The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Another historian of Indian literature, Sisir Kumar Das, makes a comparison between the influence of Persian and the influence of English. Persian, used as the ‘power’ language until it was displaced by English, was, he points out, the language of the elite. But that elite was cross-community, and included both Hindus and Muslims. It had the advantage of being a living tongue, unlike Sanskrit whose reach was more written than oral. And for centuries, Persian served as a medium of translation, receiving texts translated from Indian languages as well as translating other Indian language texts into Persian, from where they spread across the world.

  The Persian-versus-Urdu debate raged as strongly some centuries ago as the Hindi versus English one does. However entertaining, these debates should not blind us to a key fact about India: the dominant language in any region has often posed the greatest threat to smaller local and tribal dialects. Even multilingualism does not cut through hierarchies of power. As Das remarks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Bilingualism was an accepted fact of life. Bilingualism, however, did not mean equal prestige for both languages.’

  It might be utopian to imagine a time when Indian schoolchildren are encouraged to learn one of the many Indian languages on the endangered list as their third language. Or to imagine a time when English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and other dominant languages do not, like bullies, overshadow the many, many other tongues that people call their mother tongues. But as our understanding of the map of Indian languages changes and shifts, so should the old, atrophied arguments yield to newer debates.

  *

  The annual birthday party for English is held on 25 October, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s birth anniversary, and celebrating it might become a new Dalit tradition. Over a century ago, Savitribai Phule, the first woman to teach in the first women’s school in India, wrote a classic ode to Mother English:

  Brahman’s rule is now in ashes

  Under the English whips and lashes.

  It is all for the good of the poor

  Manu’s dead at English Mother’s door.

  In another, equally well-remembered poem, Phule urges ‘Shudras and ati-Shudras’ to ‘learn and break the chains of caste/Throw away the Brahmin’s scriptures fast’.

  It is only fitting that Zareer Masani’s biography of Macaulay opens with a description of a birthday party to English, held at the home of the writer Chandra Bhan Prasad. A poet sings, ‘O Devi Ma let us learn English/Even the dogs know English!’ And Prasad endorses Phule’s prescription, adding, ‘Hereafter, the first sounds all newborn Dalit babies will hear from their parents is — abcd.’

  Macaulay’s Minute is famous and infamous in India, where the spread of English cannot be denied, but where its influence and importance are often resented. Many in India still bristle at Macaulay’s ignorant dismissal of Indian literature (‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’), and his intent: ‘The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.’

  Until Mr Masani’s biography (Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernisation), though, Macaulay had been reduced to a museum portrait—like so many other figures in contemporary Indian history, British and Indian—in the absence of a tradition of biographical writing. In Mr Masani’s well-researched and engaging telling, Macaulay emerges from the dust of the past. He had little physical charm—Thomas Carlyle called him ‘a short squat thickset man of vulgar but resolute energetic appearance’—but he had a lively, ferocious mind, and a debater’s zest for argument.

  By 1832, he was secretary to the Board of Control, with an office overlooking the Thames: ‘I am already deep in Zemindars, Ryots, Polygars, Courts of Phoujdary and Courts of Nizamut Adawlut . . . Am I not in fair training to be as great a bore as if I had myself been in India?’

  Macaulay’s interest in India was broad, but not necessarily deep; he advocated ‘an enlightened and paternal despotism’ for the new Raj. He met Ram Mohan Roy before he and his sister Hannah came out to India on The Asia. On board the ship he read his Greek, Latin and Spanish, neglecting his Hindi and Urdu grammars, and his Hindi was of the ‘coop tunda’ (‘khoob thunda’ — very cold) variety.

  He wrote lyrical passages about the colours and sounds of India, even though he complained that the fish and the fruit were inferior to England’s cherries and cod. Macaulay’s standards were set by England, and when he met the Mysore Raja, he lamented what the king might have been: ‘If he had been put under tuition, if he had been made an accomplished English gentleman . . .’ His Kolkata was a racially segregated city, with the natives in Black Town, the Angrezis in power.

  Mr Masani does not attempt to excuse Macaulay’s prejudices—he was very much a man of his times—but he also draws attention to his brand of enlightened liberal imperialism. ‘Almost two centuries later,’ Mr Masani says of Macaulay’s Minute, ‘its underlying principles remain the Bible of Anglo-American nation-building in the world’s trouble spots.’

  Macaulay’s aim was to produce ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’, and for a while, English was indeed the preserve of the babus and the bhadralok in India. As the latest Census figures demonstrate, it is now the fastest growing language in India behind Hindi, and it has become part of the Indian mainstream.

  But Macaulay couldn’t have predicted that a century after Savitribai Phule and other Dalit intellectuals saw the potential of English as a way out of the caste labyrinth, there would be a temple to Angrezi Devi. When work started on the temple in 2010, Chandra Bhan Prasad was quoted as saying: ‘She stands on top of a computer which means we will use English to rise up the ladder and become free forever.’ It was not an easy undertaking; the construction of the temple was halted on one ground or another, most of them remarkably flimsy. Some newspapers reported tension in the area, after members of the upper castes objected to a temple built for and by Dalits.

