Literary Occasions (17 page)

The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden. Hence, more than twenty years later, the tears in Cyprus.

March 1983

THE DERELICTION
of India overwhelms the visitor; and it seems reasonable to imagine that the Indian who leaves his country, and all its assumptions, for the first time is likely to be unsettled. But in Indian autobiographies
*
there is no hint of unsettlement: people are their designations and functions, and places little more than their names. “We reached Southampton, as far as I can remember, on a Saturday.” This is Gandhi writing in 1925 of his arrival in England as a student in 1889. That it was a Saturday was more important to him than that he had exchanged Bombay for Southampton. He had landed in a white flannel suit and couldn’t get at his luggage until Monday. So Southampton is no more than an experience of embarrassment and is never described; as later London, never described, is converted into a series of small spiritual experiences, the vows of vegetarianism and chastity being more important than the city of the 1890s. A place is its name.

We are forty years beyond Gandhi, but the tone in
Punjabi Century,
the memoirs of a high business executive, remains the same. India is one place, England another. There can be no contrast, no shock in reverse. It is only near the end of
My Public Life
that Sir Mirza Ismail, after listing the recommendations he made to President Sukarno for the improvement of the Indonesian administration—he recommended four new colleges, five new stadiums and “publication of the President’s speeches in book form”—it is only after this that he observes:

The effect is startling, for until that moment the talk had mostly been of parks and gardens and factories, and of benevolent and appreciative rulers. We have to wait until Nirad Chaudhuri’s
Passage to England,
published in 1959, for something more explicit.

The attitude might be interpreted as aristocratic; in no country is aristocracy as easy as in India. But we are in reality dealing with something more limiting and less comprehensible: the Indian habit of exclusion, denial, non-seeing. It is part of what Nirad Chaudhuri calls the “ignoble privacy” of Indian social
organization; it defines by negatives. It is a lack of wonder, the medieval attribute of a people who are still surrounded by wonders; and in autobiographies this lack of wonder is frequently converted into a hectic self-love.

For its first half Gandhi’s autobiography reads like a fairytale. He is dealing with the acknowledged marvels of his early life; and his dry, compressed method, reducing people to their functions and simplified characteristics, reducing places to names and action to a few lines of narrative, turns everything to legend. When the action becomes more complex and political, the method fails; and the book declines more obviously into what it always was: an obsession with vows, food experiments, recurring illness, an obsession with the self. “Thoughts of self,” Chaudhuri writes in
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,

In
Punjabi Century
Prakash Tandon seems to set out to tell the story of the transformation of the Punjab from 1857 to 1947. He barely attempts the theme. He minutely describes festivals, marriage customs, his father’s engineering duties, the various family houses; and the book is transformed into a tribute to his province, his caste, his family and himself: it contains an embarrassing account of his courtship in Sweden, to which is added an injured and recognizably Indian account of his difficulties in getting a job. “Friends not only in my own country but scattered on three continents have suggested I should write my memoirs,” Sir Mirza Ismail says.

Not a few of these letters are tributes to the writer. “You’re a wonder!” writes Lord Willingdon. “I would like to name a road after you,” writes the Maharaja of Jaipur.

An old-fashioned Muslim vizier, a modern Hindu businessman, the Mahatma: assorted personalities, but recognizably of the same culture. “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West,” a “God-fearing” friend said to Gandhi on the Mahatma’s day of silence. “I know of nobody in the East having written one except amongst those who have come under western influence.” And it is in this bastard form—in which a religious view of life, laudable in one culture, is converted steadily into self-love, disagreeable in another culture—that we can begin to see the misunderstandings and futility of the Indo-English encounter.

The civilizations were, and remain, opposed; and the use of English heightens the confusion. When Gandhi came to England for the Round Table Conference in 1931 he stayed for a night at a Quaker guest-house in the Ribble Valley. The garden was in bloom. In the evening Gandhi, in sandals, dhoti and shawl, walked among the flowers. He scarcely looked at them. The story is told by Tandon, who got it from the warden.

But was it strictly a “return to nature” that Gandhi advocated? Wasn’t it something more complex? Was Gandhi’s aim to reawaken wonder, or was it rather an unconscious striving after a symbolism acceptable to the Indian masses, a political exploitation, however unconscious, of the “ignoble privacy” of Indian attitudes? The Gandhian concept is not easily translated. A “return to nature” and “patriotism”: in India the concepts are linked; and the Indian concept of patriotism is unique. Tandon
tells how, in 1919, the Independence movement made its first impression on his district.

