by Sudhir Kakar
So these people come and live like this. Her son is exactly after Jhalla [the retarded son of one of my father’s sisters] . . . Will you get your leave or not due to disturbances?
The disturbances she mentions comprise the start of the Quit India movement launched by the Congress Party on 9 August 1942 under the leadership of Gandhi, demanding full independence from British colonial rule. Alarmed by the advance of the Japanese forces that had reached India’s eastern border with Burma, the British held up the spectre of an India enslaved by the Japanese which, however, did not dent the determination of the Congress Party to force the British to quit India. ‘Leave India to God and if that be too much, leave her to anarchy,’ Gandhi said as he prepared to inaugurate a massive civil disobedience campaign with the stirring slogan ‘Do or die!’
The British responded by banning the Congress, imprisoning Gandhi and arresting Congress leaders from all over the country. In the absence of a leadership that could have kept the movement in line with Gandhi’s principle of non-violence, the large-scale protests, demonstrations and strikes by workers often turned violent. Underground organizations exacerbated the situation by indulging in widespread acts of sabotage: derailing trains, setting government buildings on fire, disconnecting electricity and severing communication lines. The British reacted with punitive and repressive measures to a situation that threatened the very existence of the Raj, measures carried out by hundreds of thousands of men like my father who served in its armed forces, police and administrative services. It was much later I realized that one of the chants of demonstrators ‘Toddie bachcha, hai, hai’ in front of government offices was not directed at the British but invoked extermination to their toady offspring (bachcha), Indians like my father who shored up British colonial rule.
Sometimes I regret that I never asked my father when he was alive about his work as a magistrate during the turmoil of the Indian freedom movement when he was responsible for maintaining law and order in Sargodha and sitting in judgement on those accused of breaking it. How did he reconcile the expectations of his British superiors to come down heavily on the freedom fighters with his Indian origins and his own father’s nationalist leanings and open support for the struggle led by Gandhi? Did my father have hidden sympathies for the freedom movement? I would like to believe so, given the number of old civil servants of the Raj who later claimed in their memoirs to actually have been nationalists at heart and who only did their duty as diligent civil servants in the colonial administration. But I am not sure whether my father was ambivalent about his loyalties. I cannot recollect him ever disavowing his association with the Raj, which he genuinely admired as having brought the artefacts of modern civilization to a corrupt feudal order and the rule of law to an anarchic Indian society. Although he had strong Indian roots, he was also a product of the colonial situation of his times in which many subjugated people all over the world dealt with a devaluation of their own traditional cultures by what psychoanalysts call the defence of ‘identifying with the aggressor’, in this case the colonial master. I remember how throughout his life he insisted that his children and, later, grandchildren, eat meat at least once a day, a practice abhorrent to the vegetarian Hindu sensibility of my grandmother and aunts.
‘All vegetarians are placid creatures, without spirit, easily subdued,’ my father would say, pretending to be oblivious of his wife and children rolling their eyes in feigned dismay. ‘Why do you think the British have ruled us for hundreds of years? Not because of their superior arms but because of their independent, fighting spirit which comes from eating beef and other meats. An elephant is immensely strong but easily enslaved by man. A cat may be small but will always struggle to preserve its independence.’ Not that he would have ever dreamt of imitating the beefy Englishman by eating beef himself. But he did free me from most eating taboos so that I could enjoy a steak (well done, of course) whenever I was outside India; it was only the Indian cow that was holy.
In addition to the class difference, there was also a minor disparity in my parents’ positions in the complex hierarchies of caste. Let me first say that growing up, caste lurked at the edge of my awareness but was never central to the living of our everyday lives. I was free to play with the children of low caste servants or even with those of caste-less Muslims. They had a free run of the house except the kitchen where Chet Ram, our Brahmin cook from the hills of Garhwal, did not allow them entry. But this prohibition was attributed less to the threat they posed to caste taboos of purity and pollution than to an eccentric defence of a kitchen he considered his private domain where even my mother was a barely tolerated visitor.
