Looking Back on India

LOOKING BACK ON INDIA LOOKING BACK ON INDIA HUBERT EVANS FRANK CASS First published 1988 in Great Britain by FRANK...

Author: Hubert Evans

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LOOKING BACK ON INDIA

LOOKING BACK ON INDIA HUBERT EVANS

FRANK CASS

First published 1988 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS & CO. LTD Gainsborough House, Gainsborough Road, London Ell 1RS, England This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS & CO. LTD c/o Biblio Distribution Centre 81 Adams Drive, P.O. Box 327, Totawa, NJ. 07511 Copyright © 1988 Hubert Evans British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Evans, Hubert Looking back on India. 1. India. Social life ca. 1900–1947– Biographies I. Title 954.03′5′0924 ISBN 0-203-98798-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-7146-3336-4 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, Hubert, 1892– Looking back on India. Indudes index. 1. Evans, Hubert, 1892– .2. India—Politics and government—1919–1947. 3. Colonial administrators India—Biography. 4. Colonial administrators—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title. DS481.E94A3 1988 954.03′092′4 [B] 88–2822 ISBN 0-7146-3336-4 (Print Edition) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro duced in any form or by any Means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior per mission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

1.

INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA

1

2.

UP-THE-COUNTRY

25

1.

Reporting for Duty

25

2.

Camp Dudhi

29

3·

VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS

47

1.

Learn before you Teach

47

2.

A Model Community

52

3.

The Rural Roundabout

55

4.

He made Both Ends Meet

58

5.

The Muslim Variant

61

4.

THE PRETERNATURAL

63

5.

CASTE

77

6·

TO BE A HINDU

91

1.

Swami Advaitanand

92

2.

Creed

98

3.

Point Counter Point

100

4.

New Testament

103

7.

THE INDO-MUSLIMS

107

1.

Islam in India

107

2.

In the Beginning

109

3.

With the Passage of Time

111

4.

The Aligarh Man

117

v

5.

1940

119

8.

THE MAGISTRATE

121

1.

Zila Sahib

121

2.

King Emperor versus Mohan

134

3.

A Backward Glance

139

9.

ABOUT PRINCES

141

1.

Their Chamber

141

2.

Three on the Front Page

143

3.

A Seventeen-Gun Prince

145

4.

Two more Portraits from Memory

148

5.

The Prince who was Pontiff

153

DELHI

161

1.

The Eternal City

161

2.

Delhi Reconnoitred

167

3.

To the Province that was a District

169

4.

Apropos of Viceroys and Vicereines

172

5.

Home of the Viceroys

177

6.

My Delhi

180

WHEN WAR CAME

185

1.

September 1939

188

2.

Minding my own business

192

3.

Taking Time Off

199

4.

Taking more Time Off

205

5.

Another Viceroy’s House

213

GANDHI—HIS LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS

217

1.

Bapu

217

2.

An Indubitable Saint

224

3.

The Call of the Arena

227

4.

‘Do or Die’

231

10·

11·

12·

vi

5.

Doing or Dying in Delhi

233

TWO YEARS TO GO

239

1.

‘Look here, upon this picture, and on this’

239

2.

At the House in Agra

249

3.

The Threshold of Independence

259

Epilogue

265

Glossary

271

Index

275

13·

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

facing ‘Shireen’ ‘Shireen’ Listening to villagers Going into camp Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru My mother in India on tour with the Willingdons The Magh Mela The All-India Cattle Show Maulvi Wali Muhammad Khan Jim Corbett The house at Agra Mahatma Gandhi (portrait by Oswald Birley from Radhakrishnan, ed., Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on his Life and Work (George Allen & Unwin, 1939)) Mira Behn and Mahatma Gandhi (from Madeleine Slade, The Spirit’s Pilgrimage (Longman, 1960))

page 34 35 35 36 74 74 84 84 251 250 251 218

218

TO MAUREEN

PREFACE

This book of reflections and reminiscences would not have been written but for some importunate pressure. My view was that with the passing of long years the only proper person from now on to describe the way we did things in India would be the young historian able to sift the archives and extract their yield. If a small handful of us who once played a role in the drama were still around —what of it? ‘Superfluous lags the vet’ran on the stage.’ My wife, however, brushed this aside: my argument was treated as a subterfuge. Archives, I was reminded, are powerless to convey the setting in which our rule was acted out. And it was the setting which from start to finish dictated the direction of that rule and determined its character. I had one card left. I contended that the novels, films, television programmes of the moment are teaching a modern generation everything there is to know about ‘the Raj’. Her reply was: ‘You don’t really mean that.’ And then, clinching the case, comes a letter addressed to me by the India Office Library and Records Department which emphasizes the value of memoirs in the very terms, almost word for word, my wife had used. I gave in. H.E.

x

1 INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA

When the liner which took me to India for the first time, S.S. Ranpura of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, three weeks out of London, made a landfall at Bombay and disembarked her passengers at Ballard Pier, it surprised nobody on the crowded quayside that with hardly an exception we were English. For Englishmen had been seen hereabouts a good three hundred years. They had even been lording it over the whole continent for a matter of one hundred and eighty. Understandably, therefore, the illusion of the permanence of our presence and authority persisted. And yet in barely another twenty years, we— for I can revert to ‘we’ in this sentence instead of ‘they’—would have packed up and gone. Eighty per cent of my fellow passengers had been ‘Sahibs’ returning from leave and, it was quite obvious, glad to be getting back. Not simply was there the hilarity of the closer groups at table or in the huge canvas bag slung aft and filled with sea-water in which to splash, but a marked sociability all round. Within the caste, that is. And was caste out of place in the world beginning at the foot of the gangway? Wherever I had dragged my deck-chair into the sun or out of it, during the long blue afternoons, I could count on conversation. Where was I going? ‘United Provinces’ I would answer, and then wait as a greenhorn should. ‘Fraid I don’t know anyone there at the moment, actually,’ the Sahib or the Memsahib might tell me apologetically. Or else, and more often, it would be: ‘Why, then you’ll meet so-and-so,’ and to cheer me up with the prospect, ‘I know you’ll like him. Grand person. Actually he and I used to…’ I have recorded these banal, if amiable, remarks for the sake of their implication. Which is that we were few, we British in India. Not that this aspect of our rule caused us anxiety, not in the I.C.S. —the Indian Civil Service—anyhow. Why should it have? We considered ourselves as being, so to speak, a few foreign gardeners engaged in training an indigenous plant. We were

2 LOOKING BACK ON INDIA

enough for the job. But of course if your mind ran on battalions, as, say, Stalin’s did, our position was not simply astonishing, it was absurd. Stalin is on record as saying to Ribbentrop on the night they signed their fateful pact: ‘How ridiculous it is that a few hundred Englishmen should dominate India, a continent as big as Europe!’ For myself, I would stand this argument on its head. I would contend that we accomplished what we did in India precisely because we were so few. Let me clarify. Our rule rested on force, as all rule must. But force applied by the very few to the very many is force lightly applied. Ours, with some deplorable lapses, was; and that is why our authority had across the centuries won the assent, and enjoyed the loyalty, of those very many. That is why, even as I was walking from the ship’s side to the Customs shed, a naughty child was being scolded in some Cawnpore home: ‘Do that again, you little imp, and I’ll tell the White Topee!’ And why in one or another of four hundred Districts up and down the country a lonely Englishman was hearing himself addressed as ‘Cherisher of the Poor’. How had it all happened? How had the British Raj come into being? How could it be that ‘a few hundred Englishmen’ were doing what they pleased with ‘a continent as big as Europe’? The story began when the first Elizabeth gave the charter to a corporate body of London merchants to trade in the name and style of the East India Company. There was nothing peculiar in that; other European nations, the Portuguese and the Dutch, were in the field already, and the French would follow suit. The year was 1600, and the India which admitted these adventurous Londoners was that of Akbar the Great Mughal. Presently they tumbled to the discovery that if their commerce were to flourish— commerce in pepper, indigo, opium, salt petre, silk, muslin and much else—they must curry favour with the Indians in the neighbourhood of the factories and forts they had established at, or alongside, or behind, Bombay and Madras. But imagine the astonishment of the trader who has been prudent enough to ingratiate himself with the warring parties round about when the latter begin to turn to him in their wrangles as an umpire. As the remaining decades of the century go by, he gets more and more involved in regional affairs— and by the same token makes more and more money for his masters. For himself too—and why not? After all, his chances of ending up as a nabob are considerably more slender than his chances of an early grave in Indian earth. ‘Shake the Pagoda Tree’ was the motto. Some did this to such effect that they were able to buy their way into history: like Elihu Yale who founded a university; like Thomas Pitt who founded a

INTRODUCING BRITISH INDIA 3

family that would give us two Prime Ministers. And so the thing continues until one fine day behold the Company acquiring territory, using Indian soldiers for the protection of this, picking its Indian allies, playing the Indian political game as to the manner born. The English government at home, able to milk the now affluent Company very nicely, is all for such activities. Meanwhile the Mughal Empire, which in the reign of Akbar the Great had been far richer than Queen Elizabeth’s realm, was showing signs of exhaustion. It now collapsed. Its majestic edifice subsided into scattered heaps of worthless rubble. In Macaulay’s pigmented prose the spectacle confronting the men from England was of ‘nominal sovereigns sunk in indolence and debauchery… chewing bang, fondling concubines and listening to buffoons.’ The Company, to be thought of by this time as one among the several country powers jockeying for position, saw its advantage in the confusion and promptly exploited it. France, our sole remaining European rival, was still to be reckoned with, for thanks to the energies of Dupleix she had established her hold on the Deccan or ‘South’. But in several collisions with us in the middle years of this (eighteenth) century, she was either outmanoeuvred or outfought. In 1770 the French formally dissolved their Compagnie des Indes; it had been, Voltaire said, as maladroit in commerce as in war. Be that as it may, for our own Company the coast was clear— and not only the coast either. We had grown out of our seaboard ambitions; we aspired now to the supremacy of India herself. In 1757 one of the ‘Writers’ or clerks turned soldier, Clive by name, secured Bengal by his victory at Plassey. It was a ‘Bengal’ stretching in those days right up to Allahabad. So now we possessed the narrow territories focussed on Bombay and Madras; the elongated coastal strip well to the north of the second of these, known as the Sircars; and, dwarfing all, this sprawling Bengal where our power would for a long future have its hub. The contest would go on between the English and certain native princes, but the issue would not be in doubt. The administration which it fell to the Company, when eventually mistress of the situation, to take over was Muslim, going back to the thirteenth century. But obviously the first Muslim conquerors themselves could not have imposed an entirely foreign system on their Indian subjects. A metaphor is tempting here. The administration was a palimpsest: the lower text was Indian, the upper Muslim. It was based on the theory of royal remuneration: in exchange for protection, the peasants paid a share of their produce to the king. In practice such a system nursed the seeds of oppression; nevertheless it is a wry reflection that under the


enlightened Akbar, the King’s share was less than the percentage of gross income an ageing pensioner in my own condition is nowadays required to surrender! Between the King and the Peasant, of course, there had to be intermediaries and one of these, a key-man, bore a designation which literally translated is ‘Collector’. His function was defined by his title. He was there to collect—to do that and sit back. The Company proceeded to clothe itself in the discarded apparel of this Mughal colossus; but it did not assume the latter’s mentality. Its servants, as already noticed, had learned that commerce could not prosper without a degree of order and justice, and they had put the lesson to excellent account. Wait some years and they would operate the Mughal machinery according to the rule of law. The Collector would busy himself quite as much with the rights as with the obligations of the peasant, establishing each man’s title to his acres, committing everything to paper for subsequent guidance, and so forth. And since wherever there is law there are lawbreakers, the Collector will have to deal with those as well. This meant investing him with magisterial powers. His designation from then on—and I think it was about a century before I received the designation myself—will be ‘Collector and Magistrate’ or, if preferred, the other way round: ‘Magistrate and Collector’. Either way he was head of his territory and monarch, or very nearly, of all he surveyed. The Company has ceased to be a trading association: in future it will be exercising administrative authority. While these developments were taking place, the boundaries of Empire were being steadily advanced. The process, spaced over a period of exactly one hundred years from Clive’s victories, culminated in the major annexations, at close intervals in the midnineteenth century, of Sind, the Punjab and Oudh. It is wrong, intellectually as well as morally wrong, to measure the thoughts and actions of men in the past by a rod not invented until af ter they were dead. We must therefore make an effort to detach ourselves from the assumptions of our own day in order to understand those of an age when Empire was not something to apologize for. Nor were those giants of our imperial past so wanting in humanity as, lifted out of context, they are apt to appear. Napier’s laconic message Peccavi reporting that he had Sind may be apocryphal, nobody quite knows. What is authentic is his more communicative gloss that the annexation was ‘a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality’. Weacted in the spirit of St Augustine who, looking out from his City of God and asking whether it was fitting for good men to rejoice in the


expansion of Empire, answered that to extend rulership is to bad men felicity but to good men a necessity. One formal step, logical and overdue, it remained to take. In 1858 the Crown superseded the Company, and our Collector, once upon a time a merchant and nabob-to-be, but latterly a Civil Servant of the Honourable East India Company writing H.E.I.C.S. after his name, was absorbed into the service of his Queen and entitled henceforward to the three initials ‘I.C.S.’ —the ‘C’ standing no longer for ‘Company’ but for ‘Civil’. It is hard to believe it today, but the few hundred of my narrative had coined for themselves a new term ‘civil servant’, that would be borrowed and used thereafter wherever their mother tongue had currency. It may be easier now to appreciate that we were a sort of contact cadre. In very many of the Districts—of which there were ultimately four hundred between the Himalayas and Cape Comorin, between Karachi and Chittagong—we might well be the only Englishman our Indian charges had any prospect of meeting face to face in the whole of their lives; often enough, moreover, the only one they would even set eyes on. And as a corollary to this, the Englishman in many a District would see no other white face except his own in the mirror. Few of us who had this experience, and it was twice to be mine, did not learn to value it. The system took a cloistered English youth straight from a bookish education, twelve or thirteen years of it, consecrated to the cultures of Rome and Greece; discouraged him from marriage; and set him down in Bara Banki or Sitapur. It was in such places, remote from the great cities and centred on a miniature headquarters town, that his earlier years of service were likely to be spent. It was in such places reached by no railway, lacking electricity, laced by no telephone wires, and where water to wash and to drink was brought in a goatskin from the well at the bottom of the garden, that ‘the District’ would so come to command his energies and fill his thoughts that the prospect of leaving it on transfer or promotion even, dismayed him. Its people, scamps (of which there were usually very many) included, he came to consider as belonging to him. He would not willingly say goodbye to them, and when at last he had to, it would seldom be without a tugging at the heart strings. Looking back I have little doubt that this happiness sprang from what I am terming the ‘contact’. Extended in open order in the ratio of one to every million or two Indians we readily developed a belief in the dignity and importance of what we were doing. If by the age of thirty you are accustomed to the exercise of authority which nobody below you or above you—for this was the case—


questions, inevitably you will tend to think and act like a despot. But the point I am making here is that if you are alone in your glory (alone, that is, of your race) amidst the million or two you rule over, two things are bound to happen. The first is that you will be drawn insensibly towards the people you are among and become attached to them. The people of your District are better than the people of any other District, are better farmers, have a better sense of humour, are better company, are better looking. And all for no other reason than that they are yours and not anybody else’s. One saw it a dozen times—the man who wouldn’t hear a word against his Jats or his Pathans or his Rajputs or whoever they were in his particular area. How could it be otherwise? Each morning they would be there, squatting in groups in front of your house or around your tent as near as the sentry would allow them to get, ready to waylay you as you came out; and every time you visited a village there they would be again, magically warned of your approach, waiting to run alongside your trotting horse for the last half mile. One of their number, thanks to his status or venerable years, would be hanging on to your leathers as you rode. So long as you lived, their pleading voices would not be stilled: ‘If you do not help us, who will help us? If you do not listen, who will?’ And the second thing is that from earliest weeks you will learn to delegate; will have to resist the temptation, once you’ve given your order, to associate yourself in the slightest degree with its execution; will have to put implicit trust in the loyalty of your subordinates. There is no explaining the British Raj without postulating this factor of loyalty, and I am not sure that the historians have yet had time to stand back from the canvas and view things in the correct perspective. This is not a work of research and there will be no illustrative charts, no statistical tables in it. Such figures as occur are rough and from memory. But consider for a minute. We had an Indian Army, meaning an Army of Indian troops, Englishofficered, of some 200,000 supported by British units doing their Indian stint totalling, say, 50,000; this for the security of a continent which would obliterate all Europe on the map. Look up, out of curiosity, the strength of the standing army considered appropriate to Belgium, let us say, or to one of the Scandinavian countries between the wars. And since this paragraph is about loyalty, it is the place to add that we had no recruiting difficulty during the Second War in increasing this modest peacetime force tenfold; so that it became at two million far and away the largest volunteer army of which history has record. Troops would be quartered either in large strategically


sited concentrations such as Quetta or in a variety of smallish cantonments adjacent to certain cities of importance, and it followed that in the immense majority of the four hundred Districts of which we have been speaking not a single Sepoy, let alone a Tommy, would be visible. The nearest regiment might be a hundred miles off, or more. The only military uniform I remember to have seen in either of the two remoter Districts I held, was that of the odd soldier returning to his village on leave. The same economy of numbers applied in the case of the Police. The force was around 180,000 for the whole of British India, which contained, besides the great cities of which everyone has heard, half a million villages each potentially the scene of an affray or some other, and more heinous, crime. In my first District I had about 800 policemen or one to every two thousand of my people— and in law-abiding Britain, as I write, we complain that one policeman to every 500 inhabitants is not enough. Of the official class composing the bureaucracy in every tier of its structure I am not prepared to cite the figure—was it half a million at the turn of the century swelling to a couple of million by the time we left? It does not matter. What I am prepared to affirm is that a degree of devotion was commonly exhibited by our Indian assistants from the highest to the humblest which never ceased to astonish and not seldom moved the Englishman who leaned on them. The British Raj assumed the loyalty of all who ate its salt—and held together because it received it. Yes, it stood to reason that you had to delegate. And this after all was precisely the way you were yourself being treated. No Viceroy, no Governor, breathed down your neck when you were doing your best to quell a riot, no Secretary ever came poking his nose into your job. I am not going to describe the Secretariat, and only need record that in a Province as large as the United Kingdom there would be ten or twelve of us in it; not more. At the Centre, which was Delhi, perhaps around fifty. These brother officers would be comparable to Whitehall civil servants in terms of their tasks but not comparable numerically (as has just been indicated) nor in their propensity to delegate. Their habits of thought and action derived from ‘the District’ and not from London, for each of them was a quondam Collector and might, moreover, resume his role. It was a saving grace. Meantime they led an urban and much more social private life, and on ceremonial occasions might be seen resplendent in a blue coatee decorated with plenty of gold lace, white silk knee breeches, cotton stockings and buckled shoes. An earnest, probably priggish, young Collector, booted and spurred, on his horse at dawn when the dew was on the fields, felt


a certain condescension whenever he thought of them. But this was a passing mood, and he did concede that they left hirn to his own devices. One day, too, he would perhaps be switched to the Secretariat himself, live in a house without good stabling for his three ponies, have to go out of an evening not to marvel how the setting sun turns the yellow rape to gold but to assist at some glittering reception dressed as for the Congress of Vienna. Pending which— his own devices. All we were required to do according to the book was submit a Fortnightly Report, and the joy of it was that we were sole arbiters of what went into this. There was a premium on eccentricity as a result. Of two illustrations that come to my mind, and there is no room for more, the first belongs arguably to legend since I cannot myself authenticate it. The hero, obliged to perform a journey in the course of duty, presented his bill for travel expenses in the normal way, but an incautious clerk questioned the distances quoted and returned the claim for corroboration. This, in the sequel, arrived in the shape of milestones piled high on a string of bullock carts drawn up outside the Accountant General’s office. In my second example I knew the man, I knew the place. A centralized health department grown too big for its boots asked him to fill in a pond where, it was foreseen, mosquitoes were likely to breed. He protested that, the country round about being flat, in order to fill in one hollow another must be dug. But this objection was brushed aside and an inspector of the department who visited the locality some months later sneaked that the offending pond was still there. ‘Wrong,’ was the rejoinder, ‘a new pond created by filling in the old.’ The moral in both these cases was the same: you don’t harry the Collector. No wonder the benevolent despot of nearly thirty, far away now from the halls of Oxford and Cambridge, was tempted to feel that some special providence had guided his steps to India. Misgiving, undeniably, there had been that day when he came down the main staircase at Burlington Gardens after the Competition, but it was momentary and had not recurred. The compensation for loss, no point in pretending otherwise, had been rich. Compensation for exile, for material discomfort, for the occasional bout of malaria. He had not seen his mother these three years; he was ten thousand miles from all the things that had made his world; the idea of marrying he had been obliged to push beyond the limits of thought. But he was being looked after with unbelievable solicitude by a dozen turbaned servants, had a syce for each of his ponies, had orderlies in scarlet gowns to fetch and carry for him. Everybody salaamed or saluted when he passed; a neighbouring


Raja had lent him an elephant for the whole winter; and when the other day he had dined in the mess at the nearest military station the Commanding Officer (just promoted admittedly but greying at the temples) kept on addressing him as ‘sir’. On the shelf opposite me where I write, rests, long undisturbed, a copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali. Leaning back these last fifteen minutes and trying to decide what detail, so to speak, of the wide canvas I ought to isolate next, I find myself staring at it idly. Seventy years ago that book made fashionable reading in England and America: Tagore had won the Nobel Prize, was a literary lion of the age, his admirers were to be reckoned in their millions. My own mother was among them, and as I reach for the little volume and open it at the fly-leaf I read, with eyes growing a bit misty: ‘For Edith from Lilian, 1914.’ I can pick up my pen—and the thread. I shall attend to the presence in Indian society all that while ago of an élite whose members I consider to have been the real Anglo-Indians. The ‘Sahibs’, conventionally labelled so, were not the real AngloIndians. These people were. It is high time to recognize this fact; and high time, incidentally, for me to introduce them. Not all were celebrities like Radhakrishnan, Zafrullah Khan, Sapru, Sarojini Naidu, Jinnah, Nehru—if I may list half-a-dozen I am lucky enough to be able to recall personally—but all had this in common, that they were socially advantaged and intellectually enriched by our English culture, yet cornered politically. The more they took to us, the more they wanted to be rid of us. In the beginning we had hesitated for fifty years, unable to make up our minds which of two lines to take in India: whether to encourage the cream of her sons to adopt our English speech and ways, or whether to foster a revival of India’s own civilization. Of this last we were dimly aware and already Burke in the eighteenth century was reminding Parliament that we had on our hands a people cultivated by all the arts of polished life while we were yet in the woods. So we started off by being, as someone put it, ‘wet nurse to Vishnu and churchwarden to Juggernaut’. The Company would work on Sundays, close on Indian holidays, and let its soldiers parade in honour of goodness knows how many pagan deities. By the date of the Fall of the Bastille we had founded an Islamic Madrasa at Calcutta, were preparing to found the Sanskrit College at Benares. Then, all of a sudden, a change of direction. I do not myself accept the verdict of the books which inform us that Indian culture was just then at a pitiably low ebb—their authors ought to read the Urdu poets of that golden age, contemplate the architecture of not a few buildings at Lucknow, Jaipur, Jodhpur—


or even leaf through an album of the paintings of the Rajput school. The explanation surely was different. The fact was that at the juncture we are here visualizing, when the Mughal masonry had crumbled into India’s dust, the whole country was at best gasping for breath, at worst in turmoil or engaged in bloody conflict. In such a state of affairs it became easier to argue the case for westernization than for orientalism, and NineteenthCentury England preferred to listen to Macaulay’s sneering rhetoric than to recall Burke’s more sympathetic sentences. Hear Macaulay asking whether we shall countenance at the public expense medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding-school, history abounding with Kings thirty feet high and reigns 30,000 years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter. The phase of tender regard was over. Picture then the grandfathers of the talented celebrities whose names have been instanced a page or two above, prompted no doubt by material considerations, urging their sons to apply themselves diligently to the acquisition of what was offered them by the Wise men from the West. In our own country a notable teacher of the classics like Dean Gaisford could end a Christmas sermon to the undergraduates of Oxford with the inspiring words: ‘Nor can I do better, in conclusion, than impress upon you the study of Greek literature, which not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument.’ Put ‘English’ for ‘Greek’ and that, we may be sure, is precisely how the Indian parent of good standing in society would counsel and exhort his promising offspring at the same period. How does our despot view all this? I have already insisted on a pronounced streak of benevolence in his character, have shown him doing the most undespotic things imaginable such as substituting law for whim and delegating his authority right and left. Those of us of the I.C.S. who survive take pride today in the fact— well documented luckily, for otherwise who would credit it? —that it was not the British politician or the Parliament or the Public of the time, but our predecessors in the Company who perceived what was implicit in the deliberate resolve of the rulers to build an Indian élite in their own image. ‘The most desirable death’, wrote one of them—and several others whom I shall not stop to quote were to echo him—


the most desirable death for us to die should be the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign nation to retain the government. The man who wrote that was born in 1779. Oh, there would be some backsliding now and again, some diehards here and there, and in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857 a sizable group of Christians who, more mindful of the Old Testament than of the New, maintained that India had earned the wrath of God. But by and large, the day’s work done and the temperature dropping a trifle, ‘Civilians’ were apt to be kindlier men, less stiff and formal than the governing set at home—or those representatives of it who simply came out for a brief spell. ‘We have to answer the helm,’ proclaimed the most dazzling of these Satraps, ‘and it is an imperial helm, down all the tides of Time.’ As might be guessed that was Curzon, Lord Curzon, who at the Coronation Durbar in 1903 overruled a proposal for the singing of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ on the occasion, not on the ground that our soldiers in India in their huge majority were either Hindu or Muslim—for this side to it did not apparently bother him—but because the hymn bids us reflect that ‘Crowns and Thrones may perish, Kingdoms rise and wane.’ To go by my own experience of living among her people both in India’s districts and in her capital city, familiarity breeds respect. I cannot believe that the response of my predecessors was different. They recognized, as we did in our generation, at least in pensive mood, that they were trustees who when the wards grew up must quit with becoming grace. Had the Indians been ‘lesser breeds’, hundreds of millions of benighted savages—why then, of course we could say: ‘make them swallow the medicine, whether they like it or whether they don’t.’ If on the contrary that is manifestly not the case, if one person in ten in that vast continent has profited by some degree of schooling, and if a million or so are using our language with uncanny facility and sharing our ideals, the time is fast approaching when they will have the right to decide for themselves what suits them and what does not. And until it arrives we can rejoice for our part that about a battalion of our wards have so reacted to our stimulus as to be beating us at our own game; sending us, let us say, a Spalding Professor for Oxford; or a member of the judicial committee of the Privy Council; or a girl not out of her teens who can write stanza after stanza as flawless as this:


Still barred thy doors! The far east glows The morning wind blows fresh and free. Should not the hour that wakes the rose Awaken also thee? In the earlier 1920s my mother and I were staying at a house where G.P.Gooch, the historian, editor of the Contemporary Review and an outspoken Liberal in politics, happened to be the other guest. Hearing that I was bound for India, Dr Gooch pinpointed for my benefit the issues raised by Indian nationalism. He had a habit of removing his pumps, those light-weight patent leather shoes with bows that went at the time with evening clothes, and warming his right and left foot alternately in front of the fire as he talked. I see him now, this nearly omniscient man, one hand on the mantelpiece to steady himself and the other jabbing a slipper at me as he progressed from the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of ten years later. The constitutional problem and the efforts to unravel it will not be discussed in this book, and I only recapture that particular weekend for the sake of the one word ‘nationalism’. Who then were the Nationalists? In the sense of wanting one’s nation to attain independence all literate Indians, which meant around ten per cent of the population, or 35 million, were nationalist in the 1920s. In the sense, however, of rejecting British direction as inadmissible a single day longer, very few were nationalist. It has to be borne in mind that large numbers ranging from the highly educated to the scantily schooled, Hindus or Muslims, rich or poor, found nothing in their religions that forbade the acceptance of an authority which was not of their choosing; positively the reverse. So these tended to echo the injunction of St Peter’s Epistle: ‘Fear God and honour the King.’ This was the easier seeing that George V by all accounts—and that included Gandhi’s own—was a thorough gentleman. This infinitely graded middle class, therefore, which kept the wheels of commerce and industry and—let this never be forgotten—of the administration itself turning, did not hate the Union Jack. On the contrary, that foreign flag enabled it to shelve some rather disquieting thoughts. As to the illiterate, wholly untutored villagers, perhaps 300 million souls who composed the remainder of India’s children—these had no conception of nationhood whatsoever. Their group loyalties were all. Under such unfavourable conditions how could a National Movement worthy of the name be launched? That it got under way and maintained,


albeit fitfully, its momentum was due to a handful of revolutionaries drawn from the cream of sophisticated society, of whom Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the paragon, working in collaboration with, and often enough using, a holy man of quaint and frequently exasperating attitudes who can only be likened to a medieval saint. It is typical of the whole complex situation that the very organization, viz: the Indian National Congress, the Freedom Party par excellence, which the two stormy petrels Gandhi and Nehru, each ruffling the waters in his own contrasting fashion, were to direct throughout the closing twenty-five years of our Rule, had been founded by a member of the Indian Civil Service itself, to enable Indians to give expression to the new (new, that is, in the 1880s) spirit of nationalism! Typical too, and logical in the light of what I have explained earlier in this Introduction, that we were tempted neither to suppress the Congress nor to muster other interests in opposition to it. Typical, lastly, that for all the inspiration and flair at the summit, the Party never managed to enrol more than 5 million members. Out of 350 million this was not impressive for a Party aspiring to speak for the entire nation. And when, as too frequently proved the case, a local committee harboured one or two scallywags of the town whom the local worthies would not be seen dead with, the benevolent young despot of my story could scarcely be expected to hold it much in awe. Remote from its leaders of any calibre, he tended to view the congress with contemptuous indifference. Alas, it had become quite apparent by around 1928 that this cherished Nationalism was a prey to a congenital sickness that would baffle every one of its apostles no matter how skilled, how conscientious, how persevering. When in that year an All-Party team of these sat down in a praiseworthy attempt to draft a Constitution for the India of tomorrow, they did not get very far. Not much further indeed than the consolatory passage in which they affirmed their certitude that as soon as India was free to face her problems unhampered by British interference, Hindus and Muslims would automatically act in concert. This, they announced, ‘is bound to happen’. Among the things I learned in India was never to rub my eyes. For those of us who, as the time ran out, were compelled to expend more and more of our available energy in preventing the hot heads of either community from having at each other, it was impossible to be optimistic. None of us could see India building her future on a foundation of unity. The critics of our Raj had long imputed to us the crafty policy of Divide and Rule; they did so from now on more monotonously, more vociferously. Yet I do not believe that in the Districts there


were really very many to endorse that reproach. Most of the callers who filed into my waiting room on Visitors day (which meant three mornings a week) were more inclined to ponder the amendment in the wording of the maxim which the blunt old politician, Muhammed Ali, had suggested: We divide and You rule. For a good hundred years the adherents of the two warring creeds had acquiesced in the overlordship of foreigners who, so far as could be discovered, had little in the way of religious zeal themselves and might be relied on to be impartial. However, it actually was beginning to look as if the strangers did not intend to stay, and when this dawned upon the India of the bazaars, the India of the electoral rolls, Hindus and Muslims started to stake their separate claims. The problem of government always and everywhere is how to ‘communicate’ . It is not enough that the regime should be competent and humane. Some pages back I described the Collector as belonging to a Contact Corps, and I think that is not a false label; but by my generation there were growing signs that the old ‘touch’ which had for so long guaranteed our success—our Iqbal as the Indians had termed it—was rapidly being lost. Between the Collector, therefore, and those committed to his care was the current passing as in bygone days? In this kind of book, no study, no résumé even, of the principal components of society would be appropriate. I am only concerned to bring out that in certain of them, and these the most influential, westernization had, by the time I set foot in India, advanced to a stage where it was visibly sapping the foundations on which we had built our prestige. It seems to me my best plan will be to instance, to begin with, some areas of human approach in which I felt at ease, and then to cross an imaginary frontier into the area in which I felt—as an official primarily, but sometimes also as a private person—acutely embarrassed. To start with, the peasant. In his presence there was no occasion for restraint. Western habits of mind had not affected him and it would never have occurred to him, had he not been tutored by the politicians, to resent our Raj on the ground that it was foreign. I have introduced him already, with more than a hint at the behaviour of the villager vis-à-vis his Collector, as also at the latter’s emotional response to this man who habitually addressed him as his ‘Mother and Father’ or as ‘Cherisher of the Poor’. He will come again into my pages. I pass, then, without more ado to the clerical personnel in whose company so much of my indoor routine was performed, taking as my model the Office Superintendent. He knew his way


