India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  At the back of the hotel was a market: I looked down on its low, spreading roof. Buzzards perched on the ledges of the hotel, waiting. The ledges were black with an accumulation of blown dust and the grit of brown traffic smoke. The style of the British-built red-brick building opposite the market – the formality, the symmetry, the elegance, the thought, the confidence, the reference to classical ornament – was now oddly at variance with the life of the street, and seemed to come from a dead age.

  The sticky-looking asphalt of the cambered street lay between wide, irregular drifts of dust that had hardened to earth in the gutters at the side; the streets would be washed now only by the monsoon. The once paved footpath outside the market had crumbled and in places merged with the earth in the gutters. People went about minute tasks. Men pulled rickshaws. In 1962 this had been offensive to see, but it was said that the poor needed employment. Twenty-seven years on, the rickshaws were still there. The same thing was said about employment for the poor; but the Calcuttans, with their low ideas of human needs and possibilities, appeared genuinely to enjoy the man-pulled rickshaw as a form of transport; and many of the rickshaws looked nice and new, not like things on the way out. Minute tasks: one man walked by carrying a single, limber, dancing sheet of plywood on his head. Other people went about perfectly seriously carrying tiny loads on their heads, no doubt for very small fees.

  On important days big circular baskets of trussed white chickens appeared outside the market, and one or two men seemed idly engaged for some minutes throwing trussed chickens from one basket to another. Then one noticed that the basket from which the chickens were being thrown was full of movement, and the basket into which the chickens were being thrown was still. And then one saw that the gesture of chicken-throwing also contained another, the wringing of the chicken’s neck: two jobs combined in a single, fluent, circular gesture.

  One man might then be seen taking away his own little load of dead white chickens: the chickens artistically arranged into a big feathery ball hung on the handle of his old bicycle, the feathers of the stiff dead chickens hanging down the other way and showing brown-yellow rather than white, with the stiff brown claws and legs like spokes in the feathery ball, like sticks in candyfloss. The man had trouble arranging the load on his bicycle. When he first tried to get on the bicycle and ride away, the chickens got in the way of his knees.

  At the end of the day a little green pick-up truck came, and the wide circular baskets, empty now, were stacked in the truck in two piles. When the truck went away, there remained – in this city where rubbish was seldom cleared – only a few scattered white feathers in the dust of the broken and silted-up street.

  The British were in Calcutta for a long time. It might be said that the Anglo-Bengali culture – out of which modern India grew – is as old as the United States. Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the first exponent of that culture, was born in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence. From Raja Ram Mohun Roy there is a direct line to Rabindranath Tagore, whom Chidananda Das Gupta saw in 1940 when he first went to Tagore’s university at Shantiniketan.

  On that visit Chidananda heard Tagore, nearly eighty, deliver a talk in the Shantiniketan temple on ‘Crisis in Civilization’. In that talk – a famous talk, published a few months after Chidananda heard it – Tagore said he had always believed that ‘the springs of civilization’ would come out of ‘the heart of Europe’. Now, with the war and the coming cataclysm, he could no longer have that faith. But he couldn’t lose faith in man; that would be a sin. He lived now in the hope that the dawn would come from the East, ‘where the sun rises’, and that the saviour would be born ‘in our midst, in this poverty-shamed hovel which is India’.

  It was an old man’s melancholy farewell to the world. Five years later the war was over. Europe began to heal; in the second half of the century Europe and the West were to be stronger and more creative and more influential than they had ever been. The calamity Tagore hadn’t foreseen was the calamity that was to come to Calcutta.

  In 1946 there were the Hindu-Muslim massacres. They marked the beginning of the end for the city. The next year India was independent, but partitioned. Bengal was divided. A large Hindu refugee population came and camped in Calcutta; and Calcutta, without a hundredth part of the resilience of Europe, never really recovered. Certain important things were in the future – the cinema of Satyajit Ray, especially – but the great days of the city, all its intellectual life, were over. And it could appear that the British-built city – its grandeur still ghostly at night – began to die when the British went away.

