India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  The eyes open to the eyes of an ayah, lifting a mosquito net, become bridal. From downstairs the ebb and flow of talk as doors open, shut. Clink of glasses, smell of cigars. In a shaft of light beyond the bed a woman raises her dress to pee: silk stockings, band of bare flesh, dark triangle of hair. She gets up, pulls the plug, and before lowering the dress, a pale almost transparent green silk, examines herself in a mirror, turning this way and that, flattening her abdomen. Later I see her often, a friend of the family, but am conscious only of that moist delta, an image incongruously revived by any map of the Hooghly estuary.

  The Sundarbans, where during monsoon tributaries of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra flood the estuaries between Calcutta and the sea, are haunts of the white tiger. On Sagar Island the Hooghly is fifteen miles wide and there, picnicking during the Daniells' visit, the heir to Sir Hector Munro was hauled headfirst into the jungle by a tiger. The Hooghly river pilots whom I knew as a child used to report on the number of tigers seen swimming between the islands. It was one of these pilots, Lew Borrett, who used to sing “Leaning” in his tenor voice when home on leave and staying with us in Cornwall. He was burly and good-natured, with black gleaming hair worn en brosse. There never was such a romantic-looking woman as his wife Anna. Years later, on my return to India for a holiday from school, I met her again on board ship; she had left her husband, married an Indian schoolteacher, thin, bespectacled, timid, and lived the genteel occluded life of those in her situation. I was traveling first-class; she was now in steerage, a nominal Indian. I could not bear it. Lew took to the bottle and picked up with a pretty Eurasian secretary who looked like Merle Oberon, herself a product of Eurasian Calcutta. Lew took me out from school in Falmouth, where I had been sent at the age of seven.

  Childhood addresses: 7/1 Burdwan Road, 11 Camac Street, 22 Lee Road, 226 Lower Circular Road. It was in the last of these streets, in the Presidency General Hospital (now S. S. Karnani Hospital) that Surgeon-major Ronald Ross in 1898 developed the cure for malaria. A plaque records the fact, but not that Mohamed Bux, Ross's servant, was sent out to catch mosquitoes in order that they could bite him. Ross was a good name to have in Calcutta.

  These houses have merged in my mind into one house: a twostoried, porticoed building of grey stone, its wide verandah opening on to a neat lawn. There is a short sweep of drive, a compound to one side. An iron gate bars the entrance to the drive; beside it a hut for the doorman is festooned by some kind of creeper.

  When my Indian childhood came to an end and I was sent to England—the first step in an alienation from all family life—it was for this composite house that I mourned. The bearers with whom secret alliances were joined against parental instructions, their lips stained with pan and betel as if they were bleeding; the mali alongside whom I would squat while he watered and weeded; the various drivers and kitmagars with whom I played cards on the verandah while increasing numbers of dependants would peer out from the compound. The authorized staff, including cooks and sweepers, amounted to about ten, their duties strictly delineated according to rank and caste. Trade Union members today have nothing on Indian domestic servants. In addition, platoons of relatives lurked in the shadows, swelling in numbers until the food bills grew out of all proportion. The servants' food always smelt more interesting than our own, and the nasal whine of Bengali popular songs never stopped. Every so often my mother would remonstrate and for a few weeks there would be a reduction in intake. Then, after a decent interval, they would drift back.

  Sometimes curious antipathies and hostility would develop between various servants, presumably because of family encroachments or unfair shares of the spoils. Bearers would glide about with stony faces, doing the least they could get away with, or go unaccountably missing. Even the games with me would be reluctantly played. Then, without explanation, everything would be sweetness and light again. There was nothing to be done during these periods of tension: questioning resulted only in withdrawal. No one knew anything: heads would just be wagged from side to side in the familiar gesture.