backwards through the bulkiest file and I see him in his brown pillbox cap bending over one now, flicking it open with deft and doublejointed fingers at the wanted page, swivelling the folder towards me and reading the villainous handwriting—English, Urdu or Hindi, it was all the same to him—yes, reading it upside down! He was grave, not gi ven to palling up with the junior clerks seated row upon row in front of him in the central hall of the Cutcherry like so many pupils in a schoolroom and scratching away with their nibs under his frowning gaze. He was distant, expected me to be the same, believed as a good government official should, as a good Hindu should, in distance. At noon a pair of his domestic servants would make their appearance bearing an elaborate luncheon from his home, cooked there by his wife. In the late afternoon his tonga would be waiting outside, a syce at the horse’s head idly swatting a fly now and then. And as this notable of the quarter drove from work, the traffic would halt in the narrow thoroughfare, pedestrians stand aside. I knew five of him and can still rattle off their names—three apiece. Each of the five was loyal to the salt he had eaten, each of the five was doing what God had called him to do. Next let me summon up the members of the legal profession, thick and perhaps too thick on the Indian ground, for with them also the Collector kept close company. I am not thinking of the great advocates, of the Sapru or the Jinnah, I am thinking of the small-town pleader with a law degree and a decent criminal or civil practice who played tennis and bridge with his confrères at the Indian Club, drank a little whisky on occasion and referred to himself as cosmopolitan, meaning by this that he did not mind eating in a railway refreshment room on one of his rare journeys to the provincial capital. In the court room he had all the courtesies of his calling, and I only recollect one serious passage of arms, one in the course of long years, one in how many thousands of hours! Out of court I found him amiable, relaxed in conversation, and—this may surprise—seldom engaged politically; rather bored indeed with the harangues from the distant platforms as reported in the press. There was no local newspaper, remember. All India Radio was in the womb of time, and ‘Boggley Wollah’ was in the wilds. I think of a man who was always eager to crack a joke with me, who was apt to bring half a platoon of tiny grandchildren to my house dressed in their prettiest clothes on the morning of some festival, and who never omitted to send me a basket of mangoes in season, or the annual Christmas card. And what of the landed gentry? The Collector mixed freely with the landowners, had to and liked doing so. As I remember them,


they were extroverts and rather indolent for the most part. They prided themselves on being gentlemen, and divided a leisured existence between their estates and their houses in the big city. They were good shots and some were horsemen; and many with these tastes would invite me to share their recreations. Even when the product of an expensive upbringing, they were philistines uninterested in literature and the arts, whether Indian or Western; but they were men whose society was a tonic, bearing in mind that a tonic is to be taken in moderation, and at proper intervals. They did not, I need scarcely add, care a damn for the gibes of the Congress leaders who branded them as our creatures, which is more or less what they were. I must exchange these countrified surroundings for an urban setting, if I am to meet the industrialist. Here is a man thin on the ground, but whose contribution is immense. Socially he was creating a new order in India, viz: a proletariat; economically he was hoisting a lethargic India out of the Middle Ages. Where numbers are restricted a type scarcely emerges, and the two magnates I shall call up are contrasting characters with a vengeance. One of them, outside the Mills where big crowds had been lapsing into rowdyism for the past few days, is rather too heatedly recommending a bit of healthy ‘bloodletting’ as the proper treatment, even using the Hindustani word (khunrezi) to make it perfectly plain to me what he meant. He had no faith in Gandhi’s prescription for human behaviour. No more did the other of my two capitalists, seemingly. For although numbered among the Mahatma’s fervent admirers, he applies to me for a gun licence — this mark of the Government’s confidence was not granted lightly — and adds, as was usual, his justificatory arguments. He explains that the weapon would be entrusted to a stout fellow at his house, Birla House, in New Delhi for the safety of the saint who is in the habit of staying under his roof. In the first of my two examples the meddlesome unacceptable pressure was attempted by a proGovernment man; in the second, the request, courteous and justified—how justified the tragic sequel some years later was to demonstrate—came f rom a member of the Congress Party. Yet with both these men a dialogue was possible, and I think this was so because both were persons of initiative and high achievement, were given to the exercise of practical reason in all they did, and wer e unresentful, if each in his manner, of my authority over them. In certain of the large cities—some fifteen, if I am right, in the whole of India—the university student was to be met. Was to be met? I think so. This may come as another surprise, for it might be supposed that the British Raj would resemble an ogre, nothing


less, in the eyes of the insecure and therefore somewhat bobbery youth who typified India’s student community. Lest my competence to discuss him at all be doubted, let me state my credentials. In as many as three out of those fifteen cities my lot was to be cast, so that over a long stretch of years I had almost each week something, trivial it could be but something, to do with a student. I was Chairman of the governing body of a college; and admitted I once had the unenviable experience of trying and convicting an Agra undergraduate implicated in the manufacture of bombs, I am compensated by the memory of repeated requests from junior common rooms to address their members. Two invitations from the officebearers of the Allahabad University Students Union have stayed in my mind. Apparently I was persona grata even in the city which, as the home of the Nehru family, was in those days the power-house generating the energy of the Congress Party. Unsettled in general, and hence easily swayed, those students were, but of smouldering resentment I could never detect any sign in their ranks. A scene as distant as a winter’s night in the early 1930s comes back to me, laid in the streets of that same city of Allahabad. The students are out in nominal support of the norent campaign which the Congress had just started among the villagers. The demonstration was peaceful, but so massive as to require shepherding. Succumbing to the temptation to defy authority, the van of the procession turned aside from the prescribed route at a convenient crossroad. The magistrate’s headache in handling these nimble but far from muscular youths was how to insist on obedience without letting his big-boned policemen, who detested them for the airs they gave themselves, go for them with too much gusto. I went forward to remonstrate with the front line. For some teasing rejoinder from the leaders I was quite ready. I was even prepared, being no longer a beginner, for a stream of chewed betel to be ejected from somebody’s mouth, into my face or on to my clothing. But I was taken aback by the command, imperious and spirited, that was shouted at me from the second row: ‘Give place, Sir! Give place, Sir! This is the King’s Highway.’ These boys were not from privileged homes, were not the country’s intelligentsia of tomorrow, least of all were they imitation Europeans who had lost their roots in Indian society. Usually they had not escaped from parental control which was heavy in Hindu and Muslim households alike. Fathers, uncles, elder brothers were fond of introducing them to me on visiting days for no specified purpose but on the principle of forward thinking, or timely preparation, peshbandi it was called, which is dear to the


Indian. One never could tell, a post might fall vacant somewhere before long, and then there would be a second approach; this to obtain a letter of recommendation in favour of a young man well known to the signatory for a considerable time, of exceptionally polite address, earnest in his studies and of loyal antecedents. By and large the students had one aspiration—government service; this seemed to them worth it, however low the salary, and it would often be pitiably low. And I believe it was the fear that they might be ‘plucked’—the English word was constantly on their lips—and thus out of the running for it, that rendered them what I have said they were a page above: insecure, and so apt to be aggressive. By and large, I am saying, all of these put up with what I stood for —and hence put up with me. I shall not pretend, it would be absurd to pretend, that I could come face to face with each of them on even terms: that would have been beyond my mandate—nor would it have been desired by them on their side. I am claiming that a dialogue went on between us. A dialogue presupposes two persons who are allowed to talk and two, the same two, who will listen. It does not postulate equality or expect unanimity. I dare say G.D.Birla did not consider me his equal. I dare say Data Din who had never been further than twenty miles from his village did not do so either, being a brahmin. But as to authority, was there a viable alternative? Very likely I may have been the lesser of two evils in their reasoning, some kind of solution. I have now reached the demarcation line on my imaginary map, and am confronting Indians for whom the British Raj had lost its savour and turned sour. They seemed uniformly to be of the privileged class, people who did not have to think where the next meal was coming from. However, they did not react uniformly. Some decided there was nothing for it but to spew out the nasty taste, and became revolutionaries. Others, the overwhelming majority, felt—and it should have moved us whenever we thought about it— that there was something un-English in conspiracy and bombthrowing and even in the defiance of constitutionally established authority. Psychologically the former experienced Release; the latter endured that state of unrelieved tension which torments the élite of a subject people. Now our humane despot was, so to speak, functus officio in respect of the revolutionaries; washed his hands of them, and was saved embarrassment. Nor were they for their part any less at ease than he was. They had found escape in the fray; breaking the law acted like a tonic, whetting the physical as well as the mental appetite. I can remember how positively jocular and hearty two


members of the Congress Working Committee were on their arrest, how willing to sit down to a free and easy dinner, ‘English style, please, tonight’ before taking the road to the Central Jail. A third political détenu, when I visited him in his roomy A class barrack, assured me he genuinely looked forward to a ‘little time off and the chance to read some of the Vedic hymns. ‘You see, I’ve never yet been able to get down to it’ It is not, then, to these, not to Nehru or Sarojini Devi or Jayaprakash Narayan or Asaf Ali that I have to think back at this point, but to the law-abiding majority who lacked the stimulus of the arena. Whereas the revolutionary would work himself into a frenzy on the platform but relax in private, his less fiery brother or cousin, calm and dignified as he went about his strictly lawful occasions, would without warning allow his feelings to well over in some tête-à-tête. A voice would become strident, a glance would flash with indignation. ‘You tell us the things to value—and you withhold them from us.’ Every Collector would hear this sentence spoken, or some variant of it, a hundred times. And uncomfortably near the truth it was, as he had to admit himself. But aloud he said nothing. Indeed no sentence ever ended in a fuller stop. I had arrived one evening at Dehra Dun in the Terai, or foot hills, of the Himalayas on a fortnight’s holiday, the first in my service. I was staying at the Club in an upstairs room of the annexe and from my window presently made out the lights of Mussoorie, the health resort 7,000 feet above sea. Never having been to a hill station, I wondered idly how it would feel up there in the cool air: Dehra Dun, although an improvement on the plains, was breathless. Next morning came a chance to find out. A Muslim politician, prominent in those days, and—since this also is relevant —out spokenly loyal to the British connexion, had rented a house in Mussoorie for the summer. He was not there himself, he was in Lahore; but his wife and daughters were there. My informant who was supplying these details suggested I might like to call. I doubt whether I can convey how horrified the average Muslim household would have been half-a-century ago at the very idea of such a thing. But this particular family had considered it a socio-religious duty to proclaim that it was not average. Every upper-class Muslim in the Punjab, almost every upper-class Muslim in the whole of India, was aware that Muhammad Shafi had taken the plunge and broken with the custom of purdah. There were, no doubt, some others like a, b, c and d—but were they really respectable? Others like e, f, g and h—but were they really Muslim? I called.


The two daughters of the house to whom I was introduced had stepped, to judge by their elegance and dress, straight out of a Mughal court; the Emperor Jahangir’s perhaps, for one of them at least was a Nur Jahan in the perfection of her looks. In Mussoorie there were walks to be taken to gain the most spectacular views in the world: valleys below lit up with sunlight; mountains opposite muffled in their scarves of cloud; peaks beyond these snowhatted, reaching for the sky. A rendez-vous the following afternoon was fixed for the purpose—and then they would tell me, the girls said: all about London for they were just back from there. On my side, a bit priggishly, I hoped they would tell me not about London but about Purdah: Why were so many of the best educated Muslims in India still defending it tooth and nail? Did their childhood friends, reared in orthodox surroundings, look sideways at them, or down on them, or up to them? Did they themselves feel they might be hissed in the streets? And so on. Hardly anybody, I thought, could have had such a chance as this. In the event, my walk with those two young women for companions taught me a different lesson altogether, one that, twelve months out from home, I had yet to learn. The story of their London ‘season’, a house in The Boltons, invitation after invitation from hostesses with important names— all this was, to my relief, quickly told. Of the answers to my prepared questionnaire, however, I was cheated by an unforeseen turn in the talk. In England these two girls, impressionable at their age, had moved in what was known in those days as Society, had enjoyed everything to the full. And then had disembarked at Bombay to realize that their own country was not theirs but in the rigid grip of a few Barbarians not one of whom, on the evidence, was imbued with the principles enunciated by Burke and Gladstone. During three weeks aboard ship they had sat in most agreeable company at table three times a day—only to lose that contact on the quayside when everybody rushed off to the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. And I myself, yes, where was I living in Dehra Dun but in a sanctuary barred to Indians unless they were bearers or coolies or sweepers? In my role of humane despot I ought to have replied pat to these charges. I could have delivered a sermon to the effect that we were inflexible in our resolve to pack our bags one day, were already making one concession after another which proved it. Parliaments had been created; local boards, both municipal and district, released from control; and the indianization of the Services was proceeding apace. ‘Are these’, I could have wound up my little speech by asking rhetorically, ‘are these illiberal things that we are doing?’ But somehow the comfortable words would not come,


and I left them unsaid. How could I bring myself to say, ‘Mumtaz, Raziya, have patience. Wait—what?—well, not so very, very long now, and we will cease to humiliate you.’ Rajnath Kunzru was a brahmin, and I should think in his early fifties when we first met. He wore Indian costume, which in his case meant black tunic fastened up the front and closed at the collar, a spotless shirt protruding at the wrists in a bishop’s frills, and tightly fitting white trousers. His Kashmiri descent showed in his aryan profile and fair complexion; and everything about him was eloquent of what he was; a man of the utmost refinement. Clearly he was of those who had absorbed what was best in our culture without departing one iota from the prescriptions of conventional Hinduism. In particular he appeared to have added Wordsworth and Bryce to the pantheon of his forefathers and was fond of quoting from these, tugging the while at the lock of hair he was old-fashioned enough to retain on the top of his shaven crown. He carried his head tilted backwards as though much pulling at that top-knot had lifted his chin upwards in compensation, giving him a distinctly contentious air. He had come this time for some piece of information, and stayed on talking. Talking with all the emphasis of one who has a clear idea of what is going on around him, and deplores it. He punctuated his remarks with sighs, as if despairing of the likelihood that good sense would govern people’s behaviour. When at length he rose to go, I promised to obtain what he wanted and saw him to the door. The Office briefed me within the day, and I thought it politest to incorporate the answer to his question in a personal note which I wrote the same evening. ‘Dear Pandit Rajnath Kunzru,’ I began, ‘herewith I am sending you…’ I folded the sheet and slipped it into an envelope which I left blank for I did not know the address, and everyone had gone. But before turning out the light I went back to my desk and in a bold fist put ‘Rajnath Kunzru’ on the envelope and laid it on top of the contents of my ‘Out’ tray. My orderly cleared this as usual first thing in the morning. A couple of weeks later, enclosed in an imposingly embossed, very white, very stiff, cover from the seat of Government, comes in original a letter reporting the lengths to which an Englishman holding an official appointment of responsibility could go to snub and insult an Indian gentleman. The affront had not been delivered in the privacy of an interview, it had been advertised in a manner arguing deliberation. By omitting the honorific prefix ‘Pandit’ not in the message within—oh! no, but on the envelope which every Tom, Dick and Harry could see, I had ensured that my contempt for the addressee should become public property. It


was a long document, hundreds of words beautifully penned—and I doubt if anyone apart from its author and myself ever read it from end to end. In different ink at the left-hand bottom corner over a scrawled signature was the perfunctory n.a; two initials standing for ‘Necessary action’ or—if a Collector preferred it that way ‘no action’. Rajnath Kunzru had qualities which in a juster dispensation would have brought him to the front of political life. As things were, what else was there for him to do except sit on the managing committees of a few charitable organizations, except be a busybody, except be prickly? Of course he was not a type but a caricature of a type, this chagrined Liberal: sighing away and fidgeting with his top-knot, and fretting. But there was a little of him in every member of the intelligentsia. In the British presence such people excused themselves all effort; in our presence, since we shouldered whatever blame was going, they lost the habit, and the faculty of self-criticism. This plight in which they found themselves was inherent in the Raj, and many of us came to see it as among the arguments why we should quit. A description is always made clearer by a contrast, so now is the moment to introduce the Maharaja. He would of course have been ushered in long before this if I had heeded protocol, or even if I had kept to the historical priorities. Some pages back, in my résumé of the evolution of our Empire I illustrated the policy of annexation by relating the hackneyed little story of the man who had Sind. But I did not so much as hint at a parallel policy which was being pursued simultaneously. This was to conclude treaties with a multitude, a veritable hotchpotch, of existing states. We termed them ‘states’ for want of a better word, and the larger ones merited the designation; but most of them were smaller than our shires, smaller than my own first District. But whether they were territorial units of the consequence of Hyderabad, Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and Mysore, or tiny islands of autonomy, they had this in common that they clung to their identity. This, too, in common that, beset in those days by marauding neighbours, they were at their wits’ end to know how to preserve it. In their need of military protection they turned to the sole power in the land which could guarantee this: viz, the Company. And the Company in extending it to them quite properly demanded the unqualified control of their external relations in exchange. There would have been chaos otherwise. Even as it was, anarchy walked unchecked over great tracts of Central India until the submerged pattern of local chieftainships could be recognized and restored. The outcome of this two-fold process—and the combined operation


covered a whole century counting from Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757—was that three-fifths of India, including practically the entire coastal belt and all the other strategic areas, became British soil, whereas the remaining two-fifths, although closely folded in our embrace, did not become British territory. A dualism had been imposed from the start on the structure of our Rule—and how this complicated things when we came to hand over! In the period of expansion it no doubt suited us to have the choice between two courses of action, and I do not suppose the Englishman on the spot would have had thoughts beyond the expedient step to take in the immediate case. Our political opponents, however, credited us with a conscious design. We had maliciously sacrificed twofifths of the country to the horror of Indian regimes, they discovered, in order to throw into favourable relief what we ourselves had brought about in the rest. You couldn’t help liking the Congress sometimes. To be accurate, therefore, we have to think of a ‘British’ India and an ‘Indian’ India rubbing shoulders inside the ambit of our Empire; the Indian, or ‘princely’, India being an aggregate of well over 500 states. Not more than a hundred of them were of much significance; and of these again only, say, a dozen were really important. Hyderabad stood first, equal to the United Kingdom in area and supporting a population of 16 million; Kashmir next; followed, if at some distance, by the other three or four whose names have been cited already. It is preferable to use the English word ‘Princes’ of the rulers collectively because the native titles were apt to vary as between states; so that if, generally speaking, the leading Hindu rulers were known as ‘Maharajas’, one said ‘Gaekwar of Baroda’, ‘Jam’ of Nawanagar, ‘Maharana of Udaipur’; and the Muslim ruler, commonly ‘Nawab’, was ‘Nizam’ in the case of Hyderabad. Miss Venner, as some of us will remember from our Kipling, lumped them together as ‘howwid Wajahs’ but that won’t pass either, except colloquially, because there were many, many ‘rajahs’ who were simply landowners and not ‘Princes’ at all. The grander Princes wore the trappings of royalty and visibly enjoyed being greeted with a salute of guns, anything from twentyone to nine according to precedence. It did not seem to them idiotic to assemble and debate whether the Sovereign was under obligation to turn out the Guard at Buckingham Palace whenever a member of their order drove through the gates. They knew by heart that promise of Queen Victoria’s: ‘We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of the Native Princes as our own.’ Of course there was a pill to swallow underneath this thick coating of


sugar and it was proving latterly more bitter than expected. To surrender foreign affairs to the Paramount Power in return for protection was, as seen, part of the agreement. But they had scarcely bargained for Her Majesty’s sanctimonious preoccupation with their moral safety. They had been adjured, if you please, to remember that their thrones were ‘not divans of indulgence but the stern seats of duty’. Faithful allies, not subjects, they had to receive willy-nilly at their courts an Englishman who would be there in season and out of season to watch, to warn, and—it had happened already too often for their liking—to bring to book. As I propose to invite a Maharaja to have his say in my chapter ‘About Princes’, it may be that certain of the wilder assumptions of the British public, the international press and the Hollywood film studios will come in for questioning. But until then, by all means, let the ex-parte judgments prevail. Nor are all of these adverse: far from it. Think—and it will be very easy—of some illfavoured politician in homespun slumped in the back of his Ford car as he hurries to a conference. Then think how the Maharaja, lissom and debonair, sits his caparisoned horse as he leads the Dasahra procession through the streets of his capital. The aroma of another India altogether clings to him, the India of peacocks and elephants, palaces and lakes, veiled beauties and bejewelled potentates. Did it so much matter if he kept his budget in his head? Was it a crime to pay the Inspector of Dancing Girls £150 a year plus an allowance of £10 for acting as Chief Justice? And which of us loved moneylenders? Which of us if he could would not have harnessed them in a team and driven them round the racecourse? To the progressive-minded this ‘Indian’ India was anathema; and in particular to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru whose faith was in ‘scientific socialism’. The princes, he declared, were a ‘blatant anachronism’ who belonged to India’s past and deserved to lose their place in her future. When the day came, the irascible Old Harrovian saw to it that they did. This introduction will have prepared the reader for the following chapters rather in the manner of a prelude which conditions the ear for the fugue. Or if that metaphor will not help, then let me change it and simply say that I have here been painting the backcloth to the stage on which the recreated scenes will be enacted.

2 UP-THE-COUNTRY

1. REPORTING FOR DUTY Nobody told us in advance where we would be posted, or to whom we ought to report. Apparently, it had been like that from the very beginning, and it has since amused me to read how a young writer in the Company’s employ, a Titan-to-be in our imperial past as it happened, his name Mountstuart Elphinstone, turning up at Mirzapur on a borrowed horse and weary from the road, had met with the haphazard reception which—even down to the last detail -I was myself to know when I arrived at that very same station one hundred and thirty-three years later. No wonder we were slightly apprehensive as we made our way ‘up-the-country’. For several days, and sometimes much longer, we would have scant cause to be cheerful—and then some affecting little episode, trivial in itself, would seem to set everything right. We woke up one morning to find that the clouds on the horizon had been dispelled. The sixteen-hour day in Bombay, my first in India, had been kaleidoscopic emotionally and pictorially. You caught the aroma of India that stole out to the ship as she slopped at anchor, waiting for the dawn in the roads—and then they made you go down into the airless baggage hold to put your things into your mis-named cabin trunk. As the sun came up over the palm trees on Malabar Point you gave a little gasp at so much beauty—and might have succumbed to it more but for that slight hangover from the last night aboard. Ashore finally, and through the Customs, you saw that the white turbans jerking and nodding everywhere weren’t all that clean; and when you emerged into the strident thoroughfare, the sharp light was already draining the colour from every vivid pink or acid green or turquoise blue saree that tried to please the eye. Farewells then on the pavement between lifelong friends of twenty-one days standing who would nevermore meet. Next, the


Secretariat to report—no, first to Grindlays to touch a cheque; to touch in the literal sense your first rupee. Did Indians, banyas or something, really bow down physically and worship the coin as we did figuratively in front of our gold sovereign, and the Americans in front of their dollar? Now the Secretariat—for the young Civilian who knew his Province a whole year in advance would only learn his post at the last minute, orally; and there were forty possibilities. Mirzapur? Where’s that? I was shown it on the map. Then off in a hurry to be lunched with a certain formal stiffness at an imposing club by a truly terrifying box-wallah, friend of a family friend. But I am being churlish in my reference to a man who was kindness itself—and it is not easy to be kind to somebody you haven’t taken to one little bit. Bombay, then, hadn’t helped; and from the carriage window on the journey up country, instead of the finished landscape of some great painter I had only seen endless preliminary drawings—quite colourless, with the odd gawky palm or cluster of tumbledown shanties to serve as an occasional point de repère—beyond which the artist had not advanced. On the evidence so far, the pageantry of India was a myth. Understandably therefore I was not in the highest of spirits as I began my unpacking next morning. I had some books among my things: the Odyssey and the Aeneid, for example, wrapped in a page of The Times already more out of date than either; and there was Sa’di’s Rosegarden, too, for I had taken Persian, which was optional, in addition to the compulsory language of the Province. I had brought no Bible with me, but I did have an attractively gotup, gilt-edged New Testament in Urdu which the British and Foreign Bible Society had generously presented me with. And thinking this might prove hard going, I had taken the precaution of throwing in my Novum Testamentum Graece for use as a crib. Then the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, both of which had loomed large in the syllabus of my three academic terms on probation and been among the subjects of my qualifying examination. Two other items there were, exceedingly slim, to be squeezed into three-quarters of an inch of shelf. The first of these, elegant in scarlet and gold, had been supplied by Authority, and was entitled Manual on Indian Etiquette. It was, as the covering slip dated 1910 was at pains to make explicit, compulsory reading. The seventeen m pages of contents moved to a grand finale, for they bore the cachet of ‘John Malcolm. Camp Dhooliah: 28th June 1821’. The instructions, penned so long ago, were not superseded, an introductory note emphasized: They are as appropriate at the

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present day as when they were compiled’. To my own thinking, however, they bore the mark of a bygone attitude. My power in India, I read, rested on the general opinion of the natives of my comparative superiority in good faith, wisdom and strength. But it was up to me —naturally the writer had not employed an expression which in his time could scarcely have been heard out of earshot of the card-table —to lay aside my pride of station. It was from the possession of truer principles of morality and religion, not from their ostentation, that benefit could be conferred upon those I was now summoned to rule. The other consisted of forty odd pages of poems from the pen, literally so in several cases, of Alfred Lyall. This most distinguished and versatile nineteenth-century Civilian filled his leisure by writing not only classics such as his monumental Studies and his British Dominion in India, but light verse. This little volume—and I have it still—is not a book in the normal sense: it comes from no publishing house and is partly, as I said, in the author’s handwriting. The rest, the printed portion, may well have been cut from say, the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette (on which the young Kipling worked as sub-editor) or the Central India Times of Nagpore, and the whole is stitched or pasted amateurishly within cardboard backs covered in left-over wallpaper of flowery design. How this charming relic permitting a peep into the privacy of an eminent Victorian had fallen into my hands I have no notion, nor does it matter. What is relevant is that one of the poems exactly hits off the mood I was in that day as I began my unpacking. So exactly that I have to quote from it. In this Swinburnian lyric a discontented Competition-Wallah (a stiff competitive examination had been made the door to the Service in 1853) lies Recollecting old England’s sea breezes On his back in a lone bungalow, and soliloquizes: What lured him to life in the tropic? Did he venture for fame or for pelf? Did he seek a career philanthropic Or simply to better himself? Why, he asks himself in exasperation, had he not been satisfied to stay put, to stop dreaming, to be average? What wonder if he is driven


…to curse Oriental romancing And wish he had toiled all his day At the Bar, or the Banks, or financing And got d d in a common-place way. At least I was not the odd man out, it seemed. My bout of homesickness had been largely induced by an isolation as complete as it was sudden. This needs explaining. In Mirzapur, although the Collector was the one and only British Officer, there were several Indians of high official standing: the Judge, a chief of police, subordinate magistrates, and so on. And this being an up-country post, not the over-wrought capital, some of them must have heard what fifty clerks plus another fifty orderlies, messengers, constables, myrmidons had heard: viz, that a Chhota Sahib—the expression will be explained further down— had joined. Why then did it occur to none of these educated gentlemen to look the young man up in the course of those lonely days? The answer is: precisely because they were educated. They would do the proper thing at the proper moment—and this had not come. They were quite right. It was for the Collector, as my sponsor, to make the first move. If they themselves did, it would be pushing. Meanwhile, I was not merely flat as a flounder, I was in slack water. For some reason I have forgotten, my sailing from England as originally fixed had been retarded by three weeks; so my Collector, obliged to adhere to his own time-table, had proceeded on tour without me. Until informed officially of my arrival in the country he could hardly give me my instructions, and since the runners would require a couple of days to get out to him and return again, I could only possess my soul in patience. In the event this was rewarded sooner than I expected. ‘You will be beginning your service in some of the finest jungles in India.’ That is how the Collector’s three pages, written in a rapid and none too legible hand, opened. He was at Dudhi for the time— indeed the heading was ‘Camp Dudhi’—where I was to join him as soon as I had got my bearings. A mare had been bought for me from a reputable dealer at Saharanpur through Charlie(?) Grant and should be turning up shortly. I would doubtless possess a gun of my own, and as for a rifle I could always borrow his. The Nazir, Durga something, could be relied on to see after me during my halt at headquarters, and a bearer (a son, it seemed, of his own man) was there in camp waiting for me. And my main job for a bit would be to get down to the language…

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2. CAMP DUDHI Meantime, however, it is still Sunday and I must sit down to my first letter from India. The previous one had been written on board the Ranpura so as to be included in the outgoing mail. Afterwards I would sort out the clothes I would presumably need in camp and perhaps take a swim before lunch. The water with the sun on it should have warmed up within an hour or so. My letter, I am sure, was short. I told my mother where I had been posted and that I had got there safely—that’s all. I did not lie. I did not tell her that I was finding my feet in a new place, was already enjoying to the full the excitements of the tough and vigorous life I had chosen. Nor yet the truth that I was moping and alone. But she probably read this between the lines. The letters from India of a Victor Jacquemont are the exception proving the rule that these were dull. But dull as no doubt they mostly were and without claim to be classed, like his, as literature, our letters did document a period and a situation: and particularly, I dare say, when written by an unmarried son to his widowed mother. In a bureau, at the back of a drawer in an English home the bundle done up with ribbon would accumulate as the months went by; and then bundle 2 would be started…and so on as the years went by. The day of course would come when the series would cease abruptly and these faded packets, now cluttering up space required for less sentimental use, be relegated to the deep recess of some commode. In the ordinary course, then, I might, as I write these present lines, have been in a position to extract the appropriate bundle from its limbo and refresh my memory of the ride to Dudhi so long ago, and of my twelve weeks camping in the region which had suddenly become the hub of my universe. A spiritual centre, it was by a minor miracle a geographical Omphalos too; for I only needed to open my Times Atlas at the two-page plate ‘India’ and lay a ruler diagonally first this way and then the other across it, to discover that the intersection occurs—at Dudhi. But let me explain why I must do without my documentation. It happened that except for a few items to be counted on the fingers of one hand all our furniture, placed in storage at Maple’s Depository in Gower Street, perished in the flames of the Blitzkrieg. Alone spared the holocaust were: our grand piano which had gone separately to Steinway’s and survived to be given subsequently on loan to the Royal College of Music; plus three items I had taken out to India with me. These were: what we called the Gladstone


chair (because bequeathed to us by his family), a mid-Victorian concession to luxury equipped with iron levers under the arm rests which, being gripped, allowed the oval back to tilt to 45° in which the G.O.M. on holiday at Hawarden would of an afternoon both imbibe and sleep off the Iliad; my mother’s copy of Gitanjali (which I have mentioned already); and a canteen of cutlery. I have digressed, but there was a point in that too. I have wanted, while the chance offered, to support by concrete evidence what can be inferred from the first section of this Chapter: namely, that the Civilian travelled light through life, and whilst in statu pupillari was not expected to be encumbered with more than could be loaded on the back of a pack-camel. Unaided memory serves me none too well in regard to that first Sunday. My letter finished I must, I suppose, have explored the Collector’s house and may have noticed that though empty it was not, as empty houses are apt to be, dusty. I did not yet understand that there is no such thing as spring-cleaning in the United Provinces. From March to June a west wind called the loo is blowing from sunrise to sunset—sometimes it will go on blowing far into the night—and develop every so often into a choking and blinding sandstorm. From July to September, it is the monsoon, the Indian ‘mausim’, when you cannot spread out the carpets and curtains and coverings on the lawn to beat them. And therefore the annual cleaning of your Bungalow occurs in October. That is why the old Boar in the vestibule looked as if he’d just had a Wash and Brush-up, and those turned up tusks of his, surely eight inches each of them, gleamed like waxed moustaches. I must have strolled out into the garden, visited the row of outbuildings, stables, servants’ quarters. How many Collectors had there been here before the present one? I believe my mind may have run on that sort of line, for we Probationers during our three academic terms had been introduced to Indian history with special reference to the British period, and I was aware, if vaguely, that the Company, pushing its dominion forward from Bengal, had utilized the old Mughal routes, had to a certain extent allowed these to govern the direction of its own thrust up-the-country. Most of them had radiated from Delhi or Agra to run east and west; but one great highway had run more or less at right angles to the rest from Mirzapur to Jubbulpore. That caravan route which we can picture with its milestones, its avenues of trees, its police-posts and toll houses, accounts for the early significance of the region later to be known as the Districts of Mirzapur, Benares and Ghazipur. More of an effort is demanded to appreciate that England’s gaze, having shifted from the United States as a result

UP-THE-COUNTRY 31

of Cornwallis’ defeat at Yorktown in 1781, had settled in these very parts. Here, it seemed, she might win compensation for her loss. Behold the same Cornwallis, now an actor in the new theatre, considering the application of the Prince Regent for the post of Collector at Benares—and rejecting it on the ground that the claims of a man like Samuel Davis were superior to those of the royal applicant! Of course, I don’t suggest my reflections carried me that far; for one thing I was not au fait of the details and knew more of the growth of the Roman Empire than of our own. I could not have put my pencil point on either Plassey or Wandewash. But I did have the sensation, up country and alone in that dear old house with its antlered walls and the Tusker still giving me his confidential wink, that at least one of my race had been seen around here without interruption for a very long time. Anyway I piled up on the bed the things I would want to take with me into camp. First the khaki clothing purchased from F.P. Baker and Co. off Regent Street; including shirts with special buttons, two where the wearer’s shoulder-blades would be and a third one at the waist, to fasten the quilted T-shaped spine-pad; my puttees; my riding boots; my sola topi—not that I needed to put that on the pile. I was not likely to forget it after the tales of horror I had listened to at the School of Tropical medicine. It seemed you must not even dart across the Compound no, not even at tea-time on a December day, without it. The ferocious lecturer had gone further: I must cut half-moons out of all my clothes under the arms to let a salubrious puff of air in; but here, visualising the morning coat and the tails my mother had not without sacrifice, given me when I became an undergraduate, I had rebelled. And there were two more things, likewise from F.P.Baker: the bedding roll or bistar and the metal washbasin called chilamchi. I wonder whether a London shop assistant would still use the words. Anyhow, here was my camp gear assembled, each article flaunting an exotic Indian name as its passport to Dudhi. For even sola is Hindi, and those who spell it ‘solar’ should refrain from sneering at others who by a similar example of folk-etymology turn asparagus into ‘sparrowgrass’. Well, those items were obvious, but —such awful apprehensions torment us in youth—could I leave anything at headquarters without making an ass of myself? There was that story, perfectly authentic, about King George V who, travelling North to shoot tiger on the Nepal border whilst Queen Mary went sightseeing at Agra, observed a Collector’s camp not far from the track and stopped the Imperial train to pay him a surprise visit. He found the Collector seated in his tent dressed, it being near sunset, as he himself was dressed, that is, for dinner.