  6

  The End of the Line

  One of Satyajit Ray’s few films to be set outside Bengal is The Chess Players. It is an historical film about the annexation of the kingdom of Oude by the British in the 1850s. Oude was one of the provinces of the Mogul Empire; in the mid-18th century it became one of the successor states of that empire. The city of Lucknow was the capital of Oude, and it was the setting of the Ray film: a work of subtlety, looking at the events of the 1850s as they might have seemed to people at the time. The film was more than a comment on 19th-century British imperialism. It also considered – with understanding and melancholy and humour – the decadence or blindness or helplessness of a 19th-century Indian Muslim culture at the end of its possibilities: where the rulers play chess and conduct petty affairs, while their territory (and its people) pass into foreign rule.

  The British annexation of Oude was one of the things that led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In colonial times, and for a period afterwards, this was called by some the First War of Indian Independence. But this was a 20th-century view, 20th-century language, and a kind of mimicry, seeking to give to old India something of the socialist dynamism the Russians found in their own history. The Mutiny was the last flare-up of Muslim energy in India until the agitation, 80 years or so later, for a separate Muslim state of Pakistan.

  Lucknow was the end of the line for Muslim India. The city is the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest state in the Indian Union. In its historical heart it is like a graveyard from the days of the Nawabs of Oude, full of the ruins of war. The city was shelled and fought over during the Mutiny; afterwards the British preserved the ruins as a memorial, and passed them on to independent India.

  The hunting lodge of the Nawabs, Dilkusha, ‘Heart’s Delight’, is roofless. Much of its plaster has gone, revealing the layers of thin bricks that make up the mass of the walls. It was a local way of building; but the style of the – palatial – lodge, with what remains of the stables, is of European inspiration: the Nawabs of Oude employed Europeans in many capacities. Even in ruin, the hunting lodge remains wonderfully suited to the climate. To stand in the shade of its thick walls, even on a bright and warm day, is to feel cool and relaxed. The climate – that elsewhere in Lucknow, amid the concrete and glass, seems altogether unfriendly – here, a short distance away, becomes quite benign, almost a perfect climate. So, almost certainly, it would have appeared to the designers of the lodge. Among these shattered old walls, one can even think of the Lucknow climate as part of the luxuriousness of the days of the Nawabs.

  A more extensive ruin, in a similar kind of style, is the Residency. The British Resident, originally an ambassador or agent, became in time the effective ruler of Oude; and the Residency was built by the Nawabs, over some decades, for this powerful figure. It was a settlement, a little town, not simply a building on its own. It was where, at the beginning of the Mutiny, the British people of the area were gathered together, with Indian servants and Indian soldiers loyal to their cause (or fearful of the mutineers’ cause). There were 3000 people in all in the Residency, and they were besieged for three months by the mutineers. When the siege was lifted, 2000 of the 3000 had died. The British among them had been buried in a corner of the Residency; later, fine tombstones were put up in their memory in that corner.

  And just as the ruins of the Nawab’s hunting lodge were left as a re
minder of the end of the power of the Nawabs of Oude, so the damaged buildings of the besieged Residency were preserved as a monument of British courage. The hunting lodge – blown up after victory by the relieving British forces (mainly Scots and Sikhs) – was the more complete ruin. The buildings of the Residency carried very many little dints caused by rifle bullets, with occasional larger excisions caused by non-explosive cannonballs. Perhaps the siege had failed because the mutineers didn’t have the weapons for it. Both the hunting lodge and the buildings of the residency showed, below plaster, the flat thin Lucknow bricks that made up their mass.

  The Residency was one of the famous monuments of the British Raj. Now, after the withdrawal from India, and the wars of this century, there is hardly room for it in the British memory. But it remains important in Indian history. Independent India inherited the monument, and has kept it up. The Residency is now a public garden, with trees and flowers and paths between the shot-up, weathered buildings.