We are in fact dealing with the type of society which Camus described in the opening chapter of
The Rebel:
a society which has not learned to see and is incapable of assessing itself, which asks no questions because ritual and myth have provided all the answers, a society which has not learned “rebellion.” An unfortunate word perhaps, with its juvenile, romantic 1950s associations; but it is the concept which divides, not the East from the West, but India from almost every other country. It explains why so much writing about India is unsatisfactory and one-sided, and it throws into relief the stupendous achievement of Nirad Chaudhuri’s
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
which, containing within itself both India and the West, has had the misfortune of being taken for granted by both sides.

Chaudhuri’s
Autobiography
may be the one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter. No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West—and, by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another—will be or can now be written. It was an encounter which ended in mutual recoil and futility. For Chaudhuri this futility is an almost personal
tragedy. Yet we can now see that this futility was inevitable. To the static, minutely ordered Indian society, with its pressures ever towards the self, England came less as a political shock than as the source of a New Learning. Chaudhuri quotes from
Rajani,
a Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterji:

The astonishing thing about this novel is its date, which is 1877. Kipling’s
Plain Tales
were to appear in book form just eleven years later, to reveal the absurdity of this New Learning, nourished by books alone. Between the New Learning and its representatives in Simla there was a gap. Dead civilizations alone ought properly to provide a New Learning. This civilization survived; it had grown suburban and philistine, was soon to become proletarian; and it was fitting that from 1860 to 1910, which Chaudhuri fixes as the period of the Indian Renaissance, the educated Bengali should have been an object of especial ridicule to the English, to whom the unintellectual simplicities of the blue-eyed Pathan were more comprehensible. Chaudhuri, lamenting the death of the Indian Renaissance, and the corrupting, “elemental” Westernization that took its place, pays little attention to this aspect of the encounter.

The élite Indo-English culture of Bengal was as removed
from the Anglo-Indian culture of Simla as it was removed from the culture of the Indian masses. It was a growth of fantasy; the political liberalism it bred could not last. It was to give way to the religious revivalism of a mass movement, to all the combative hocus-pocus of revived “Vedic” traditions such as the launching of ships with coconut-milk instead of champagne, and finally to that cultural confusion which some sentences of Tandon’s illustrate so well:

Language has at last broken down. Gao Mata, Ram Rajya: for these there are no English equivalents. We can see “national pride” now as an applied phrase, with a special Indian meaning. In the definition of Ram Rajya the true stress falls on “plenty,” while “freedom” is an intrusive English
word.
Here is the futility of the Indo-English encounter, the intellectual confusion of the “new” India. This is the great, tragic theme of Chaudhuri’s book.

1965

*
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
, by M. K. Gandhi, translated by Mahadev Desai, 1966.
Punjabi Century,
by Prakash Lal Tandon, 1963.
My Public Life,
by Mirza Ismail, 1954.
A Passage to England,
by Nirad Chaudhuri, 1959.
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
by Nirad Chaudhuri, 1951.

YOU DON’T
have to wait long for the characteristic Nirad Chaudhuri note in
The Continent of Circe.
It occurs, unmistakably, almost before the book begins; yet it has the effect of a climax. There is a frontispiece with two views from the author’s verandah in Delhi: one looking up to clouds, one looking down to refugee tents. The title page has a Latin device:
“De rerum indicarum natura: Exempla gentium et seditionum.”
The motto—“Know Thyself”—follows, in five Indo-European languages. Seven detailed contents pages come next. And then we come to text: six pages, a chapter almost, headed “In Gratitude.” Chaudhuri begins by thanking Khushwant Singh, “the well-known Sikh writer, good companion, and man-about-town, for the loan of his portable typewriter.” This seems straightforward enough; but it soon becomes clear that we have to do with an incident.

It is like this. Chaudhuri is tapping away on Khushwant’s machine. He is nearing the end of one of the sections of his book and his gratitude to Khushwant, as he says, is at its highest. A “public print” comes his way. It is “the official publication of the American Women’s Club of Delhi.” It contains “An Interview with Khushwant Singh”:

Chaudhuri is “struck all of a heap”:

Khushwant explains. His statement has been given the wrong emphasis. He thought he was only entertaining a lady to tea; he had no idea what her real intention was. He offers Chaudhuri a brand-new portable typewriter as a gift:

And a footnote adds:

So much about the typewriters on which the book was written; the Americans, though, continue to receive attention for a whole page.