  But Macaulay would have approved; his aim was not to replace local languages, but to add the library of English into the ‘native tongues’. As Phule wrote in her poems:

  In English rule we’ve found our joy

  Bad days gone, Mother English abhoy!

  English is the inheritance of none

  Persian, Brahman, Yemeni or Hun.

  There it stands, 175 years after Macaulay’s Minute, ready to be claimed by Angrezi Devi’s devotees.

  (Based on writings from 2001 to 2014.)

  TWO

  Poets at Work

  These short interviews that appear in the following pages should be consumed like samosas or paapri chaat. They were written in the moment, built around conversations that lasted at most for a few hours, and are useful only in the way that those old black-and-white snapshots by Mahatta are helpful: as snapshots of their time. With great regret, the editor and I left out interviews with authors who write in Indian languages other than English, since this collection of essays is chiefly about the history of Indian writing in English. Book reviews tend not to age well, so only two or three have been included, chiefly when they focus on the work of a writer who should not be ignored.

  1

  Dom Moraes

  (1938–2004)

  On the narrow ramparts of Neemrana, while a literary festival swung through its various moods—insularity, belligerence, camaraderie, jealousy—you might have observed a quiet, white-haired figure who managed to stay in the background while being present at every key moment. Dom Moraes, unlike other literary luminaries, enjoyed a position of relative ease on the fringes of the great game, and only his love of conversation and a certain humorous, observant, shrewd gleam in his eye marked him out.

  If you wondered what was going through his mind, he had provided a partial answer years ago in Gone Away: ‘I have a little game I play with people, which in my nastier moments I am proud of: I take notes of their mannerisms,
chuckling to myself. I was just starting the first invisible chuckle when I noticed [Ajit] Das chuckling too. His eyes rested on me, intelligent, sardonic and seeing, I stopped taking notes hastily.’

  Fortunately for readers who enjoy his matchless prose just as much as the poetry on which his reputation rests, Dom Moraes encountered few subjects equipped with Ajit Das’s ability to see what he was up to. Over the three volumes that make up A Variety of Absences: Gone Away, My Son’s Father and Never at Home, he is relatively free to get on with his observations, chuckling invisibly all the while. And, spaced apart as they are, these three volumes offer a remarkable insight into the life and times of a singular figure. No novelist could have created a character like Dom Moraes, though most would have given their right arms to be able to do so.

  Gone Away was first published in 1960. At the precocious age of twenty, Dom had won the Hawthornden Prize for poetry, launching his career in somewhat premature fashion. Dom was not your average self-conscious twenty-year-old; the son of a famous father (the legendary Frank Moraes), he summed up his curriculum vitae in ‘Song’:

  I sowed my wild oats

  Before I was twenty

  Drunkards and turncoats

  I knew in plenty.

  He had met Stephen Spender, who had praised his poems; been taught by W.H. Auden; met Cyril Connolly, who had criticized his suit; refused to respond to Raymond Chandler’s gibes about Nehru; received a magisterial nod of approval from T.S. Eliot. He had travelled, far more than most young men of his generation, and grappled with the complex emotions his mother’s progression into madness had evoked.

  As the first volume of his memoirs, Gone Away works precisely because it was never meant to be a memoir; Dom had been commissioned by Heinemann to write a book about India. ‘The book was called a travelogue,’ observes Dom, ‘but it turned out to be a better picture of me as I was at twenty-one than any more orthodox autobiography.’ Nevertheless, he managed to pack in some travel: inside Bombay, gloomily surveying the extremely strange phenomenon that was a cocktail party in a prohibition state (as it was at the time), Dom pushed off to scrutinize the infinitely more fascinating world of Bombay’s bootleggers. In Delhi he noted an eternal truth about the capital: ‘All the gossip in New Delhi is political.’

  Ved Mehta—he accompanied Dom on several other alcohol-fuelled trips with long-suffering phlegmaticism—and he visited Nirad Chaudhuri and listened in some bewilderment to the Bengali author’s extolling of the wonders of England, including Lyons’ tea-rooms. With Ved, too, he travelled to Nepal and met ‘the last feudal overlords that the world has seen, these Ranas’, saw villages and monasteries, recited Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘For Any Dying Poet’ to the poet Devkota as he lay, dying of cancer, among the bodies of more dead and dying. With the sardonic Ajit Das for company, he travelled to Nathu La—not, in those days, just another offbeat tourist spot, but a grim forbidding pass guarded by the Chinese—and saw the first Indian troops enter Sikkim.

  At thirty, he wrote an autobiography—My Son’s Father—more personal in tone, his eye for detail and his sense of humour more focused, his critical faculties combative and developed. He sums up the poet Sarojini Naidu in one line—‘Naidu, who in her youth had lived in England and written quantities of appalling verse which was praised by Yeats and Gosse’. He fell in love; he wrestled with his mother’s nightmares; he became a poet. He was able to look back at the first stirrings of his talent with the clarity and humour that mark his best work:

  My imagination, naturally vivid, was fired and flowered by anything I read . . . I wanted to extend the myth of the book into my own mind, to create new situations for the characters of the book. I told myself stories, therefore, based on the characters I had just read about: Tarzan, Black Bartlemy, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, etc. At first I simply told myself these stories in bed: then I began to do it walking up and down my bedroom; finally I wandered through the flat, murmuring to myself, and gesturing fiercely with my hands as the tension of the plot mounted. My father and his friends, sitting on the verandah, often watched astounded as I slowly paced the drawing-room, mouthing and flapping my hands. My father was already worried about my mother’s mental health: he now began to worry about mine.