  It was this shifting, shiftless surrogate family whose loss I found most hard to bear in England. They appeared nightly among the squawks of mynahs and the flapping of crows. Their bare feet trod dry mango leaves and the sound of doves was drowned by the mali's mower. Calcutta came to me as a series of glints: glint of eyes and of hair and of saris, of cycles and rickshaws, of cinema hoardings and punkahs, and always of the Hooghly. There was no heat or oppressiveness in these Bengal images. Discomfort had no part in that interior cinema whose colors were fusions of brown and green, the brown of bodies and water and earth, the green of palm trees and lawns, of the racecourse and Eden Gardens cricket ground, and the swarming maidan that contained both. Between now and then a thick glass pane muffles the misery. At the time it cracked and the splinters were embedded around my lungs.

  I had a childhood in India and a brief period of adolescence there. What I left behind I came to understand less and less, but all the more to need. The childhood is real though scarcely remembered, as if memory itself was blindfolded. All the sounds of those years, jackals and pi-dogs howling into the dawn, the whistle of long-distance trains and shunt of engines at Howrah, the sirens of Hooghly steamers and tinkle of rickshaw bells, were melancholy, intimations of departures I had no part in. Through those boarding-school years what was most loved and familiar was oceans away, though it was the brown hands that I craved, and not the alternately distant and crowding affection of parents.

  PAUL SCOTT

  (1920–78)

  Paul Scott first went out to India in his early twenties, during the turmoil of World War II, and, while immediately attracted by the landscape and people, he found himself alienated by the ignorance and racism of the British ruling class in India. He returned to India in 1964, after a successful career as a literary agent in London. His experiences on this trip—which included dinner parties with Anglicized Indians as well a paranoia-infected week at a village in southern India—gave him the inspiration for The Jewel in the Crown (1966). The book, so obviously superior to the novels, also with Indian themes, that Scott had previously written, was the first of the four novels that described the last days of the British Empire in India and came to be known as The Raj Quartet. In 1977, Scott published Staying On, a novel about British expatriates in independent India. Scott's reputation has grown since his premature death in 1978. A brilliant television adaptation of The Raj Quartet in 1984 introduced many new readers to the subtleties of Scott's vision of India: how he transmuted a seemingly commonplace affection for India into active sympathy and acute historical insight, and himself grew from a mediocre novelist into possibly the greatest fictional chronicler and analyst of the British Raj. In the following excerpt from The Jewel in the Crown he looks back at that great Anglo-Indian institution, the club, whose graveled driveways and high-ceilinged rooms are still found in the hundreds of towns the British created across India, along with its turbaned waiters and complex rituals of snobbery.

  from THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

  The Mayapore district of the province is still administered in five sub-divisions as it was in the days of the British. It covers an area of 2,346 square miles. In 1942 the population was one and a quarter million. It stands now, in 1964, at one and a half million, 160,000 of whom live in the town of Mayapore and some 20,000 in the suburb of Banyaganj where the airport is. From the airport there is a daily Viscount service to Calcutta and a twice weekly Fokker Friendship service to Agra for the Delhi connection. The area in the vicinity of the airport has become the center of a light industrial factory development. Between Banyaganj and Mayapore there are to be found the modern labor-saving, whitewashed, concrete homes of the new British colony, and then, closer to town still, the old British-Indian Electrical factory, newly extended but still controlled by British capital. From the British-Indian Electrical the traveler who knew Mayapore in the old days and came in by air would find himself on more familiar ground as he passed, in su
ccession, the redbrick Mayapore Technical College which was founded and endowed by Sir Nello Chatterjee, and the cream-stucco Government Higher School. Just beyond the school the railway comes in on the left with the bend of the river and from here the road—the Grand Trunk Road—leads directly into the old cantonment and civil lines.