IT IS
impossible to take an interest in Nirad Chaudhuri’s work without becoming involved with his situation and “personality.” This has been his extra-literary creation since the publication in 1951 of his
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.
The book made him known. But in India it also made him disliked.
Cruelly, it did not lessen his poverty; this mighty work, which in a fairer world would have made its author’s fortune and seen him through old age, is now out of print. So, persecuted where not neglected, as he with some reason feels, he sits in Delhi, massively disapproving, more touchy than before, more out of touch with his fellows, never ceasing to attract either the slights of the high or the disagreeable attentions of the low.

His fellow passengers on the Delhi buses wish to know the time. Without inquiry they lift his wrist, consult his wrist-watch, and then without acknowledgement let his wrist drop. Sometimes he walks; and, in a land of “massive staticity,” where when men walk it is as if “rooted trees were waving in the wind,” he walks “in the European manner, that is to say, quickly and with a sense of the goal towards which I am going.” Elderly people shout after him, “Left! Right! Left! Right!” Boys call out, “Johnnie Walker!” Sometimes they come right up to him and jeer in Hindi:
“Aré Jahny.”
It is not even the Johnnie Walker of the whisky label they refer to, but “a caricature of him by an Indian film star”:

Indoors it is hardly less dangerous. The London Philharmonic Orchestra comes to Delhi. Chaudhuri talks music to Sir Malcolm Sargent; an English lady whispers to Mrs. Chaudhuri, “What a bold man he is!” He goes to the concert the next day; the British Council has provided tickets. He finds that he is separated from his wife by the aisle. An upper-class Indian lady claims that he is sitting on her chair. She is wrong; she objects
then to his proximity; she calls the upper-class usherettes to her aid. He yields; he takes his chair across the aisle to join his wife.

The extra-literary Chaudhuri “personality” is more than a creation of art; the suffering, however self-induced, is too real. Nearly seventy, he is a solitary, in hurtful conflict at every level with his environment.

FAILURE:
it is Chaudhuri’s obsession. There is the personal failure: twenty years of poverty and humiliation dismissed in a single, moving sentence in the
Autobiography.
There is the failure as a scholar, recorded in the
Autobiography
and echoed in the present book.

There is the failure, or rather the futility, of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Bengali culture, Chaudhuri’s own, set against the larger futility of British rule. These were the interwoven themes of the monumental
Autobiography.
Now Chaudhuri addresses himself to a more encompassing failure: the failure of his country, his race and the land itself,
Aryavarta,
the land of the Aryans.

He has called
The Continent of Circe
an “Essay on the Peoples of India.” But his subject is really the Hindus; and his starting-point is the incomprehension, rapidly giving way to rage, which the Hindus have immemorially aroused in non-Hindus. Even E. M. Forster, Chaudhuri says, is more drawn to Muslims; and for all his pro-Indian sentiment, “there are few delineations of the Indian character more insultingly condescending” than those
in
A Passage to India.
Forster’s plea for Indo-British friendship reminds Chaudhuri of the poem:

“This massive, spontaneous, and uniform criticism by live minds … cannot be cancelled by afterthoughts which have their source in the
Untergang des Abendlandes.
” And Chaudhuri wishes to cancel nothing. He seeks only to explain. But the act of explaining frequently drives
him
to rage. Where the
Autobiography
was analytic, detached and underplayed, the Essay is strident and tendentious. Chaudhuri’s sense of failure and vulnerability, that personality, comes in the way; and it is as a display of personality that
The Continent of Circe
is best to be relished. It is at its most delicious when it is most passionate; and it is most passionate when, one suspects, it is most personal: in the account, for instance, of the “sob-chamber” of Hindu family life, where the only competition is in gloom and people can legitimately consider themselves provoked if they are told they are looking well. So, in Chaudhuri’s essay as much as in the work of any uncomprehending foreigner, “Hindu” ends by being almost a word of abuse.