The rare occasions on which I became aware of caste issues was when my father’s mother visited us from Lahore. She would be shocked and complain to my father that Shanti, the untouchable sweeper-woman, was allowed to clean our rooms or even sweep the kitchen floor in the absence of Chet Ram who had to frequently go home to sort out fights between his mother and his brothers’ wives. Egged on by my mother, who looked down upon my grandmother as an illiterate Lahori, my father would scold his mother for her old-fashioned ideas on untouchability. In a sulk, my grandmother would then retire to her room, where we could hear her grumbling about the advent of Kaliyug—the age of Kali before the end of the universe when all moral standards have broken down—and that she would never come to her eldest son’s home again.
The only other occasions I became aware of caste was when I overheard adults discussing a prospective marriage alliance in the extended family. The families of both my mother and father were Khatris. Khatri is a Punjabi language word for Kshatriya, the warrior caste in the ancient division of Indian society who were traditionally administrators and rulers. In course of time, as a result of economic and political exigencies, the Khatris also expanded into mercantile occupations, which were originally the domain of the Vaisyas, the trading classes. Some thirty years later, when I was gathering material on the inner experience of caste in modern Indians for The Inner World, my first book on Indian society, I had written to my father who had recently retired from government service to ask whether being a Khatri had meant anything to him. He had replied:
As I could follow that Khatri was a derivation from Kshatriya, the warrior and princely class of the Vedic and classical age, I have always thought of myself as belonging to the Herrenvolk when compared to other castes. I took pride in stories that they [the Khatris] did not marry or interdine with Aroras, said to spring from Vaisyas, the merchant class. I used to take pride in the fact that Khatris are, by and large, good-looking and have a fair complexion, without bothering about the fact that I possessed neither. I know I do not possess any attributes of the warrior class, yet I cling to the dogma of being a warrior type of yore, of being a ruling type with all the obligations of conduct that go with it.4
Most Khatris in Punjab were Hindu or Sikh. In the autobiographical portion of the seventeenth-century Dasam Granth, a sacred book of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh gives a detailed account of two Khatri lineages: his own Sodhi lineage and the Bedi lineage of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Hindu and Sikh Khatris collectively formed a single community and traditionally intermarried. My mother’s youngest sister, Prem, for instance, was married to Bawa Arjan Singh, a mona Sikh, that is, a Sikh who has cut off his long hair and shaved his beard. Yet with an enduring, pan-Indian fascination for hierarchy and creating status differences where none existed before, the Khatris were divided into sub-castes. The highest was the dhai ghar (i.e. 2½ houses—the number 3 being considered unlucky) grouping, comprising families carrying the surnames of Malhotra, Khanna and Kapur. My father’s family was in the char ghar (4 houses) grouping which comes into being when the Kakars (or Seths) are added to the first three. The divisions go on further into the barah jati grouping of twelve sub-castes such as Bhandari, Chopra, Dhawan, Sahgal, Talwar, Tandon, Vohra, Wadhawan, and still further into the bavanjai or fifty-two sub-castes.
Not that I was conscious of the intricaci
es of caste while I was growing up. I was only aware that my mother, a Kapur, was something called a dhaighari and that in marrying my father, a Kakar who belonged to the charghari, she had not married outside but certainly below her caste. And the way my father gave an embarrassed but proud smile whenever she talked about the higher status of the Kapurs, I understood that this was true. For my father, marrying a modern Kapur girl, the daughter of a famous surgeon, was a further badge of his success, another gold medal, in entering the world of the Indian elite. Even seventy years ago, meritocracy, though much less widespread than it is today, was not absent from Indian society.
Caste, then, was a guilt-free way of shoring up self-esteem by looking down upon some other group. Dhaigharis felt superior to other Khatris, who looked down upon the banias, the ‘business-class people’ as my mother called them, unless they happened to be very rich, in which case they were accorded honorary Khatri status. The intended beneficiaries, of course, were blissfully unaware of this honour as they proceeded to look down upon the Sudra castes who, in turn, disdained their favourite reservoir of ‘looked-down-upon’ castes, and so on in almost infinite regress. Although I grew up in a ‘modern’ household where caste was but an infrequent and disreputable visitor, not considered fit to be invited to the table, I wonder about its contribution to an unconscious, hierarchical way of looking at my social world and an assumption of easy superiority I am loathe to admit consciously. I still remember the twinge of shame I felt when at the age of twenty I wanted to learn the clarinet from a well-regarded Goan musician in Calcutta and my grand-uncle, who I was visiting at the time, reproached me: ‘You are a Khatri not a mirasi [the caste of traditional musicians]. You should be holding a gun in your hands, not this tuti.’ Tuti being the disparaging term for a wind instrument.
