India (65 page)

That impression of an energetic, spreading civilization is heightened by Russell’s careful modesty, the character he gives himself as an observer who is conscious of his special reputation but at the same time knows his limitations. He will not compete with other experts; he will not describe again what he knows others have described. So he refuses to say anything about the wonders of ancient Egypt, or to say one word about the ‘much-vexed’ Mediterranean. Until he sets out on his march from Calcutta, his tone is
allusive; he is writing for his equals; he is an imperial traveller, travelling in a well-charted world.

Yet days out of Calcutta, moving at first in a horse-drawn covered cart, he seems to have gone back a century or two. Just days away from the comforts of Calcutta, he is among people to whom the wider world is unknown; who are without the means of understanding this world; people who after centuries of foreign invasions still cannot protect or defend themselves; people who – Pandy or Sikh, porter or camp-following Hindu merchant – run with high delight to aid the foreigner to overcome their brethren. That idea of ‘brethren’ – an idea so simple to Russell that the word is used by him with clear irony – is very far from the people to whom he applies it. The Muslims would have some idea of the unity of their faith; but that idea would always be qualified by the despotism of their rulers; and the Muslims would have no obligations to anyone outside their faith. The Hindus would have no loyalty except to their clan; they would have no higher idea of human association, no general idea of the responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea of human association, the country works blindly on, and all the bravery and skills of its people lead to nothing.

It is hard for an Indian not to feel humiliated by Russell’s book. Part of the humiliation the Indian feels comes from the ambiguity of his response, his recognition that the Indian system that is being overthrown has come to the end of its possibilities, that its survival can lead only to more of what has gone before, that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before; that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell’s march.

Nine years after Russell’s book was published, Gandhi was born. Twenty-one years after that, in 1890 (when Russell would have been sixty-eight years old, with three more
My Diary
war-books to his name, one in 1861,
My Diary North and South
, about the American Civil War, another in 1866 about the Austro-Prussian War, and a third in 1870 about the Franco-Prussian War), in 1890 Gandhi was a law student in London, coping as best he could with
the bewilderment of a cultural journey the opposite of Russell’s Indian journey in 1858. Ten years after that, in 1900 (five years after Russell had received a knighthood), Gandhi was in South Africa, campaigning for the rights of Indians who, 20 or 25 years after the Mutiny, had been sent out as indentured immigrants to many of the former slave colonies of the British Empire, to work on the plantations. And then in 1914 (seven years after Russell’s death: the 86 years of the newspaperman’s life entirely contained within the period of imperial glory), Gandhi was getting ready to go back to India, wondering how to get started there, how to make use of the political-religious lessons he had learned in South Africa.

From 1857 to 1914, from the Indian Mutiny to the outbreak of the Great War – it isn’t long, and great things are seeded in that time. But look back over the 100 years before the Mutiny: right through this period there is an unvarying impression of a helpless, trampled-over country, never itself since the Muslim invasions, wealth eternally squeezed out of it, with a serf population always at work, in the fields, building fortifications, for kings that change and kingdoms with fluid, ever-shifting borders.

‘I shall never cease thinking, that rational liberty makes men virtuous; and virtue, happy: wishing therefore ardently for universal happiness, I wish for universal liberty. But your observation on the Hindu is too just: they are incapable of civil liberty; few of them have an idea of it; and those, who have, do not wish it. They must (I deplore the evil, but know the necessity of it) they must be ruled by an absolute power; and I feel my pain much alleviated by knowing the natives themselves … are happier under us than they were or could have been under the Sultans of Delhi or petty Rajas.’

The words are by a great 18th-century British scholar, Sir William Jones. They come from a letter he wrote in 1786 from Calcutta to an American friend at the other end of the world, in Virginia. Seventy-five years before William Howard Russell’s journey to India, Sir William Jones – at the age of thirty-seven – had gone to Calcutta as a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court. There were no railways or steamers then, no short cut through Egypt; the journey to India was around the Cape of Good Hope, and could take five months; one out of three letters between India and England was lost. Sir William Jones wanted to make his fortune in India. For five years he had angled for an Indian appointment, for
the great money it offered. He hoped, once he was in India, to make £30,000 in six years; he was obsessed by that figure. Such were the sums to be made out of the servility and wretchedness of India – trampled over, but always working blindly on.

His talk – to his American correspondent – of liberty and happiness was not disingenuous. William Jones loved the idea of civil liberty, and was a supporter of American independence. He had made three visits to Benjamin Franklin in Paris; and at one time he had even thought of going out to settle in Philadelphia. He was of modest middle-class origins (one grandfather a well-known cabinet-maker). Though he was a lawyer and a fellow of an Oxford college, and famous as an extraordinary scholar of eastern languages, he always in England needed the support of an aristocratic patron. That was why he wanted the £30,000 from India: for his own freedom. And he was unusual: he gave back to India as much as he took. In Bengal, while he did his important and original work on Indian laws, and regularly sent back his money to England to add to his growing hoard, he was also – for no money, for love, learning, glory – going deep into Sanskrit and other languages, talking with brahmins, recovering and translating ancient texts. He brought many of the attitudes of the 18th-century enlightenment to India. In the cultural ruins of much-conquered India he saw himself like a man of the Renaissance in the ruins of the classical world.

