The Writer and the World (7 page)

C
AUSATION
: it was the theme of the Buddha 2,500 years ago in the distressed land of Bihar. It was the theme 150 years ago of Raja Rammohun Roy, the first British-inspired Indian reformer. It is the necessary theme today. It is depressing, this cycle of similar reform and similar relapse. Reform doesn’t alter; it temporarily revives. Ritual and magic forever claim the world, however new its structure.

The process of relapse can be charted in our own time in the work of Vinoba Bhave, the Gandhian land-reformer of Bihar, who fifteen years ago made the cover of
Time
magazine. “I have come,”
Time
reported him saying, “to loot you with love.” His programme was simple: he would ask landowners to give away land to the landless. It was the spiritual way of India. “We are a people wedded to faith in God and do not give ourselves to the quibblings of reason. We believe in what our Rishis [sages] have taught us. I have the feeling that the present-day famines and other calamities are all due to our sins.” It was not therefore his business to think in any practical way of the food problem or of creating economic units of land. “Fire merely burns; it does not worry whether anyone puts a pot on it, fills it with water and puts rice into it to make a meal. It burns and that is the limit of its duty. It is for others to do theirs.”

With this there went ideas about education. “Human lives are like trees, which cannot live if they are cut off from the soil … Therefore, everyone must have the opportunity to tend the soil …” Agricultural work will also keep the population down, because it takes the mind off sex. Care has to be taken in choosing a craft for a school, though. Fishing, for example, wouldn’t do, because “I have to show [the children] how to deceive the fish”; poultry-keeping is better. Literature should not be neglected. “It is a fault in the Western system of education that it lays so little stress on learning great lines by heart.” But the best education is the one Krishna, the mythological-religious figure, received. “Shri Krishna grazed cattle, milked them, cleaned the cowshed, worked hard, hewed firewood …; later, as Arjuna’s charioteer, he not only drove his horses but also cared for them.”

It isn’t only that so much of this is absurd, or that Bhave was taken
seriously until recently. It is that Bhave’s sweetness adds up to a subtle but vital distortion of the Mahatma’s teaching. The stoic call to action and duty becomes, with Bhave, an exercise in self-perfection, an act of self-indulgence and holy arrogance. He will not see his responsibility through to the end; it is the duty of fire only to burn. He separates, in a way the Mahatma never did, the private religious act from its social purpose. He misapplies the doctrine of bread-labour by which the Mahatma hoped to ennoble all labour, including that of the untouchables. Bhave says that the untouchables do work which is “not worthy of human dignity”; they must become tillers and landowners. He leaves them, in effect, where he finds them. And he does nothing to solve the food problem which, in India, is related to the ignorant use of land.

Bhave goes back again and again to the scriptures: their rediscovery becomes an end in itself. So, in the name of reform, the Mahatma and goodness, Bhave slips into reaction. The old world claims its own.

Indians are proud of their ancient, surviving civilization. They are, in fact, its victims.

R
EFORM
this time will be more brutal. China presses; Pakistan threatens; non-alignment collapses and America drives hard bargains. The new world cannot be denied. Incapable of lasting reform, or of a correct interpretation of the new world, India is, profoundly, dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers; foreign journalists are more important in India than in any other country. And India is fragmented; it is part of her dependence. This is not the fragmentation of region, religion or caste. It is the fragmentation of a country held together by no intellectual current, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of a country without even an idea of a graded but linked society.

There is no true Indian aristocracy, no element that preserves the graces of a country and in moments of defeat expresses its pride. There have been parasitic landowners, tax-farmers; there have been rulers. They represented a brute authority; they were an imposed element on a remote peasantry; in moments of stress they have—with exceptions—proclaimed only their distance. They are the aptly named “native princes”; and though here and there their brute authority, of money or influence, has been reasserted, they have disappeared and nothing marks
their passing. In Hyderabad you wouldn’t have known that the Nizam had just died, that a dynasty older than Plassey had expired. Every Indian, prince or peasant, is a villager. All are separate and, in the decay of sensibility, equal.