In the end I opted for the black tie and boiled Shirt, and not unwisely as the sequel proved. I will not say I wore these regularly those next months under canvas, but I wore them on occasion, and then for the best of all possible reasons, viz. that my Collector had elected to wear his. But wasn’t it time now for that swim? The dawn chill had yielded to the sun’s rays and the Ganges would have warmed up. The bank, steep at this central point in the river’s curve, began at the bottom of the long garden and it was not many minutes before I was in the water. The sight of a crocodile sunning itself, mouth agape, on the mud and then slithering in ahead of me had, somehow, not put me off. But when I had had enough, and began climbing the slope back to the house my thoughts recurred to it. Just then I came upon two villagers who, since they were squatting on the ground, must have been watching me. They got to their feet and the broad smile they bestowed on me invited the question, easy in Hindustani even for a beginner: ‘Is that crocodile dangerous?’ My interlocutors, if I may stretch the term, turned to one another and laughed; then looked again towards me, one nodding his head energetically and the other shaking his with the same amount of conviction. Now nobody can be certain what the Indian peasant means by a nod or, conversely, a shake of the head. But he means something, and I doubt, on the basis of later experience, whether those simple men could have given sounder advice. I expect the zoologists will tut-tut; but just as history is not wholly a matter of books, so their science could occasionally benefit by a holiday from the zoo. Over the years that followed I saw plenty of crocodiles cut open to reveal a woman’s forearm with the bracelet still adorning the wrist, or a human foot. But I was in each case persuaded that the creature had feasted on an ill-cremated corpse. Nothing indeed, as it seemed to me, was more poignant a reminder of a people’s poverty than the frequency with which imperfectly cremated bodies were consigned not only to holy Ganges but to any river or pond whatever, the bereaved being too poor to shoulder the cost of the complete incineration of their loved ones. No doubt the Indian crocodile (Ghariyal: Magar) with his long slender snout and sharp interlocking teeth, could he employ our idiom, would insist that fish is his staple food, but the evidence I have cited proves that he will vary his diet. Moreover, as every villager knows—why, I have seen it myself scores of times—he will lie half submerged with nostrils, eyes and part of the back visible, pretending to be a floating log— and woe betide the unsuspecting beast, quenching its thirst there, who is taken in. But does he or does he not attack

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man? I answer that I have no proof of it. Seeing however that through the weeks of drought he has frequently to travel overland in search of a ‘tank’—a pond, that is—where he may eke out a bare subsistence, it is fairly obvious that he will grow hungry enough to eat anything he can get. His instinct, so the authorities affirm, is to keep clear of man, but with the crocodile as with many of God’s creatures one instinct can be overpowered by another. I have known crocodiles to make a bee-line for a tank even though this led them right past a village. My conclusion is that a starving crocodile in a confined area of water would be dangerous company. And very likely that is what my two informants intended to tell me. Well, tomorrow came, and with it, if I’m getting the days right, the Collector’s instructions. To say these had a tonic effect is to put it mildly. In the Bombay Secretariat they had ‘noted’ my arrival — my coming out to India fired with the wish to spend my working life there, ten thousand miles from home—‘noted’ it. But here was somebody steering unerringly between feeling and formality. I reread what he had written. There was one particular, perhaps, that puzzled me: that mare from Saharanpur. How could she ‘turn up shortly’? Out with the map. Yes, Saharanpur was the better part of 500 miles off, way up north of Delhi. This dismayed me because I was ignorant enough to suppose that the syce would have to ride her all that distance by road. I did not know that a horse-box could be hired at short notice at any main-line station and hitched to a passing express. Imagine then my delight when Shireen turned up unexpectedly soon (would it be the third or the f ourth day?). I know I ran f rom the room and down the verandah steps when I learned she was there. As I went to examine her, she backed her ears and showed fright but presently permitted me to rub her forehead. She was very young, a two-year-old light bay with blaze and four white socks nearly matching, delicately built. She had more than a touch of Arab blood. Those ears she had backed were small and pointed, her eyes were huge and protruding and she had a mouth that could drink out of a tea-cup by the look of it. She was skittish, and judging by her subsequent performances, it must have been a job coaxing her into the horse-box. Skittish, too, she would remain. I christened her on the spot after the heroine of the Persian romance Khusraw and Shireen. She would be Shireen, ‘My Sweet’. Let me peer ahead into the years: she played polo— shockingly, and I was incompetent to improve her; caught by accident in a city riot she displayed not a single one of the qualities of a police horse; as for pig-sticking, I had at least the wit


never to ascertain how she would behave; out with the Delhi Hunt she was to come down so heavily that I bear the marks of it still. Below average in her accomplishments then? Possibly. But she did have a turn of speed and three or four years after we met, she and I in combination won an amateurish event grandiloquently known as the Agra Plate. And—need I add it?—she had another gift, pronounced beyond measure: the gift of captivating me completely. It was not for me to know it, but the Collector’s private communication to me had been accompanied by directions to the Office; and in that area of activity as yet outside my ken, my immediate movements were being arranged. When the Nazir, whom by this time I regarded as Hermes, messenger of the gods, puts in his next appearance, it is to present me with my own tour programme. Typed in English, it read: Date…… .................March: Mirzapur to Robertsganj .................March: Robertsganj to Son River .................March: Son River to Dudhi.

Listening to villagers (see page 56)

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Going into camp (see page 125)


‘Shireen’ (see page 36)

Underneath was the footnote that the Collector’s motor car would be made available for the first of these ‘marches’, and the services of Risaldar Abdul Aziz Khan for the second and third. At the bottom of the page to the left was added: Collector for information. Tahsildar Robertsganj for necessary action. Station Officer Police Station ditto for necessary action. Finally over to the right and more gratifying than all: Signed ................. with a space for my signature. I was about to ask Hermes to interpret a few of the particulars here when he got in before me with: ‘Your Honour will kindly insert the dates considered proper, and sign’. It was the first time I had been addressed as Your Honour (Huzoor, lit. Presence), and the first time I was issuing an order. Fifty years on, the recollection causes me to smile as it will, I hardly doubt, cause others to yawn. But the fact was, the Collector’s word to the Office had amounted to a brevet. I was now the Chhota Sahib in the Mirzapur District of the United Provinces, India. The literal rendering ‘Little Gentleman’ won’t do at all. The grade—for grade it was—designated the Collector’s Number Two. ‘Assistant’, therefore; further, not any assistant but specifically a Collector’s Assistant. The standard dictionaries, such as Platts Urdu and

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Classical Hindi Lexicon 1884 (a veritable Liddell and Scott) will confirm that this was so. Just one small matter I had to settle for myself. Planning to be two days in the saddle, I had to decide what to keep with me and what to send ahead. If it was the first time in my life that I had to work that out, it was also the last; for my bearer, once engaged, would relieve me of that responsibility ever afterwards. The situation was saved by something so humble I didn’t think it worth listing above: viz, my old haversack. No problem now: so I threw all my assembled gear into the smaller of my two trunks, heaved it to the bedroom door and stood it on end. On it I balanced my bed roll, the basin (have to wash meantime under the tap—but there’d be no taps!) and my gun. The operation was understood, and I was next to see these possessions inside my spacious tent at Camp Dudhi. Meantime a syce set out for Robertsganj with Shireen. On the morning of departure a Ford car of the model associated in the minds of most of us with the immortals of the Silent Screen drew up, and from it alighted the Tahsildar who had come in person to fetch me. I should here explain once and for all who he is. As will be realised from my introductory pages the Government, being the sole owner of the Indian soil, levies a Tax on every rood of land in every village. This Tax, known as Land Revenue, is the keystone of the financial edifice—in my United Provinces it exceeded 50% of the total revenues—and its payment, if injustices and avoidable hardship are to be eliminated, can only be secured by a decentralised system. The Tahsildar is there to bring it in, within the territorial jurisdiction of his Tahsil, and there will commonly be 3, 4 or 5 of him to the District. Since it was our policy to grant remissions of Revenue (and of course Rent at the level of tenants) wherever some calamity or straight crop failure dictated clemency, he must pass for the expert—in my experience he almost invariably was—on the agricultural conditions exhibited at the given moment in his Tahsil. If I had to translate Tahsil and Tahsildar (which nobody ever did!) I would borrow the French ‘Perception’ and ‘Percepteur’; but this, mind, would be literal translation; it would not convey a meaning which is, to my knowledge, peculiar to India. Robertsganj then was this area’s ‘Perception’, and I supposed (not wrongly) that a Civilian of the past had been commemorated (Lyallpur, Campbellpur, Jacobabad—there were many parallels) in the name of that little ‘ganj’ or market centre.


Leaving by the road that serves Vindhyachal, a resort of pilgrimage some three miles out, we were very soon raising a feather of white dust across the plateau that separates the Valley of the Ganges from that of the Son. The northern tracts are highly cultivated, and it dawned on me as we drove southwards how fortunate I was to have as my travelling companion a most competent guide to the agriculture of these parts. India was divided climatically and therefore agriculturally by a line which we can imagine as drawn from, let us say, Surat just north of Bombay up the Tapti valley to Khandesh and onwards to Nagpur whence it bears north-east to a point about one hundred miles above Calcutta. The northern region was Upper India, including, but much larger than, ‘Hindustan’; and the southern was, in our forgotten parlance, ‘the Peninsula’. Now in northern India there were two distinct harvests: the Autumn crop (kharif) reaped from October onwards and the Spring crop (rabi) reaped from, say, the end of February onwards. Seated alongside my Tahsildar I was being introduced to a countryside somewhat bare at this juncture, for the Autumn harvest was now in and the Spring crops had only just been sown. I understood the principal components of the Autumn crop in the neighbourhood to be various kinds of millet, barley, rape and mustard. I could not have got even that far, had the Tahsildar not given me the English equivalent of each. I tried to scribble the words down in my little red-backed Woolworth notebook as we swayed about. ‘Don’t bother,’ said my instructor whose commonsense exceeded mine. ‘Wait till you see these different crops with your own eyes’. There were scattered villages as far as the eye could reach on either side just here. ‘How big would they be?’ I asked. Three hundred people, he thought, four or perhaps even five sometimes. I had read that there were half-a-million villages in India, so putting the average population of each at four hundred, that makes two hundred million villagers— all watching with anxiety to see how the crops would turn out. But the driver was toot-tooting the horn, for we were drawing near the Tahsil at Robertsganj. The brick building, rather grim architecturally, reminiscent of those wayside railway stations of ours in England—minus the platform and the track, that is—dating from the middle of the last century. I remember it with affection for never before had I been greeted anywhere with pomp and circumstance. In the receivingline stood the Sub-Inspector in charge of the local Police Station, flanked by half-a-dozen of his men with arms at the ‘present’; the Assistant Tahsildar; and ten or twelve notables, small landholders presumably, from round about; and not least,

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Risaldar Abdul Aziz Khan. I had found out that this officer (for a Risaldar is a lieutenant of cavalry who has risen f rom trooper) resided beyond the Son, was on leave preparatory to retirement and, happening to be up at the Robertsganj Tahsil on some business had offered to wait for me so that we could ride south together. It is possible that my telescope now turned upon those three ‘marches’ so far away is rose-tinted, but of this much I am certain: I would have been happy to stay much longer in my novel company; long enough to enter, stumbling but dogged, into the animated conversation; long enough to pick up a snippet here and there from the constant banter of those four—cavalryman, police officer, and two Tahsil officials—among themselves. The veriest beginner can distinguish between Hindu and Muslim names, and I knew that my companions were two and two. Frequently of course one could tell by dress; for instance, the Risaldar wore a fez. There was a bottle of Red Label on the board—I wondered if one could tell by that too. Not that evening, anyhow, for presently a servant brought in a tray with a single glass. But I did learn, and as early as this, something about the hospitality of the people in whose midst I had chosen a career. Shireen went well alongside the big roan on which the Risaldar was mounted. As we trotted steadily that second march I was taught the points of a horse in Hindustani, the terms for the parts of the bridle and of the saddle. It made it all the better that the teacher had not one word of English. He would lean over towards me and stretch out a finger, then pronounce the word and I would imitate him like a parrot. His white teeth would gleam, and then he would lean over again picking on something else. At intervals he would say ‘Canter’. And then we would continue in unbroken silence for the next quarter of an hour. My syce, all this while, was keeping pace with us at a discreet distance behind, safe from the worst of our dust. He was riding a mettlesome pony borrowed from I don’t know whom. Oh, I had already given up worrying about these trifles—spare horses, bullock-carts, bed, board. On tour up-country it was a game of leap-frog, and these people from Nazirs and Tahsildars down to the syce in your own employ were past-masters at it. One week in India and I could see that. No, the real worry—and it would persist for many a month—was how in the world I would ever be in a position to earn my pay. As we came within view of the Son, the sun was setting in a blaze of glory and the river shone like silk shot with many colours. The level evening light of India, how it could transfigure all it


touched! I saw there were two or three tents pitched on the sandy shore and a little knot of villagers squatting close by. A policeman recognizable from afar by his scarlet turban and khaki uniform was standing guard. Lo, our lodging for the night. We crossed on a gigantic raft next morning, horses and all, hauled and poled simultaneously, and were in the saddle on the far bank while the air was yet chill. I was thoroughly stiff, as may be imagined, and could not disguise it. The old cavalryman laughed and said: ‘All the English officers are like that coming on a boat from Blighty (vilayet)’; adding, countryman born and bred as he was: ‘Riding a ship is different; riding a horse is different.’ It sounded so funny that the remark has stayed with me ever since. We were leaving the cultivated plain to our rear, and heading now towards the Vindhya Range. The population was thinning out already, for we were entering a tract which from here on would be more and more scarred by ravines. We came into a gulley, threaded it, climbed out at the far end, and there, not half-a-mile away was the Collector’s camp. The Collector’s Camp is a British period piece. It does not antedate the Raj. Here at least was something of which the Mughals had never dreamed; of which, grand administrators in their heyday and their fashion, they had never felt the need. It is to our credit that we did. At this very moment there must be hundreds of thousands of underprivileged Indians, querulous septuagenarians many of them, illiterates most of them, who can conjure up a Collector’s visit to their neighbourhood; and thousands who can still see their fathers and grandfathers face to face with the Englishman outside a great big tent gesticulating excitedly and demanding the redress of a wrong—or else cracking gaunt fingers and looking sheepish because of some words which, pronounced in a strange accent, have gone home. But except in India (and I must not keep on saying in these pages that my India embraces Pakistan and Bangla Desh) there are few today who know from experience how a Collector went on tour and why. In these next paragraphs I shall be recounting both the how and the why. Four months of the year would normally be earmarked for touring. In Districts such as Allahabad or Agra (a man must be forgiven if he instances what he knows rather than what he hears about), containing large cities too often simmering politically or communally, the programme was liable to interruption and dislocation. But in Mirzapur or say, Bahraich right up by the foothills of the Himalayas, the seasonal tour would be accomplished according to plan. And the plan, other things being

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equal, would be to select an area whose turn it was. Ideally, tent would be struck after three or four nights and the Camp could march ten or twelve miles; so that an energetic Collector might reckon to pitch on some two dozen sites in the course of the winter. This presupposed not only the sparkling climate of Upper India, but a clockwork operation which the subordinate staff, the henchmen, everybody, performed con amore. You are eating your breakfast of scrambled eggs on toast at 5.30a.m. in a roomy tent which has a bathroom attached, flap doors and a drugget on the ground, and you will be enjoying your cooked luncheon twelve miles away at a table in a marquee where at the moment nothing identifies the landscape save a mango grove or an avenue of neem trees. By that hour you will have been through the morning’s mail delivered at the new halting place, and your Reader, your Clerk of Court, will have classified the petitions presented there. You will have intimated to those concerned the inspection you propose to carry out that afternoon, and your Stenographer, already accustomed to his fresh surroundings, will be prepared to take dictation when you send for him. There is no rural bazaar, let alone a shopping centre to depend on, yet you will go to your neatly made bed by lamplight after a menu no whit less adequate than one served in your more permanent dining room. The retinue at either of my two remote Districts would comprise, not counting the Reader and the Stenographer, the following on the official establishment: the armed Police Guard; the Orderlies; the couriers; the elephant mahouts; the cameleers (muleteers in mountainous country); the bullock cart drivers; and the team of men-of-all-work. The domestic personnel with you in camp meant the entire household except the gardeners and ranged from the bearer, cook and tableservants to the syces, grass-cutters, laundry man, water carrier and sweeper. The total could vary but I would not put it lower than fifty souls in the less get-at-able tracts—south of Dudhi, say, where the couriers, for example, would be relay runners in the most literal sense. This then, without, I hope, too many burdensome details is the how. I come to the why. The impression is often gained that the British official in India, hedged about by venal underlings, was inaccessible to those who could not pay. I concede that the word baksheesh comes to us from India and I could add that in Persian ‘bribe’ and ‘manure’ are expressed by the same noun. But there is a tendency to exaggerate, and what Indians have the right to resent is the implication that greasing the palm is a practice of which they have the monopoly, is something not countenanced in the West. At


headquarters, even in big cities like Delhi and Allahabad a sprinkling of poor men could commonly be noticed among the rich or influential in the waitingroom three mornings a week. To none was the door barred. I dare say the chaprasi, the orderly wearing a great sash, expected his obol; rather, however, in the spirit of the guard on the Great Western Railway who used to get you a corner seat—and a shilling for it. For the immense majority of India’s population, however, the peasantry that is, a journey to town was a formidable step; to be contemplated, if at all, in extremis. Now the seasonal tour brought the Hākim (the man who gives the order) into their very midst, and I think a Collector usually treasured all his days the memory of a certain response. You see yourself once more, seated uncomfortably on the edge of a charpoy, the fourlegged low frame, in front of some windowless hovel—too wretched to be called a cabin or hut which serves your host and four or five of his family, both sexes, as bedroom, living room and kitchen, as can be told from the raftered ceiling blackened with soot; you are drinking a cup of rather sweet, very smoky tea, the buffalo milk glistening on its surface; and Data Din—for this is his chance—is doing most of the talking. Or, still in your thoughts, you are taking your evening stroll after work and perhaps observing how the blades of the young wheat, quite colourless at noon, are showing emerald green in the setting sunlight. You sense that you are being followed, you expected that anyway, and you wait for the opening gambit from behind, the ritual ‘Huzoor’, ‘Huzoor’, ‘Presence’, ‘Presence’—‘Your Presence is Mother and Father to me…’ Of course the Collector does not camp for months on end merely to listen to one side of every case, and the villager knows it. But he also knows his adversary will be getting his word in as well and will embellish; therefore he must do likewise. And to the peasantry there is comfort in the sheer obtaining of a tête-à-tête with the Hākim. And the latter for his part found it worth while too. Living in a tent, there is no escape; but he did not go into camp to escape—or only from the quires of foolscap, not from his people. ‘I am never alone except at meals,’ wrote a collector from the wilds long ago in a letter home. It was not a complaint, it was a boast. Nor will the contact be all. There will be the scrutiny of papers in selected, but not pre-selected, villages. We have to visualize an isosceles triangle. The Collector is at the apex, three or four of his principal officers will be along a top line; under these, the Tahsildars along a second line; and then (I am skipping the remaining intermediaries) along the base hundreds of village accountants called Patwaris. The Patwari holds the Crop Record

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in which is entered the serial number of each field in the village; its proprietor; its actual cultivator; its area; the soil classification; the crop sown in the current year (a) in Autumn (b) in Spring. My excuse for introducing these technicalities is that we are touching here the very core of the system. The State owns the land. Good. Everybody accepted this, always had from time immemorial. In return—and this was our British contribution— the people deserve to know exactly where they stand in law; each cultivator vis-à-vis the landholder, each landholder vis-à-vis the Government. A very little reflection will show how much hinged on the correct maintenance of records which would be at the disposal of the courts in the event of litigation. They were evidence of the rights and the obligations of the rural population of the District; of the Province; of the whole of India; affected the welfare of over 200 million souls in half-a-million villages. In the given touring season, the particular Village Accountants responsible for the immediate environs of the two dozen odd camping grounds would be on their mettle, obviously. But remember (and the Patwaris did) that the Collector on his horse can cover a good deal more than the ten or twelve miles constituting the march, and will frequently have it announced at twenty-four hours’ notice that he will be at Pandeypore or Jasra (both villages being off the line and chosen either at random or because of some disquieting rumour that has come to his ears in their regard) to inspect the records. He can be certain of an attentive audience, for this is an affair which nobody in the two named villages will feel he can afford to miss. Hanky-panky was not eliminated, it would be foolish to pretend such a thing: in a country where few of the cultivators can read what the Village Accountant writes, opportunity is bound to be the ally of temptation. But it was combated untiringly. And one authority, acquainted with what happens elsewhere, has concluded that the accuracy of our Indian returns was probably unapproached in any other country; adding that the agricultural statistics periodically published in the United Kingdom would strike a competent Patwari who investigated the methods of their compilation, as a mass of assumed and unverifiable figures! However, I am getting out of my depth now. Half a mile to go. Ought I to freshen up a bit before meeting my Collector? Too ridiculous. Everyone riding in shirtsleeves under that cloudless sky would be in my state. Nevertheless we reined in our horses for a breather, and wiped our brows. The resourceful Risaldar produced a cloth to flick our boots with. I thought we might go forward, when he said ‘Please’, unslung his field-glasses and handed them across to me. They were powerful and I had no


trouble in focussing the camp, several very large and several smaller tents, surmounted by the Union Jack; and studded round about them various tiny white huddles, motionless until one of them dissolved into movement and trickled towards the central marquee; an elephant too, in a patch of shade, and a semi-circle of camels couchant. These things I could distinguish with ease from three or four furlongs off, but much concerning them was three or four days away and not yet in my focus. For example, that you became drowsy in those tents when the sudden sun began beating on the roof, and grateful for the contained warmth within when its rays were as suddenly withdrawn. I could not yet take for granted the presence from an early hour of all those villagers in white, squatting immobile and patient, waiting for the summons from an imposing usher in a scarlet sash to come to life, to advance, to go into the big tent where the Hākim was. I could not know that the elephant’s name was Ram Pyari and that you mounted by treading with one foot on the sharp edge of the heel as she knelt, and placing the other on the looped-up tail held out for you, before crawling with the aid of the girth-ropes onto the pad (not howdah, notice) where you would sit in comfort as well as style ten feet above the plain. Or that those camels would be gurgling contentedly as they rested; but that at loading time each package, even the first, was by definition ‘the last straw’ and apt to provoke extremes of rage and utterance. I was approaching Camp Dudhi. More, I was approaching an important private landmark. If elated, I was also anxious. I was confident the coming year would be absorbing but apprehended it might be testing. I was not entitled to expect that it would be pure delight. That it turned out so was due to the wisdom, tact and humour of the man I was soon to meet. It was of consequence, this matter of wishing the novice on the master who would have to initiate him into the mysteries of his craft. Admittedly the two would in the usual run be of similar background but in no walk of life is that a guarantee of harmony, and obviously there were fairly long odds on a so-so outcome. Between the protégé and his Collector the communion was closer than that between the former and, say, the dons who had tutored him hitherto; it bore no resemblance to the relationship of a subaltern with the colonel of the regiment, none to that between the houseman and the hospital chief. It was not like being articled to anybody, devilling for any body. Of course you would be free to go your own way after office hours; but a very early lesson to learn was that in this profession there were no such hours. So I come back to my word ‘communion’ with its hint of mutual fellowship. If in that first hot

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weather one of the pair was down with a bout of fever, who but the other would sit at the foot of his bed for twenty minutes each evening after sunset? In the inferno of that first summer when the two of you, stretched in long chairs in the open, waited for the night to rise up as from the earth and enclose you—it never seemed to descend in India— who but the other was there to respond to your enthusiasms even if he failed to share them; for Cricket perhaps, for Greek History, for whatever it was? Who but the other could co-operate in the solution of the month-old Times Crossword Puzzle? The severe lines of his face suggested an eminent judge gazing down from a portrait on the wall. But no, that is wrong, for the glance instantly belied severity and spoke only of kindness, of modesty. In my mind’s eye I can see, coming forward from the tent to meet me, a very tall figure in a slightly shabby tweed jacket. I notice the knitted MCC tie and the heavy ‘Cawnpore’ topee with the chinstrap dangling behind, but at this distance of half-acentury only a few of his remarks are audible. What I am sure of is that from those first moments he stood for me above the common stature of mankind. Hugh Bomford, born in Calcutta, was to die at Meerut—how could such as he be considered Strangers in India? When, in 1939, the word was gasped out to me in Delhi by a breathless messenger, I knew I should not look upon his like again.

46

3 VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS

1. LEARN BEFORE YOU TEACH ‘Our villages are dung heaps’ cried Gandhi on one occasion, and there could be no more sincere or more influential champion of the 200 million souls who lived in them. Now dung was the symbol of wealth, not misery, in the countryside; and certain critics, unable to resist this chance to be flippant, rejoined: ‘Hooray and hurrah! With so much and to spare, the peasant can at long last plough it into his field instead of burning it away as fuel.’ An orthodox Hindu, in private conversation and with a humour which would have tickled Gandhi himself, asked me: ‘Has our Mahatma forgotten that tale in the Mahabharat where the peerless goddess Shri chooses to take up her abode in the dung of the sacred cow?’ For my own part, in and out of those villages on horseback, stopping at them, inspecting them, going back to them over the years, I judged Gandhi to be right, or more right than wrong: in their majority the villagers, twice-born and untouchable alike, were dragging out their existence painfully indeed. However, if you must criticize the Saint it was: first, for a seeming dismissal of the style and degree of contentment which the village life engendered, something absent altogether among the urban poor; and second, for omitting to consider the sizable minority composed of peasant proprietors cultivating their own few acres. A small army of cultivators of 20 acres gladdens the memory, Spartan and dignified men, men to whom the dictates of conscience and custom were stronger than the lure of economic gain. ‘Come inside,’ one of these has said to me, and in the spick and span little homestead the brass pots are gleaming. Outside, in the evening light where shadows are achieving the weirdest shapes and most prodigious lengths, it is ‘the hour of the dust of the cows’ and the beasts are


returning from pasture. Here was no ‘dung heap’, but a setting of beauty and tranquillity. However, the majority claims us, and this, as I am saying, had little in the way of solace. Upon the lot of the rural masses the politicians were apt to spread themselves—and lay the blame squarely at our door. The degradation of the villages ‘like every other major problem today is the direct result of British policy’. This time the bitter words are Nehru’s. Tolstoy has a little story about a young intellectual on a visit to his father’s village. It is harvest time, when everyone lends a hand. ‘D’you mind coming along and bringing a rake,’ says the old man. The lethargic youth excuses himself: ‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten all my moujik words.’ But strolling later out of doors he treads on a rake, the handle of which flies up to hit him on the forehead. Rubbing his brow, he bursts out: ‘What damn fool left that rake lying around!’ It is scarcely possible to transplant that scene in Indian soil. No Indian intellectual would boast he did not know how the peasant lived; he would pretend he did know. For political purposes he must affect to know. But it would have been revealing to take a bus load of top politicians—a bus to seat twelve rather than twenty — including Nehru and Jinnah naturally, to a village a couple of hours’ run from Delhi and, having assembled them around a threshing floor, to have put them through a viva. Dr Rajendra Prasad and Pt Govind Ballabh Pant would have emerged unscathed from this. I would not have expected any of the others to put up much of a show; to be at all certain, for instance, how the peasant referred to that rake with wooden teeth pointing upwards for turning over the sheaves, and what he called that other implement, his scoop. But Gandhi, surely Gandhi…? I dodge the question; he was at odds with the Congress party, out of politics temporarily, when my imaginary outing was organized. In this place I am simply saying that between the urban intelligentsia from whose body the political leadership was drawn and the villagers representing ninety per cent of the total population, a chasm yawned. It need not therefore astonish us that when Pandit Nehru in My Discovery of India comes to describe the Indian village, he has to do so not in his own words but in those of an English Civilian put on paper in 1830. And of his sister Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, most strikingly decorative of all the Society ladies ‘messing about’ (her own father’s phrase) in the arena, and whom I had the enviable duty of escorting when she was Minister in the very last lap of the Raj, what can I truthfully record except

VILLAGES AND VILLAGERS 49

that she could go rustic as charmingly as Marie Antoinette could go shepherdess? Who, then, not being a villager, did know him? Surely I am not hinting that an Englishman in my situation did? I make no such claim, it would be preposterous. The educated outsiders who came nearest to knowing him were: first and foremost, the sturdier of my assistants, a Rajput from Jhansi, a Muslim from Bulandshahr, somebody else from somewhere else, who having battled successfully with their books at school and university and been appointed to a Government post, had remained countrymen at heart; second, the landed proprietor of moderate means living his whole life on his estate and in the well-nigh undiluted company of his tenants; and third, our small-town lawyer of an earlier page, born and bred in one of the remoter Districts, of whose clients at least nine out of ten will be rustics. No, the utmost I maintain is that a certain Englishman could take his pulse. By dint of camping for four months each winter within walking distance of some village; of inspecting the villager’s crops; of hearing his reply when sued for arrears of rent; of judging him in a criminal case; above all, of attempting to elicit from him his attitude in the chronic tug-of-war between religion, or more properly custom, on the one side and material advantage on the other—by dint of these things the Collector could, if but by a little, narrow the gap that separated this man from himself. I said that Nehru borrowed his version, eloquent and roseate, of the Indian Village from a Civilian of past days. This was Metcalfe who had called the village communities ‘little republics’ which have nearly everything they want within themselves and are almost independent of any foreign relations. Now that description itself echoes the language of an equally acute, much more ancient observer: namely, Megasthenes, ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya shortly after the death of Alexander the Great. A recorded opinion may not amount to gospel truth, but it is worth notice surely that in 300 B.C. and again in 1830 A.D. the Indian village conjured up for a Greek and an Englishman respectively something they each of them had been educated to admire; a politeia, a self-governing institution. The inference is that until as recently as the second of our dates the rural community was still exhibiting its traditional solidarity. During the hundred years, however, that followed Metcalfe’s famous minute the integrity of the independent little units was being steadily eroded by the tide of the British presence. The Village Accountant, that influential functionary whose acquaintance we have made already, is no longer as in olden times


a local nominee but a Government servant; and his jurisdiction, moreover, may well embrace two or three other villages if these be small. Communications are so improved and secured that a poor peasant may supplement his frail resources by, say, haulage or cartage in a neighbouring place during the agricultural off-season; or that a more affluent cultivator may send his sons to a Primary School three miles away. And, finally, our villager if he falls badly from grace will not, as in days of yore, be judged by Five Wise Men, his peers in the community to whom he will not dare to lie, but by a tribunal of the modern sort to which he will not be so foolish as to tell the truth. In gauging the extent of this process of disintegration the contrast offered by villages behind the times, by villages in Princely India I mean, where it has not occurred or anyhow been less pronounced, is of help. A later chapter reports the visit I paid to some examples of these at the invitation of a Maharaja. But for the moment let me sum up by saying that while one could no longer consider the village to bear any resemblance to miniature republics as they still did seemingly in 1830, one could nevertheless hardly fail even in 1930 to be profoundly impressed by their internal cohesion; by their amazing staying power; and by the immobility, possibly unequalled anywhere in the world, of their inhabitants. To refer to my own experience of the Indian village, I found myself invariably aware of a selfcontained society, suspicious of, and usually resentful of, interference from without—no matter whether this came from an agent of the British Raj, or from a party politician, or from a social reformer. Two hundred million peasants distributed among half-a-million villages; ninety per cent of India’s children thinking of a particular village as ‘home’. The statistics convey the immensity but not the quality of the scene. They do not tell us whether villages vary greatly or at all in importance or in character; whether one village community is or is not comparable with the next. India is a continent spread over twenty-nine parallels of latitude — Virginia is on its northern line, Venezuela on the southern—a continent therefore as varied as it is vast. But what chiefly used to astonish us half a century ago on the journey, four or five days of it, by train from Peshawar to Madras, or, not quite as long, from Bombay to Calcutta, was that the variety of the landscape never obliterated its uniformity. And man’s touch was even more monotonous than nature’s. From the carriage window some of those untidy huddles were visibly larger than others—that is about all you could say. There were those huts, thousands upon thousands of them, mostly thatched, mostly of mud, occasionally


tiled, occasionally of dry stone, always windowless, always chimneyless; huts of a couple of rooms with a yard and a byre attached. In the world of the Indian village, it was evident, dif f erence was in size, not in style. It may be remembered from the preceding chapter that I had put the question of size to my Tahsildar guide out of Mirzapur and learned that the average village flanking our route that day was of four hundred souls. Elsewhere in the United Provinces I was sometimes to find the figure climbing towards the thousand mark. In several other provinces, no doubt, e.g. in those parts of the Punjab which benefited by modern schemes of colonization, or in the tropical Peninsula where heavier soils, red or black, favoured the growth of more extensive crops, villages were as a rule larger. As against this, they were apt to be very much smaller in fringe areas. Smaller in the sparsely populated tract south of Dudhi, say, which ravines and gullies rendered unrewarding agriculturally; smaller, too, in the hilly districts bordering the Himalayas. But let us have done with it—the figures do not alter the case much—and suggest that a village of less than two hundred inhabitants is particularly small, and a village of more than two thousand particularly large. Our initial impression of the Indian village obtained from a railway journey was of a huddle rather than a lay-out, and a closer look would have confirmed this. Admittedly there are likely to be a couple of focal points such as a tree of some girth surrounded by a raised masonry platform on which the wiseacres may relax and gossip, and a central well for drinking water (those for irrigation being out among the fields they serve). But the houses cluster higgledy-piggledy, the intersecting lanes lack the least alignment. Hamlets? Around Delhi, the Eastern Punjab, Agra, Meerut—in those regions the cluster is compact, centripetal. But towards Allahabad and Benares the hamlet is common enough: and in Peninsular India is usual. I suppose that where a village is, or in the past has been, exposed to attack it will be disinclined to throw off satellites; that where the community is strongly heterogeneous it will be inclined to do so; and so f orth. My recollection is that the peasantry in the first of the areas I have named had no specific term even for ‘hamlet’; this being a concept they never had occasion to express. If to the passenger in our train the village was just that clump of mean dwellings, to the villager it signified the inhabited site plus the lands belonging to it. Or more exactly the villager would think of it as certain lands plus the inhabited site associated with these. He would employ one vernacular word for the ensemble (mauza), another for the collection of houses within it; and he would never