  Rashid, who came of an old Lucknow Muslim family, walked with me in the Residency on my last day in Lucknow. He had in the beginning been neutral, talking of history, pleased to show the famous sights of the famous city, and pleased, too, to show that in Lucknow (unlike other Indian cities) there were still places to go walking in. But in the museum building, with its trays of pathetic mutineers’ cannonballs, and other carefully tended imperial relics, its tarnished photographs and engravings with faded captions, Rashid’s mood changed. His Muslim sentiments flared up; he became quite agitated at the events of 130 years before, full of rage about the powers of the British Resident and the humiliations of the Nawab, full of rage and grief at the siege that had failed, the chance of Muslim victory which, though so near, had not come. He said, ‘Bastards! Bastards!’ And he was referring not to the besiegers but the besieged, whose heroism and general predicament, lucky escapes and cruel deaths, were the subject of the museum display.

  Not far away, and visible from the ruins of the Residency, was a white marble pillar with a twist at the top, to symbolize the flame of freedom. Independent India had put that monument up, to counter the British Raj’s monument to itself. It was a feeble thing, the equivalent in marble of Rashid’s rage. Its symbolism was quite crude beside the real, bullet-marked buildings of the Residency, and it was historically invalid: the Indian independence movement didn’t grow out of the Mutiny.

  No monument of independent India could have solaced Rashid, because, in Rashid’s view, independence – 90 years after the Residency siege – had come as another kind of Muslim defeat. Independence had come with the partition of the subcontinent into India and the two wings of Pakistan, so that the Muslims of undivided India had found themselves, as Rashid said, under three roofs.

  Many of the middle-class Muslims of Lucknow had migrated to West Pakistan. The Muslim culture for which Lucknow had been known – the language, the manners, the music, the food – had disappeared. Where once Muslims had ruled, there now remained, after what could be seen as 300 years of a steady Muslim decline, the cramped, shut-in, stultifying life of the Muslim ghetto of the old town. There were other Muslims still, middle-class people like Rashid, and upper-class people as well, people sometimes of princely antecedents. But the predominant feature of Muslim Lucknow was that life of the ghetto, where people were ill-equipped and vulnerable, withdrawn and highly-strung.

  Lucknow still had something of its old Muslim legend and aura when I went there for the first time, in 1962. Certain frivolities still seemed to speak of the past. People flew kites; special toys were made; special perfumes (including a clay perfume, meant to give the monsoon scent of rain falling on parched earth) were made with a medium of sandalwood oil, so as not to offend the Muslim religious law. Though there were no longer any singing girls, the intricately worked screens on the upper floors of buildings in the chowk or bazaar area seemed to speak (like a 19th-century oil portrait of a Nawab, baring one plump breast) of old Lucknow indulgences.

  There was no legend now. The upper-class Muslim community, which had been at the centre of the legend, had shrunk; while the general population of the city had doubled or trebled. Shabby, post-independence concrete had spread everywhere; certain thoroughfares had become hellish. The city of the Nawabs had become an administrative city, Rashid said, a district city: an Indian mofussil town.

  The hotel, part of the new concrete city, was like a parody of a five-star hotel. It had its ‘logo’. It had various cards in the rooms, offering this and that, listing services and asking for comments. It had its door-knob breakfast menus, very difficult to fill in rationally. It had it all. All the best hotel forms had been borrowed; only the services were missing. The ‘Do Not Disturb’ light didn’t function. The red telephone was more or less a dummy, sometimes releasing a faint, seemingly cavern-lost voice, hardly decipherable. The towels, perhaps because of some violent bleach, had turned a pale fluorescent blue, with a thin but thorny nap. The lampshade was broken; the lights were dim and strained one’s eyes. A full half of the wall that faced west was of glass. Even now, and it was still only spring, it became quite oppressive in the afternoons, and it was necessary to use the weak-metalled window catch (weak-metalled: the catch seemed ready to bend between one’s thumb and finger) to open the window, to let in a lot more hot air, together with the full roar of the traffic and the horns and the hooters.

  But, miraculously, out of that window, there was a view that took one back to the past, gave one the illusion of looking at the original of one of the large views done by Thomas and William Daniell in late 18th-century India, and later published in London as aquatints. The view was of the River Gumti – or its lower channel, full, placid, not wide – between its tawny and dusty-green banks.