Hindus pacifist? Rubbish, says Chaudhuri. Hindus are militarist, have always been; it is only their inefficiency that makes them less of a menace to the world. To prove this he gives selective historical examples and interprets the frontier conflict with China in a way that will not be faulted in Peking. Again: “The industrial revolution in India at its most disinterested is an expression of anti-European and anti-Western nationalism.” This is possible; but it cannot be squared with what immediately follows: “a far stronger force, in actual fact the positive force, is the Hindu’s insatiable greed for money.” This, at first, seems too
meaningless a statement even for simple denial. But he is making an important point; he is speaking of what some people in India call the “pigmy mentality” of the Indian capitalist:

So that the Indian industrial revolution, so far from being an expression of anti-Western nationalism, turns out to be a very petty, private thing indeed. Its cynicism might appear to some to be an extension of caste attitudes. And it might be expected that Chaudhuri would be critical of caste. Not at all. He asks us to keep off the caste question if we don’t want to pound India to dust. Caste is the only thing that holds Indian society together. It is “a natural compensation for man’s convergent zoological evolution and divergent psychological evolution.” Caste did not suppress mobility; that came only with the
Pax Britannica.
And the Chaudhuri flourish is added:

It might seem then that Chaudhuri, in an attempt to make a whole of Hindu attitudes, has succumbed to any number of Hindu contradictions. But I also feel that Chaudhuri, living in Delhi, enduring slights and persecution, has at last succumbed to what we might call the enemy. He sees India as too big; he has lost his gift of detachment, his world view. He seeks to expose where exposure is not really necessary. He has been taken in by
the glitter of “the diplomatic” at Delhi, the flurry of visitors, the cultural displays of competing governments. He exaggerates the importance of India and the interest taken in India. People in England, he says, “are still longing after [India] with the docility of cattle,” and the words make sad reading in London in 1965.

BUT THIS
is the theme of his polemic: that tropical India is the continent of Circe, drugging and destroying those whom it attracts, and that the Aryans, now Hindus, were the first to be lured from a temperate land, “denatured” and destroyed. Their philosophy is the philosophy of the devitalized. It is rooted in secular distress, the anguish of flesh on the Gangetic plain, where everything quickly decomposes and leads to
tamas,
a comprehensive squalor:

Be neurotically fussy about cleanliness; or—the greater spirituality—show your indifference to the extent of being able to eat excrement. Hindus are not philosophers; nor do they reverence philosophy. “What we respect are the sadhus, possessors of occult power.”

In Chaudhuri’s argument it follows without contradiction that a people obsessed with religion, really a “philosophy of sorrow,” are obsessed with sex. It is the great anodyne. “Defeat was on the fleshly plane … Rehabilitation must also be in the flesh.” The sex act in Hindu sculpture is not symbolic of any sort of spiritual union, as is sometimes said: it is no more than what it appears to be. With a loss of vitality this celebration of the senses declines into the “sex-obsessed chastity of the Hindu,
which is perhaps the most despicable ethical notion ever created in the moral evolution of any people”:

Well said; but it is on the subject of sex that Chaudhuri becomes most fanciful. Tracing the decline of vitality, he makes too much, one feels, of the emphasis in Sanskrit erotic writings on the pleasures of the
purushayita
or reversed position. Wasn’t it in such a position, if one reads right, that Lucius and Fotis first came together in
The Golden Ass
?

Chaudhuri writes of India as though India has never been written about before. He pays little attention to received ideas; he mentions no authorities:

He places the Aryan settlement of the Gangetic plain in the seventh century
B.C.
This will be offensive to those Indians who think of India as the Aryan heartland and, playing with millennia, like to think of Rome as a recent, and peripheral, disturbance. He allows no civilization worth the name to the indigenous Australoids, whom he calls the Darks. Rigid barriers were set up against them, and Chaudhuri—going back on some of his old views—claims that no significant intermingling of the races took place. The Darks, in their free or servile state, remain to this day genetically stable; and to this day, it might be added, the
burning of a giant effigy of a Dark is the climax of an annual Hindu pageant-play. Hindu
apartheid
quickly gave the Darks the psychology of a subject race. Chaudhuri retells a story from the
Ramayana,
the Hindu epic. It is reported one day to Rama, the Aryan hero, that the son of a brahmin has died suddenly. There can be only one explanation: an act of impiety. Rama goes out to have a look and, sure enough, finds that a young Dark has been performing Aryan religious rites. The Dark is at once decapitated and the brahmin’s son comes back to life. In later versions of the story the Dark dies happily: death at the hands of an Aryan is a sure way to heaven. Not even slavery created so complete a subjection.