confuse the two. It was similarly this aggregate that constituted the administrati ve unit in which the Government was directly and most intimately involved. The boundaries of each of the five hundred thousand communes, unchanging down the years and very likely down the centuries too, will be known to a nicety and recorded in the official registers. Finally, the question of size will be put, and once again my answer will be hesitant. In the parts I knew intimately an average mauza was between one hundred and two hundred acres. Yet in certain other parts of India my lower and upper limits could, I understand, be multiplied by as much as ten. And it was in my experience emphatically the small holding, anything f rom three acres to twel ve acres per cultivator that prevailed. It would be idle to generalize further on population and acreage. 2. A MODEL COMMUNITY If I had turned up at this village about one hundred years sooner than I did, I should no doubt have been welcomed in the meeting hall or Chowpal by the Council of Five known as the Panchayat. And dancing attendance on this would have been the hereditary Headman, an elected Accountant, and the Foreman of the Untouchables; three employees composing the executive. But in the 1930s the Headman, the Accountant and a third village functionary, the Watchman, a Dogberry in blue tunic piped with red, who line up to receive me, are on the Government pay-roll and therefore outside purely local control. Worse than this, though the meeting hall is still in evidence, its hallowed purpose has lapsed beyond recall. Truth to tell, it is simply a shed and a dismal one, so we move towards the neem tree in front of it. Under the shade of this I see a rickety iron chair, manifestly intended for me, and a score of villagers seated on the ground in a semi-circle. I ought to make it clear that the present is not a composite photograph of the village community. I am portraying an example, a real example of one species of a genus. Its place on the map is the District of Agra; an area, that is to say, distant in mood and not only mileage from Benares and even more palpably removed from Peninsular India. You would easily find its double in the neighbourhood or, pushing north, anywhere around Delhi; or, looking still further afield, in the eastern Punjab. I am choosing it now because it came as near as any I knew to the ideal—for surely it is an ideal—of homogeneity. It was ‘small’ according to my definition, worked by ‘small’ cultivators. The latter were


predominantly Jats: that is, they belonged to a farming caste middle-ranking in the hierarchy. And those who were not Jats, just a few houses of them, were Brahmins. Outside this combined body of cultivators was the complementary element in the community—the Untouchables. It is misleading to call them ‘outcastes’; Hindu society does not disown them; it owns them. But keeps them in the bottom drawer. How then could there be the homogeneity I talked about? I merely mean that differences in my Jat village were reduced by the two salutary tendencies which always seemed to me worthy of considerably more attention than they got. The Brahmins in my village had come down to earth and were doing things they were not supposed to do: they were touching the plough and behaving like Jats; while on the lower rungs the Chamars, untouchable tanners, had given up eating carrion, were washing themselves more frequently than my Jat friends washed, and generally taking to Brahminical practices. And in any case a small village like this was apt to be less riven than your large one; and more respectable. It might not have a priest literate enough to read the Mahabharat aloud in the vernacular, and might only have a very paltry temple indeed; but the ugly extremes would be absent. It hardly attracted the professional thieves and bogus ascetics who swarm over the Indian countryside, and it was comparatively clean. Because the inhabited area was restricted, it could be ringed by a belt accessible to every one when nature called—to the marked benefit of the interior lanes which were thus kept free of human excrement. That Brahmins should unbend and Untouchables display more dignity than is their wont was due to the Jats who set the tone in the village. The finest farmers in North India, they were also the best levellers, up and down, in rural society. On the occasions, rather rare, when a Jat finds himself in a temple, his demeanour is unconventional. Face to face with his god, he betrays not the slightest sign of awe, is even capable of giving the deity a thorough dressing down. As a Magistrate I therefore felt flattered on the occasions, numerous these, when a Jat pointed an indignant f orefinger at me in my court room. Moreover, the Jat, possessing skills himself, was quick to value these in his neighbours. He could see that the barber, the oil man, the smith, the tanner, the whole contingent of the Untouchables had theirs; he could not see that the sanctimonious Brahmin had any at all. I have heard him refer to syces and tanners with a respect verging on fellow feeling. The result was that in the village now claiming our attention, the socially inferior caught the Jat manner themselves and to that


extent were uplifted. On one of my tours in this vicinity, we were striking tents when the office marquee flopped heavily upon a table which had inadvertently been lef t inside: and smashed it. The village carpenter was sent for to repair it, and I found him presently seated on the ground, and working with such concentrated zeal that he made no move to get to his feet at my approach. I picked up his saw by its rectangular wooden f rame and idly ran a hand over the blade. ‘My dear chap (Are bhai) the teeth are cut in the wrong direction,’ I said. They ought to bite when you push, not when you pull.’ Without looking up he replied: ‘I hold my job down with my toes, as you see. How you hold down yours I can’t think.’ Somewhere in Chapter 1 I commented that the Collector was prone to favour his own protégés. I shall very likely be charged now with showing undue bias in favour of my Jats. My defence is not simply that they were the ideal farmers on account of their skills and physique, but that, in their unsophisticated fashion they were having a healthy impact on Hinduism itself. And the reason no doubt why I was to return to this mauza and sit on that iron chair under the neem tree whenever chance offered over the years, was that here if anywhere a latterday Englishman might sense something of that ancient community of interest which from time immemorial had been the stamp of Indian village life. In the village the individual is more demonstrably submerged in the collectivity, and enmeshed by it, than he would be in any town. His two primary allegiances as a Hindu are more obsessive. To begin with, the ‘house’ or joint family consisting of father, sons, grandsons and the corresponding womenfolk all living under one roof, will be exposed to fewer disintegrating forces; and second, the ‘brotherhood’, i.e. the small caste group made up of a number of such ‘houses’, will be emotionally more intense because so narrowly parochial. Moreover, his relationship with the lower element of the community could not but be close. The untouchable section was remunerated in grain from the threshing floors in Autumn and in Spring, and might receive supplementary rewards. For example, a Sweeper, if I remember, could normally count on a chupatty (girdle cake of unleavened bread) a couple of times a week from every family he served. And then he could send his wife along to deliver your children, women in travail being unclean. She would earn one rupee (ls.6d. or seven and a half pence) for a boy, this fee covering conventional publicity as well: such as the announcement of the arrival of a one-eyed girl, so as to trick the evil influences. For a daughter she could charge half; that is, eight annas. Another ‘Untouchable’ of consequence in the


community was the barber, and I am putting the label between inverted commas to indicate how inappropriate it is in his case. For the Twice-born suffered his touch regularly, and, as if this were not enough, would of ten appoint him— or they did so in the parts of India I knew best—as their trusted gobetween and a match-maker! And a third man to keep in with was the Chamar, or tanner, whose leanings towards self-betterment I have already noticed in this chosen village of mine. He made your shoes for you, and should your cow expire in the living room—no uncommon disaster in a society which nursed the creature so long as there was breath in her body—who but he would be on call to remo ve the carcase? Of course the last barriers were not down. I believe that if I had asked my Jats under that neem tree about temple entry, they would have grinned and left the question in the air. But if I had pinned them down to say whether their Untouchables could draw water from the central well in the village, what then? I can hear in reply the Hindustani equivalent of ‘Oh, come! There are limits.’ 3. THE RURAL ROUNDABOUT I argued early in this chapter that the vocabulary of the villager was largely incomprehensible to the more sophisticated politicians. No less apparent was it that the voice of the latter, however repetitive and shrill it might sound to us officials, went unheard even a little way out of town. The anecdote of the rustic who surmised that Dominion Status must be one of the granddaughters of Queen Victoria is doubtless ben trovato. But everyone will accept the testimony of so reliable an informant as Mr M.N.Srinivas that just after Partition, with all that this entailed, ‘intelligent’ villagers twenty miles from Mysore City had not heard of either Jinnah or Nehru. In my experience the usual social space, as the anthropologists term it, of the poorer people in rural areas was about fifteen miles. Not more, in spite of the lorry that occasionally passes, trailing its streamer of dust, along a metalled road three kos (leagues) from their home; in spite of the need to take that lorry into the city, should litigation occur; in spite of the decision of a lad from one of the Jat houses to join the Army and see the world. The score or so of villagers who wait to greet me under the neem tree—we might as well go back to them—are either charged with the advocacy of some local cause or else are in venerable retirement on account of age. The rest of their number, aided by


such of their sons as have grown beyond the toddler stage, will have been out in the fields since sunrise; nor will they return until dusk when they will smoke the hubble-bubble and chat until their womenfolk have cooked the evening meal. And this would be their routine save in the period of enforced idleness, some eight weeks of it from midApril to mid-June (that is after the Spring crop and before the land can be made ready for the Autumn crop), when they stayed at home thatching and pottering about; or, if energetic enough, sought subsidiary work in an adjacent place. The economists, the reformers, the Collector too, all of us properly fed and unacquainted with the toll of physical strain on the undernourished, deplored this unproductive interlude. I doubt if we always bore in mind that each field must be ploughed ten times and levelled six times against the Autumn crop, eight and six times against the Spring crop. Did we take due account of the intensive toil exacted at the time of irrigation? If by luck a pond be near, its water will be channelled into a suitably sited reservoir, and be lifted from this in baskets into a catch basin a few feet higher. Meanwhile, the given field will have been divided into small squares having raised borders of deftly patted soil. Into these squares in turn a rivulet of water will then be coaxed in an operation which, as I watched it, would take me back to childhood experiments on a sandy beach in Cardigan Bay. Sometimes—it depended on the distance of the pond from the field or fields— several reservoirs would be required; and as many lifts, with half a dozen men posted at each. Otherwise there was nothing for it but the well. And in this particular at least Nature relented: there would be water no matter where you drilled at a depth of, say, seventeen to twentyone feet in the areas I have been naming. A huge leather bucket is attached to a rope which passes over a pulley at the well mouth. The other end of the rope is fastened to the yoke of a pair of bullocks. These are made to descend a ramp equal in length to the depth of the well, thereby raising the bucket to the surface; and they lower the bucket again when emptied by walking back up the slope. Dharti, the Good Earth of India, demanded much of those who were pledged to her cult, and the onlookers were possibly too quick to reprove a community which so far from being idle was periodically in sore need of a respite from its labours. However that may be, the women of the village profit from no such holiday. If their men are stretching themselves, yawning, ejaculating ‘Ram Ram’ or ‘O Prabhu’ by about five o’clock in the morning, their wives will already have begun the daily task of


grinding grain, pounding it in a stone mortar with a mighty pestle. The woman holding this by its iron ring swings it into the air and lets it drop with a thud into the bowl, and will think nothing of repeating the movement for two uninterrupted hours. A song accompanies the action, and deaf was the Collector riding past en route for an early inspection who did not hear it. To hear it was not to catch the words, however, and for myself I never could. Next, the women will have the yard to clean, the floors to sweep, the pots and pans to scour. Then it will be time to prepare the mid-day meal to be sent or taken out to the men in the fields. This is a picnic rather than a spread, meagre for a farmer who has been fortified at dawn by no more than a cup of water and a few pulls at the hubblebubble. It is normally of grain parched and ground to flour and whipped into a paste. Some wild-growing greens, tough and leafy, may be boiled to go with it. The evening meal will be grander, requiring longer preparation. At this, chupatties of barley or spiked millet—wheat is too dear—will be the main dish, and with these there will be pulse boiled with spice; and if the weather is hot, there may be a sherbet of unrefined sugar in water. It could be nine o’clock before the family assembles to sit down to this, and the hour will be late by the time dinner is over and done with. And all day long in between there will have been that stately parade back and forth, the procession to and from the well. In the role of Rebeccas the village women have a second song, much quicker moving than the other, and, except for the refrain, quite near to ordinary speech. The difficulty of grasping it was not linguistic but had to do with manners. Not in purdah, these women were none the less of good name, and if an outsider such as my Muslim assistant or myself approached so as to get within earshot, would stop singing, draw their bordered headdresses across their mouths, and giggle self-consciously. To entreat them to resume was of absolutely no avail. One might at most hope to do better some other day when the effects of a novel situation had worn off. It was due to Jafri and not to me that we managed in the end to get the words down on paper. A recitative of this sort is a jingle not a ballad; but at least a jingle in which the bells are shaken in sequence, not in unison. In the refrain of this one there was, as I have hinted, a literary echo. An imperious vocative of six syllables: ‘You-with-the-sallow-face’ can, I am fairly certain, only be an apostrophe to Krishna. I do it into English here in the hope that the flavour of Indian village humour may prove pungent enough to be tasted even when thus adulterated.


SONG AT THE WELL

We each have got our grouses as we sing about our spouses. Krishna, be a listener to our song! I being the first have a husband with a thirst, He’s drunk and he’s lying on the floor. Krishna, just you listen to my song. I am the second and to mine a harlot beckoned, Krishna, just you listen to my song. I being the third have a lad who can’t be stirred In our bed where his pleasure is to snore. Krishna, just you listen to my song. I am the fourth, and the reason for my wrath Is that Auntie’s pushed us in and locked the door. I’m a newly wedded bride and she says it’s time I tried But I shrink from my beloved more and more. Krishna, just you listen to my song. The spinning of thread for the weaver was another of woman’s tasks and it may seem odd that I have left it to the end. I have done this deliberately for the reason that it was taking up less and less of her time. In the past each woman would have had her wheel, but nowadays one or two sufficed for the house, and usually an old crone would be seen at it rather than girls and younger women. If ever I enquired why, the answer was invariable and rational: Millmade clothes are cheaper. Working so hard as these village women did, five a.m. to ten p.m., it was perhaps a good thing that they were no longer obliged to spend much energy on this traditional occupation. 4. HE MADE BOTH ENDS MEET Take Ram Din—and it is sheer luck that I can. Occasionally I used to choose a village I had visited and get my revenue assistant to go back there at leisure, without me, and elicit, check and record the budget of some crony of mine from among the cultivators. A notebook meant for ephemeral reference found its way in the sequel into a tin-box instead of the wastepaper basket. How Ram Din, grazier by caste, of Pandeypore in the Kantit circle of District Mirzapur in the United Provinces fared in the year ended 31 March 1930 can therefore be told in this place. The figures are not guesses: all I do below is to touch up the running


comments the speaker allowed himself in his several detailed chats with Najmuddin Jafri all those years ago: ‘We are five men, five women and six children in my house. We cultivate nearly twel ve and a half acres, six in the Autumn crop and a bit more in the Spring crop. We use two ploughs with two pairs of bullocks. We have cattle also, twenty cows; for we are Ahirs by caste, graziers. ‘You ask if I have read in school. No, because my life is here. After schooling village lads cannot work in the fields; they are too weak, and become loafers. What? Yes, I know, I know the eldest son of Baijnath did read in Primary School only two miles from here and is now in service Allahabad way with the Raja of Shankar garh, but he is Brahmin. And his two other sons, they also read in school, and what are they doing? They are sitting, sitting. This is all right, for no Brahmin touches the plough in Pandeypore; so the two boys are back where they were. I am not against Baijnath. No, all I say is some can afford to sit quietly, but we people cannot. ‘I told this to Collector sahib also who was with us the other day, but he said, “No, education is a good thing.” “Look,” he said, “if I want to send an important word I write it instead of asking the barber to go somewhere and speak it with his mouth.” “Like this,” he said, taking a stream-pen (sarit kalam) and paper from his pocket. But the ink gushed from that pen, making the white sheet black as night, and everybody laughed. “It seems it is not my lucky day,” says he. “Perhaps I ought to have consulted my Prohit, my spiritual director, before coming to you.” And we laughed again. It is true we all have our family priests to cast horoscopes and tell us whether to go out or stay home. We paid ours sixty four pounds of grain this year. ‘What am I saying? I mean last year. For today is the middle of the month of Chait (March-April) and the old year is out. This is why I can sit here, pulling at the hookah although the sun is up these many hours. The Spring crop is garnered and a man takes rest. But soon we must begin carting on hire hereabouts, our two pairs of bullocks being idle; and also we will thatch the house. Just for now are we passing the hookah round. Today is a day for thinking, for counting; not a day for doing. I told the Collector this and he said, “That is right. People, especially villagers, prefer not to count, but one man in the village is fond of counting and he is the money-lender.” I replied: “We know it. I remember what our father would repeat to us sons: “Take a stride according to the width of your skirt.” “Clap hands at that,” said the Collector, clapping his. So we all clapped.


‘I had persuaded our Village Accountant who is Kayasth by caste and clever at arithmetic to write down both what resulted in Autumn and what came out in Spring. This he did in Aghan (November-December) and again lately. He was willing, for he always drinks milk when he visits our place. “Everything is written,” I said to the Collector, showing him this very paper, “and may be read.” ‘For the Autumn crop I sowed as usual great millet, spiked millet and pigeon pea, having obtained the necessary seed, 60 lbs in all, on loan from my landlord. I harvested nearly 3,000 1bs. ‘For the Spring crop I sowed barley, grain and wheat, with 100 1bs of seed likewise borrowed; and I harvested nearly 2,000 lbs. I had to pay back the landlord 200 1bs, being the loan plus interest. And during the year I paid the village servants (washerwoman, barber, carpenter, smith) 600 1bs of grain—and there was our Prohit to reward as well. Thus the grain left in my bins was 4, 000 1bs; that is, 50 maunds (2 tons). ‘At the prevailing prices of the different grains this is valued at about Rs300. Then my cattle. My twenty cows have been yielding 5 1bs of milk daily and this fetched Rs250. The sum would have been more had they not been thin cows. We sold the yield to Brahmins, not drinking a cup ourselves and only pouring off a little each day for the three smaller children. But I admit we also consumed ghi, clarified butter, to the value of Rs60. ‘So income came out at about Rs600; from which my annual rent of nearly Rs100 was paid, leaving Rs500. ‘But wait. Our bullocks are strong and usually earn us that much in the off-season. This time cartage was also demanded at Vindhyachal six miles from here where they are building a hospital: so we gained an extra Rs500 in the slack months. This was against hope. ‘Of course we had manure f rom the cows and enough dung cakes for fuel. And from the various crops we got sufficient grain stalks and chaff for our fodder. ‘Well, then, we sixteen souls had about Rs1000 to live on, and this would have done us nicely, eating as we do. But I have not told you our daily diet. Per person it was: 21bs flour of barley or millet; 4oz of pulse; 2oz of unrefined sugar; wild-growing greens; and some ghi, clarified butter, but not much. And tobacco, to be sure, 2oz for us men. But no milk for any of us except the little ones, as I have said. It would have done us, yes, but for the marriages…ah, the marriages. We had three this last year. However, mindful of Father’s advice I had put by Rs100 from the


previous year; and not only this but I celebrated all three at one and the same moment, thus keeping expenses down to Rs300. We could not observe the festivals or save a maund (80lbs) or two of grain for a rainless (sic) day; but at least there was a new sari at Rs3 for each of our women, and there was oil for the cressets. We were able to pull through, thanks to Father. Father spoke true. We people are hobbled by our skirts and must tread gently, gently.’ He was a sensible man, Ram Din. 5. THE MUSLIM VARIANT I have been describing village life in terms of Hindu society for all the world as if Islam had not impinged on it. But did not Muslims predominate heavily in the Punjab, in Bengal, in Sind; were they not present in sizable minorities elsewhere including, and notably, the United Provinces where my scenes are laid? True, quite true. But I consider my method to be defensible. Perhaps I might hang this postscript on the following casual reminiscence. I was riding away from a village one day with Jafri, my Muslim assistant, at my side. ‘You know’ he said, ‘the villagers we’ve just been among don’t exclaim ‘Ram! Ram!’ when they wake up in the morning, but, punctuated with several yawns, ‘La ilāha illa ‘llāh…There is no God but the one God: Muhammadur Rasūl-Ullāh…Muhammad is his Apostle.’ He was of course being mildly sarcastic; was implying that Muslim villages were identical with Hindu villages in every essential, and distinguishable by no more than the occasional expletive to be heard on the lips of their inhabitants. It is not easy to reply to this gentle taunt. In the Muslim village there will be a little white-washed mosque in lieu of a temple where the officiating Mulla, almost certainly illiterate, repeats the Koran without understanding what he recites. Amjad Ali, if that be our villager’s name, will repair here to worship; while in the corresponding Hindu village a couple of miles away, Baijnath will go along to the temple now and then and tinkle a bell there, or listen to a Pujari (no more literate probably than the Mulla) blowing a conch. And in the Muslim village each family will be counselled by a Pir instead of by a Prohit. Through both villages a constant trickle of beggars will be wending its way: in the one case he will be an unkempt Sadhu announcing his arrival with a wooden clapper; in the other a dishevelled Fakir announcing his in a singsong chant. In either setting our villager will put a pinch of grain or a morsel of food into the extended pail or bowl—and feel much better for having done so. It can be argued that these are parallel


not identical performances. So be it. But a shock is in store: in our Muslim village the caste system, which gives Hinduism—or so we all say—its identity, manifestly retains its hold. How is one to account for this? I think we have to remind ourselves that the village communities were not subdued by force of arms when the Muslims descended upon India in their several waves of conquest. On the contrary, they were left to the continued expression of their traditional character on the single condition of loyalty to a distant throne. Largely Hinduism’s reaction to foreign dominion had been to withdraw into itself: to harden its institutions; so that caste became more not less rigid. To be sure, in the regions where the aggressors had established their strongholds and where, consequently, Islam was ‘in the air’, countless villagers who were low in the social scale welcomed conversion as an escape from degradation. But these converts, having sought a new status rather than a new society, clung to their customs. I was never inclined to attach much significance to the interest of Muslim villagers in this or that Hindu festival, or even to the eagerness of some in the region of Hardwar or Prayag to bathe in the Ganges at the time of the great pilgrimages to these centres. With them it was a case of joining in the fun. But the organic structure of their own society was another story. Where several Muslim villages were clustered together it was no rare thing for the agricultural and the artisan groups to be rigidly endogamous, and to be otherwise steeped in caste. There was no doubt about it. Perhaps then there was point in my companion’s gentle irony. The Indian villages, label them Hindu or label them Muslim, conformed to the stereotype; and the people in these tiny, coherent communities did so no less. They differed outwardly in a few things, of course they did; but they shared their inner attitudes. And if in retrospect a Collector had to frame a sentence about them I believe it would be this: Two hundred million rustics, deprived of nearly all the material advantages that life can offer, were unshakeable in their conviction that man shall not live by bread alone.

4 THE PRETERNATURAL

‘Magic’ was the heading I had in mind for the present chapter, but I have changed it at the last minute, considering that in modern English we employ this word only when speaking of something which is not magic: a conjuring trick for example, or even the drying property of a certain make of paint. The Supernatural’, which I next thought of, would fill the bill, but fill it to overflowing; being hallowed on a plane far above most of what I shall be writing about. So I have come down a peg or two to fix on The Preternatural’. My definition of this is: that which, situated alongside the world of the senses, is not explicable by the known laws of physical science. By insisting on the preposition ‘alongside’ I hope to convey that this adjacent region is not heaven, that its inhabitants are as often as not cantankerous, spiteful, malevolent, and deserve to be outwitted by stratagem or, should they unhappily get inside you, to be cast out for the devils they are. At the time of my arrival in India the health authorities of Bombay were improving their measures to combat malaria. An obvious step was the sealing up of the large number of mosquitobreeding wells in the yards or paved enclosures of private houses; these serving no purpose whatever since the introduction, long ago now, of a piped water supply. Strong objection was taken to this proposal on the ground that if the wells were to be covered over, the spirits which reside in them would be unable to get out. The protest was not held to be unreasonable, and the Health Department proceeded to suggest that the concrete covers, which had been envisaged, might be fitted with perforated metal discs drilled with holes to allow the entrance and exit of the spirits. The only point to settle was the size of these holes. In the opinion of the entomologist of Bombay University who was called in, a mosquito could not drag its tiny frame through an aperture of, say, onetwentieth of an inch even when starved. How would that do? The response was favourable: according to the best advice at

64 THE PRETERNATURAL

the disposal of the objectors, a spirit, being unencumbered with wings, and of course unlikely to be bloated, would have no trouble in negotiating perforations of that measurement. The Municipal Commissioner was now in a position to go ahead, and announced that ‘in order to give access and egress to the spirits, brass plates with fine holes not more than one-twentieth of an inch in diameter may be inserted in the covers’. Fresh to the scene I seized on this little episode in municipal government as an early opportunity to raise my eyebrows and murmur ‘Match me this marvel save in eastern clime.’ It was a bad mistake that I made. The Indian habit of thought was different from ours not because it was specifically oriental but because we had been engaged on and off in changing ours for some centuries now, whereas the Indians had not, or hardly noticeably, been changing theirs. Anyhow, I quickly forgot about the thing and it was not until a good ten years later that I recalled it. Fortune had by then set me down in the presidential chair at the Delhi Town Hall; and one day, happening to have several members of the council with me in my room, I related the Bombay incident to see how they would take it. They exploded with laughter. And salaaming me before dispersing, they declared how much I had lightened the day’s burden for them by telling them that comic story. Nevertheless I was quite sure that each one of them believed that there had indeed been spirits in those disused wells of Bombay even as there were spirits inhabiting wells and cracked boulders and trees round about us at that very minute in Delhi; believed that only a fool did not reckon with them. One of those same committee-men in fact, Harish Chandra who wrote B.A. LL.B. after his name, would in the sequel come to me, his eyes rolling with apprehension, to report that a mischievous Muslim was planning to lay an axe to a Pipal tree in his Ward, the Pipal sacred to all Hindus on the branches of which the Devs were wont to recline and listen to the music of the leaves. Today they had guffawed, Muslims and Hindus both, because it had been expected of them. In a word, my experiment hadn’t come off. These representative burghers had not revealed their thoughts; any village audience would have been better value. To get anywhere I would have to broach the subject with a Muslim divine, and with a Pandit of the traditional sort nurtured on Brahmanic beliefs. Of the former Khwaja Hasan Nizami was a graceful embodiment. I do not have to jog my memory in his regard: his

LOOKING BACK ON INDIA 65

photograph is in front of me, his Koran in Urdu at my elbow. Each time I encounter that humorous gaze, each time I read the inscription to me on the fly-leaf of The Book, the years fall away. And how the Sage of Delhi looked the part! He habitually wore a flowing robe with capacious sleeves, and a conical cap. His tall delicate figure was familiar alike to the unlettered and to the studious; to the humble pilgrims from far and near who streamed out of the city of Delhi to visit the tomb of the celebrated fourteenth-century saint Sheikh Nizamuddin Aulia, of which my friend was the hereditary guardian, and to those who sat at his feet spellbound as he discoursed on the life and works, including at least one very famous malediction, of their patron. The austere would sometimes hint to me that Khwaja Hasan Nizami was a showman. But the austere (the Imam of the Great Mosque among them) were of the puritans of the Faith who in India, as throughout the Islamic world, were inclined to raise their voices— not always convincing themselves, let alone others, as they did so —against the veneration of saints. ‘It is more right and worthy,’ the Imam would quote severely, ‘to dwell beside God than to dwell beside His creatures.’ Certainly Khwaja Sahib had his critics. He also had his enemies. One of these had tried to murder him. He never tired of illustrating for me on the site, and with the aid of a plan, how the attempt had been foiled by higher agency. ‘I am seated here in the courtyard,’ he would begin, ‘Holy Writ on my knees, my head bent, my eyes lowered on the page. The would-be assassin enters by the only door from the outside, that narrow one; he is therefore straight in front of me. He takes aim, he fires. Now look at the spot (it is ringed in bright colour) on my right, three yards from me, where the ball deflected in its flight struck, and embedded itself in that wooden partition…’ Presently, the drama narrated for the umpteenth time, he would call for tea to be served; and as we drank this would point to the graves, several of them very ancient, surrounding us, and extol the character of each of the occupants till we reached the newest. ‘Here is uncle,’ he would say curtly. Curtly, I would guess, because he revered the tomb exceedingly and did not want anything untoward to happen to it. Praise is apt to stimulate the attention of the Evil Eye. You have to be careful of this, as every Muslim knows. To Khwaja Hasan Nizami, then, I put my question: ‘were those brass plates with the little holes in them really necessary?’ There are drawbacks about a conversation in an oriental language, but there is this advantage, that the salient words spoken by your interlocutor tend to stick. ‘They were not necessary,’ he replied,


‘but they were proper.’ He elaborated. It is only in fairy tales, he explained, that jinns (this Arabic word has made itself at home in Urdu as in English) can be bottled. ‘In real life,’ he went on, ‘they can get through concrete if need be. But the thing is there are benevolent and malevolent genies, and we should endeavour to assist the former and propitiate the latter.’ ‘Assist?’ I interrupted, ‘how, pray?’ ‘Look,’ he continued in his soft mellifluous Urdu, ‘if you return to your residence this afternoon to find a pile of bricks on the front verandah you will enter by shifting some and climbing over others; but you will not regard the obstruction as a seemly reward for your benevolence.’ ‘I see,’ I said, flattered to be aligned, albeit simply for purposes of illustration, with the well-disposed spirits, ‘but what of the second category? Is it right to be conciliatory in the face of evil?’ ‘In the preliminary stage, yes,’ he answered, ‘as a manoeuvre; as a ruse merely, while the trap is being laid for the adversary’s lasting discomfiture.’ He paused reflectively. ‘But, alas, the favoured few alone know how to accomplish this.’ Then he chuckled softly, leaving me to infer that a man of his spirituality might aspire to be among those few. It remained to feel the Brahmanic pulse and Pandit Jyoti Prasad, Shastri, of Benares was obliging enough to extend his wrist. I did not know him, wanted anyhow to meet him, and here was a talking point. In India, perhaps more than elsewhere, a first conversation between strangers may too easily peter out in a series of hesitant, inconsequent trivia. The Pandit was fair, lean, long-headed, of intellectual countenance. He was carefully shaven, neatly turbaned; and wore over his shoulders a lovely snow-white flimsy muslin shawl like a toga. His dress was a linen dhoti dangling to his heels and a shirt worn outside this. He was of the old school, versed in the Hindu sacred texts (that is what Shastri means), educated at the centre of Sanskrit learning and emphatically a product of that environment. Which is to say, he was observant, and acutely so, of the sensuous world but utterly undisturbed by it: was, for instance, totally apathetic in matters political, suffering Gandhi with an amused tolerance. Enough for him the puzzle of existence. ‘You are troubled, sir, needlessly,’ he began, speaking to my delighted surprise a pure English the tone of which was only slightly alien to the ear. ‘You have been worrying about this insignificant incident, asking yourself—and, now, ten years later, asking me—whether the Bombay City Corporation ought to have stood by the real world and to hell with the unreal world invented by some barmy objectors. For, excuse me, that is how you are viewing the matter. Now, to start with, I do not like your “real”. Of


course I accept what is evidenced by the appearances, but I accept it only provisionally. I deny that it can impose finality. And I treat— we of the priesthood all treat—what is not so evidenced in precisely the same somewhat, if you follow me, cavalier fashion. Why, the popular deities, they too are liable to vanish! And what is this antithesis you are introducing? Surely, sir, it is you who are inventing —inventing frontiers without warrant, yes, without warrant. Those mosquitoes, now, and those spirits—do you mean to tell me…’ ‘Panditji, Panditji,’ I interrupted by way of setting a limit to the discussion, ‘if I understand you aright, you are complimenting the Bombay authorities on their rational attitude.’ Was there or was there not a smile drawing those compressed lips sideways and up? ‘You understand me aright,’ he said. It was not in the wolds, it will be seen, not in some outlying subdivision of a remote country District where souls are simple that I was given this lesson in India’s unabashed acceptance of the preternatural. India’s acceptance I am saying because it was everywhere, everybody’s. You could not be long in the company of those about you, cultivated or untutored, polite or boorish, without becoming aware of their constant preoccupation with a department of existence which is pooh-poohed—or at any rate unrecognized— by modern science. In the picture I have been trying to recapture and reproduce the concern was with the antics of hobgoblins, but of course the area of the ‘department’ as I have called it was large: it extended to the uncanny in any form. Everybody believed in sprites and ghosts—that went without saying: but everybody believed also that some of us men, quite ordinary men, are endowed with latent powers which are perpetually seek ing, and occasionally obtaining, release. Whether such release just happened or could be assisted by secret technique, breathing exercises, self-torture etc. was uncertain and much debated: what was beyond dispute, was that powers of the kind were sometimes released, were sometimes exerted. The particular power, so far as I could understand, might be mental (expressed, for example, in clairvoyance, prophecy, thought-reading, witchcraft) or physical (expressed in various manifestations of bodily control baffling to medical science). It was not very many months before I listened for the first time to an allegation of witchcraft; nor many years before I was solemnly assured by a subordinate official that there lived a mendicant in his home town who could lift cannon balls with his eyelashes. For the strangest tale everybody had an ear so that I began to wonder whether ‘unbelievable’ could be translated into


any Indian vernacular. Some of the stories, candour compels me to admit, were in danger of becoming stock. For instance there was that wizard whose pleasure it was to reduce a buffalo to the size of a pea, persuade his enemy to swallow this and then cause the buffalo to resume its original bulk. And there was the Rope Trick—but more of that in a moment. On my own in a District, I very soon grew accustomed to the pattern of thought I am here tracing, and took it for granted that people would cling tenaciously to their traditional beliefs. It ceased to strike me as odd that the humble rustic in his millions should prefer to suspend a potsherd containing a charm—a word or two scrawled by a semi-literate spiritual preceptor, or perhaps only a few circles and strokes—across the entrance to his village when his cattle fell sick, rather than take the poor beasts to the veterinary hospital; and should submit to vaccination against small-pox or to cholera inoculation merely for the sake of the benefits that might be calculated to accrue from humouring the Collector. Humble those rustics were, but I dared not write them off as ignorant—not in this context. Think of the Greeks here. The Greeks for all that they had exalted Reason to as high and glittering an eminence as it has ever attained in the story of civilization, remained a society which saw gods everywhere, gods meriting a very small ‘g’ for the most part, who loved to interfere in human affairs. Wasn’t it Thales, the Father of Science, himself who declared ‘All things are full of gods’? But what need was there, for that matter, to go back to Antiquity? Why, Dr Johnson, incredulous on all other points, hard-hitting, magisterial, was a firm believer in miracles and apparitions. As an Oxford undergraduate, while turning the key in the lock of the door to his room at Pembroke, he distinctly heard his mother calling him by name; and later on in his career went eagerly to Cock Lane on a visit to a little girl of eleven who could feel the spirit running about like a mouse up and down her back. Or let us be more up to date still. Here is Bertrand Russell claiming in one of his Essays that some unaccountable strength within him compelled him to persist (in his plea for Great Britain’s neutrality in 1914). It was a force, he adds obscurely, that others would have called the Inner Voice. What on earth is the great philosopher, as a rule so adroit in his management of language, trying to say? In Gandhi you expected this kind of utterance; not in Russell. And if in the 1980s half the glossies on sale at the bookstalls in London, Paris and New York have their Horoscope page, was it really so laughable that in many of the Indian States of my time the Department of


