisted by his mistress and an assortment of vagabond accomplices. It was a true crime passionel with thuggish overtones, and at least five people faced, there and then, the ultimate penalty. The judge was a grave and clever Sikh, turbaned and spectacled. The court was jammed with a festering, jostling audience, hungry for the salacious, the macabre and the terrible. The white-tabbed attorneys droned and argued, the watchmen barred the door with staves, the accused sat in chains along the side of the court, shackled to their guards.