There are contractors and civil servants in Delhi, where a “society lady” is usually a contractor’s wife. There are business executives in Calcutta, which still has an isolated, ageing set with British titles. There are the manufacturers and advertising men and film people of Bombay, where “suave,” “sophisticated,” and “prestigious” are words of especial approval. But these are trade guilds; they do not make a society. There is an absence of that element, to which all contribute and by which all are linked, where common standards are established and a changing sensibility appears to define itself. Each guild is separate. Even the politicians, with the state withering away for lack of ideas, are sterilized in their New Delhi reserve. And each trade—except the entertainment trade—is borrowed.

Every discipline, skill and proclaimed ideal of the modern Indian state is a copy of something which is known to exist in its true form somewhere else. The student of cabinet government looks to Westminster as to the answers at the back of the book. The journals of protest look, even for their typography, to the
New Statesman.
So Indians, the holy men included, have continually to look outside India for approval. Fragmentation and dependence are complete. Local judgment is valueless. It is even as if, without the foreign chit, Indians can have no confirmation of their own reality.

But India, though not a country, is unique. To its problems imported ideas no longer answer. The result is frenzy. The journals of revolt are regularly started; they are very private ventures, needing almost no readership and having responsibility to no one; within weeks they are exhausted and futile, part of the very thing they are revolting against. Manners deteriorate. Each Indian wishes to be the only one of his sort recognized abroad: like Mr. Nehru himself, who in the great days was described, most commonly, by visiting writers as the lonely Indian aristocrat—his own unexplained word—presiding over his deficient but devoted peasantry. Each Indian, looking into himself and discovering his own inadequacy, attributes inadequacy to every other Indian; and he is usually right. “Charlatan” is a favourite word of Indian abuse. The degree of this self-destructive malice startles and depresses the visitor.
“The mutual hatred of men of their own class—a trait common to
shudras”:
the words are Vivekananda’s; they describe a dependent people.

This dependent frenzy nowadays finds its expression in flight. Flight to England, Canada, anywhere that lets Indians in: more than a flight to money: a flight to the familiar security of second-class citizenship, with all its opportunities for complaint, which implies protection, the other man’s responsibility, the other man’s ideas.

I
T WAS WRITTEN
, of course. It was the price of the independence movement.

The movement, as it developed under Gandhi, became a reforming religious movement, and it was in the Indian tradition that stretched back to the Buddha. Gandhi merged the religious emphasis on self-perfection in the political assertion of pride. It was a remarkable intuitive achievement. But it was also damaging. It was not concerned with ideas. It committed India to a holy philistinism, which still endures.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Raja Rammohun Roy had said that forty years of contact with the British would revivify Indian civilization. He spoke before the period of imperialist and racialist excess; the technological gap was not as wide as it later became; the West, to the forward-looking Indian, was then less the source of new techniques than the source of a New Learning. But the gap widened and the mood changed. The independence movement turned away, as it had to, from people like Roy. It looked back to the Indian past. It made no attempt to evaluate that past; it proclaimed only glory. At the same time the imaginative probing of the West was abandoned. It has never been resumed. The fact escapes notice. The West, so much more imitable today than in 1800, might be pillaged for its institutions and technology; its approval is valuable. But the political-religious-philistine rejection still stands. The West is “materially affluent but psychologically sick”; the West is a sham. No Indian can say why. But he doesn’t need to; that battle has been won; independence is proof enough.

A scholar in Delhi reminded me that Macaulay had said that all the learning of India was not worth one shelf of a European library. We had been talking of aboriginal Africa, and Macaulay was brought in to point out the shortsightedness of a certain type of obvious comment. Later it occurred to me, for the first time, that Macaulay had not been disproved
by the Indian revolution. He had only been ignored. His statement can be reaffirmed more brutally today. The gap between India and the West is not only the increasing gap in wealth, technology and knowledge. It is, more alarmingly, the increasing gap in sensibility and wisdom. The West is alert, many-featured and ever-changing; its writers and philosophers respond to complexity by continually seeking to alter and extend sensibility; no art or attitude stands still. India possesses only its unexamined past and its pathetic spirituality. The Indian philosopher specializes in exegesis; the holy man wishes to rediscover only what has been discovered; in 1967 as in 1962 the literary folk squabble like schoolmen, not about writing, but about the proprieties of translation from all their very ancient languages. India is simple; the West grows wiser.