Astrology prepared periodical reports on future events? Of the fifteen bedrooms at the Athenaeum none is No. 13. The Members, literate to a man, and not a few of them bishops and scientists, have shown the sense to approve nem-con. the painting of 12A on a middle door along the fourth floor landing. Deep down then, undeniably, the human species relishes the Occult. Only in India the appetite for it is avowed. We have to bow to the habit, the genius of a people, and if India has had an aptitude, it has been for contemplation as opposed to action. And as a sort of side effect of this, a premium has always been put upon mendicancy. I can remember how in one of the very first and very simple criminal cases I tried as a junior magistrate, a witness on being called to the box gave his occupation with self-conscious dignity as House-on-Shoulder, Khana-ba-dosh. I had just been reading a Persian tale in which this expression meant ‘snail’ so I was momentarily nonplussed. But my sympathetic Reader, who knew some English, leaned towards me and whispered: ‘Sir, mostly he roams.’ I there and then made it my business to learn the various ways of conveying ‘beggar’ in Hindustani: and halfacentury later I can write down six. There is nothing to boast about in this, considering how regularly in the court-room, in the bazaar, in the Chowpal of a village, one or other of those six terms would enter the talk. A Punjab Civilian friend once informed me that there were some 600,000 ‘friars’ wandering about his Province living on alms, men asserting their claim to the charity of the public in virtue of their superior otherworldliness. Thus, at a conserva tive estimate the All India figure might have touched ten million or more—who knows? This idle and malodorous horde battening on society without shame and indeed with positive insolence, consisted chiefly of charlatans, thieves and scatty tramps. Yet a small proportion of them there would undoubtedly be who were genuinely wedded to a vocation which the whole of India concurred in regarding as half-way to sanctity. I am approaching here the case of those possessing powers pronounced impossible by medical science, e.g. the arrest of the blood flow at will, or the control of the breath over long periods; which, subject to correction, have never been exhibited in the West. I have been avoiding technical terms, but there is one I cannot help introducing at this point, seeing it can only be rendered periphrastically: Samādh. To carry out Samādh means: to suspendone’s-breath-for-a-fabulous-period-of-time-and-submittobeing-buried-alive. Every now and again the report would circulate of a Sannyasi, an ascetic, in some place or other usually distant, who had acquired this faculty of intense absorption, but


it was not until (I think) the winter of 1941 that such a one was heard to be at hand. At hand signified Delhi; signified moreover my own doorstep. ‘Heard’ too seems fair, for protesting voices were being lifted outside my room. A Brahmin of the fourth order of Ashram, a holy man who has abandoned all affections, does not await his turn in a queue. Straight away a characteristic Sannyasi made his entrance: masses of neglected hair piled on the crown of his head; scanty beard and moustaches; tattered garments; a long staff. He might be unwashed; he was certainly not uncouth, and when I indicated a chair he muttered something self-deprecatory and seated himself on the floor. He was an unconventional visitor in this respect, also, that he came without preamble to his business; announcing that, a native of Ajodhya but wedded to the length and breadth of the land, he was now in the capital to perform Samādh in aid of one of the War charities. ‘In a good cause,’ he said. This ethical consideration surprised me a bit, for I had always understood that in the Fourth State the very distinction between Good and Evil is blotted out. However, it was not for me as Honorary Treasurer of the said Fund to quibble. Arrangements in the way of publicity, site, enclosure, police and, of course, ‘gate’ he would leave to me; but his own two or three assistants would do the spade work. My trusty lieutenant Khan Bahadur Mumtaz Hasan Qizilbash, Secretary of the Delhi Municipal Committee, selected an area not far from the Fort, and had it roped off. The Senior Superintendent of Police supplied a guard of sufficient strength in charge of two Sub-Inspectors, picked officers not likely to collude. Moreover, the Khan Bahadur promised to remain present himself into the hours of darkness, for dark it would be according to the timetable laid down by the performer for his disinterment. The Samadh lagāne-wālā, the ‘man-doing-Samadh’, having faded out on schedule, was covered by a layer of soil in a shallow trench and unearthed hours later. He came to showing only mild signs of exhaustion. Qizilbash, the Shi’a Muslim, undemonstrative as the high-born know how to be, recorded in a written report of two lines to me that the Samadh had been ‘uneventful’. A second Sannyasi I had dealings with likewise passed for a star in his profession. His feat was less spectacular but, I was told, not less mysterious medically. This second homeless wanderer offered to appear on a public platform in the centre of a semicircle of observers to be chosen by myself, and under their gaze to drive a skewer into one of his veins; more precisely, into the vein situated just below the bend of the elbow (from which I believe patients are usually bled). On the withdrawal of the instrument, he said, his


blood would gush freely until commanded by an observer to stop. At the word ‘Stop!’ the flow would be checked and not resumed until some one else called out ‘Go!’ I turned for assistance to my friend Colonel Cruickshank, at the time Chief Medical Officer of the Delhi Province. Martin Cruickshank suggested a modification in the seating: he would take up his own position immediately alongside the holy man and himself shout the Stop and Go orders; otherwise there would be scope for cheating—a blunt skewer; a goat’s blood squirting all over the show from somewhere; all manner of things. The resulting performance gained much credibility in the eyes of the audience from these precautions, and was wildly applauded. There had been no hoax, Martin assured me afterwards. I fear I cannot add the Indian Rope Trick to the tale of the Wonders it came my way to witness. For I never met a soul prepared to allege that he had seen it done, never a soul who would even tell me candidly whether he considered it a demonstration of magic or a juggler’s illusion. In fact I can’t remember anyone’s volunteering to discuss it at all. Yet it must have been commonly performed or talked about—or both, at some time or another in the past. How else can the Western world have come to regard it as among the ingredients that must be swallowed in the Indian dish? Anyhow, as described to me, the claim is that a length of string, thread or twine—these were the words employed, never ‘rope’—is thrown into the air and a boy climbs up it and dissolves into nothing. Patently, if a trick, such a performance would do mighty honour to the foremost of the Indian Maskelynes; if magic, would signal an indubitable victory of wizardry over the regime of nature. But supposing one of those Indians who have just been in and out of my paragraphs had, on his solemn affirmation, witnessed the ‘Trick’, what then? Then, for sure, we his companions would have concluded the poor chap had been ‘seeing things’; hallucination is a vastly more probable occurrence than that of a little lad swarming up a cord and vanishing into thin air. Perhaps the Indian atmosphere is heavier with suggestion than ours; I believe it is. I know that an expression I of ten used to hear, and in all sorts of situations, was ‘sight binding’ (nazar bandi): the art of making the other man see something you wanted him to see. ‘Come and see the Library,’ said Sapru, laying an avuncular hand on my shoulder. The room resembled a don’s in a rather sombre angle of the quad with books from ceiling to floor, on occasional tables, all over the place. Except on the day-bed


beneath the single window where the Right Honourable gentleman could relax after hours on his feet in the High Court. ‘We can talk there till the others arrive,’ he went on, ‘and anyway I wanted to show you that powder I’ve found at last for sprinkling my shelves with.’ For he had lost many a rare volume in the harsh climate of Allahabad. ‘It works,’ he added in Urdu, ‘like magic’ I remember his phrase to this day, and I believe I reflected even at the moment that when an Indian uses it he means it; whereas when we say something acts like magic, we merely mean it acts. His other guests were then announced, and we were soon splitting our sides over our host’s account of a recent visit he had paid His Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose legal adviser he was. Anecdotes concerning the Faithful Ally were many and mostly chestnuts, but two or three were told in that room for the very first time. If I drag these in here, it is because I want to create the mood, verging on the hilarious and mundane as could be, of Sapru’s company that night, before I come to something that changed it in a way I can never forget. The richest man in the world’, I hear him saying, ‘has now had his walking-stick repaired, and he even offered me a cigarette. But when I accepted it he took it back with a polite “Excuse me”, and clipped it neatly in two with the nail-scissors he keeps in his waistcoat pocket for the purpose, remarking “Let’s go halves.” And you haven’t heard this one, either. Just before I got there he had granted a party of Congressmen permission to hold a meeting on State territory, and placed a luxury coach at their disposal to be hitched to the scheduled express. Our politicians fell for the cajolery—but imagine their dismay when the carriage, noiselessly uncoupled at top speed, ran smoothly but with a constant deceleration to a halt in a desolate spot.’ We could imagine it and relish it the more since several of the said group were firom Allahabad, and one at least was known to us all as a sanctimonious bore. That was the point at which an anxious face appeared at the door. Was the Collector there? There had been a fatal accident: an Englishman, Resident Engineer of the Electric Supply Co., had been returning from Benares, where he had been to see his brother, when his car had left the road. Our shocked silence was momentary. Sapru broke it. ‘Then I know where it was exactly,’ he said quietly. ‘It was by the big tree overhanging the route at…’ and he described the locality minutely. ‘Bhūt hai,’ he explained, gazing gravely at me through his spectacles. ‘There’s a ghost there,’


Bhūt hai. Readers of Kipling’s Kim may possibly recall the haunting phrase. And now a Privy Councillor, a Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council was pronouncing it, a man whom I was not alone in regarding as among the maîtres à penser in the India of my day. In that India, as in immemorial India before it, it was admissible and even good manners for the pupil, the chela, to question the guru. ‘Is that your verdict?’ I asked. ‘I see my place as not on the judicial bench but in the witness box,’ he replied. I have related how when I landed at Bombay for the first time, the aldermen had lately been engaged in placating the City’s hob goblins. During the next twenty years repeatedly some event, whether grave or gay, would endorse a whole people’s inclination to fuse what we separate and to regard what is patent as no more than a pathetic fringe of that which is latent. To the cultured in the land the frontier of sense-perception was at best provisional; among the masses the very notion of such a frontier was absent. It was an April morning in 1948, it was Bombay, and I was leaving India. When the sun rose again over Malabar Hill I should have said good-bye to her for ever. I had been leaning for a while and possibly longer than I knew, on the massive parapet near the Gateway of India, just by the stone stairway, watching the rhythmic heave and relapse of the sea. Each time the water came flooding over one of the broad steps, a wavelet would detach itself to gain a yet higher tread, course along this, and then run back laughing to its parent. Coming away, I crossed the road diagonally towards the Taj Mahal Hotel and took the narrower street that flanks this on the left. I had gone a dozen yards down it when I became aware that I was being followed. I went on a bit to make quite sure, then spun round to face a Sikh, turbaned but otherwise in neat, if shabby, European clothes. His eyes, I noticed, set somewhat close together as is not seldom the case with Sikhs, were extraordinarily steady. There was no fanaticism in their stare, simply a distance. ‘Hindostani?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said, raising and shaking the flattened palm of my hand to discourage him. But I was not to be so easily rid of him. He persisted in halting English: ‘You think…for marry…she, she also think. She seven’—he couldn’t get the English here—‘seven kyā nām (what d’you call it) hurūf (letters), sāt hurūf: M————.’


Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru (see page 73)

I was so startled that I recoiled a pace or two backwards against the wall of the hotel building. I fumbled foolishly in my pocket for a coin. ‘No, no,’ he protested hastily. Then turned on his heel and walked away.


My mother in India. On tour with the Willingdons (see page 90) On tour with the Willingdons I

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‘The money-lender pursed his lips: “I say that there is not one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.”’ The quotation is from Kipling’s Kim, and served in my time as an effective enough lead-in to the argument that Hindu attitudes had been changing, and probably changing out of recognition, for quite a while. Consequently, I set out for India half thinking I might find caste, after so much palaver about it, to be little but a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance. And in the event the evidence of laxity was everywhere. The passers-by, or such of them as were hatless, were manifestly not wearing the traditional tuft; and none of the bicycles I saw in the streets had the saddle covered with the inoffensive deerskin. A Brahmin caller, amused at my enquiry, assured me he sat down to his dinner at a table, not on the floor, and without the precaution of first removing the shirt from his back. People I took to be among the Twice Born smiled pityingly when I asked them about their Sacred Threads. Thousands of the well educated were reportedly boasting that when the date came round for the next Census they intended to reply to the question, What is your caste? with a blunt, defiant ‘None!’ However, the neglect of certain items of ritual which, all said and done, bore very remotely on piety, the bravado of an insignificant, if vocal, fraction of society—these proved nothing. The crux was: how did Hindus behave at the crises in their lives? How did the finest among their spirits teach them to behave? The answer to both questions stared one in the face. The Hindu is born into a particular caste because of deeds in a previous life, and his deeds here and now condition his future. The wages of sin is not death but suffering. It follows that caste is the gauge of a soul’s progress towards God. It follows that the duties of taste are the rules of right living. The money-lender on the 3.25 a.m. southbound from Lahore said so, and the verses of

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the Bhagavadgita said so. You cannot get away from caste and stay Hindu. That is why so eminent an intellectual as Radhakrishnan, whom I shall be quoting directly, summoned his erudition to its defence; and why Gandhi, the greatest teacher of the age, while fearlessly condemning what was evil in the system, lauded caste to the skies. These and other minds only less fine than theirs knew it for the very cement that held Hinduism together. In 1926 Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan delivered a course of lectures at Oxford in which, to repeat his own words, he attempted to state the central principles of the Hindu view of life. I was not among the audience, but I read the lectures in book form years later in India. I found they expounded the outlook of the Hindus in terms I could understand; I did not find that they prepared me in the slightest degree for their social system as I observed it around me. This, of course, is not criticism: I have already said that the lecturer’s concern was with a view, not a way, of life. In so far as he did attend to the Hindu attempt to regulate society, it was of ‘a four-fold caste organization’ that he spoke. The wellbeing of the whole, as he eloquently phrased it, was assured by the serenity of the teacher (Brahmin), the heroism of the warrior (Kshatriya), the honesty of the businessman (Vaishya), and the patience and energy of the worker (Shudra). Those who listened to his persuasive sentences or those who afterwards read the printed page, were being introduced to India’s traditional conceit of ‘colour grouping’ connoted by the extremely learned Sanskrit word varna; they were not being allowed a glimpse of the caste system as it is. How were they to guess that the Brahmins were not a select corps of tutors, but were the largest caste in the land? How were they to know there were not four but more than two thousand identifiable castes, and that a considerable fraction of these were despised by the others; that the lowly in the fold aggregating at the time, if I remember, about forty-five million souls were Pariahs? Now if we are to be guided, as the lecturer certainly seemed to suggest, by the concept of varna which does not signify ‘caste’ at all but ‘colour’, we shall remain, so far as I can see, in the halflit dawn of history when the fair-skinned Aryans descended upon the darker complexioned aboriginals of the continent. The scheme assigns to society four broad categories: priests, soldiers, merchants, artisans or farmers. And it places these in an order of precedence which is still respected—this is undeniable. But it does not bother with the actual units. The word for ‘caste’—and it oversteps linguistic boundaries—is jāti or, dropping the barely pronounced little ‘i’ at the end, jāt. The average Hindu in the India


of my memory was conscious the livelong day of his jāt, and expected in any context to be asked: Name? Father’s name? Caste? Like Charity this thing began at home. To start with, hemming him in, even elbowing him literally in the house, was the joint family— we met it in one of our excursions into a village— consisting of father, sons and grandsons with the corresponding womenfolk; ‘people eating food’: as the Hindostani had it, ‘cooked on the same cooking place’. And his joint family was one among a number of other joint families which together constituted an exogamous group. The latter was in its turn a subdivision of a larger group; a group, this time, not exogamous but endogamous. This was the group within which you were obliged to marry; this was your ‘caste’. And it followed that with caste-fellows one and all you need not hesitate to sit down and eat. Of course there was much else to it: a man’s caste was conventionally associated with a calling; occupied its particular position in the hierarchy; was governed in its relations with other castes by rules of pollution and purity, and so on, and so forth. The system is thus complex with a vengeance, so complex that sociologists have not finished defining it. But there is this saving grace. The ‘family’ seated around that hearth, now in loving harmony now getting thoroughly on each other’s nerves, never, so far as I managed to observe, had much difficulty in grasping if not exactly what caste was, at least exactly what it demanded of them in the given situation. It mapped for these ordinary men and women not the tenor of life simply but the precise direction they must take at every turning point in it; prescribed for them the rites and ceremonies to be performed within the home; taught them how to propitiate ancestors and local deities; said to them: After this manner pray ye. It took them on fatiguing pilgrimages to shrines and to sacred rivers; and it lifted them, finite as they were, out of the temporal dimension into a state transcending time. In very large part the traditional way of life was followed within the home, where the outsider could scarcely hope to go. However, the great festivals in the calendar might bring it into the open, even though lopsidedly, noisily. So, short of watching the Hindu family going about its sacramental occasions behind its own closed door, you could hardly do better, provided you had the chance, than observe how it managed on Ganges’ bank when it rose in the morning, busied itself with the symbols of its worship, took its repast and retired to its makeshift bed. I had that chance.

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Munshi Iswar Saran was waiting for me as arranged on the track leading to the level foreshore of the Ganges upstream from the confluence of this most holy of rivers and the Jumna. The locality was the chief bathing place in all India. Its Sanskrit designation was Tirath-Pati, ‘Lord of the Pilgrimages’; and, extra refinement, the specific spot where the waters mingled was Triveni, Three Streams’. For behold, the Saraswati, invisible except to the inner eye and supposedly subterranean in its earlier course surfaced just here—or so the pious would tell you—to make Twain into Trio. More prosaically I was going to a rendezvous on the fringe of the city known to the outside world as Allahabad ever since the heyday of the Muslims, but still named in the older style Prayag or ‘Oblation’ by many Hindus. I wanted to show the persistent, but undeniably engaging old gentleman, the site I had in mind for the camp of those whom India had been learning at Gandhi’s instance these last four or five years to call Harijans, ‘God’s Children’; instead of Untouchables or Pariahs or (in the British euphemisms) Depressed Classes and Scheduled Castes. For Munshi Iswar Saran was President of the Society of the Servants of God’s Children: proclaimed on his visiting card as ‘Harijan Sewak Sangh’. He was other things too: Advocate of the High Court and a talented parliamentarian who had made his mark as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly on the Congress ticket—and he was amongst the closer and more amiable of my acquaintances in the Party. In the late autumn of his career he was devoting his days to the crusade which Gandhi had recently inaugurated. I think I ought to relate how. A Round Table Conference had been convened in London in 1930, and at its second session in the following year when Gandhi himself was present, the thorny question of minority representation had been debated; the principal minorities being the Muslims, with whom we are not concerned in this chapter, and the Depressed Classes whose number was nearer fifty than forty million. Their accredited leader, Dr Ambedkar, demanded separate electorates for them, but Gandhi—though of course he was only a selfappointed spokesman on their behalf—would not hear of it. They would be cut off, he protested, more than ever from the body of Hindu society and he would resist such a demand with his life. Faced, and it was no novel experience, with Indian disagreement, the British Government had no option but to make a Communal Award on its own. This, when it came out, provided for reserved seats in the legislative assemblies to be filled by the separate voting of the Depressed Classes. Gandhi’s entreaty had


been rejected. Back by this time in India, back in jail, he resolved ‘to fast unto death’. The Peacemaker in this as in many another fix was Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru. He pleaded for the acceptance of a formula obliging everyone to give way a little without seeming to do so, and a pact (to be remembered ever after as the Poona Pact) was eventually concluded in the terms of which the reserved seats would be filled in two stages. In the first round the principle of separate electorates would be honoured, the Depressed Classes voters electing four candidates for each seat; but in the second round the ensemble of Hindu voters would take their pick from the said panel. Gandhi swallowed a glass of orange juice. I make no apology for my dense paragraph on the origin of the Harijan Movement. That Movement belongs here, and I have not dragged politics into the story of caste. Politics was there already; there from the far off days of Chandragupta Maurya’s empire three hundred years before Christ when those ‘little republics’, the Indian village communities, which made Megasthenes the Greek so homesick, elected their Councils of Elders from all castes to represent all interests. But returning from Poona to Allahabad, I must make it a good deal clearer why the Society whose energetic President was standing beside me had applied for a ‘camp’ near the Sangam, or ‘junction’ of the waters. A pilgrimage is any journey to a sacred place. But it gains in sanctity if performed at a propitious moment, and the prescribed time at Prayag was the month of Magh which is our January-February. To bathe then is to cleanse the soul, and is worth the effort. Immeasurably more rewarding, however, is it to bathe not simply in that month of Magh but when the planet Jupiter enters Aquarius—which happens every twelfth year. The Magh gathering, or Mela, then becomes a Kumbh (Aquarius) Mela, and it is to this that the two of us were attending on that midOctober morning. In barely three months the Kumbh, greatest of Melas, would be attracting anything up to two million pilgrims and these sandy flats now untrodden would swarm with ten thousand sticky little stand-offish groups (a faded snap-shot shows it) hailing from every corner of the continent. And who were these bathers traditionally? In the nice Sanskrit they were Jatris, which means ‘goers’; they were the people who ‘went’ par excellence, went to places worthy to be visited. Any Hindu whatever his standing social, political or economic could deem himself of their number: he had only to ‘go’. However, there was a sting in the tail of the licence: he might not cause pollution to higher-caste worshippers than himself. Hitherto, as may be guessed, shelter

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had been taken behind this proviso to frown on the attendance of Untouchables at the select bathing places; but very lately a wave of popular enthusiasm had been stirred by Gandhi’s dramatic stand in their favour and at the date to which I am reverting this, though patently subsiding, had not lost all its momentum. And in the eyes of the callous official I was, obviously if you could consent to sit next to an Untouchable in parliament you must not mind washing away your sins while he was doing the same a hundred yards perhaps, or anyhow a decent distance, off. In principle there was no objection, in practice no problem. There were ‘camp’ sites galore already earmarked for the different philanthropic or caste organizations, and all I had to do was to find room for just one more. Munshi Iswar Saran was satisfied, was gratitude itself. He would tell Gandhi next time he saw him what a sympathetic young man I was. When we had said good-bye, I went to watch my huge Office Tent going up—for a giant Mela sets its administrative task. I had been placed on six months special duty to discharge this, and from now until March would be spending all my days on the site. I looked forward to this interlude: it contrasted with the usual round. And if interlude is a short entertainment between the acts in a more serious play, then I have chosen the right word. I would have to concoct a bulky report at the end—but meantime I looked like being neither the recipient nor the initiator of tiresome ‘phone calls and telegrams. A typewriter was being unpacked, I could see. I could not see to what use it would be put. But all in good time. No doubt I’d get to know the ropes when Pande joined me. The Rai Sahib had been on this Mela assignment before when he was twelve years younger. It comes back to me now that an initial challenge was to plot a branch railway, taking off from the main line and ending wherever I decided on the Mela grounds. Challenge? Child’s play. Describing a graceful curve on the large-scale map was simply the test of a steady hand, inking in the sleepers a work of irresistible supererogation. But my principal job from the start was to coordinate the services: Police, Fire fighting, Medical, Postal etc.; and then ensure that the multifarious voluntary bodies, mostly sectarian and terribly consequential, worked hand in hand with them. The caste factor—well, we were there to bow to it. On my side everyone in authority was a Brahmin, had to be: even all our Sub-Inspectors of Police were high caste Hindus. And everyone down to those Sub-Inspectors had to parley English—otherwise not a sentence could be exchanged with people from the South. But even having hit on a medium of communication, how was my


team to put its case over? From the police standpoint the hundreds upon hundreds of thieves and pickpockets hanging around ought to be ordered off the field; but no pilgrim would shoo a mendicant at a place and time like this. The Jatris would be housed in thousands of flimsy huts constructed of matted screens, inflammable therefore; and the Fire Brigade officers pressed that meals should be cooked in the open air. ‘No,’ said the Brahmins, and especially the Brahmins from Madras, ‘we will not eat where the glance that pollutes can fall on our food.’ I was myself the witness of a rumpus on this score. By the mistake of some guide, a Kayasth family—a caste, notice, rating high, not low —was brought along to a hut slap against a collection of Brahmins who were dining alfresco. The Brahmins did not tumble to it for a while and went on eating. Then someone must have put the word around, for the whole line jumped to their feet, scooped up their dining leaves, which the ultra orthodox use in lieu of crockery, and scampered out of view. Admittedly there would not be much to go up in flames, and there was sand all about and water everywhere. Nevertheless, the danger to life was extreme. Fire, I remembered, had broken out at the Hardwar Mela where conditions were similar—and a multitude of pilgrims stampeded to their death. So all we could do was to urge the volunteer organizations to shepherd sensitive Southerners to the central sector of the given caste hutment where they would be insulated on either side by the less delicately adjusted Brahmins of + the North—and train our firemen to flatten out a whole hutment in double quick time by hacking at the bamboo supports. Then Health. Notoriously pilgrimages were favourable to the spread of cholera: a single carrier in the densely crowded grounds of the Mela could transmit the disease in no time to a number, and that number dispersing homewards before the symptoms appeared, might introduce it to a whole Province. Alas, the higher the caste, as I soon discovered, the lower the esteem in which the notions of the M.O.H. were held. How could one count on the notification of the first case or enforce the prompt inoculation of all who had been exposed to risk? A Collector in his District with presumed rewards up his sleeve might bring it off, not the Health Department official whose audience was both kaleidoscopic and far from home. But enough of my administrative worries and back to the Pilgrims. They were urban and rural and sophisticated and simple, of a hundred occupations, whether the blithe North had sent them or the sultry South. They ranged from pensive Benares pandits to Mysore villagers who were never happier than when sacrificing

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The Magh Mela at the Sangam or Confluence of the Waters (see page 81)

animals to their deities; from people who would not have water taps in their houses to others who skinned carcases and consumed carrion; from those who worshipped the particular species of mouse on which the God Ganpati rides to those who regarded field rats as a tasty dish; from Brahmins of the Gangetic plain who would not handle a plough to Kashmiri Brahmins who were not even vegetarians; from the scholar of the Scriptures to the dunce for whom a wavy Y, picturing the confluence of the waters, had been printed on the railway ticket valid for the journey from his home, wherever that was, to Allahabad. Qualitatively they were Hindu society, these Pilgrims; and exhibited its distinguishing marks. Pilgrim in the singular was a grammatical abstraction; he lived in and through his caste, his subcaste, his joint family. Every Hindu did. Caste, I have said, had its minute prescriptions. It simply had to. Otherwise Hinduism, innocent of any dogma concerning the nature of God, would have run riot. Even as things stood, the


The All-India Cattle Show. Receiving the Viceroy and Lady Linlithgow (see page 181)

distance from its centre to its circumference was so great as to invite the question: Is there a circumference? And therefore the population on Ganges’ bank for whose material comfort I was responsible, would make religious room for every moment, big or little, solemn or the reverse. It must be understood that I am now well through the month I had learned to call Magh. One day I had been down at the Sangam for an hour, chatting with the constables and the Boy Scouts and the volunteers on duty there, but most of all watching the bathers. I noticed how many couples, man and woman, would enter the water with the ends of their garments tied together. In Hinduism, as I knew, monogamy is held up as an ideal, and here the union of those who are joined together in holy matrimony was being symbolised, beautifully enough, by a couple of yards of wet linen. Still, there were one or two doubts. I was witnessing nothing less than a sacrament, evidently. But did it transmit an equal grace to the partners? And another thing, was the sex code harsher towards women, as I suspected, the higher the rung in the ladder of Caste?

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Presently I was back in my tent. Two pilgrims were ushered in, mild in manner and respectful, seeking, as they said, a signal favour. They had already been next door (these marquees had doors; that is, flap doors) to interview my lieutenant, Pande, but he had referred them to me. There was a shy charm in the bearing of this obviously well-educated pair and an unfamiliar ring in their Hindi. They were from Ujjain, they explained: that sacred city, one of the Seven that are Holy, Septa-Pura in the Sanskrit, and I can still hear their heavy insistence on the double ‘j’ and their way of sounding ‘jain’ like ‘join’. Could they, coming diffidently to the point, could they drive right down to the Confluence in their Ford? I was taken aback. My rule was: No vehicles anywhere near. And at the appropriate place on the approach-road huge multilingual notices read: By Order. No Pilgrim shall drive or cause to be driven a wheeled carriage beyond here. ‘Certainly not.’ I snapped. They looked crestfallen. ‘It was not for ourselves but for the sake of another who cannot speak for himself, having a handicap in that regard. However…’ And they shifted as if to go. Then: ‘May we repeat what Pandit Pande told us’. ‘Well, what?’ ‘He told us you could consider a special case.’ ‘Look here’ I said testily, ‘pilgrims, be they Brahmins, be they Sweepers, shall not drive to the Sangam in motor cars.’ ‘Could Pandit Pande drive to the Sangam?’ they asked, taking me up. ‘He’s not a pilgrim’. ‘Oh! yes, he is,’ I said’ ‘that’s s just where you’re wrong. He’s bathed here every Magh since I don’t know when.’ I had walked into the snare. ‘You are not a Pilgrim,’ they countered. ‘You could drive, Pandit Pande said you could.’ ‘The thing is’ they continued, ‘it is better, at least Pandit Pande thought, that our friend should not go on foot to bathe, out of respect for timid ladies.’ So that was it. The protégé was some sort of Naked Penitent. ‘He doesn’t wear any clothes, your silent friend?’ asked. ‘We have to admit it. But he has freed himself from animal impulses. His dietary is strict; he may not touch onion, potato, carrot, radish, or beetroot. He eats, as do we Brahmins all, off a dining leaf and our women purify the spot where this has rested with a solution of cow dung.’ I reached for my topee. ‘Come on, then.’ ‘Oh! Sir,’ they exclaimed, ‘our people will be agog.’ ‘Your people?’