  Going from the cantonment bazaar which is still the fashionable shopping center of Mayapore, along the Mahatma Gandhi road, once styled Victoria road, the traveler will pass the main police barracks on his left and then, on his right, the Court house and the adjacent cluster of buildings, well shaded by trees, that comprised, still comprise, the headquarters of the district administration. Close by, but only to be glimpsed through the gateway in a high stucco wall, similarly shaded, is the bungalow once known as the chummery where three or four of Mr. White's unmarried sub-divisional officers—usually Indians of the uncovenanted provincial civil service—used to live when not on tour in their own allotted areas of the district. Beyond the chummery, on both sides of the road, there are other bungalows whose style and look of spaciousness mark them also as relics of the British days, the biggest being that in which Mr. Poulson, assistant commissioner and joint magistrate, lived with Mrs. Poulson. Almost opposite the Poulsons' old place is the bungalow of the District Superintendent of Police. A quarter of a mile farther on, the Mahatma Gandhi road meets the southeastern angle of the large square open space known as the maidan, whose velvety short-cropped grass is green during and after the rains but brown at this season. If you continue in a northerly direction, along Hospital road, you come eventually to the Mayapore General Hospital and the Greenlawns nursing home. If you turn left, that is to say west, and travel along Club road you arrive eventually at the Gymkhana. Both the club and hospital buildings can be seen distantly from the T-junction of the old Victoria, Hospital and Club roads. And it is along Club road, facing the maidan that the bungalow of the Deputy Commissioner is still to be found, in walled, arboreal seclusion.

  At half-past six in the evening the sun has set behind and starkly silhouetted the trees that shelter the club buildings on the western side of the maidan. The sky above the maidan, colorless during the day, as if the heat had burnt out its pigment, now undergoes a remarkable transformation. The blue is revealed at last but in tones already invaded by the yellowing refraction of the sun so that it is awash with an astonishing, luminous green that darkens to violet in the east where night has already fallen and reddens in the west where it is yet to come. There are some scattered trees on the edge of the maidan, the homes of the wheeling sore-throated crows which Lady Chatterjee says were once referred to by an American woman as “those durn birds.” Certainly, in India, they are ubiquitous. Driving slowly down Club road with Lady Chatterjee, in a grey Ambassador that belongs to a lawyer called Srinivasan whom one has not met but is about to, one might indulge in the fancy of a projection from the provable now to the hallowed then, between which the one sure animated connection is provided by the crows, the familiar spirits of dead white sahibs and living black inheritors alike. At this hour the maidan is well populated by an Indian middle class that enjoys the comparative cool of the evening. There are even women and young girls. They stroll or squat and talk, and children play games. But the overall impression is of the whiteness of men's clothes and caps and of boys' shirts, a whiteness which, like the brown of the grass, has been touched by the evening light to a pink as subtle as that of that extraordinary bird, the flamingo. There is a hush, a sense emanating from those taking the air of their—well, yes, a sense of their what? Of their selfconsciousness at having overstepped some ancient, invisible mark? Or is this a sense conveyed only to an Englishman, as a result of his residual awareness of a racial privilege now officially extinct, so that, borne clubwards at the invitation of a Brahmin lawyer, on a Saturday evening, driven by a Muslim chauffeur in the company of a Rajput lady, through the quickly fading light that holds lovely old Mayapore suspended between the day and the dark, bereft of responsibility and therefore of any sense of dignity other than that which he may be able to muster in himself, as himself, he may feel himself similarly suspended, caught up by his own people's history and the thrust of a current that simply would not wait for them wholly to comprehend its force, and he may then sentimentally recall, in passing, that the maidan was once sacrosanct to the Civil and Military, and respond, fleetingly, to the tug of a vague generalized regret that the maidan no longer looks as it did once, when at this time of day it was empty of all but a few late riders cantering homeward.

