The Writer and the World (6 page)

“Lady Chatterley?” the head interrupted. He had, mysteriously, understood.

The Professor cast him a swift look of gratitude and ended with relief, “This is the value of literature.”

P
OOR PROFESSOR
, poor India. Yet not poor—that was only the estimate of the onlooker. The Professor, and the other officers we had met, considered themselves successful. In the midst of insecurity, they
drew their rupees. The rupees were few but regular; they set a man apart. All of India that was secure was organized on this tender basis of mutual protection; no one would apply to others the sanctions he feared might one day be applied to himself. Survival—the regularity of the rupees—was all that mattered. Standards, of wealth, nourishment, comfort, were low; and so, inevitably, were those of achievement. It took little to make a man happy and free him of endeavour. Duty was irrelevant; the last thing to ask in any situation of security was
why.
A colleague of the Professor’s had said that the problems of teachers in the district were two: “Estatus and emolument.” (But he liked alliteration; he described his pupils as “rustics or ruffians.”)

So the abstractions and good intentions of New Delhi—the dangerous administrative capital, all words and buildings, where chatterers flourished and misinterpreted the interest of the world, where analysts who had never considered the vacuum in which they operated reduced the problems of India to the day-to-day scheming of politicians, and newspapers, which had never analyzed their function, reported these schemings at length and thought they had done their duty to a country of five hundred million—so the abstractions of New Delhi remained abstractions, growing progressively feebler, all the way down. Insecurity merged with the Indian intellectual failure and became part of the Indian drabness.

And the physical drabness itself, answering the drabness of mind: that also held the Indian deficiency. Poverty alone did not explain it. Poverty did not explain the worn carpets of the five-star Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi, the grimy armchairs in the serviceless lounge, the long-handled broom abandoned there by the menial in khaki who had been cleaning the ventilation grilles. Poverty did not explain the general badness of expensive, over-staffed hotels, the dirt of first-class railway carriages and the shantytown horror of their meals. Poverty did not explain the absence of trees: even the Himalayan foothills near the resort of Naini Tal stripped to brown, heat-reflecting desert. Poverty did not explain the open stinking sewers of the new middle-class Lake Gardens suburb in Calcutta. This was at the level of security, the rupees regularly drawn. It did not speak only of an ascetic denial of the senses or of the sands blowing in from the encroaching desert. It spoke of a more general collapse of sensibility, of a people grown barbarous, indifferent and
self-wounding, who, out of a shallow perception of the world, have no sense of tragedy.

It is what appals about India. The palace crumbles into the dust of the countryside. But prince has always been peasant; there is no loss. The palace might rise again; but, without a revolution in the mind, that would not be renewal.

A
YEAR OR SO AGO AN
I
NDIAN
holy man announced that he had fulfilled an old ambition and was at last able to walk on water. The holy man was claimed by a progressive Bombay weekly of wide circulation. A show was arranged. Tickets were not cheap; they went to among the highest in the land. On the day there were film teams. The water tank was examined by distinguished or sceptical members of the audience. They found no hidden devices. At the appointed time the holy man stepped on the water, and sank.

There was more than embarrassment. There was loss. Magic is an Indian need. It simplifies the world and makes it safe. It complements a shallow perception of the world, the Indian intellectual failure, which is less a failure of the individual intellect than the deficiency of a closed civilization, ruled by ritual and myth.

In Madras State the Congress had been overthrown in the elections. The red-and-black flags of the Dravidian party were out everywhere, and it was at first like being in a colony celebrating independence. But this was a victory that could be fully understood only in Hindu terms. It was the revenge of South on North, Dravidian on Aryan, non-brahmin on brahmin. Accounts had been squared with the Hindu epics themselves, sacred texts of Aryan victory: no need now to rewrite them from the Dravidian side, as had been threatened.

The students of a college held a meeting to “felicitate”—the Indian English word—a minister-designate. “The evening is cool and mild winds are tickling us,” a student said in his speech of welcome. He was heckled; the evening was hot. But we had moved away from reality already: the student was inviting the minister-designate to drown
the audience “in the honey of his oration.” The minister-designate responded with pieces of advice. A cunning man never smiled; at the same time it was wrong for anyone to keep on laughing all the time. Some people could never forget the loss of a small coin; others could lose six argosies on the ocean and be perfectly calm. Reality was now destroyed, and we were deep in the world of old fairytale: the folk-wisdom, the honey, that was the satisfying substitute, even among politically active students, for observation, analysed experience and inquiry.

The national newspaper that reported this reception also reported a religious discourse:

This, in South India, was still news. There had been an election, though, a process of the twentieth century. And here, on the main news page of another newspaper, were post-election headlines:

A nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself: it was the impression Indians most frequently gave when they attempted analysis. At one moment they were expressing the old world, of myth and magic, alone; at another they were interpreting the new in terms of the old.

•   •   •

T
HERE
is an 1899 essay,
Modern India
, in which Swami Vivekananda, the Vedantist, takes us closer to the Indian bewilderment and simplicity. Vivekananda came from Bengal, the quickest province of India. He was pained by the subjection of his country and his own racial humiliation. He was also pained by the caste divisions of Hinduism, the holy contempt of the high for the low, the “walking carrion” of Aryan abuse. Vivekananda himself was of the Kayastha caste, whose status is still in dispute. In religion Vivekananda later found compensation enough: he exported the Vedas to the West itself, and found admirers.
Modern India
can be seen as a link between Vivekananda’s political distress and its religious resolution. It is an interpretation of Indian history in apocalyptic Hindu terms which barely conceal ideas borrowed from the West.