  The Daniells’ views were often taken with the help of the camera oscura, and they can suggest immense distances; close to, an Indian aquatint of the Daniells’ is full of literal detail, full of human figures, some very small. There was that kind of distance, that kind of minute busyness, to this view of the River Gumti from the hotel room.

  Along the top of the bank to the right there was a path, and figures were walking on it down all its length, small, separate figures, the colours of their clothes not easy to catch at this distance. Trees at the back of this path concealed the residential streets on that side of the river bank. More in the foreground, above the full lower channel of the river, but well below the path on the right bank where people walked, there was a wide, irregular, tree-less shelf. Far to to the left, black water buffaloes, small, moving black specks, gave a touch of the African or American wilderness to this river shelf. To the right, and closer, washermen in the mornings spread out their washed sheets and clothes to dry. In the middle of the shelf, at the edge of the flowing river channel, were widely spaced huts, with distempered walls, pink or white, some with advertising copy in Hindi: single-roomed huts with sloping roofs, reflected in the smooth water. These huts belonged to swimming clubs. At the weekends boys swam in the river, keeping close to the bank and the huts.

  On the left bank of the river, directly below the hotel, there were Hindu temples. Far away, on the same bank, were the minarets of old Lucknow, reminders of the mosques and imambaras in which in 1962 I had looked for the glory of old Lucknow. Below, hidden by trees, were the lanes of the chowk or bazaar, which in 1962 still had a touch of the Thousand and One Nights, but which now, Rashid said, showed the final tragedy of the Muslim city to someone who knew how to look.

  I went looking with him one morning. It was so crowded and cramped and repetitive in the lanes, the visitor might have seen the area as the expression of a single culture; and he might have missed the distinctions that Rashid saw.

  The shops or stalls, as in the usual Indian bazaar, were narrow little boxes, fully open to the road or lane, and set side by side, with hardly a gap between. The floors were a few feet above the lane. Gutters at the side received water and waste from the drains that ran between or under the stalls. This waste water didn’t r
un off to some larger drain, Rashid said. It just stayed there, in the open gutter, and evaporated.

  All the shops and stalls had metal shutters; every shop and attached house was built like a fortress, for the days of riot. From time to time, where there should have been a shop, there was a moraine of rubble, as though – out of age, fragility, or rot – the shop and the house with it had fallen inwards, a small demonstration of how the ground level of cities might rise, layer upon layer.

  Had there always been a bazaar here? Was it possible to think of a time when this site was bare, a field? Rashid and I walked through a ceremonial gate, an archway, called after the great Mogul emperor Akbar. He ruled from 1556 to 1605. Perhaps the gate had been built in the late 16th century to mark a visit of the emperor’s; so the outlines of the bazaar would have been then (in Shakespeare’s time) what it was now. There were glimpses of a more recent past – 18th-century or 19th-century – in the small flat Lucknow bricks that could be seen below the broken plaster on some old buildings. The bricks were set in lines that echoed the lines of the structure – in arches, for instance, they were set in concentric arcs – so that they looked like iron filings demonstrating the lines of magnetic force around a magnet.

  The outer bazaar was mixed. The shopkeepers were Hindu; the artisans were Muslim. Both groups had their history and special traditions. The artisans did simple work. They beat thin ribbons of silver into very thin, half-crumbling silver leaf or silver foil. They made cheap shoes; they did a local kind of embroidery called chikan; they did bead embroidery. The shopkeepers, Hindus, were either merchant-caste people from Uttar Pradesh, or Punjabi khatris who had come to the area 200 or 300 years before and had stayed as moneylenders and traders.

  One shop out of five was supplying goods for bigger shopkeepers in the same area: thread for chikan embroidery, gold and silver spangles for brocade work, wooden printing blocks for stamping designs on chikan work, the very wide ledgers used for the single-entry style of Indian book-keeping. Some shops sold kites: Lucknow still had that tradition of kite-flying. Some shops sold goldsmith’s equipment; some sold fresh flowers, for Hindus to take to the temple. Generally, Rashid said, the shops in this outer bazaar sold basic, everyday items connected with traditional ways of living, Hindu and Muslim.