Her revolution did not equip India for a twentieth-century independence. When that came, it existed within an assumption of a continuing dependence: an accommodating world, of magic, where Indian words had the power Indians attributed to them. The bluff had to be called; the disaster had to come.

O
NE BY ONE
I
NDIA
has had to shed ideas about herself and the world. Pain and bewilderment can no longer be resolved by the magical intervention of a Vivekananda, a Gandhi, a Nehru, a Vinoba Bhave. Fifteen years ago Bhave said, more or less, that his aim was the withering away of the state. He called it “the decentralized technique of God,” and even the pious dismissed him as a dreamer. The state has now withered away. Not through holiness; it is just that the politicians, homespun villagers in New Delhi, no longer have an idea between them. Magic can no longer simplify the world and make it safe. India responds now only to events; and since there can be no play of the mind each disagreeable event—the Chinese attack, the Pakistan war, devaluation, famine and the humiliating deals for food with the United States—comes as a punishing lesson in the ways of the real world. It is as if successive invasions, by the reaction they provoked, that special Indian psychology of dependence, preserved an old world which should have been allowed to decay centuries ago; and that now, with independence, the old world has at last begun to disintegrate.

The crisis of India is not political: this is only the view from Delhi. Dictatorship or rule by the army will change nothing. Nor is the crisis
only economic. These are only aspects of the larger crisis, which is that of a decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further swift decay. The present frenzy cannot be interpreted simply as a decline from stability. That was the stability of a country ruled by magic, by slogans, gestures and potent names. It was the stability of a deficient civilization that thought it had made its peace with the world and had to do no more. The present mood of rejection has dangers. But it alone holds the possibility of life. The rejection is not religious, even when its aims are avowedly the protection of a religion. It does not attempt reform through self-perfection. The
mode
is new, and of the new world.

It may be that I exaggerate; that I forget the holy man putting his thumb in his mouth and pulling out a prick, to applause; that I forget the pious who, in a time of famine, pour hundreds of gallons of milk over a monumental idol while an Air Force helicopter drops flowers. But magic endures only when it appears to work. And it has been proved that man, even in India, can no longer walk on water.

1967

W
HOM TO VOTE FOR?
the English-language poster in New Delhi asked. And when, in mid-February, a fortnight before the first polling day, I went south to Ajmer in Rajasthan, it seemed that the half a million voters of this Indian parliamentary constituency, part urban, part rural, part desert, had a problem. The Congress had won freedom for India, and for more than twenty years, through four election victories, it had ruled. Now the Congress had split. The split had led to this mid-term election. But both sides continued to use the name.
Kangrace ko wote do
, the posters of both sides said: Vote Congress. And the same saffron, white and green flag flew from rival campaign jeeps: the jeep the favoured campaign vehicle, authoritative and urgent in the dusty streets of Ajmer, among the two-wheeled tonga carriages, the battered buses, bicycles by the hundred, handcarts and bullockcarts.

Both sides would have liked to use the old election-winning Congress symbol of the pair of yoked bullocks. But the courts had decided that the yoked bullocks shouldn’t be used at all; and both sides had devised complicated and naturalistic symbols of their own. A cow licking a sucking calf: that was the Congress that was with Mrs. Gandhi, the Prime Minister. A full-breasted woman at a spinning-wheel (the fullness of the breasts always noticeable, even in stencilled reproductions): that was the old or Organization Congress, that had gone into opposition. Both symbols, in India, were of equal weight. The spinning-wheel was Gandhian, the cow was sacred. Both symbols proclaimed a correct, Congress ancestry.