It was not only musicians but all performing artists who were spurned by ‘respectable society’ as entertainers. The disparaging attitude was an old one. For instance, ancient Hindu law books such as the Manusmriti have strict injunctions against adultery. One of the few exceptions, though, where ‘criminal conversation with another man’s wife’ is condoned is with ‘the wives of actors and singers’.5 Whereas today some training in classical Indian dance is counted as an accomplishment that increases a young woman’s allure in the marriage market, dance in the 1940s and 1950s was associated with ‘nautch girls’, a skill needed by prostitutes of some refinement. Bharatanatyam, for instance, was believed to be the province of devadasis, women who traditionally served God through song and dance but who by the twentieth century constituted a class of temple prostitutes. It was as late as in 1935 that Rukmini Devi, founder of the renowned Kalakshetra Dance Academy in Madras, became the first woman of a respectable family to perform Bharatanatyam in public.
Female movie stars were even more suspect since many of the leading ladies of the screen—Naseem Bano, Mumtaz Shanti, Khursheed, Noor Jahan, or later in the 1950s Nargis, Suraiya, Nimmi and Madhubala—were actually or reputed to be daughters of singer-dancer tawaifs, the earthier Indian equivalent of the Japanese geisha. As a signifier of his material possessions and an object of envy for other men, a wealthy man could have an actress as his mistress but never as his wife. The licentious odour of the kotha, an upmarket bordello patronized by the aristocratic and the wealthy, clung to movie actresses till well into the 1960s. I remember an aunt wondering as to how such respectable people as the Tagores of Bengal, associated with the great Rabindranath himself, could countenance a daughter of their extended family, Sharmila Tagore, a popular film star of the era, acting in movies.
I inherited the gulf between my father’s and my mother’s origins as a split in my own psyche. My father’s ‘Lahori’ family had always placed high hopes in their eldest son. He had been brilliant in his studies, effortlessly standing first in his class in school and college. With his intellectual gifts, they took it for granted that he would be the first one in the family to move out of the Indian world of Lahore’s bazaars into the Indo-Anglian world represented by Model Town, perhaps even Lawrence Gardens. This move, a couple of miles in geographical distance but vast in cultural space, was the dream of many young middle-class men of his generation. The surest passport to this other world was by passing the competitive examination for the provincial civil service, an examination which incorporated essentially a similar dream that the Indian Administrative Service does today for hundreds of thousands of young men and women from the villages and small towns of India. The written examination with an interview at the end was extremely difficult; only four to five candidates from all over Punjab were recruited for the service each year. The other routes to the Indo-Anglian world were through officer training in the army, professional studies in law, engineering or medicine, or, through the most prestigious examination of them all, the Indian Civil Service or ICS for short. The entry into the ICS, the ‘steel frame’ of around 1500 officials posted throughout India, had been open to Indians for some years but the majority in the higher rungs of the service were still expatriate Britishers.
My father’s family was comfortably off but did not have enough money to finance his years of study in England which was considered essential for passing the examination. This is the official version. I believe the examination for the ‘heaven-born’ ICS, for which one ideally prepared in England, was well within my father’s intellectual capability but beyond his cultural competence. To enter the service, the young man (there were no women in the ICS) had to be at least a second if not third generation out of the bazaars so as to possess the natural ease with Western manners and social sangfroid that upper class British interviewers looked for in Indian recruits who were to be moulded into passable imitations of themselves. As a young man just out of college, my father did not know how to eat with a knife and fork. He was sublimely unaware of the difference between a pink gin and gin and tonic; indeed, brought up to value the nourishing properties of milk and lassi and never having tasted alcohol, he would not have known the difference between whisky and rum. He had played gilli danda in the alleys of Machhi Hatta but his acquaintance with the subtleties of cricket was slight. He neither rode, nor played tennis nor danced; he would have been tongue-tied in the presence of any young woman who was not a member of the family. What he loved was Indian-style wrestling on the banks of the river Ravi early in the morning and declaiming Sanskrit verse to admiring friends—the romantic poetry of Kalidasa in his youth and, later, when he grew older, the more cynical verse of Bhartrihari.