‘Yes, a party has arrived, by train from Oo-dj-dj-oin and they are betting on the outcome.’ ‘How do you mean, outcome?’ ‘What your Honour will decide.’ I took the rear seat alongside the mysterious worshipper who wore no clothes and could not talk; my two visitors taking the front seat, and one of them the wheel. And like this we toot-tooted our way cautiously through the milling crowds towards the Sangam. As we drew near I could see a double row of Boy Scouts lining the route down to the brink. Pandit Pande’s work! My persevering pair led, and I followed with the chief guest, hanging on to him by a linen leash, through the ceremonial lane and into the shallows. The lion refused to advance further but he lowered his maned head to drink; then crouched blinking in three or four inches of holy water while we sluiced his shoulders and his flanks. ‘We shall soon have the Nagas here,’ Pande said, glancing at the calendar. Their parade was hallowed by custom, was appreciated by all and sundry, and on a religious occasion like this! It did not make sense to me. Or perhaps not until, much after the event, I recollected what Gilbert Murray had once taught me: that it is in the tradition of the Indo-Europeans to mock at the things they venerate. The Greeks did so through their Comedy, the English in the Middle Ages did so through the Mummers who turned nuns and saints and even the communion chalice into ridicule. But first of all, who and what were the Nagas? In the standard works of reference they are a people of the Andhra empire in the South over sixteen hundred years ago; or a barbarous tribe of head-hunters existing in Assam to this day; or an ill defined ethnic group in the Western Hills on whom the rules of caste sit lightly. The Nagas whose name the Pilgrims bandied about at the Mela had no connexion with any of those. They were Hindu, they were Mendicant, they were Naked. Pressing Pande, I elicited that though coarse they were not of criminal bent. Further I could not get. There remained, and would remain, the contradiction that whereas with mendicants the rule is each man for himself, among the Nagas there is an acquiescence in joint behaviour. They would duly appear, receive generous alms, perform their customary march to the Sangam, and depart. Thus I found myself making arrangements for the date; for date, somehow or other there was. Several days in advance we cordoned off an enclosure, and into this trickled the equivalent of, I suppose, some three infantry companies; grubby, smirking men with

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matted locks; men unencumbered with the goods of this world save for a staff, a thick bamboo with seven knots. On the procession day the Mela ground was packed well before the hour announced, and the police were having their work cut out to keep the thoroughfare open down to the Confluence. Thinking of those bamboos, I had seen to it that all constables were armed with lathis, the heavy brass tipped quarter staff, instead of the truncheon at the belt which was normal issue on Pilgrimage duty. As the hour approached I cantered my Police horse in the direction of the starting point and soon saw the Nagas falling in with a surprising semblance of military precision. So I wheeled and returned towards the Sangam and waited with everybody else. They were coming now, and once again their unexpected discipline impressed: they were marching; not in step admittedly, but keeping ranks, and—marching. It was an astonishing sight. They carried their staffs laterally across their middles, and from where we waited it looked as if each man in the leading files was gripping his with three hands. But individuals were not too distinct yet, because the ashes smeared on their bodies and foreheads merged with the grey sand underfoot. However, less than a minute gave confirmation of what we had divined. I could see wide grins on the faces of the leaders, and also that each bamboo, held five or six inches clear of the body and steadied by firm fists to right and to left, was entwined at its centre by a clinging tendril. Laughter, awkward, inane and high, broke from the crowd as our psychologically released pilgrims looked at one another foolishly and then back at the spectacle. I never enquired by what exercises, ointments, or adhesives the Nagas achieved the results here chronicled, and it is anyhow more profitable to consider what their rôle was in a society ridden, as we are seeing, by caste and ritual. I don’t doubt that like that of the Athenian actors in the ‘phallika’ or that of medieval comedians at the Feast of Fools, it was to mock at things especially revered. Theirs was a triple mockery—Hinduism is fond of doing everything by threes. It was a mockery of the sacrament of the waters; a mockery of the ideal of religious mendicancy; a mockery of the Great God Shiva, Insolent and Ithyphallic. Magh had ended, the pilgrims had gone their separate ways, my team was breaking up. While everything was yet fresh, and while I could compare notes with Pande, I began collecting my thoughts on caste. Ought I to say correcting them? For manifestly certain of my assumptions had been shaken. To begin (where this chapter began) with Kipling’s te-rain. The money-lender told one side of the story. The Kumbh Mela told


another. Railways, postage, telegraph, cheap printing in the regional languages had enabled castes to organize as never before. Postcards nowadays carried news of caste meetings, buses enabled people to attend them. Certain castes, on the evidence of their Associations present on the Mela grounds, actually had their printed ‘constitutions’. A Madras Brahmin I met at the Sangam had brought a pot of sea water from Kameswaram (the tiny spit that points like a finger at Ceylon) and, to the envy of all Brahmins of the North, there he was, pouring it into the Ganges. I would say then that the fillip caste had received in the last hundred years was more than compensating for the blows it had taken. In the span of a century there had been two really new events in Indian history, and each had stoked the fires of caste. The first was greater mobility. In pre-British times you had a chieftain or raja, above him the viceroy or an emperor, and below him the headmen of single villages; and the territorial boundaries of that chieftain’s domain were also the horizons of local caste activity. But now the vertical barriers were down and the horizontal extension of caste was unchecked. An increase in caste solidarity ensued, balanced by a livelier sense of caste interdependence on the spot. Which is to say: whoever you were, you became more, not less, casteconscious. The other new event was the passage of political power to the people from the rulers. Under a parliamentary regime minorities could not obtain a hearing without preferential treatment; and through such treatment caste gets into the house of commons. The British set that ball rolling. And what of the common belief that each caste abides by its traditional position in the hierarchy? On the evidence of the Mela there was considerable uncertainty and much argument over mutual rank. Brahmins of course are the top people, the Untouchables the bottom people in the system, and I never came across a Hindu who did not know who were the Brahmins and who the Untouchables. Moreover, just below the Brahmin level and just above the Untouchable level there was scarcely scope for doubt. It was in the middle of the hierarchy that you might notice castes ‘showing off’, trying to prove on the strength of their written or unwritten Book of Rules that they were equal to their superiors and superior to their equals. I have dodged the matter of occupation by choosing a Pilgrimage as my setting. But I can hardly close the chapter without alluding to it, because here again there is a popular misconception. Hereditary association with a calling there invariably was in each

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caste, but it never followed that all, or even most, in that caste made their living by it. India could count several rulers who came from merchant or peasant castes. I could count several Brahmins on my own staff who were peons carrying bundles of papers about; true, without loss of dignity since this was not manual labour; but it was not the function of a natural élite supposed to be wielding the sacred power. Castes with a tradition of literacy, e.g. Brahmin, Vaishya, Kayastha, understandably tended to become clerks, schoolmasters, officials, lawyers and doctors; Banias slipped easily into the commercial openings offered by the Pax Britannica; the Jat, the Gujar and Ahir remained proudly wedded to the soil; and Rajputs, modelled on the Kshatriyas of a golden age, proved an unfailing source of recruits to the Army. That is about all anybody could say. ‘What of caste in the future, Rai Sahib?’ ‘It will be seen.’ ‘How Indians love that; so impersonal, so passive! But what do you yourself predict?’ ‘I am a Brahmin brought up in a Christian College.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Well then, we people mostly obey caste and keep its commandments, while taking its name in vain.’ ‘In other words, it will absorb the present shocks?’ ‘So far as I think.’

6 TO BE A HINDU

My duties soon brought me within range of Hinduism as a social system, but they did not introduce me to a religion fit to blazon abroad a message to mankind. Not that this troubled me. I was content to affect an air of condescending amusement about the whole thing. I smiled at the thought of adult Hindus sucking up to a god who has an elephant’s head with a broken tusk, a fat paunch and a cheerful disposition—the very spit of the adored, battered jumbo we once had in the nursery—and even petitioning him to remove obstacles in his capacity as Master of Snags, Vighneshwar, each time they set out for the railway station. I was an Englishman ‘Out East’, and did not share the propensity of a certain West to swallow the syrup administered by the gifted apologists of whom Rabindranath Tagore was prince. My mother, on the other hand, was of those on whom the propaganda worked; and toured India for a year-and-a-half armed with that copy of Gitanjali which I have listed in my introductory chapter as being among the few of my possessions not destined to perish in the flames at Gower Street. A waste of breath to tell mother that Tagore had sized up his public, was interpreting Hinduism in Western terms which were alien to it; was anyhow an eclectic; to tell her that his school at Shantineketan, guaranteed to instil an instant appreciation of the divine, was rivalled by another institution, also in Bengal, but more unsavoury: namely, the Temple of Mali at Calcutta, reeking and slippery with blood. Of course, and I admitted it, if you listened to him singing, say, his hymn to the Distant Goddess, full marks. I know thee, I know thee, O thou Bideshini; thou dwellest on the other shore of the ocean. I have seen thee in the autumn, I have felt thee in the spring night. I have found thee in the midst of my heart, O thou Bideshini. Putting my ear to the sky I have heard thy music…I have roamed through the

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world and have come at last into the strange country. Here I am, a guest at thy door, O thou Bideshini. Full marks—assuming you wanted a pastiche of the Carmel Canticle of St John of the Cross. However (I would then reflect indulgently) let it be Tagore. Better Tagore than the latterday Yogis, Vivekananda and his successors, who had not only sold the promise of ineffable joy to shoals of rich American widows but actually knocked Romain Rolland and Aldous Huxley, cerebral and sensitive geniuses, all of a heap. My own drift then was into the diametrically opposite camp. I collected and passed on with zest and occasional embroidery any stories that showed up Hinduism in a ludicrous light. Was incarnation the topic? Krishna to the rescue, God Incarnate, having fun with the milkmaids. Or if it were metempsychosis, I would drag in the unfortunate woman who had little pleasure in her promotion: scrub herself as she might, she simply could not get rid of the smell of fish. And in the Census there had been that householder who, in the space for ‘Head of Family’, returned a local deity, specifying this personage’s ‘Occupation’ as subsistence on an endowment, and his ‘Education (if any)’ as omniscience. Nor would Lionel Curtis be let off lightly. Lionel Curtis, one of Lord Milner’s famous ‘kindergarten’ and a man burning with zeal, had lately visited India and been enthralled by her to such a degree that he decided he must become a Hindu. So he consulted the Pandits of Benares. But oh, dear, dear!—they replied that if he supported a hundred poor Brahmins for a whole year and then committed suicide, the odds were he would be reborn into a reasonably decent caste. So it would go on. Without much doubt I wanted kicking. 1. SWAMI ADVAITANAND If I grew out of that callow phase, I owe it largely to Swami Advaitanand at Rikhikesh. This little place is not shown in any of the standard atlases, and it may require a call at the address of the Royal Geographical Society to locate it. But every Hindu of culture knows where it is. It is where the Jumna, after being choked in deep gorges and bashed against giant boulders, frees itself from the Outer Himalayas to rush out over laughing rapids. It is there fore above the immensity of the plain, but below the eternity of the snows; sited mid-way between the dark forest and the gleaming glacier. It called to the Rishi (which is Rikhi in another


spelling) of ancient days, and it has called to the modern seer, as an ideal hermitage. There the Sage might meditate and perhaps catch behind the muffled voice of the torrent the hum of the cosmic dynamo itself. I had gone there on duty the first time. I was distinctly raw; in fact just assigned to a Sub-division, the subdivision which contained Rikhikesh. My job was to take a look at the Notified Area Committee, as it was termed—something more than a Parish Council but less than a Rural District Council in status—which ran its affairs. In a region of India where Islam was strongly entrenched (Muslims were a majority in the nearby city of Saharanpur, for instance) there had always been a tacit understanding that this was a Hindu precinct. It struck me then, as it would continue to strike me on and off, that the Muslim conquerors had on the whole been, if not exactly forbearing, astute enough to allow Hinduism to withdraw into pockets. Rikhikesh was one of these. In this Hindu enclave there was no mosque because no need of one; no poultry; no kitchen-garden even. It was hinted I might like to send off my bearer Husain Ali, alias Kalloo on a week’s leave and entrust myself to the Brahmin servant attached to the modest inspection bungalow where I would be putting up. Since that occasion two years ago when he had waited nervously alongside his father, Niaz Ali, for me to come into sight at Camp Dudhi, Kalloo had not been beyond the sound of a shout for a single day, and as we paused now on the edge of the Area he dropped his eyes and after a second’s hesitation held out a limp hand. I then walked on without him, my belongings balanced on the head of an indubitable Hindu at my heels. A lineup of notables, which is to say four or five members of the Committee, was there in welcome. Their spokesman was Mahant Paras Ram. ‘Mahant’ means Head Priest, and this smiling, tubby and, if appearance counted, self-satisfied dignitary was the incumbent of a benefice which many of his fellows must have envied him. For the Temple at Rikhikesh, unremarkable in itself, was in receipt of donations from far and wide; so that most of the properties around, including a Pathshala or Religious School, were part of its patrimony. The Mahant therefore was quite as much a Comptroller of Accounts as a shepherd of souls. In an earlier chapter we met the family preceptor, a simple Prohit, semi-literate at best, casting horoscopes in the home or officiating at marriage ceremonies; we have met the village Pujari tinkling the temple bell, blowing the conch and, it may be, reading aloud from a sacred text to an assemblage of rustics. Now we encounter a sophisticated Mahant who is very likely the son and the grandson

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of mahants, and will probably have been trained by some guru of reputation rather than in a classroom. During a committee meeting that afternoon his genial assistance enabled me to romp through the agenda. He clinched the disposal of one of the items, I distinctly remember, with a Persian tag, an exceedingly worldlywise couplet from Sa’di, and the lines are in my head to this day. I ought not to have been startled, I suppose. His polish was that of his native Delhi: to which, as gossips did not omit to inform me before very long, he was never without the cash to repair on mysterious jaunts; where, added other tongues not less malicious, he was the life and soul of certain parties in a lane off the Chandni Chowk. If I have strayed into a by-way, no harm. The priesthood of the Hindus is badly reported, its lower and middle echelons hardly at all. The professional Pandits, perhaps it is worth saying, are not exclusively a grade of scholars distributed among the celebrated centres of learning and given to nice metaphysical speculation. Of course there are those Pandits in excelsis; Pandit Jyoti Prasad of my fourth chapter was a notable example. But there is also, and ubiquitously, as befits a religion averse to congregational attitudes, a teeming category of society which is thought of as being in its entirety the heir to a ‘sacred power’; a whole class to whom an ‘utterance’ has been vouchsafed; and it is with these pandits, literate, semi-educated or totally unschooled, that the mass will come into almost daily touch whether in the intimacy of the joint family, or under a tree in the open, or in the temple at the corner of the street. And from these pandits—how else?—the average man could learn what Hinduism was about. In my villages I would occasionally attempt of an evening to bring the talk round to such matters. ‘Avatars, now. Do you think of some people as avatars? Is Gandhi a divine incarnation?’ Or, ‘What is a Mahatma?’ Or, ‘Can you tell me about Salvation?’ What usually astounded me was not the fluency of the reply. This was never fluent and was often unintelligible. What astounded me was that the expressions (Sanskrit, mind, not everyday Hindi) did not seem unfamiliar, were part of people’s vocabulary; that Karma, Liberation, World Spirit and so on, were concepts somebody must have repeatedly put to them—to these peasants who had in many cases not moved thirty miles from their village in their lives and could neither read nor write. But on reflection was it not sheer commonsense? Hinduism had caught on, evolved, and endured for two and a half millennia or whatever it was exactly, exhibiting an amazing inner cohesion from Himalayas to Cape Comorin. It could not have done so unless it


had been steadily assimilated and quietly practised by the humblest in the land. In the nature of things, many, indeed most, of those heirs to the sacred prerogative were of the earth, earthy. I doubt if ‘spiritual is the just word to apply to that superior domestic who can acquaint you with the astral influences of the hour; or to Mahant Paras Ram either, setting off on a spree in white silk muffler, tailored overcoat and shiny patent leather shoes. But there was and always had been an élite as well; good men, teachers of special sanctity and revered as such, and an élite of that élite; and so on until you came to the great founders of schools such as the ninth-century Shankar, a sort of Saint Thomas Aquinas of Hinduism, who maintained the doctrine of salvation by knowledge; or Ramanuja in the eleventh century, for whom devotion was the key to it; and in more modern times to the reformers: for example Ram Mohan Roy (we date him by recalling that his London friend was Jeremy Bentham); Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century; and, of course, Gandhi in ours. Far up the slope, but visible from the Temple where we stood was a stone-built hut I could see a saffron-clad figure moving about on the parapet in front of it, and asked the Mahant who he might be. That’s our Swami,’ he replied in his jovial style—‘Swami Advaitanand. Bengali fellow. Some Calcutta merchant pays me the rent.’ Then ‘I’ll get him to meet you,’ he promised impressively. Next day nothing happened; nor the day after that. On the fourth day, returning from a walk up the hill after work, I had to pass quite close to the rough little shelter—two rooms behind that parapet, it looked. On an impulse I pushed at the rickety door. Now a Swami, as Western and particularly the American world had cause to know, could be almost anything from charlatan or slob to real thing. Which would my Swami be? Inside, but evidently about to come out, faced me a man in, I suppose, his late fifties, wiry and spare, athletic looking. His head was shaven as closely as his chin; he had a straight narrow nose and the chiselled lips that go with a Greek statue. His saffron vestment resembling a cassock was held at the waist by a cord, and he wore the heavy sandals of a monk anywhere. The tough exterior did not deceive, as I discovered a year later when tramping the hills in his company. I had come back then to Rikhikesh expressly to cultivate him. Ineptly put: I wanted him to instil the culture. However, that’s jumping ahead. I have yet to make his acquaintance. ‘I imagine you hate seeing people?’ I said awkwardly when I had introduced myself.

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He laughed. ‘I hope I don’t show it’ ‘Mahant Paras Ram told me you were here,’ I ventured. ‘Ah, the Mahant.’ I bit my tongue. Needlessly, for the Swami side-stepped instantly to a less controversial local character. ‘You’ll know Mannu too by this time,’ he said with a twinkle. They all worship him down there. In and out of everybody’s house.’ ‘Know him? I should jolly well think I do,’ answered, glad of an opening. I related how, my first evening at the bungalow I had flopped into a chair in the half-light and was waiting for the Brahmin attendant to bring me a lamp when my thermos, aimed at me from the direction of the mantelpiece, landed in my lap. ‘So you see,’ I ended, ‘I’m the odd man out—who refuses to do puja, as you put it, to Mannu the Monkey down there.’ He smiled engagingly. ‘Bear with me and I’ll tell you why we others do. But in English, in English.’ This conversation on the doorstep had been ten times more laboured than it reads above. On both sides. For the Swami spoke an awkward plodding Hindi, pronouncing the long a’s like o’s and getting at least one of his genders wrong. Why hadn’t it occurred to me after my two years in India that even an anchorite in his hermitage on an Outer Himalayan slope, a soul aspiring to realms loftier than those where the Hindu gods dwell in their glory, might speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake? We both laughed. ‘No merit,’ he continued, ‘I had digs near Belsize Park station on the Hampstead and Highgate line for years. I ate my dinners— not always with hearty appetite, I may say—at Gray’s Inn. Long, long ago. However I was telling you why we Indians do puja to monkeys. The whole story’s in the Ramayan, “The Doings of Rama”. And if you ask me whether it’s religion or poetry I shan’t know what to reply. But this I do know, it goes the rounds properly. That’s how it is with us, our Scripture, our literature—call it whichever you like—doesn’t stay on dusty shelves. It’s the same with the Mahabharat, the Great Epic, which has that wonderful Sermon, or Song—take your choice again—tucked away in the middle of it. One day we’ll talk about the Gita; I’ll only say now that no Hindu ever need go outside its teaching. But I’m wandering. I was going to tell you a story. Well, Ajodhya—which is near Fyzabad—was the capital of a kingdom in olden days, and Rama the heir to the throne was a brave prince and always quick to punish the demons who battened on the peasantry. In revenge for this, the Demon King whose base was Lanka, Ceylon, chose a


moment when Rama had gone out shooting to kidnap his wife Sita and carry her off in a flying machine. Luckily a helper was at hand in the Monkey General, Hanuman. His acrobatic troops leaping here, swinging there and dropping stones as they went, laid a causeway across the straits, over which an army was able to march and rescue the princess. And this Rama—as we know, but pretend not to know for the sake of the thrill—is none other than the High God Vishnu all the time. That was written in Sanskrit before the Christian era, but the people have taken it more closely than ever to their hearts, these last three or four hundred years, in the homelier vernacular of Tulsi Das.’ We had left the modest shelter absent-mindedly, and were trudging slowly up the hill I had been descending less than half an hour before. The unexpectedly sociable solitary stopped and faced me. ‘We Hindus love it, and it is good for us,’ he said. ‘You see, quite a lot is enshrined in that episode: the marriage tie, the fight against evil, loyalty, the constant presence of God in our midst— it’s all there. And every monkey, as the living embodiment of Hanuman, recreates the incident for us.’ He may have sensed I was about to put my oar in at this point, f or he went on without a pause. ‘I know, I know—it’s the worship of the destructive little wretch you can’t stomach. But let me finish. We Hindus see things as graded, tiered as it were, but not disparate, if you follow. We don’t separate the animals from man as you do. We hold the distinction between them and ourselves to be in status, not in kind. The divine possibility, if it be ours is also theirs. Hasn’t the cow stepped from her kingdom to become a goddess in our eyes? Divinities, we see them everywhere. We place them, however, we place them. Vishnu and Shiva are High; alone in fact in their splendour. Others are—don’t laugh—mediocre. We should not look down on mediocrity even where gods are concerned; we should look up to excellence. But come back to Mannu. Hindus don’t regard him as a god, please be clear on that; they consider there is just a bit of something that is holy in him.’ We continued walking, neither of us speaking. He was not waiting for me to say anything, I’m sure. Presently he resumed. ‘Always remember that we Hindus are conscious of that progression. We think of ugliness as already on the road to beauty, we think of error as already on the road to truth.’ Another silence. Then: ‘Altogether, my friend, we are deeply shocked by your maxim that the best is the enemy of the good

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At this he spread his arms upwards towards the eternal snows, let them drop to his sides, raised them again. Endeavour, relapse, renewed endeavour in the gesture. ‘And if, but only if, you wish,’ he added, his shy engaging smile returning, ‘we might go on with this discussion sometime.’ 2. CREED I am always reading or hearing it said that the Hindu religion is non-credal. Probably the theologians are right in their phrasing, but to the rest of us the punctilious formulation of a belief is of secondary importance to the holding of it. I employ the word ‘creed’ here to mean the body of beliefs which Hindus actually hold. Whenever I used to ask Hindus to enlighten me on some point they would begin: ‘we people believe…’ So I shall try now to state the essentials of the creed. In the subsection of a chapter I have to stick to what is both central and undisputed. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are offshoots of Hinduism, but they left it altogether in the guise of separate religions and are consequently not in focus; and even the protestant movements such as Brahma Samaj and Arya Samaj, although they are within Hinduism, are aberrant so far as we are concerned here. Well then, I do not think it mistaken to name four or five presuppositions—I shall not irritate scholarship further by terming them dogmas (‘Hinduism is free from dogma’)—occurring in the main stream and unchallenged, which Hindus in general accept as the self-evident facts of life; self-evident and not therefore dependent on revelation. The chief of these grand assumptions, at the core and uncontested, is that of the rebirth of all living things: gods, demons, humans, animals, fishes, birds, reptiles, insects—all. The word for this is Sansār and I have heard it on the lips of quite ordinary people. I translate it The Round’. Now the Round presupposes, in Hindu thinking at any rate, an allied principle; which is that the condition of the individual soul on rebirth is determined by the sum total of that soul’s activities to date. Here and now, declares the Hindu, I am eating the fruit of all my yesterdays. The technical term this time is well travelled: Karma, which I translate ‘The Deed’. Too often Karma is presented in the West as fatalism, but it is exactly the opposite: I am this because I have done that. So you have in these two doctrines taken together an explanation of life’s inequality and life’s suffering.


But if the Round is dependent on the Deed, what must you do? The Code tells you. This, known as Dharma, is less easy to put in a nutshell and I am perhaps exonerated from trying, since the Hindus themselves confess it to be extraordinarily elusive. Etymology is not everyone’s hobby, but it helps occasionally: Latin and Sanskrit are cousins, and Dharma is simply our word ‘firm’, as also our word ‘form’ , making an Indian appearance. It has thus the sense of holding or maintaining in position. The conventional translations of it, ‘Righteousness’, ‘Eternal Law’ seem to me highfalutin for the essentially practical Dharma which orders you to stay put, to do this, that and the other—or else. The Rules of the Game’ might hit off the meaning, especially remembering that the Code is formulated with painstaking precision throughout the whole corpus of Hindu scripture. It looks therefore as if we are intending nothing less than ‘religion’ by this word, and in fact I do not know how ‘Hinduism’—which is sheer western terminology —can be expressed in an Indian language otherwise than by its use. Now the Round, the Deed, the Rules of Behaviour were all very well, but where did re-birth lead except to re-birth? Something more was wanted: not surprisingly, the Hindus grew profoundly dissatisfied with an orthodox religion that offered nothing better than bondage to a roundabout. Their doctors, and still more perhaps their mystics, accordingly arrived at yet another basic assumption: viz, that escape from the revolving wheel is possible for all. This release they named Moksha; which therefore is the eventual liberation of the human soul from the trammels of time and space. A common rendering—I have used it myself—is ‘salvation’, but the Christian overtone is misleading. To the Hindu the salvation is not from guilt but from the human condition. My translation here is ‘The Way Out’. Whether the state of bliss is to be reached through effort or through grace, the schools would debate. I arrive at the fifth and last of the grand assumptions (as I am naming them) of the Hindus and once more am obliged to burden my text with a technical expression. The fact is that such terms, lacking as they do a precise equivalent in a different language, must be supplied in the original as they crop up, if only as pegs on which to hang rough and ready definitions. Since there are more words for philosophical and religious thought in Sanskrit than in Greek and German combined, perhaps I shall be forgiven for resorting to five. My fifth is Brahman, the label of a concept which is as Indian as can be. Some of the attempts to translate the word bring English to the end of its tether. I have seen it served up as

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‘the Non-This indwelling the This’; I have seen it as ‘In-ness’. A third shot, ‘The unspeakable It’, is booked poignantly in my case since boyhood as the nickname we gave a puppy that did puddles on the drawing-room carpet. The term, as I say, is Bráhman. But beware! This is a neuter noun accented on the root and having as its grammatical doublet the word with which all Western civilization is acquainted: Brahmán, accented on the suffix. The first has the meaning of a sacred power while the second is the agent wielding it. The transliteration of the pair is of small consequence: throughout my pages I write conventionally ‘Brahmin’ for the agent, and in the present chapter—it will occur nowhere else—‘Brahman’ for the authority which he exudes. We have noticed it already indeed as that ‘something’ of which the Brahmin is the vehicle, and I rendered it ‘sacred power or utterance’ when discussing the priesthood. However, that power or utterance which is the priestly Brahmin’s prerogative is but one manifestation, Hindus hold, of an energy that unites the whole of temporal existence with what is eternal. In its totality Brahman is that Reality which is both outside the world and inside it; both transcendent and immanent. Brahman is the Absolute, Brahman is Being. And it is into such an extra-temporal state that the soul on escape from the Round may aspire to enter. 3. POINT COUNTER POINT So much for the deposit of doctrine on which Hinduism stands. Even when thus hurriedly resumed it betrays a curious ambivalence of thought. The Rules of the Game which you ignore at your peril lay the emphasis squarely on duty in this world; yet the goal of the individual is simultaneously announced to have nothing whatever to do with this world: it is union with a governing reality outside it. There are consequently two competing trends within orthodoxy itself: the Hindu is committed to righteous action and to an escape from it. Obviously only introspective intellectuals would give much thought to what the goal, so prized in advance, was likely to amount to. But in India the introverts have never been noted for keeping their thoughts to themselves, and historically an extreme position soon declared itself known to Hindus rather characteristically as ‘Non-Twoness’ (Advaita) and to us, less indirectly, as Monism; which supposes the individual soul at the last to be dissolved in the One of ultimate reality. Monism has claimed its adherents without interruption these two thousand


years and more; and it does so still. For instance, it is almost invariably in this dress that Hinduism has crossed the oceans to advertise itself as a great and living religion. Nevertheless, all the time—in India, I mean—there has been an answering evangel running counter to Monism and matching it in strength. The evangelists, if I can lend them this name here, proclaimed that you did not lose your identity when liberated; on the contrary, you found it—in communion with a personal God. They could dialogue, that is, with Christians or with Muslims. I want to insist on this in greater detail before I close my chapter if only for the reason that so many of the propagandists, as it seems to me, have chosen to soft pedal it. But for the moment there is an anomaly to record. In this astonishing religion of the Indians, Theism and Monism are not in flat contradiction (as any Christian or Muslim would maintain they simply must be); far from it. Of the two positions which we would pronounce mutually antagonistic neither wishes the least harm to the other. I suggest, then, it is away from Logic and towards Music that one is driven in the search for a clue to such tolerance. In Hinduism two distinct melodies are heard, and separately appreciated, of competing value as in a successful piece of counterpoint. My Swami was a Monist, was in the procession of modern teachers, mystics, philosophers headed by the internationally publicized Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose and indeed the restrained Radhakrishnan. My friend’s very sobriquet, Advaitanand, means ‘Non-Twoness Bliss’. Yet he it was who would have me see how powerfully an entire people is gripped by those morality stories from Epic literature which establish man’s duty to his neighbour and before God. We Hindus love it:’ he had said, ‘and it is good for us.’ He included himself, that is, among those upon whom Theism —even when this made room for the worship of the ignoble and pestilential little Mannu—had a tonic effect. If cornered he would, I suppose, have reverted to his image of the stiff climb. The worship of sticks and stones, he would have reminded me, thrusts upward to become the worship of spirits; upward once more to become the worship of incarnations; and this again achieves its higher manifestation in the worship of a personal God. ‘And at the highest level of all,’ the latterday Seer would have added quietly, since there is no shouting in such rarefied air, ‘the soul, Atma, worships, until it ultimately becomes lost, extinguished in the Brahman which is Reality.’ When I went back to Rikhikesh in the following year my time was my own, and since my companion most generously set all of his time at my disposal we tramped that mountainside together a

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good deal. Of course it was a shallow understanding, all said and done, that I got of his Hinduism; but enough to convince me that Monism, Advaita, Non-Twoness, had been, and still was, in the central stream of Indian thought. Whether my instructor was a typical member of the community is beside the point: the character of a society is expressed quite as much by its élite as by the mass. To the mass—apart, it is somewhat needless to remark, from that fraction of it, not inconsiderable in India, whose depth of misery may provoke an urge to be out of it at any price—to the mass, presumably, the prospect of annihilation does not present itself as enjoyable. The village wiseacre lecturing me at the Chowpal and wagging his finger in my face, the Gandhi-capped draper in the bazaar protesting his detestation of the Congress Party, the hundreds or thousands, rather, of witnesses who swore by God in my courtroom to speak the truth, did not ardently desire to identify their ‘ego’ with a featureless substrate. From them, and they counted, counted in their hundreds of millions— an impersonal It could not evoke a religious response. Vishnu could; Shiva could. Vishnu, benevolent and near, in whom the spark of divine grace and divine love is ignited; Shiva, awesome and erratic, veering from the ferocious to the gentle and back again—which of them is the Lord of Lords? If each fulfils the function by turns, might it not be that the two are but different ways of regarding the same God who is King of all? So, at any rate, the educated Hindu has argued for the past couple of thousand years. In popular religion, admittedly, Hindus to this day are worshippers of either the one or the other of this pair; but allegiance is largely dictated by regional custom or family tradition. Religion has little to do with it, and I can remember no instance of tension between the two groups (Vaishnavites and Shaivites in the usual spelling) of devotees. There is a nice tale of a Vaishnavite who could not abide Shaivites. As he bowed before the image of Vishnu the face bisected and Shiva’s features appeared on one half. Then a smile united the two halves, a pitying smile on the bigot, and a voice spoke to him saying: ‘Look, we are one!’ Besides the Lord of Lords, be he Vishnu or be he Shiva, there are lesser gods in plenty, there is no denying it. But, paradoxically, polytheism there is not. If we have to allow an -ism in this place, let it be pantheism. Some sign of God the Hindu is always detecting in most of what is around: nature to begin with; then in many of the human beings he has to do with. The Brahmin is ‘godon-earth’; to every woman her husband is god-like, and the child


does puja to his parent. A fortiori the divinities with whom the air is charged, borrow a certain glory from the Lord. The gods of the small ‘g’ thus enjoy the status of the Saints with a big ‘s’ whose cult is celebrated in Christian churches. ‘Does it seem to you in the West peculiar,’ India asks, ‘that we invoke those who may aid and assist us?’ 4. NEW TESTAMENT The doctrine of The Way Out had stemmed from an engrossing desiåe to escape from The Round. But it did not per se tell you how to engineer your exit, nor yet about the Bliss that awaited your soul at the end of the passage. Upon the blessed state itself the learned and contemplative pronounced in due course after the Hindu fashion; which is tantamount to saying: contrapuntally. I have described the two distinct tunes that were audible in com bination. Now as to the path leading to Liberation—and all the teachers agreed upon this—an inner discipline would be called for in order to tread it; a ‘harnessing’, as Indians put it, having recourse at this juncture to the graphic but nowadays badly mauled word yoga, which is our English ‘yoke’ and the French ‘joug’. But a harnessing to what? The Monists leaned towards the chill virtue of indifference, a passionlessness in this vale of tears. Those, on the other hand, who conceived ultimate Being not as a neutral Absolute but as a personal, beckoning God, proclaimed the validity of fervent attachment and of this alone. ‘Devotion’, Bhakti, became their watchword. Glance backward across two millennia, and this impassioned self-abandonment to the mercy of a loving God will be noticed breaking surface from time to time. The fact that it has often done so in the larger context of some attempted reform or other has, if I read the case aright, disposed Hindus themselves to regard it, on each given occasion, as a new and salutary injection. Salutary it is; but not new. Or only new in the sense in which our own Gospel is ‘new’ compared to the Old Testament. The parallel is by no means absurd. For in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘The Lord’s Song’, where Bhakti, ‘Devotion’, was first preached, it must have fallen on Hindu ears as a new gospel indeed. The Bhagavad Gita—‘no Hindu ever need go outside its teaching’ my Swami (the Monist, remember!) had said. I think he meant that for more than two thousand years it had both prompted the lonely speculation of sages—men of his own stamp—and, equally, had been the food of rustic piety.

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The scene of the Gita is a battlefield in the neighbourhood of the modern Delhi at zero hour. The opposing hosts are drawn up facing each other, the air vibrates to the loud uplifted conches of the captains. The struggle is for a throne, and the contenders are cousins; so that the war is practically fratricidal. Krishna, head of one of the clans involved, has failed to bring about a reconciliation, and joins one of the armies as the charioteer of his young friend Arjun. The latter, an Indian Achilles, quails at the prospect of killing his kinsmen. Warrior of the warrior caste, he takes up the bow as he is bound to do—only to lay it down in an agony of mind. ‘I will not fight.’ Comes a pregnant pause in the march of events almost as in grand opera while we, the audience, watch the charioteer, still in his car, gazing at his protégé with a wistful smile. We are not wrong in guessing that he is about to deliver the Song of the Lord, a song in dialogue which will extend to eighteen cantos and contain the answer, immediate and long term, to that question of Arjun’s: Master, what would’st thou have me to do? The epic contest is now properly at the mercy of the operatic device and hung up until further notice. We are in for a discourse, profound and—we are expecting this—self-contradictory. But— and herein its miracle—as light in manner as it is weighty in substance. ‘Oh, come!’ Krishna can say colloquially in one of the stanzas, ‘snap out of it, boy!’ Arjun is lectured on The Round, the Deed and The Rules; is commanded to remain true to his caste, to his station in life. Obedient to the dictates of these, he can still be detached, the Teacher insists: for contemplation is inward and beyond the reach of outward action. From here the pupil is led to the fourth of the concepts we defined: Liberation; and told that those who strive earnestly for deliverance from death shall know the Absolute. ‘But what is that Absolute?’ asks Arjun. In the two or three Cantos assigned to the answer, ample concession seems made to the Monist postulate of Reality as a boundless, neutral substrate. At the same time nobody can miss Krishna’s constant employment of the first person singular, and his frequent use of such expressions as ‘devotion’ and ‘loving faith’. The atmosphere grows more and more electric. The Teacher is speaking now as the Lord. ‘Show me Thy face’ pleads the pupil, and Krishna is then momentarily transfigured before his eyes. But the climax is not yet. It is delayed until the very last few stanzas, and imports into Hinduism in the space of about forty lines something completely new and which will be a part of it from then on. We hear the Lord’s final word. It is a summons.