  Never at Home is best read as the third volume of a trilogy; it has a sense of closure about it, even though Dom’s fans might well ask for a fourth volume. Of Eichmann sitting inside his glass box as the trial wound on and on, he writes: ‘I could not feel pity, because of the evidence, and because of his dehumanization by the glass box; for the same reasons I could not feel anger or hatred. The evidence might have caused those; but the evidence had become unconnected with the man.’

  He covered Algiers during its war, and Vietnam during its struggle. ‘It had been a beautiful country, but it had also been depopulated and deforested; scabbed with napalm, stained with cordite, it lived on in a new incarnation, goddess of boredom and war.’ In between there was poetry; then there was writer’s block. There were distractions—affairs, other writers, the bizarre figure of Christine Keeler, sponging off journalists without any of the charm of Holly Golightly demanding change from her escorts for ‘the powder room’.

  In 1982, Dom wrote the first ‘real’ poem he had produced in seventeen years. It’s called ‘Absences’ and the title of this edition of his collected memoirs is drawn from it: ‘No sound would be heard if/So much silence was not heard . . . this/World only held together/By its variety of absences.’ For the moment, he rests—a travelogue through India with Sarayu Srivatsa came out last year, and another book is in the pipeline. He doesn’t so much fight his long-term illness as he eyes it sardonically, in between more travels, more wine, more cigarettes. At the end of his memoirs, illuminated by his inimitable raconteur’s voice, he leaves ‘a little tired, but in the end/Not unhappy to have lived’.

  *

  His voice was so quiet that you had to lean forward, straining, to catch what he said; until he startled you by summoning up a resonance and a richness from somewhere deep within. ‘Writers, if they are good writers, don’t talk much about writing,’ Dom said the first time we met, and he talked about everything else instead.

  I was not one of Dom Moraes’ circle of intimates; the few encounters I had with the poet (the writer, the columnist, the reporter, even the cheerful, committed drinker: all these stemmed from this primary version of his self) happened in the evening of his life, after he’d crossed sixty. I didn’t see the young Dom, the precocious boy-poet who shared his anecdotes of Stephen Spender and Henry Moore in a London long since gone.

  I never met the Dom Moraes who grappled with his mother’s importunate demons, who struggled with the formidable shadow cast by his father, the legendary Frank Moraes, who told his wife, Henrietta, that he was just going out to buy cigarettes and walked out of the house and the marriage.

  I was a little too young to hear about the Dom Moraes who married Leela Naidu (to say that Naidu is celebrated chiefly for her beauty may seem condescending, unless you remember the extraordinary quality of that beauty). The marriage didn’t last; Dom’s friendships survived better than his relationships.

  His appetite for good whiskey almost matched his relish for a good story: he consumed both in generous quantities. E.M. Forster once asked for ‘a non-alcoholic edition’ of Dom’s early memoir-travelogue, Gone Away.

  In the last few years, Dom had cut back; his cancer had been diagnosed (according to Jeet Thayil, he had nicknamed his tumour ‘Gorgi’). But there is something essentially wrong, naggingly incomplete, about any memory of Dom that doesn’t include the whiskey. In ‘Song’, he continues, after the mention of drunkards and turncoats:

  Then with the weather worse

  To the cold river

  I came reciting verse

  With a hangover.

  I remember it was a Wednesday night when the phonecalls and the emails came in. One friend wrote: ‘Dom’s dead. I’m off to drink to his shade.’ I no longer d
rank, so I saluted him with plain orange juice. But many others must have instinctively done the right thing, raising a glass to his memory.

  Any toast to Dom would have to commemorate his great gift, a singular, unmistakable talent that never reached the heights he aspired to, but that never fell below a certain level either. I cannot remember a single poem by Dom that stands out or that would be anthologized repeatedly, which may be just as well.

  Too many lay readers remember Nissim Ezekiel only for ‘The Night of the Scorpion’, Gieve Patel only for ‘On Killing a Tree’. But with Dom’s verse, you read on, never running out of new lines to fall in love with. He published over thirty books in his lifetime, some in collaboration with his companion, architect and writer Sarayu Srivatsa, who saw him through his twilight years with a marvellous blend of grace, humour, exasperation and affection.

  By dying peacefully at sixty-five, he won a kind of victory over cancer: Dom retired for his afternoon nap, had a heart attack, and never woke up. He never had to suffer what he and Sarayu had feared—the long hospital stay, complicated operations, a slow descent into pain. ‘He died without indignity,’ Sarayu said, and she was grateful for that small mercy, of the perfect ordinariness that could make him spend the day before he died choosing aquariums for the house, Japanese fighting fish, turtles.