Though my father had studied and appreciated the classics of English literature and wrote a grammatically correct prose, he rarely had occasion to speak the language when he was growing up. He was uncertain about the correct pronunciation of many English words—a certain recipe for disaster in the ICS interviews. Later, my mother, my sister and I, all of us second-generation immigrants into the Indo-Anglian world, educated in convent schools run by British and Irish missionaries, often teased him about his English accent and pronunciation of English words. He loved this teasing, even encouraged it, for instance, even after we children had corrected him many times, he deliberately continued to pronounce ‘meadow’ as ‘meedow’, exciting hoots of our delighted laughter. His self-deprecating grin on these occasions did not succeed in hiding his pride that he had made it possible for his children to fulfil his own ‘lack’—to speak English with correct pronunciation and with a minimum of Indian lilt in its intonation. As an adult, when I was consciously trying to get a Punjabi lilt back into my spoken English, there was always a twinge of guilt for betraying one of my father’s cherished hopes for his children.
My father’s family’s dream of their eldest son moving into the world of the ‘sahibs’ almost came crashing down even before it was heaven-borne. There were four vacancies available in the provincial civil service in 1934, the year he sat for the examination. He was tied for the fourth place with two other young men, a Muslim and a Sikh. On rejection of one of the successful aspirants on medical grounds, the other
two candidates were selected on the basis that they had performed better in the oral interview conducted, of course, in English. My father believed that his relatively bad performance was not only due to his deplorable accent but also because of his ‘bad personality’, which he equated with his short stature. This was a disaster since he could not appear for the examination again in the following year as he would have crossed the permissible age limit. My father petitioned the Governor of Punjab, meticulously detailing his case and ending with the grovelling language Indians used in their communications with the Raj: ‘Your Excellency’s humble petitioner begs to appeal, in the end, to Your Excellency’s well-known sense of justice and fairness and prays that the post to which he is entitled be kindly bestowed on him.’ An exception was made in that he was allowed to appear for the examination again in the following year, a test which he safely negotiated.
My mother was seventeen when she married my father. Pitaji, who was enthusiastic about the match, saw my father as a ‘comer’ who reminded him of himself at that age—brilliant, hard-working, a selfmade man—and accepted the offer of marriage when it was brought to him by a mutual acquaintance of the two families. My mother, who idealized her father, did not reproach him for the marriage. Somewhere, she may have even felt flattered that her adored father had selected a husband for her who was in his own image. When asked by my grandmother whether she approved, she is reported to have said, ‘Whatever Pitaji thinks best.’
Later, she blamed her mother for not intervening to stop the arranged match. My father was not only a Lahori but he was short and dark, though not at all as ugly as he always thought himself to be. Moreover, he was not even in the ICS but was a member of the lowly provincial service, the PCS. My mother felt that Mataji had taken a keener interest in the marriages of her two younger sisters and that she valued her other sons-in-law more than my father. Envy was not a missing emotion in my mother’s relationship with her sisters. They had graduated from college while she had dropped out of college because of her impending marriage. The sisters had not only married later but also ‘better’. Kamla was to marry an ICS man and the youngest sister, Prem, a businessman. The latter could theoretically be looked down upon as being in ‘trade’, except, as I have said before, when the businessman is extremely rich, which Prem’s husband was. In a letter to my father from Lahore, dated September 1943, the envy is palpable. After she has written about her money problems my mother mentions that her sister Prem who ‘came with her husband from Kashmir [where they had a holiday home], stayed at 8, Lawrence Road, for three days and [they] have now gone to Poona for the horse races’. That Kamla’s marriage ended tragically with the murder of her husband a few months after her marriage and Prem’s marriage turned out to be a disaster because of her husband’s alcohol abuse and its associated violence after he lost most of his wealth when they migrated to India as refugees after Partition, must have felt to her as some kind of divine restitution.