Every country, Vivekananda states axiomatically, is ruled in succession by the four castes of priests, warriors, merchants and
shudras
, the plebs. India’s top castes have decayed. They have failed in their religious duties, and they have also cut themselves off from the source of all power, the
shudras.
India is therefore in a state of
“shudra-hood,”
which perfectly accommodates the rule of the
vaishya
or merchant power of Britain.
Shudra
rule, though, is about to come to the West; and there is the possibility, in India as well as in the West, of a “rising of the
shudra
class,
with their
shudra-
hood.”
The emphasis is Vivekananda’s; and from his curious position he appears to welcome the prospect, while saying at the same time that
shudra-hood
can be rejected by India, just as “Europe, once the land of
shudras
enslaved by Rome, is now filled with
kshatriya
[warrior] valour.”

So, out of mock-Western historical inquiry, out of borrowed ideas and personal pain, Vivekananda reduces the condition of his country to a subject for simple, though slightly distorted, Hindu religious contemplation. Failure was religious; redemption can come only through religion, through a rediscovery by each caste of its virtuous duty and—at the same time—through a discovery by India of the brotherhood of all Indians.

Modern India
is part of the unread but steadily reprinted literature of Indian nationalism. It is not easy to read. It wanders, is frequently confused, and is full of the technicalities of Hindu metaphysics. It could never have been easily understood. But with Indian sages like Vivekananda, utterance is enough; the message is not important. A nation exchanging banalities with itself: it cannot be otherwise, when
regeneration is believed to come, not through a receptiveness to thought, however imperfect, but through magic, through reverential contact with the powerful, holy or wise. The man himself is the magic.

There is a whole department of the Central Government at work on The Complete Works of Mahatma Gandhi; they have an entry, under that name, in the Delhi telephone directory. But
The Hindu
newspaper of Madras reported in March that 90 per cent of high-school students in one district knew nothing of Gandhi except that he was a good man who had fought for independence. In a southern city I met a twenty-year-old Dravidian student. He was a product of independence, privileged; and we met at, of all twentieth-century things, an air show. The uncertain native, of Jabalpur or Gerrard’s Cross, seeks to establish his standing in the eyes of the visitor by a swift statement of his prejudices. And all this student’s social attitudes were anti-Gandhian. This was news to him. He reverenced the name. It was the name alone, the incantatory magic, that had survived.

Mind will not be allowed to play on the problems of India. It is part of the Indian frustration.

B
UT NOW
I
NDIANS
have a sense of wrongness. They have begun to feel, like the Spaniards, that they are an inadequate people; and, like the Spaniards, they feel they are inadequate only because they are uniquely gifted. “Intelligent” is the word Indians use most often to describe themselves, and the romantic view is gaining ground that they might be intelligent to the point of insanity. In India self-examination is abortive. It ends only in frenzy or in generalities about the Indian “character.”

The humanities are borrowed disciplines that always turn discussions about famine or bankruptcy into university tutorials. There can be no effective writing. The ritual of Indian life smothers the imagination, for which it is a substitute, and the interpretation of India in the Indian novel, itself a borrowed form, is at a low, unchanging level. “I don’t wait for another
novel,”
Graham Greene says of the Indian writer he admires; he waits for an encounter with another stranger, “a door on to yet another human existence.” The Delhi novelist R. Prawer Jhabvala has moved away from the purely Indian themes with which she started; she feels unsupported by the material.

In such a situation the novel is almost part of autobiography, and
there have been many Indian autobiographies. These—always with the exception of the work of Nirad Chaudhuri—magnify the Indian deficiency. Gandhi drops not one descriptive word about London in the 188os, and even Mr. Nehru cannot tell us what it was like to be at Harrow before 1914. The world in these books is reduced to a succession of stimuli, and the reacting organism reports codified pleasure or pain: the expression of an egoism so excluding that the world, so far from being something to be explored, at times disappears, and the writers themselves appear maimed and incomplete. All Indian autobiographies appear to be written by the same incomplete person.

So the sense of wrongness remains unresolved. But it is possible now for the visitor to raise the question and at times to tease out a little more, especially from men under thirty-five. At a dinner party in Delhi I met a young businessman who had studied in America and had felt himself at a disadvantage. He said, “I felt that intellectually”—the Indian pride!—“they were far below me. But at the same time I could see they had something which I didn’t have. How shall I say it? I felt they had something which had been
excised
out of me. A sort of motivational drive, you might call it.”

The jargon was blurring, but I felt that, for all his businessman’s adventurousness, he was like the peasants I had met some hundreds of miles away. It was a late afternoon of dust and cane-trash, and golden light through the mango trees. The peasants were boiling down sugarcane syrup into coarse brown sugar. The bullocks turned the mill; a black cauldron simmered over a fire-pit. A bare-backed, well-built young man scraped up sugar from the shallow brick trough level with the ground and pressed it into balls. His father
chewed pan
and watched. He said, just giving information, that his son had to write an examination in the morning. He would fail, of course; another son had written an examination six months before and had failed. In his mind, and perhaps in his son’s mind, there was no link between failure and this labour in the fields. The peasants were Kurmis, a caste who claim Rajput ancestry. The British-compiled gazetteers of the last century are full of praise for the Kurmis as diligent and adaptable cultivators; they are praised in exactly the same way by Indian officials today. But they have remained Kurmis, demanding only to have their Rajput blood acknowledged.

What had been excised out of the Kurmis had been excised out of the
businessman: “motivational drive,” that profound apprehension of cause and effect, which is where magic ends and the new world begins.