This is from a very long journal-letter he sent back to his patron, the second Earl Spencer, in 1787, towards the end of his fourth year in Bengal: To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the
Brahmans
for the priests of
Jupiter …
’

William Jones made more than the £30,000 he had set his heart on; he amassed nearly £50,000. It took him almost 11 years to do so. The thought of the money would have comforted him; but the
money itself did him no good. His wife went back a sick woman to England. The year after, when he was getting ready to follow her, he died, and was buried in Calcutta. He was forty-eight.

He, and people like him, gave to Indians the first ideas they had of the antiquity and value of their civilization. Those ideas gave strength to the nationalist movement more than 100 years later. And those ideas travelled very far. In Trinidad, in colonial days, and before India became independent, those ideas about our civilization were almost all that we had to hold on to: as children we were taught, for instance, what Goethe had said about
Shankuntala
, the Sanskrit play that Sir William Jones had translated in 1789.

What luck that bit of knowledge should have come our way! Sanskrit was considered a sacred language; only priests and brahmins could read the texts. William Jones had to get the help of a Hindu medical man to translate the play; and even in our own century pious people could get fierce about the sacredness of the language. Nearly 200 years after William Jones had translated the play, someone in independent India asked Vinoba Bhave, an imitation-Gandhi, seen by some as a kind of spiritual lightning-conductor for the country, what he thought of
Shakuntala
. The idle fellow replied angrily, ‘I have never read the
Shakuntala
, and never shall. I do not learn the language of the gods to amuse myself with trifles.’

It is a wonder that, with this internal destructiveness, the play survived; that some knowledge of our cultural past should have come down to us. For every Indian the British period in India is full of ambiguities. For me, with my background – the migration from that overpopulated Gangetic plain 20 or 25 years after William Howard Russell had crossed it in imperial, Times-correspondent style, with servants and tents and access to the staff mess of headquarters; and the darkness which for so long blocked my own past as a result of that migration – for me there are special ambiguities.

It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a depressive’s exaggeration, or a far-away colonial’s exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts – of law and freedom and wide human association – which give men self-awareness and strength, the accidents which have brought us to the point where we can in a way meet William Howard Russell,
even in those ‘impressions made on my senses by the externals of things’, not with equality – time cannot be bent in that way – but with something like lucidity.

So I could go only part of the way with Rashid in this contemplation of the recent past. I had no idea of a state of glory from which there had been a decline or a break; and I had no easy idea of an enemy. Growing up in far-off Trinidad, I had no idea of clan or region, none of the supports and cushions of people in India. Like Gandhi among the immigrant Indians of South Africa, and for much the same reasons, I had developed instead the idea of the kinship of Indians, the idea of the family of India. And in my attempt to come to terms with history, my criticism, my bewilderment and sorrow, was turned inward, focussing on the civilization and the social organization that had given us so little protection.

People in India didn’t feel as I did. Perhaps – being in India, and having to order their day-to-day lives there – they couldn’t feel or allow themselves to feel like that. But in Delhi this time I met a publisher whose sorrow went beyond mine. His name was Vishwa Nath. He was in his seventies. His family had lived in Delhi for 400 years. There was a story in his family that during the Mutiny, at the time of the British siege, they had had to abandon the family house and take refuge somewhere else. One episode out of many: Vishwa Nath’s thoughts, as a Hindu, went back much further than the Mutiny, went back centuries.

He said, ‘When I read the history of India, I weep sometimes.’

He was fourteen at the time of Gandhi’s salt march in 1931. Ever since then he had worn Indian homespun.

He said, ‘Gandhi made us a nation. We were like rats. He made men out of us.’

Rats!

But he was speaking almost technically. ‘Man as a species has been trying to kill off rats all through his existence on the earth, but he has never succeeded. Even in New York they haven’t succeeded. Similarly, we have been subdued, subjected to torture, conquest – but nobody has been able to kill us off. That has been the strong point of our civilization. But how do you live? Just like rats.’

He hated the idea of caste: ‘the main reason why we are slaves’.
And he had what I had never had: a clear idea of the enemy. The brahmins were the enemy – yet again, and more than 1000 miles north of the anti-brahmin politics of the South.

‘The brahmins let the country down, during all those dreadful invasions by the Mohammedans. All through, they went on chanting their prayers, their
havans:
“God will protect us.” ’

With his homespun and his nationalism, his sense of history, and his reverence for Gandhi, there was his – seemingly contradictory – rejection of religion. The mixture made for a special passion, and Vishwa Nath’s passion came out in the magazines he edited and published in four languages. His women’s magazines were especially successful.
Woman’s Era
was a fortnightly in English. It had been started 15 years before, and it had damaged the older English-language women’s magazines. It sold about 120,000 copies now; it was the best-selling women’s magazine in English. Vishwa Nath thought he could take it up to half a million.

I don’t believe I had ever looked at an Indian women’s magazine. I had taken them for granted. I had been aware of them, knew some of the names. It had never occurred to me that in India they would have had a unique evolution. As soon as the idea came to me, I saw that it couldn’t be otherwise, in a society still so ritualized, so full of religious rules and clan rules, where most marriages were arranged, and the opportunity or need for adventure was not great.

I had heard about
Woman’s Era
in Bombay. Its success was spoken of as something extraordinary; but people I met didn’t care for the magazine itself. It was thought uneducated and backward-looking – in spite of what I was to learn later in Delhi of the editor’s iconoclasm and reforming mission. The magazine was extraordinary because it had found a new kind of working-woman reader. A reader of that sort who spent scarce rupees on an English-language magazine might have been thought to have social and cultural ambitions. But that wasn’t true of the
Woman’s Era
reader; and that was part of her oddity. She was content with her old, shut-in world.