Because thou art my dearly beloved in whom I am well pleased, forsake all (all Dharma, all the Rules of the Game) and come unto Me, for I only am thy refuge and I shall give thee rest. Arjun replies: ‘Thy will be done.’ The Indians were not among those to whom a revelation was made: they are not People of the Book. But they did come into possession of a luminous scripture to which they have never ceased to turn for light. For the Bhagavad Gita teaches what it means to be a Hindu.

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7 THE INDO-MUSLIMS

1. ISLAM IN INDIA ‘You’ve asked about the Muslims.’ My reply was ready-made. Years ago I had written it out for my mother, I had even got it down on paper for Rosita Forbes when she turned up in Agra. I didn’t need to check my names and dates again for the benefit of the elderly little person who was opposite to me now. ‘You ask me if the Muslims are just like the Muslims in Egypt or Morocco and places, and I think the answer is, no. Because, you see, they are Indians, and Mother India is a strong character who has a way of compelling her own to take after her. Theologically, of course, they’re exactly the same. There are Sunnites here, the big majority, who are the same as the Sunnites anywhere else, and there are Shi’ites here, one in every thirteen to be precise, who are like those in Persia or Iraq. ‘But I suspect what you really want to know is about Polygamy and Purdah! Well, Polygamy is the exception nowadays, and it is becoming good form to condemn it openly. Purdah on the other hand—I am talking of the towns, mind—is the rule. You simply couldn’t imagine Muslim telephone girls, for instance, here in Delhi, or typists, or nurses in the male ward of the Irwin Hospital. And as for the gentry, trying very hard I can count perhaps a couple of dozen wives I see at functions or sitting next to me at table, or acting as hostesses in some way or other. And—oh, yes—there was that unmarried girl, of an Agra family, who came to my house to borrow a book and get an address in London—so signal an event that the eyes of the onlookers goggled. In the villages, though, it is otherwise. This has to be remembered. The poor Muslims there can’t afford such a luxury as Purdah.


‘You haven’t asked about it, but it comes in here. There is actually just one Indian expression of Islam—or deviation from it, if you prefer: the Ahmadiyya Movement. It was founded at the end of last century by Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian in the Gurdaspur District of the Punjab. He claimed to be the Messiah, incarnating both Our Lord and Muhammad. The followers believe that Jesus after the resurrection migrated to India to preach the gospel here, and is buried at Srinagar: and also of course that Ghulam Ahmad was indeed the Messiah. I have a ‘Qadiani’ on my staff at this minute. They are exceedingly worthy people but a bit stuck up, or so most other Muslims tell me. Anyhow, they don’t rock the boat. ‘Of course there are other religious minorities as well: Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians. Who are the Zoroastrians? That tiny but immensely influential colony of Parsees concentrated in Bombay, a most westernized society rejoicing in an exotic faith, and balancing the possession of wealth with a taste for public charity. Oh, diversity with a vengeance is the mark of social life in India. But come back to the two big communities. What an absurd situation it is, Hindus and Muslims peopling this whole continent since I don’t know how long—and still looking askance at each other! They cannot intermarry, do not apparently meet except in rather anxious bonhomie, wear different dress, worship differently, call themselves by an altogether different set of names—and hardly let a week go by without having a crack at one another somewhere.’ By the time I set foot in India, I had been dipping into Indian History for three terms under the guidance of one of the handful in England at that day competent to teach it: Professor Dodwell of London. I knew, because the rotund sentence was in one of the prescribed books, that in India as nowhere else on the map of mankind the spectacle had been witnessed of two vast, strongly developed and yet radically dissimilar civilizations meeting and mingling. And Dr Grahame Bailey in the same interval had succeeded in arousing my interest in Urdu. Here, at all events, I thought, was proof of the blending of the two cultures. ‘Urdu’, our word ‘horde’, is Turkish for ‘camp’; and the Urdu language is the Hindi spoken around Delhi overlaid by the Persian speech of Muslim invaders of Turkic stock who had descended upon India from the north. Surely after eight or nine centuries of partnership there would be countless other proofs of harmony. But as yet I was no better equipped than the next Englishman to give any thought to the crucial question: These Indo-Muslims—were they more Indian than Muslim or more Muslim than Indian? Indian and Muslim. On the face of it the terms are contradictory. Islam means awed obedience to the One God who is totally other

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than his creation, and the Muslim is he that resigns himself to the mercy of that One God, acknowledges Muhammad as his Prophet, and knows that the Believer is bidden to pray five times a day, is expected to fast in the month of Ramazan if physical conditions permit, to pay the Community Levy provided he has the means, and (again, if he can afford it) perform the Pilgrimage. The whole thing is clear-cut, sharp as the desert horizon at the coming of dawn—and challenges everything that India has stood for throughout the centuries. A Muslim writer of renown, a sympathiser too, one who had made himself a profound Sanskrit scholar and whose knowledge of the Hindus has rarely been excelled, put it like this: They differ utterly from us, these people, for we believe in nothing in which they believe and vice versa.’ Al Biruni wrote that nine hundred years ago and the position has never been stated more pithily. Kabir, indeed, the fifteenth century mystic, a sort of Indian Ruysbroeck, did dream his way to the millennium, as the Western world knows: the Poems of Kabir, in the rendering of Tagore and Miss Evelyn Underhill, are part of English literature. His listeners in Benares and Gorakphur no doubt dreamed with him, catching the rapture, catching the charity of his songs. Yet in waking hours no Hindu could bring himself to repeat that there was ‘nothing but water at the holy bathing places’: no Muslim that ‘the Koran is mere words’. And a second attempt, also famous, at reconciling the two creeds was of course Akbar’s. I think myself the guidebooks on sale at Fatehpur Sikri are much too kind to the Great Mughal’s Divine Faith. On the evidence, the Emperor’s motives were political; his religious leaning was nil. The great man was a vain man too; who rejecting the revelation of the Prophet, retained next to nothing of Islam save the affirmation, or salutation as he chose to consider it, Allahu Akbar—and this, very likely, for the reason of its ambiguity in Arabic: ‘God is very Great’ or ‘Akbar is God!’ 2. IN THE BEGINNING We tend to think of Islam as having burst like a flood from Arabian gates to inundate the lands of Syria, Egypt, Persia, Transoxania, Asia Minor, North Africa and Spain; but as having slackened before reaching India. That is quite a fair mental image; needing, however, just this small correction that the flood did in the sequence of its initial rush attain a thin stretch of territory in India also, which it submerged in the political sense without


soaking it through and through culturally. For the eighth century had barely opened when the Arabs, apparently in reprisal for acts of piracy, overran and mastered the extreme north-western strip of the Indian continent: Sind, that is to say. But there was absolutely no follow-through during the next three hundred years; and Islam’s assault on the Indian world, when it did begin in earnest, was at one remove from the Arabian source. Mahmud of Ghazni in modern Afghanistan set the ball rolling. In a series of lightning raids he crossed the Ganges into Bundelkhand, sacked the temple of Somnath on the coast of Kathiawar, and wrested the entire Punjab from the Hindus. Now his troops who settled at Lahore in 1027 showed small inclination to leave it. Their commander might, and did, retire to Ghazni in order to govern from the centre; but their own preference, evidently, as hectoring soldiers in the very active enjoyment of local perquisites, was to stay. Stay they did, and became the first Indo-Muslims. They cannot have regretted their choice, for the house of Ghazni was soon supplanted by the house of neighbouring Ghur. It was predictable that the ‘Ghurids’ too would one fine day turn their attention to India, treating the descendants of that original garrison in Lahore as subservient allies possessed of a valuable know-how. And so it happened. By 1193 joint Ghurid and Ghaznavid forces were in Delhi itself; and but a few years later both Bihar and Bengal were Muslim provinces. Dates are not for us here, but the two I have cited enclose William the Conqueror and it surely helps us to situate the Muslim presence in India if we can think of it as having originated at the time the Normans landed on our shores. By the middle of the fourteenth century—I am neglecting the ups and downs of two or three dynasties which secured and then lost the throne in the meanwhile—a Sultanate of Delhi has extended its rule to the Deccan and even includes a slice of the Malabar coast. But then, and for roughly the following two hundred years, the Muslim advance was halted, its progress barred by the new Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar in the south. This respite ended when Babur, the chief of a Tatar tribe from beyond the Oxus, and Ruler of Kabul, invaded India in 1525. During the next one hundred and seventyfive odd years his line would be at the helm of the colossal empire to which the monuments of Mughal architecture bear their arresting testimony. At the peak of its glory under Akbar this empire comprised Afghanistan, all of northern India and territories extending south to a boundary running from modern Bombay in the west to Cuttack, in Orissa, in the east; and the later seventeenth century actually saw the imperial officers levying tribute as far from the capital as Tanjore


and Trichinopoly. However, by that date the Hindus had mounted a counter offensive, the hero of which was the Maratha Shivaji. And there was something else. Just at this juncture—it is tempting to suppose a causal connexion—a devotional revival, a Bhakti movement (we know this word from the last chapter) was in the Hindu air, and charging it heavily. So this best of Indian generals, in his bid to reassert Hindu power at the expense of a Muslim regime now past its prime, was able to draw simultaneously on the martial ardour of his people and on their renascent spiritual fervour. It was this scene of political disunity and religious division that confronted us British when we took it upon ourselves to intervene. 3. WITH THE PASSAGE OF TIME It has needed a couple of rather dense pages, but I had to bring out the temporal span and the spatial spread of the Muslim Conquest. How else to account for the man I am seeking to identify? Throughout those five hundred years, plainly, Islam was pounding away at India, changing her. Unfortunately neither contemporary records nor modern studies of the period appear much concerned with our Indo-Muslim; their stage is peopled with the invaders on the one side and the Indians on the other; the number of the former seeming to us astonishingly small. A chronicler reports the Ghurids to have numbered 120,000 on that epoch-making march to Delhi, and this was reckoned a large army; while Babur in his own diverting Memoirs claims to have founded the Mughal Empire with a tenth of that strength: twelve thousand men, including merchants and servants. Today’s historians for their part inform us that ‘Muslim government was sustained by constant importation of fresh blood from abroad’; that ‘not only the military but the civil chiefs were vigorous recruits from Central Asia who took service under sovereigns of their own race and religion’; and that the foreign invaders ‘neither ousted the Hindus established in trade and clerical occupations nor won converts from among them’. Judgments of the sort occurring passim in the standard Histories of India are substantiated, but they leave much unsaid. Too much unsaid for a period lasting, mind, not five years or fifty years but five hundred years. Admittedly we get warmer sometimes. As, for instance, when we read that the Emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan were both sons


of Hindu mothers, or that the famous bulbous dome so typical of Mughal buildings may possibly after all be of Indian inspiration. But the vagaries of royal behaviour and controversial points in architectural history do not supply us with the hyphen we are after. Of course we accept the fact, we must, that for five centuries the Hindus and Muslims lived side by side as parallel units in the body politic. All I contend is that the proposition itself presupposes a significant Muslim element at every level of society to whom India was home. This had come into being in several ways. By the date of the Battle of Hastings a proportion of that ‘Ghaznavid’ army based on Lahore must have been half-Indian by blood, and by the time the ‘Ghurids’ joined up with them four generations later, almost wholly so. The same story was repeated when Babur came. Thus in the India of my memory you had any number of families which could look back to, and take pride in an ancestry hailing from beyond the North-West Frontier. I remember how I would be told importantly that as many as ten per cent of the Muslim citizens of Allahabad or Agra or Delhi, or wherever it might be, were descended from the foreign conqueror; as if this implied that onetenth of the Muslim community was actually of Arab or Persian or Afghan or Turkic strain. It would have been crushing to murmur that we all have two parents, four grandparents, eight greatgrandparents, sixteen ancestors of the fourth generation and, at that rate, millions of ancestors (albeit half of them female who did not seem to count!) drawing breath at the period of the first conquests. But of course it was a different process, namely conversion —frequently group conversion—that accounted for the bulk of the community right from the start, and nine-tenths of the Muslims did not pretend to be of foreign extraction. That the conversion was on occasion forcible can hardly be doubted, but as a rule it was voluntary. The high percentage of Hindus at the very heart of the Mughal Empire till its very end proves this. Everything depended on the Sultan of the age. If he were indifferent or lenient, as in most cases he was, all would be well; if he were fanatical—and we think of the Emperor Aurangzeb—then woe unto the Hindus within reach. I am not suggesting proselytism went forward in either case by leaps and bounds. On the contrary, I have pointed out above, as also in another of my chapters, that Hinduism upon the whole was sullenly resentful of Muslim advances, turned in on itself, and rallied. This said, power attracts. And it was during those earlier successful stages of the Conquest that certain soldierly Rajputs whose clans had been lording it, unfortunately for themselves without much cohesion, all over the north until the previous


evening, embraced Islam; to become the most scrupulously Muslim of Muslims whilst retaining, as we in our day were constantly given cause to recognize, the engaging characteristics of Rajput chivalry. In Kashmir too, going by results, Islam met with some degree of acceptance; possibly because the Hindus there, being relatively lax about ceremonial purity, were less offended by the manners of the uncouth Mlechchas or ‘barbarians’; I do not know. But let me come without more fuss to Islam’s principal area of recruitment; I mean the despised and rejected of Hindu men, the Untouchables. Multitudes of these must have felt the appeal of a faith in which all are proclaimed equal before God. Numbers yielded to that pull. My mind here races back to the poorer Muslim quarters of several large cities of the north, back also to a hundred Muslim villages in various Districts. These urban or rural concentrations were of long standing, they were centuries old. And you had not to look very hard at the features of those who led their lives in them to perceive that you were among the descendants of converts from the lower strata of Hindu society. The Muslim community, then, was of heterogeneous origin; and a closer look reveals it to be only less stratified than that of the Hindus themselves. There were those, we saw, whose ancestors had brought Islam into India, and their number may, as claimed, touch ten per cent of the total. The point I was making about them was simply that ‘descent’ and ‘blood’ are not interchangeable terms. With microscopic exceptions the blood in the veins of those Muslims ‘of descent’ was as Indian as that of anyone else. What really mattered was the ‘tree’ , and this mattered much. In the top drawer were the ‘Sayyids’ (also written ‘Syeds’) who claimed descent from the Prophet, no less; and below them the ‘Shaykhs’ who traced their line to somebody in his entourage or perhaps the head of an Arabian tribe. Then there were ‘Pathans’ and ‘Mughals’, LBI—E honorifics speaking for themselves. I should make it clear that the four resulting divisions are not castes. They are merely the names given to groups which are supposed to share the descent in question. It goes without saying that this whole area of IndoMuslim society observes the doctrines of Islam to the letter. But what about the converts in that respect? By and large, the only converts who keep the prescriptions of the Faith intact are the Muslim Rajputs. So therefore we can list the Sayyids, the Shaykhs, the Pathans, the Mughals and the Rajputs, all five, as meticulous in their observances, and then draw a horizontal stroke across the body of the community. The remaining segment, comprising the overwhelming majority, has clung to social


customs that governed it before conversion. In Delhi, or in Agra, for example, the butchers were to all intents and purposes a caste, marrying only among themselves and obedient to a code of rules enforced by a sort of panchayat. In the countryside the survival of old habits was even more marked. How often has an unprivileged Muslim, telling me his name, not added: ‘my caste is Weaver’? How often would a Muslim village, set alongside a Hindu village, not join in the latter’s festivals, imitate its rites, share its superstitions? At Prayag in the month of Magh I once came on a party of Muslims having a ritual bath in Mother Ganges. ‘What are you at?’ I said jokingly, ‘You people and I are Barbarians here. Outsiders.’ The jest was wasted. ‘You’ll be saying next that some of us bow down and worship Hindu idols in between whiles. Well, you needn’t. I’m saying it for you, and it comes better from me.’ The Imam threw back his head and laughed his high-pitched laugh. It would be difficult to imagine a less ‘oriental’ physiognomy than his: the fairest of skins, bluish eyes and the Caucasian profile. How on earth, especially after all I have been saying on the subject of blood, did this fine old gentleman born in the Bulandshahr District of the United Provinces some sixty years previously, manage to look like that! Anyway there he was, Prayer Leader at the largest Mosque of a country supporting far and a way the largest Muslim population of any in the world. You could see the tall swaying frame in the long robes any day mounting the steps of the Emperor Shahjahan’s Jama Masjid at Delhi, as you could, if very lucky, catch a glimpse of his double at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem or on the avenue that leads to the Shrine at Meshhed. Reading and writing Arabic and Persian with ease he spoke only Urdu to my knowledge, had been outside India only on Pilgrimage, and was not of those who hoped for Islam’s renewal and rebirth through scientific achievement. In an age beset by strident propaganda, banner headlines and hypocritical oratory, he was often mocked. Throughout my seven years at Delhi seven weeks would be about the gap I could expect between the Imam’s visits. ‘I had nothing else to do until the Noon Prayer’ was the usual opening gambit. He would then produce a gunmetal watch from some deep fold of his gown, glance at it attentively and, apprehension having yielded to relief, settle down. So not surprisingly our talk had frequent chances to turn on these things. He was stating now something that more learned Divines were slow, or perhaps did not want, to grasp. Namely that the Muslim peoples, wherever they


be, are peoples as well as Muslims. As Muslims they have their Great Culture, meaning the universal norm expressed or predicated in religion and law, which is recognized as authoritative by all. As peoples—they are affected by Little Cultures, each with its own interpretation of the Great Culture. The situation is not that the ideals of the latter are whittled, but that they are interpenetrated by other influences deriving from the local way of life. Considerations of the kind bring the Indo-Muslim into proper focus so far as his religion goes, but we still have to locate him in society. Say—and I do not have to use my imagination—say, there are three of us in the room; two of my assistants and myself. Our business done, the Indians get up to go. First, how do they regard me? I am not talking here of feeling but of classification. As a stranger, it is sure; albeit a stranger whose strangeness has rubbed off in the course of the last one hundred and fifty years. In fact I remember the senior of these two, a Hindu and a Rajput, one day teasing the younger, Hashmi by name, whose forbears were of the Banu Hashim, the Hashemite clan in the Prophet’s time. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you people hadn’t queered the pitch we Hindus could have adopted them (the British) as a pukka caste. They’ve got the qualifications, you can’t deny it’ Hashmi, an example of what modern India knew as ‘the Aligarh man’—the significance of this label will come presently—slapped his thigh: ‘Jolly good, jolly good!’ However, all that was an idle ‘if’ of history, and meantime I am a sojourner: in India, but not, like themselves, of India. And now about them. How do they view one another? They happen to belong to the same small township of the Western U.P., have had similar educational chances, are social equals. They have been with me nearly three years during which they have spent much of the working day in and out of each other’s company—and good company it is. Yet neither has been inside the house of the other, neither looks forward to that experience. I know the Rajput home is cram full of relatives; young Hashmi’s bungalow is inconveniently equipped—all that sort of thing. But bluntly the position is that the one household is conventionally Hindu and the other conventionally Muslim. So those two estimable assistants of mine, having just gone out of the room practically arm-in-arm, I do not mind betting, will at this moment be exchanging a valedictory wave of the hand on the verandah. These eight hundred years, Indian society has been split from top to bottom. At the apex you had the Muslim nobility and you had the Rajas; and at the base were the Untouchables doing the dirty jobs of the Hindus, and their Muslim counterparts,


sheltering under the euphemistic class name of Musalli, who did the dirty jobs of the Believers. And should the dividing line lose its sharpness at any point this will in general be somewhere near the summit or somewhere near the foot. The professions and the services, not to mention inherited wealth, sometimes fostered close relationships on the upper rungs of the ladder; while in the countryside a rustic fête or a common disaster could dwarf the distance between the Temple and the Mosque. But for the most part the social insulation of the one community from the other was complete. However, my metaphor of the vertical line cleaving the Indian people is after all a figure of speech. Islam hacked off a quarter of Indian society in a brutal downward stroke, severed it from the block for ever. Fine—except that Islam was not an axe nor India a block. As I interpret it, Islam and India each got just about as good as it gave. From the start, and in various departments of thought and action a two-way traffic passed between the communities; with the result that the Hindus on their side were never to be quite the same as they had been, or the Muslims on theirs quite the same as Muslims anywhere else. I had been in India a matter of months, had seen little of her but the scarred ravines and the hushed jungle south of Mirzapur when one day, out riding, I met a group of strolling minstrels who to judge by their nasal index were on the outermost fringe of Hinduism. Pointing to a six-stringed pandore I enquired what they called it. ‘Guitar,’ they replied. Then I pointed to a tabor; ‘And this?’ ‘This is a tambour,’ they said. They were using the nomenclature of fellow musicians from Samarkand to the Atlantic. I move my private clock on a decade, and am in a more sophisticated setting now. Pandit Amarnath of Delhi, a prominent poet to be found in anthologies of Urdu verse under his nom de guerre Sahir, ‘The Sorcerer’, is reciting to an audience consisting mostly of Muslims who are ejaculating ‘Wah! wah!’ in admiration. The piece is one of lofty sentiment; how God’s blinding radiance quenches equally ‘the Ka’ba’s candle and the lamp that lights Somnath’—in that genre. After which portion of religious flavour we are offered an airy soufflé in contrast, a love lyric, and I can still hear the whitebearded, benign, bespectacled Brahmin treating us to lines whose burden was no heavier than this: She passed this way and smiled one day, The rose its head unbent; She smiled that day—and all of May


Smiled with her where she went. The form is Persian not Indian; the conceit also; and six of the words are Persian words. In short a Hindu was giving the Muslim literati that evening what they had given him: even to their own entanglement in the toils of an adopted idiom. The elderly Romeo is not in Shiraz, he is in Delhi where May—or the second half of it, and he insists on the ‘all’!—evokes a shade temperature of 120° Fahrenheit, evokes Hell. But I risk flogging a hobby-horse here to the neglect of broader approaches. Let me therefore resume. Islam taught those kings whom I have described above as staging the Resistance from Vijayanagar and Maharashtra, to do what Hindu rulers had never done before and would not have done then but f or its own example: namely, to champion and defend a creed. But now for some traffic in the opposite direction. I have spoken enough of the hold Hindu culture retained over the humbler Muslims, the converts. So I leave them and come to the nobility: those Sayyids and those Shaykhs we singled out as forming the upper crust of Indo-Muslim society. You would say they ought to have been impervious to Hindu suggestion, but so sensitive had they in fact become—and seemingly from an early date—to the caste attitudes in the giant community adjacent to theirs that they married only within their own particular group. Or, turning to a totally different area of expression, consider the abundant evidence of the Muslim monuments. I think, at random, of the lovely Mosque of Sher Shah inside the Old Fort at Delhi. It used to be officially described, if I remember, as a jewel of ‘Pathan Architecture’. Well, I never saw anything remotely like that when I was in Kabul. I saw that crenellated parapet in the gateway of the Kailas Temple at Ellora. Why, the very dome of this mosque is crowned with the Indian lotus-and-vase! To my thinking the touch of the local craftsman is omnipresent in Mughal Architecture. I am without title to discuss this, but having spent five or six years of my life in Agra within walking distance of the Taj Mahal and another seven or more in Delhi within walking distance of the Red Fort, I cannot doubt that it is instinct with an Indian grace. 4. THE ALIGARH MAN I undertook to introduce the ‘Aligarh man’. We owe him a salute in this place, for he served his fellows well and truly in the penultimate phase. It was the Aligarh man who just one hundred


years ago, aghast at the condition into which his community had lapsed, began a comprehensive long-term rescue operation. The tide of Indian Islam had fallen to a low ebb about the middle of last century—the years on either side, shall we say, of the Mutiny: a low economic ebb vis-à-vis the Hindus, a low political ebb vis-à-vis the British, a low moral ebb vis-à-vis itself. At this point of unprecedented depression there came forward a man fit to assume the virtual direction, both social and religious, of the entire community. The name of Syed Ahmad Khan is unfamiliar in the West perhaps, but Indo-Muslims of the whole continent pronounce it to this day with a degree of reverence reserved for no one else in their eventful saga. I forget in which year it was, but not very long before I booked ‘a passage to India’, E.M.Forster had written his brilliantly staged novel of that exact title and I suppose there was none in my batch who did not read it—read it with more than a shade of anxiety. If this was the life in front of us, how could we endure it? ‘Dismiss Forster till you are older,’ was to be my wise Collector’s advice, ‘then re-read him,’ I obeyed—and found, when the time came, that though Forster’s central character, Aziz, is a highly sensitive portrait of a young Indo-Muslim, a young Aligarh man in fact, his district officials and the jumpy world in which they jerk and bob are pure guignol. However, all this is an aside. Of sole concern here is the detail that A Passage to India was dedicated to a certain Syed Ross Masood. Now Syed Ross Masood it was who first told me about ‘the Aligarh man’ and the Aligarh Movement of which that man became the spearhead in every corner of India. And a better intermediary I could not have had, because Ross was the grandson of Syed Ahmad Khan. One particular evening comes vividly to mind. The two of us are out on the lawn of the lovely old house at Agra, and I see again my visitor’s oval face, large, handsome, pallid, glistening in the lamplight. He keeps on pushing back a troublesome strand of black hair from his forehead as he talks, talks very rapidly, of his boyhood. Listening to him I feel I have tuned in to Mughal India. In a manner, I have. These people had been of the Court. Grandfather Ahmad was the son of a courtier close to the Emperor and himself earmarked as a child for an appointment in the Household. Ross’s own tender years had been spent largely, he told me, under his grandmother’s vigilant eye, ‘something you can’t possibly know, something unexampled in Europe since the Middle Ages.’ I wish there were space here to repeat some of his stories of matriarchal prerogative. But the main topic that


evening, and he presently came to it, was the Movement. Decay had set in, he explained, because of that abiding disadvantage the Muslims laboured under in India—dispersion. They had no common intellectual background with which to counteract this drawback, no common ideology, no common language. Syed Ahmad’s aim was to give them these. He began by founding an educational centre: viz, the College at Aligarh which later grew into the Muslim University of which Ross Masood at that moment was Vice-Chancellor. The College played from the beginning a dual role; it put young men through a degree course as any other college might, but it also awakened a missionary enthusiasm in their breasts, and soon the Aligarh Movement was represented in every Province and in the major Native States. Cultural institutes were opened in every town of consequence to propagate the doctrine of the new ‘school’ and encourage the study of the Urdu language, and a respectable press was subventioned to cater for a countrywide Muslim readership. Beyond any question it was the Aligarh man going forth in his thousands over the next fifty years who lifted Indian Islam out of the slough of despond. But remember, the Aligarh man’s battle was for the survival of Islam in India. He had no wish to say good-bye to her. Such an idea never entered his head: after all there had been no hint of such an issue in Syed Amad Khan’s writings or in the pattern of his personal attitudes. I can imagine a studious young Aligarh man early in the century, before the Great War, tackling Acton’s Lectures, and coming upon the dictum that ‘the one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority’. I think he marks this in the margin, that is all, and reads on—on the look-out for something not quite so academic, something with an application to his own homeland. 5. 1940 And so it would be until well after the apogee of the Aligarh Movement, until well through the period of Muslim League ascendancy. In fact until 1940. Not until that year did the agonizing alternative of a separate state commend itself to the Indo-Muslims. At a Lahore session the League, claiming to speak for the eighty millions in the community, then for the first time formulated a demand for ‘Independent States’ in ‘the North western and Eastern zones of India’. The League decided to follow up this epoch-making Resolution with an open-air meeting in the capital which Jinnah would


address, and applied to me for the use of the Delhi Municipal Gardens. These, flanking the historic Chandni Chowk but protected on that side by very high, very massive, railings, lent themsel ves, and were habitually put, to purposes of this sort. I had lately allowed a Congress gathering on the same site and could have no objection now. But I thought I might enquire what the meeting was about. ‘About Nationalism’ the applicants answered. ‘Not about your Lahore Resolution, then?’ I asked. ‘No. Really more about safeguarding Islam, our cultural heritage, and our Urdu language,’ they said. So that was it. Jinnah’s text would be taken from the Epistle of Syed Ahmad Khan to the Muslims. I put this on record just to remind myself and, it may be, others, that at that stage (1940) the boundaries of an eventual Pakistan were not even a subject of thought. When Jinnah himself turned up, desiccated of person, elegantly attired, a bit languid in conversation, but courtly, he had a request. Could he be found an interpreter, a Delhi Muslim with a good delivery? Like most men gifted with humour—and his, if notice ably sardonic, could be relied on—he knew how to keep a straight face. All went well. Everything the ‘Leader’, the Qaid i Azam, said won thunderous applause. Especially—or so my friend who had interpreted assured me—the sentence ‘There is not one of you whose heart will not swell with pride as I speak of that priceless inheritance of ours, the Urdu tongue’. Nobody in the audience considered it incongruous that Jinnah had to say this in English. The Aligarh man had striven hard, he had accomplished much. But two formidable obstacles he could not overcome. The first was the dispersion on which Ross Masood dwelt in talk with me; and the second, chase away the thought as they might, was that the hold of the language wishfully termed ‘national’ was weak where the Muslims were numerically strong and strong where they were numerically weak. And who can say, even now, which of these two bedevilled their progress towards nationhood the more?