  Not that the maidan did not find itself in those days—on certain occasions—even more densely populated than it is this evening. The British held their annual gymkhana here, and their Flower Show, and it was the scene of displays such as that put on by the military complete with band in aid of War Week, which Daphne Manners attended with other girls from the Mayapore General Hospital and several young officers from the military lines, which, like St. Mary's Church, are to be seen on the far side of the maidan. The flower show is still held, Lady Chatterjee says; indeed until five years ago she exhibited in it herself; but the roses that used to be grown by Englishwomen who felt far from home and had infrequent hopes of European leave are no longer what they were and most of the space in the marquees is taken up with flowering shrubs and giant vegetables. The gymkhana, too, is still an annual event because Mayapore is still a military station, one—that is to say—with a certain formal respect for tradition. Cricket week draws the biggest crowds, bigger even than in the old days, but then any event on the maidan now is bound to be more crowded, because although the British gymkhanas, flower shows and cricket weeks were also attended by Indians, that attendance was regulated by invitation or by the cost of the ticket, and the maidan was then enclosed by an outer picket of stakes and rope and an inner picket of poles and hessian (except in the case of the cricket when the hessian had to be dispensed with in the practical as well as aesthetic interest of the game)—pickets which effectively conveyed to the casual passerby the fact that something private was going on. Nowadays there are no pickets other than those—as at the gymkhana, for instance—whose purpose is to separate the spectators from the participants, and there are influential Indians in Mayapore, the heirs to civic pride, who feel that it is a mistake to leave the maidan thus open to invasion by any Tom, Dick and Harry. Last year's gymkhana [Lady Chatterjee explains] was ruined by the people who wandered about on those parts of the maidan where the gymkhana was not being held but got mixed up with the people who had paid for seats and even invaded the refreshment tents in the belief that they were open to all. So great was the confusion that the club secretary, a Mr. Mitra, offered to resign, but was dissuaded from such a drastic course of action when his committee voted by a narrow margin to reinstate the old system of double enclosure in the future. As for the cricket, well, on two occasions in the past five years, the players walked off in protest at the rowdyism going on among the free-for-all spectators, and the last time this happened the spectators invaded the field in retaliation to protest against the players' highhandedness. There followed a pitched battle which the police had to break up with lathi charges just as they had in the days when the battle going on was of a more serious nature.

  From problems such as these the British living in Mayapore today naturally remain aloof—so far as one can gather from Lady Chatterjee (who, when questioned on such delicate matters, has a habit of sitting still and upright, answering briefly and then changing the subject). It is rare (or so one deduces from her reluctance to swear that it is not) to see any member of the English colony at a public event on the maidan. They do not exhibit at the flower show. They do not compete at the gymkhana. They do not play cricket there. There would seem to be an unwritten law among them that the maidan is no longer any concern of theirs, no longer even to be spoken of except as a short cut to describing something mutually recognizable as alien. Indeed, you might ask one of them (for instance the Englishwoman who sits with another in the loun
ge-bar of the Gymkhana club, turning over the pages of a none-too-recent issue of the Sunday Times Magazine—today's fashionable equivalent of The Tatler or The Onlooker) whether she went to the flower show last month and be met with a look of total incomprehension, have the question patted back like a grubby little ball that has lost its bounce, be asked, in return, as if one had spoken in a foreign language she has been trained in but shown and felt no special aptitude or liking for: “Flower show?” and to explain, to say then, “Why yes—the flower show on the maidan,” will call nothing forth other than an upward twitch of the eyebrows and a downward twitch of the mouth, which, after all, is voluble enough as an indication that one has suggested something ridiculous.

  Apart from this Englishwoman and her companion there are several other English people in the lounge. But Lady Chatterjee is the only Indian and she has only sat where she is sitting (bringing her guest with her) because the first person met, as the club was entered and found not yet to house Mr. Srinivasan, was an Englishman called Terry who had been playing tennis and greeted her gaily, with a reproach that she came to the club too seldom and must have a drink while she waited for her official host and so had led her and her houseguest to the table where the two English ladies already sat and then gone off to shower and change, leaving Lady Chatterjee wrapped in her sari, the stranger in his ignorance, and the table in awkward silence punctuated only by Lady Chatterjee's attempts at explanations to the guest of his surroundings and his attempts to engage Terry's waiting ladies in a small talk that grows large and pregnant with lacunae, for want of simple politeness.