8 THE MAGISTRATE

The portrait that follows is a self-portrait, and self-portraits have a habit of flattering the sitter. But I had no option. ‘The Head of the District’: Kipling drummed this home enough, was a man who ruled alone. He had no chance to watch his opposite number somewhere else. For him there was no such place as somewhere else. The District was all. What wonder, then, if I can see no warts as I regard my image in the mirror? 1. ZILA SAHIB Lord Macaulay in that famous essay on Warren Hastings reminds the reader that an Englishman’s performance in Britain’s asiatic empire is to be gauged with reference to the setting. You do not ‘compare the best baker in London with Robinson Crusoe who, before he could bake a single loaf had to make his plough and his harrow, his fences and his scarecrows, his sickle and his flail, his mill and his oven’. The Indian Civil Service magistrate did not behave like a London magistrate; he did much that would astonish and quite a lot that would shock the latter. But the latter, had he been dropped from the sky upon Bahraich or Agra or Allahabad or Delhi and told to get on with it, would have suffered a chameleonic change and adapted his style to the environment. Just as I, supposing I could have inhabited the skin of a stipendiary at home, must soon have conformed to the custom of entering the courtroom not only punctually but decently clothed, and without either my flywhisk or my face-towel. I should explain that the strangely behaved person under the lens throughout this chapter is not any magistrate but the magistrate: he is this as far as the eye can reach and as far as thought need travel. Anything up to five or six of his principal assistants will be magistrates too, sharing his own competence to sentence to imprisonment for two years; to a fine not exceeding

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two thousand rupees; to whipping. But he himself is a great deal higher, and a great deal mightier, than they. His official designation, ‘The Ruler of the Zila’ (District), is not a misnomer. And the unsophisticated will hit the nail even more truly on the head, calling him—listen to them attentively—‘Zila Sahib’: Mister District, as it were. Now this Mister District did plenty of things which the public conscience of the English would not have tolerated in their island home. Let me give an instance. A magistrate, you might be forgiven for supposing, was there to punish for some crime, misdemeanour, peccadillo or frolic—and to rest content with that. But this one was actually empowered under a sufficiently shocking section of the Criminal Procedure Code to have at you before you had raised a finger towards doing anything at all. Your protest, if you made one, that you were not meditating anything reprehensible was a waste of breath. Before you knew where you were, he would pass an order absolute at once and issued ex parte requiring you to do this or refrain from that. And if you ignored him —well, you were ‘in’ for a month. However, wait to hear it from my angle. From the hour I assumed charge of my District I became answerable for the maintenance of law and order in it, and if there were a flare-up that was my personal failure. I ought to have known who would be likely to start it, over what, and when. I ought to have been there in the street beforehand, ready for him. This handcuffed hooligan in front of me at the minute, I told him weeks ago I was not pleased with him: ‘not a bit pleased’, those were my very words. Half my time, quite half, I was doing things right outside the competence of a’beak’; things, moreover, incompatible with a beak’s functions. I had to supervise the casework of assistants some of whom exercised magisterial powers on paper identical with my own. Every so often I would visit the District Jail, and spend an hour or two among the under-trial prisoners to satisfy myself that their appearances in court were not too slow, or too frequent. I would study, question, perhaps modify before confirming them, the arrangements the Superintendent of Police submitted to me on the eve of every religious festival in the calendar. Oh, those processions! Muslims bent on damage to pipal trees, Hindus at their noisiest when passing mosques. There is one due shortly—there will be a grand old argument about the route it shall take. I have already decided what route it shall take. Any fool could stop a riot, I used to tell myself, not everyone could anticipate it. Anticipation was the secret. Anticipation as in music: move to the note of the next chord before this one is


properly sounded. But my ear could be faulty, and then instead of a harmonious passage I got a bloody uproar. Only one thing to do in that case—I had to be, had to be, more bloody than anybody else. A section of the Criminal Procedure Code enabled me to call on the Army, if my Police were worsted. Mr A.Sabonadière (none could discover what the ‘A’ stood for) whose lectures on Indian Law I attended for three terms before I went out, had fluted when we came to this: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to use it,’ and he had even committed this piece of optimism to print in his published commentary on the Code. ‘The occasions,’ he wrote, ‘when military force has to be used on account of civil disturbances are rare.’ Now Sabonadière had been a Sessions Judge in the United Provinces before 1914 and spoke with authority—but from the experience of one side of a watershed. The Great War was that watershed. On my side of it certain headstreams contributed to a battling, riotous confusion of currents of which he had no notion. Obviously it depended on where the Government chose to place you. You would not face much turmoil in the hill country of Garhwal: or have to quell a communal riot from a chair in the Secretariat. Whereas a posting to a district containing one of the teeming cities of Upper India rendered such a prospect well nigh certain. I was not quite thirty when I asked for a battalion to stand by. That, of course, fell far short of a cry for help—my police had not been strained to breaking point. I was merely of the fear they might. But they came out on top. So I was several years older before I had to resort to that section of the law concerning which the gentle lecturer had spoken comfortable words. Under that section it was for me to say whether the civil force at my disposal was indeed proving unequal to its task. If that was my view, I had to direct the Officer Commanding the troops to do what I wanted done. And amid the shouting, the sweat, the blood, the total tumult of the scene, very often the darkness too, it could be a job to put this over to him. Legally he was himself to decide the degree of strength to exert: how many platoons to throw in, how many rounds to fire, and so on. But in practice I found military commanders only too anxious to co-operate on ways and means as well as on ends. There is no chronological order in these pages, and I leap from that early anxious moment in Allahabad to a much later incident. The British Raj was preparing—no, not preparing, there were no preparations—our Raj was on the verge of bowing itself out, and communal hatred was surfacing and bubbling as never

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before. I am back in my familiar Agra, an Agra held dear through seventeen years by now. If anxiety was more apparent among the Hindus than among the Muslims, this was not without reason, for the large butcher community had been abroad with their knives. Their erstwhile leader Shaykh Ajmeri, a Falstaffian personality who had kept faith with me on certain tense occasions in the past was no more, and things threatened to get out of hand. I had therefore one battalion of Indian infantry, the Rajputana Rifles, in the heart of the city and a second battalion was in reserve in cantonments ready to move in to its support or to its relief, as need dictated. Things were bad, as I say. However, I had seen worse in my time. After two sleepless nights in the Kotwali, or Central Police Station, I thought I might get to my house again. The curfew was being respected and only at lengthening intervals would a shot or two ring out. They would resume, of course, for a bit, but not—if I knew the form—with gusto. At least there was this about communal feeling: in the bazaar it was not chronic. After each roughand-tumble you packed it up and put it away. It was in better society, where it might never come to a fight, that you never quite put your feeling aside. Be that as it may, it was a let-up now in which to snatch some rest. I made a last round in my jeep accompanied by an orderly, dodging like a taxi-driver down the side streets I knew so well. Nothing untoward except for a poor wretch, dead, mutilated, in the gutter flanking a bye-lane. He was so scraggy as to be below the walls of the channel, and I might easily not have noticed him. We lifted him and laid him across the flat bonnet, our jackets under him so that he should not slide about. ‘Musalman’, my Muslim orderly muttered savagely… By midnight I was peeling off my soiled clothes and sluicing myself down in cold water. There was no hot at that hour. Anyhow, provided my face and hands were clean what did the odd reddishbrown stain matter for a while? I thought of putting on the gramophone: ‘Santa Lucia’, ‘O rest in the Lord’, or something. I had those. But I was too weary for anything more than a stiff whisky. I flopped onto my bed. The air coming in from the garden was sweet, and nothing but an occasional rumble in the distance told of the city’s unease. Kalloo, as always at such times, had run the telephone extension-wire all along the floor from the vestibule where the instrument normally stood, and it was beside me now. At 2.30a.m. it rang. ‘Prime Minister this end. Am I speaking to the District Magistrate?’ ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’


‘It’s bad with you, isn’t it?’ ‘Has been, but is getting better, I’m pretty sure.’ ‘That is not what people are sayig.’ ‘What people?’ I snapped. ‘Hindus, rich Hindus afraid of being looted.’ ‘No, not only they’. There was a pause and I could hear his laboured breathing. He was in poor health as everyone knew. I waited for him to go on. ‘I really feel you ought to go the whole hog,’ he continued. ‘Meaning by that?’ I asked. ‘I can send you a British regiment. I don’t think the Indian troops you have will do. I shall arrange it.’ ‘No, Sir, I do not want your British soldiers. My Indians are doing fine.’ There came another and longer pause. Having been away from the United Provinces these last seven years I had had no dealings with Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. But he had once dropped in on me to my astonishment, where I happened to be on tour in Bahraich. Congress leaders did not pay courtesy calls on officials, so what was he after? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He had chatted for ten minutes, mentioned that a cousin of his had been on my staff at Allahabad once (a good man, too), and enquired whether I took to the Bahraich log. ‘I’m glad you do, they are just like the villagers where I come from,’ he had said. And then, ‘Well, I must be going.’ That chat recurred to me now, and perhaps it did to him. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘You are the judge.’ I lay awake reflecting how preposterous that call had been: a declared disciple of Gandhi urging me to step up my violence, a Congressman who wanted to see the backs of the English deploring the trust I placed in Indians. Then through my shut eyes I saw that triple row of corpses in the Kotwali, aligned by the feet, bare feet mostly, the shoes having been kicked away; but six or seven pairs in ammunition boots, Police issue. Certain of those bodies were there through my doing. Oh, my involvement was professional, not emotional. I was neither a Hindu going the whole hog nor a Muslim putting more beef into it. No, that quip was cheap, unprofessional. I would take it back. The perfume from the garden was reaching me now, and soon there would be a glimmer in the sky and the crowing of a cockerel somewhere. I could not understand why there were slow tears trickling down my cheek towards the pillow, since I was not emotionally involved. It was my lot, my apprenticeship in more junior posts barely over, to be put in charge of three districts in succession which centred on great cities. There is thus some risk in this chapter of

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my emphasis falling too heavily upon these. The District Magistrate was a district man by definition: countryman, therefore, quite as much as townee. I have just named Bahraich, I see, but not in its own right. It will make for balance if I bring it into focus with a sample of the demands likely to be made on the Zila Sahib in such a place. Bahraich lies against the limits of Upper India; it marches with Nepal. Follow the glades of its northern tahsil and you will be in and out, in and out, of British territory. There were forest firebreaks that ran straight as an avenue, climbing gradually into the Nepalese tarai, and on your evening stroll you could see panthers crossing these at right angles in stately promenade. I can picture them now. But try as I may I cannot picture the inside of my courtroom in the miniature town of Bahraich that was my headquarters —I was so rarely there. Court is not a room; it is where the Magistrate takes up the case. On the date I am thinking of, February 1937, I was camping at Katarnian, which is up beyond Nanpara; right on the border of Nepal, that is. I was attempting to narrow the gap between two local factions; cheerful types, they were, but wedded to the principle of unilateral action. Because the brass-tipped quarterstaff or lāthi which cultivators carry could be an ugly weapon in a fracas, I ‘apprehended’ to quote my Code, ‘danger to human life’. That adjective ‘human’ in the wording of the law I have always regarded as a testimony, eloquent and touching, to India’s attitude: you have to make plain as you need not in the west, that it is only one amongst the plural manifestations of life to which you are referring. But I must not digress. I had come from camp on my elephant and then sent her back, hoping to walk the two miles home for the sake of the exercise. A small folding table and a canvas-backed chair told the parties where the alfresco proceedings were to be held. My heavy Springfield leaning against the table excited no interest. Why should it? If a London stipendiary enters the court building with an umbrella on a cloudy day it is no subject of comment. Everybody in Katarnian knew there had been a tiger hereabouts this last week, marauding from Nepal. Big too, for some had seen him and others had measured him from the pug marks. Those concerned were seated on the ground in two wellseparated groups except for the spokesman of the one side who was standing at the table. We had been at it for the better part of an hour when a panting villager interrupts, reporting a kill close by: ‘come quick, he sleeps.’ Before the man could gabble out more, my champion at the table stretches forward and seizes my


rifle. The rest are on their feet in an instant and, the groups coalescing now, off we move in single file behind our guide. And no talking—this is a silent matter. We had to walk about half a mile. Then ‘Here is the track he’s been using,’ breathed our informant in my ear. There was no doubt of it. My lot henceforward was to be cast in cities, but I had already had more than my fair share of Tigerland: Mirzapur first, the jungles of the Doon afterwards, and now, this last winter, Bahraich. The broken twig, bent grasses, a flattened tussock and even the faintest imprint of an outsize paw where the earth was soft enough —it was text-book stuff. ‘Here’s a tree will do,’ whispered my spokesman of the court. ‘Yes, it’s okay,’ (thīk, bahut thīk) an opponent assented softly. Gracious, they had thought of that too! There was my collapsible table being hoisted aloft and wedged steady with a couple of these lāthis of theirs where the branches forked twelve feet above ground. Useless at games as a boy, I had been good at gym. By standing on someone’s shoulders, I got noiselessly onto my perch. Then grasping the muzzle of the rifle which someone else was holding up as high as he could, I swung the thing up beside me. I knew what to expect next: eerie silence, a bad quarter of an hour; then distant staccato cries, the clapping of hands, and the bang and biff and bang of the bamboo against the tree trunks; louder, louder and nearer, nearer as the ring closed. He would come out unhurriedly but peeved and on the verge of anger, looking right and looking left, without the very slightest deviation from the path he had made his own. When I had done what they had looked to me to do, which was to kill the killer, and slid down from my tree, the amateur beaters hugged me in turn and afterwards hugged one another. Then we all trooped back to the starting-place, noisily elated. For stock, not mine individually but everyone’s, had risen under the pressure of a shared adventure. I told them to sit this time in a semi-circle in front of my chair. They obeyed absent-mindedly, going on with their animated chatter. My ‘Silence in the Court!’ was rewarded by an abrupt compliance, instantly neutralized by giggles. ‘Can’t you boys get back to it: or what? Let the spokesman of the second party step forward.’ One of them rose reluctantly, shuffled towards me, cleared his throat lengthily and without inhibition. ‘Excuse me, Your Worship, at yours—in Blighty, I mean—do you have many tigers?’

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Not always was the scene so idyllic. Quite often court was a physical endurance test. In a packed room in June when the thermometer on the wall showed 120° plus, I would now and then prop my chin on the nib of my pen during arguments—and hope that my fist concealing it might simply reinforce an impression of judicial poise. And in Agra once—it was when one of Congress’s more pedestrian anti-government campaigns was trudging along— my head was swimming and my eye-balls hurt; signs of rocketing temperature we all of us knew so well. I forget the particular charge, but a patriotic mob, hired at two annas a head, was yelling slogans outside so that the poor Police Prosecutor was obviously going to have difficulty in making himself heard. When I was taking my seat a few minutes earlier, the Court Reader, a fatherly old boy, sensing that I was in high fever, had leaned forward and laid the back of his hand on my brow. And now, as soon as the Congressman counsel for the defence (or ‘Justification’, as he called it) entered and assumed his place, he bent over the bar and said something against the din. Counsel immediately rose and left. The chanting ceased. Counsel returned. ‘Scum!’ he muttered audibly. The proceedings then opened and were rapidly concluded in hushed tones, the sarcasms and histrionics of advocacy being given a miss that day. Kipling, as the cub assistant-editor of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, has written how one summer’s day when he was counting on a holiday ‘the Sind Punjab and Delhi railway needs must derail a train and slay thirteen coolies’ so that he ‘had to ride two miles in the sun over to the court, and report’ and ‘was there for four hours’ in a room ‘crowded with natives’. I doubt if it could have occurred to an I.C.S. Magistrate to record so modest a feat. Two miles on a horse, if you please, and four hours in court— and once in a blue moon at that! To all of us running our districts it was of cardinal importance that the bully should not get away with it, and the lesson of our experience was that a scrupulous regard for British law tended to let that happen. To more than one judge it must on occasion have appeared that my concern was to secure a conviction at any price. To me it would seem—probably on the morrow of some such occasion—that judges as a class, but especially High Court judges straight from home, had not the remotest interest in making the culprit pay. The result could be a certain tension between the magistracy and the judicature—as this little snapshot selected from several in my private album will illustrate. It was in Allahabad. The principal witness in a nasty downtown brawl involving grievous hurt was a High Court Messenger. He


had been ‘got at’ during the investigation, I knew for sure, and the investigating Police Officer had brought him before me now, as he was naive enough to tell me, by the illegal expedient of waylaying him on his way to the High Court and bundling him into a tonga. My clock showed only minutes to go at the fag end of a long afternoon and the case was called only to be adjourned. Then tomorrow morning—punctually, so you can get away?’ ‘Can’t come. Mister Justice Harries needs me.’ Then, impressively and taking us all in with a disdainful glance: ‘Needs me.’ ‘Very well. Monday next, same hour.’ ‘He will need me then also.’ The man was wearing his resplendent scarf with its great embossed badge of brass. ‘Must you fix your sash whenever you take duty?’ ‘Always.’ ‘Strip him of his belt’ Sharp on ten the following Monday he was there, waving a large envelope. I affected not to notice this until he was called to the box, when I asked for it to be passed up. ‘I do not know by what right,’ wrote Harries, ‘you have deprived this Messenger of his Badge but I know that without it he is as nothing among his fellows and has not dared to show up for duty since. Please return it to him.’ I tossed the letter ostentatiously into my waste paper basket. ‘Take the oath.’ He did so. Then I added: ‘Before the Prosecutor puts his questions, listen to me. You will get your sash back as you leave the box on condition that you reply—properly.’ It was a scandalous direction from a Magistrate. I was not reminding the witness he was on oath. I was telling him—and on pain of continuing to endure the disgrace I had planned for him to speak out in the sense I wanted. Which he did. I convicted and my sentence was upheld by the Court of Session. To the relief of the neighbourhood and my own peace of mind a dangerous blackguard was put behind bars for two years. Every bazaar in every town in India had its bully like that one in Allahabad who went behind bars a paragraph back, and every rural area had its gang robbers, its dacoits. If therefore—and this is no supposition—up and down the country there were ‘Zila Sahibs’ corresponding to my portrait ‘out for a conviction’ and flouting some of the cherished principles on which British justice is founded (not to mention scoring off the best legal brains in the spirit of odious schoolboys) why was the jail population so low?

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Let me quote a figure which should give us in England today to reflect. The prison population of our Indian Empire in 1938 was 122,000; as compared with a prison population in the United Kingdom at the present time of 64,800. You can argue that Indians are immeasurably less criminally inclined than Englishmen, and this may be a quite tenable position. But I believe we must seek the explanation elsewhere: I mean in the paternalist ethos of my generation which is now dead as the dodo. Remember to be gentle with the underdog, my first and best teacher would say to me, quoting Virgil, in those early months of Mirzapur, and to wear down, war down, the arrogant: et debellare superbos. And I was very quickly to discover that in India the humble and the down-trodden were the many, and that these were too poor to do much wrong, let the old Adam prompt them as he might. The others, then, should be my target, on them must I align my sights. The scales of Justice would need tipping against the wrong-doer, and as for the bandage on her eyes—oh, not in India! Not in my District anyhow. To be sure, the jails in my day had to cope with a quite separate intake, swollen to overflowing or dwindling to vanishing point at a signal from the high command of the Congress Party. I am not saying the Militant could not belong to the ranks of the Arrogant. Too often, to the distress of the leaders, he did. He, however, was not the worry. The worry for the prison administration was the socially secure among the political offenders: to make it worse, there were delicately nurtured ladies amongst them: Mrs Sarojini Naidu; Nehru’s wife Shrimati Kamala; and his sister Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit if I can cite three who at one time or another, each in her own undeniably captivating way, added to my cares. I can remember Jawaharlal Nehru’s arrest in 1930 and how, a Magistrate as yet on a leading rein, I went to the Naini Central jail a few days later to see how he was settling in. This was only the first of many such visits to his quarters, so I do not depend on a fleeting impression. By the time his library had been moved in, his chosen pieces of furniture, and his personal odds and ends, he was more comfortable materially than were we who had arrested him. To those who recall India, perhaps also those who have merely managed to digest my chapter on Hinduism, this will come as no surprise. India does not practise, does not believe in, social equality. And therefore the Jail Administration had to make very special pro vision indeed for such of the cream of Society as chose the path of Disobedience. Even at that date I had met Jawaharlal once—at the house of a common friend. I had met his father, Motilal, too. Pandit Motilal


Nehru was a gentleman of the most exquisite courtesy, ‘so much more polished than his son’, certain old-world members of the Allahabad élite would let you know sotto voce; versed in the rules of sitting down and standing up, as the Persianized Urdu had it; he would not loll or drape himself on a chair. Understandably when I encountered Jawaharlal now in the Central Jail our exchanges were stiff and few, nor did they alter in the succeeding weeks. Then I left Allahabad for the next and final stage of my apprenticeship, and we did not meet again for about five years. He had once more been in prison. This time in the healthier mountain climate of Almora; and I was once more in Allahabad, not, this time, a pupil magistrate but the Magistrate. His wife Kamala was meanwhile in a sanatorium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest of Germany. I think it was at the beginning of September 1935 that news came of a worsening in her condition. Nehru was instantly released on compassionate grounds, but to his anguish was unable to obtain a seat on the next KLM flight. It was KLM alone which served that part of India in those days and, the small Fokker machines carrying but fourteen (was it?) persons, flights were habitually booked up weeks and weeks ahead. The burden of my paragraphs so far has been that the District Magistrate’s authority, instead of being sharply defined, trailed away at the outer edges into a fluid haze. It was normal that Nehru should have turned to me to get him on that plane; normal for me to know that I could. And in assuring him that I would, I was being no more than logical, as I told him. The Government of India had pardoned him so that he might reach Shrimati Kamala’s side in time. He could have travelled in the aisle, but the slight additional weight was unacceptable in those pioneer days of Civil Aviation: you had even to be weighed with your standard-size suitcase provided by KLM. That was off. No, better to detain the steward on the tarmac and whisk him away home as my guest. He could have the run of the house, the entrée to the Club and a pass to the Cinema. He would love it. The Captain would jib, but he would hesitate to tangle with his gendarme in Upper India—there was all that valuable property lying around. And since passengers were grounded for dinner, bed and breakfast in smart hotels en route, could they really have anything to complain about? Half-anhour it would take me, the whole thing. These heroics, however, were cut short. In the list of those intending to join the flight at Allahabad was the name of an American, a teacher at the Forman Christian College. But, alas, a particularly disagreeable person I had found him. Dr. Sam Higginbottom would be the man for this

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job—for what job would old Sam not be the man! This great missionary, Principal of the Naini Agricultural College, must know the wouldbe passenger for a certainty. When I had got through on the telephone he said at once: ‘I promise you, Hubert, he will stand down.’ Fifteen minutes before take-off Nehru came on the line, a catch in his voice, to thank me and to say good-bye. Not the Nehru now of the political arena, not the Nehru convinced of the unassailable virtue of his own opinions, but an unaffected, grateful, emotional man. And I could only say ‘God go with you.’ It did not establish any tie between us, absurd to suggest such a thing; it was no more than one of those flimsy threads that take the strain, hold for a moment—and are unlikely ever to tauten again. Our memories of that September day might easily have lapsed had not chance stepped in to jog them. Years later—it was much after Independence—Pandit Nehru asked my brother to be his doctor, and whenever in London, where the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference used to bring him periodically and where there might be other visits as well, he would turn up at 26 Weymouth Street. At the initial rendez-vous, the consultation over, he gave his celebrated performance, on the centre of our Persian rug, of the Shirsasan. In Sanskrit this means ‘Head Posture’. To achieve it, the amateur Yogi dropped to the floor, placed his palms on the ground beside his head and seemingly just waited for his body and legs to rise up slowly and straighten in the air. When he was the right way up again, he made some casual remark about Yoga. Then, to Horace, ‘Do you know India at all?’ ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘or only what my brother tells me.’ ‘Then perhaps he has told you,’ Nehru went on, ‘that when he was in Allahabad years ago…’ The political leaders were not consigned to the ordinary District Jails but to one or other of the dozen Central Jails located up and down the country. The latter being primarily designed for longterm convicts were subdivided into barrack areas, had their carpet factories or the apparatus of other small industries, their vegetable gardens, and their recreation yard; and were staffed by a picked personnel under a governor, designated Superintendent, who would be a colonel in the Indian Medical Service. Thus only the Magistrate having one of these Central Jails within his jurisdic-tion would be concerned with détenus of national standing. At Allahabad (more precisely at Naini just across the river), as I have said, there was a Central Jail, and Agra had one likewise. And so did Delhi. In Agra it was that I came to know a slight, soft-spoken socialist of exactly my own age with whom an


occasional interview was invariably rewarding. Jaya Prakash Narayan his name was, and if I spell it here that is because he is in the world news as I draft this very page. He is back in prison with only a change in jailer. This time the daughter of the politician I was picturing a few minutes ago is playing that rôle; who in September 1935 had been a schoolgirl called Indira Nehru at Bex in Switzerland. Plus ça change… At a hub of prison administration, then, those incarcerated in the Central Jail and the District Jail combined made up an entire cross-section of the country’s convict class. At any given moment there were bound to be several in both jails whose names and faces and records I knew. They would have come to my notice in a variety of ways. A release on compassionate grounds such as Nehru’s was rare; but remissions of long sentences for one reason or another were a matter of routine, and I presided over a committee consisting of the Superintendent and three non-official Visitors to consider individual claims. Or again some short-term rustic from one of my villages might have gone beyond the limits of what India describes meaningfully as a ‘verbal discussion’ with a fellow convict. And so on. Not every prisoner lef t by the door wherein he went, and I do not mean by this that some climbed out over the wall. On the contrary, it does not cease to astonish me as I look back that I, who was by the accident of my postings as familiar as any of my coevals with prison affairs by the time I had finished, did not have to deal with a single case of escape. I put this down to two very Indian responses: loyalty on the part of the prison personnel and a propensity to conform to a regime on the part of the convicts. I can see myself following a warder. He is nonchalantly swinging a bunch of enormous clanking keys on a metal hoop. Into cell after cell he leads me, for there were half-a-dozen in that particular gang of dacoits who had perpetrated their pillage and their murder in concert. The barred door would not even be reclosed when we entered—it was all in the day’s work to this simple man, alone usually, always unarmed, always—did not the facts prove it?— incorrupt. Not every prisoner left by the main gate, I was saying. Hugh Bomford had prepared me for this in Mirzapur. On my very first visit to the local jail, he had made me sit down and share the prisoners’ dinner with them. They were in for minor offences, were thoroughly enjoying, as it seemed to me, this short carefree interlude in more comfortable surroundings than they were used to—and seated on the ground among them I had passed a pleasant half hour. When I got back, I boasted, I fear; and was quietly told

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that not all my jail half-hours might be as pleasant. I learned this within a year or two. Every so often a prisoner went out of a Central Jail by a side entrance, his penalty paid. The crooked arrangement of his neck where the two pieces no longer fitted showed how. Half-an-hour before, the Superintendent would have looked at me, and I would have looked at my watch. A nod to the hangman, and the trap-door on which a hooded figure was standing would have dropped. I had to go down the ramp, then, of the mound on which the scaffold had been erected and into a narrow side-passage ending just beneath the small square space now open to the dawn sky. They pulled his hood off, the Superintendent, torch in hand, threw a beam of light on his face, certified his life to be extinct. I would put my name to a document in which not only the place and the date but the fatal hour had been entered already. 2. KING EMPEROR VERSUS MOHAN In one of the volumes of Indian Law Reports, Allahabad series, a half page disposes of the case K.E. versus Mohan, section 302 of the Penal Code. It is unlikely to be of interest to anyone in the legal profession and surely no one else reads this forbidding literature. On a reference to the High Court it was held by a Bench of two Judges that the offence of murder had been proved inasmuch as the accused, although acting under provocation, had committed it in the full possession of his faculties and after mature reflexion. The sentence of death at which the Court of Sessions had arrived was accordingly confirmed. No opportunity for fireworks or obiter dicta; facts, too, run of the mill; few reports could be as flat. Nonetheless there had been a feature which as a magistrate I would have thought merited a remark: the despatch with which the proceedings from arrest to gallows were conducted established something of a record in the legal history of British India (and a fortiori in that of the United Kingdom). There was a reason why I should ride Ginger, my chestnut, to the polo-ground that Friday morning and knock a ball about. It was no ordinary thing for four civilian players to be in the same place at the same time, as was the case in Agra at that winter’s end of which I write, and we were taking on the King’s Own Light Infantry on Monday. On the other hand there was a reason why I should ride Shireen through the City. I made it my weekly habit to do this provided I was not absent in Camp and, Saturday being


tiresomely booked by something else, here was my week running out. No, Sunday must do for knocking a ball about and reining back. I was heading for home and had come through Belanganj, when my attention was caught by a knot of wayfarers outside a doorstep. A gesturing beldame was getting no reaction except uncomprehending frowns. Any incident whatever was up my street on these morning rides. I urged Shireen forward, dismounted, threw my reins to one of the by-standers, and took the old woman by the shoulders. ‘It’s at Mohan’s,’ she wailed. ‘Upstairs.’ I swung her round, shoved her through the entrance in front of us and aided her up a steep flight to the first floor. Nobody about. ‘Up again,’ she said. We were not in a wealthy quarter but neither was it squalid, and the houses, although shabby, were tall and airy. There would be three or four storeys, and the staircases connecting them narrow and very nearly sheer. The occupants were shop-keepers’ assistants, I took it, with a sprinkling of modest clerks, perhaps. We were on the second floor now. ‘Up again,’ she said. And still there was nobody about. The door on the third floor landing stood ajar and opened onto an ante-room, bare of furniture. An aperture facing us was curtained. ‘There,’ she said, pointing a skinny forefinger. I drew aside a coarse cloth and went in. On a bed set in the centre of the room lay a naked girl. Her brow framed by tumbling coils of hair, her closed eyelids and slightly parted lips—surely those spoke of a tranquil sleep. But beginning from the collar-bone parallel red gashes descended to the breasts and continued in staccato jabs down either side to the hips. Or rather to where, slashed in a deep criss-cross the walls of her womb curled back to reveal a tiny crouched figure, perfectly outlined within. On the floor under one edge of the bedstead was a child who looked about three. She sat in a pool of blood, playing with a doll and talking contentedly to herself. The ante-room had filled, I could sense it, but I had not been followed further; Indians do not hem in the dead. I picked up the happy child from the scarlet puddle and carried her to the aperture, from where a pair of bangled arms stretched out to take her. I walked to the window and gazed down on fifty upturned faces. There was Shireen, patiently held, on the far side of the road, hindquarters towards me. Funny, I had never thought how like a fiddle a horse would look viewed from a height.

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‘Listen, one of you,’ I shouted, cupping my hands, ‘fetch the policeman from the Belanganj crossing. Hurry!’ It was only three hundred yards away. I rummaged in a chest by the wall and found what I wanted, a sheet. I spread it over the girl. ‘What do I do next?’ I wondered. ‘Take my helmet off for one thing.’ That curtain was straining and bulging but still they held back. In a minute the click of nailed boots, and in came the constable from point duty. He brought his heels together with a crash in the quiet room. ‘Huzūr!’ he saluted. ‘You know me?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ I had ridden past his crossing often enough. ‘Run to the station,’ I ordered, ‘good marks for speed. Tell whoever is in charge to be here quick-as-quick. Jaldi-Jaldi.’ I went back to the bedside now, lifted the covering. Pointlessly I began counting the stab-wounds. In Hindostani; aloud. You have to swot up your numerals from one to a hundred because they are all different. I could hear my voice. I got to ‘twenty seven’, ‘twenty eight’, then ‘twenty nine’, then stopped. Once—and that had been in Agra too—once under the straw on the floor of a stable I had picked up a pair of ears, just where a sly informer had told me I would find them. Gently I pulled back the girl’s hair from over her ears. They were intact, beautiful. As intact as the small, straight nose. That was a wonder, too. If only men were animals you would know what they would do. I looked intently at her face. No, no pain in the expression of the mouth, no contortion at all. No death even as yet. I heard my own voice again…‘And death’s pale flag is not advanced there’. I had been given that for iambics. Half the I.C.S. had been given that for iambics. The finest bits of Shakespeare, why, I knew them by heart only because I had been made to put them into Greek and Latin verse. Had that been the best preparation, years and years of it, for what I was doing now? I did not know the answer. The shrill note of a bicycle bell, much over-worked it sounded, interrupted my thoughts. It could not be the Sub-Inspector so quickly, but it was. Somebody nearby with a telephone, it turned out, had rung him at the station and, pedalling hard, he had met his traffic man half-way. A clatter outside and he is in the room, handcuffs dangling from his left wrist. The breathless constable was at his heels. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Note the name Mohan and then question an old dame who must be somewhere around still. But first, and you’ll explain it to your sepoy here, I want word put through to my house. I want my car sent with a syce.’ I waited till the policeman had grasped the message and gone. ‘Now let’s look for the burhiya and see what she can tell us.’


Ten or fifteen minutes later I left the Sub-inspector scribbling in his notebook and went down the stairs and out A crowd had collected, for people had seen the handcuffs; and the rumour of a murder had circulated, I did not doubt. Of course inside the tall house the womenfolk had known it all along, but their men had gone off to work; and so they had retreated behind doors on their own landings. How else to account for that hush, that emptiness? I picked my way across the road to where Shireen was. Then saw, standing apart on that side of the thoroughfare and gazing at the house from which I had emerged, a lightly-built, rather faircomplexioned citizen, quite young. By citizen I intend that he was of the city: dark pill-box style hat set straight: a collarless shirt fastened at the neck by a brass stud, European waistcoat but no jacket, ankle-length dhoti and black English shoes. Very neat, very clean also, but hardly of distinctive appearance, I would have said. Would have said only to gainsay it, for his eyes, not a doubt of it, were trying to catch mine—and there was a plea, more than a plea, an entreaty in them. ‘Are you Mohan?’ I asked. ‘Yes, Sir,’ he said simply. The lumbering Buick saloon was drawing up and a syce hopped out to attend to Shireen. ‘We’re going home now,’ I told my new acquaintance. ‘I’ll drive,’ I added, ‘so sit beside me.’ ‘Agra man?’ I enquired, for something to say. His background, it seemed, was not local; he came of a Muttra family, had married into a Muttra family. But a friendly recommendation had secured him a place here in Agra with SethsomethingChand, Bazzaz, cloth merchant, of Belanganj. His hands, when I glanced at them resting on his lap, were small, wellshaped, the nails carefully pared. A literate man evidently, and perhaps even up to keeping the books for his employer. He had not talked more, his eyes were fixed on the road. It was mine that left it now and then. That thin moustache was trim and—surely I could not be mistaken, he had shaved or been shaved that morning. The sentry smartened to the ‘present’ as we swung in at my gates, and when we pulled up under the porch Kalloo appeared at the double, right hand flattened inwards against turban in the approved salaam. It had been simple to estimate how much longer I should be, and the mechanism of my bachelor household had been set in motion appropriately: bhishti trotting under the weight of two cans of hot water towards the side-door of my bathroom; second syce hovering to help me off with my boots; cook in a

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position to time the scrambled eggs and bacon. It was a mechanism not to be thrown out, or visibly affected in the slightest, by an unanticipated load. Word should go to the guard house, I told Kalloo, as also to the orderlies, to the mali and the garden coolies, that the stranger I had brought was in custody. A charpoy was to be placed under a tree on the lawn for him, a cushion on it. He would want drinking water immediately and some food later. I took Mohan to the charpoy and instructed him to lie there until I roused him. On leaving him, I met the second syce crossing the grass in our direction with an eight-foot length of rope. I fluttered my hand back and fore in reproof, and he halted, a foolish smile betraying his embarrassment The rope would be used soon enough. I was sure that in a couple of hours I should be listening to a confession. I could almost hear Mohan’s resigned reply to my carefully phrased warning. ‘Oh, I understand all right. It’s hanging for me.’ Why, then—unless to provide material for a self-gratifying story —had I not handed him over to the police instantly? Hadn’t everything pointed to a confession from the very start? It had. But India was not England. In India no statement made by the accused to a police officer could be used in evidence against him. And my unsought situation that morning was a rare one—rare at least in modern times—of a magistrate able to record the statement of a murderer who has not yet been in police detention at all. A statement volunteered, that is, in a sufficiently pure sense of the word. I have come to the rim of our present preoccupation with this affair: it was a stock conjugal drama leading to a stock catastrophe. And no doubt two sets, two hearths, of old-fashioned parents in Muttra would maintain to their dying day that it had all occurred simply because the safeguards implicit in the jointfamily system of the Hindus had been absent; a system under which, in houses of their respectability at any rate, the young wife would have been protected from approach, the young husband given no grounds for jealousy. Even at the time I had more or less come by this stage to the end of my connexion with the case. For my furlough was due shortly, and before the proceedings in the Court of Sessions were over I had gone from India. So I would never set eyes on Mohan again, and I breathed a prayer of thankfulness that him anyhow I would not fetch from a cell as the dawn crept through his barred window, not watch ten minutes later gyrating slowly at the end of a hempen cord.


3. A BACKWARD GLANCE Experience, they say, teaches, and if my years as Magistrate had their lesson for me it is this: Nowhere in the world could one hope to observe a concentration of human souls more obedient to Christ’s injunction to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s than the population of the average Indian District under the British Raj. Evidently the remoter the District and the simpler its folk, the more poignant the expression of that obedience; but it was there in the major and more sophisticated centres as well. Herein lies the explanation of the repeated failures of the Disobedience Movement to disrupt society. And not only in my Mirzapur or my Bahraich but in the bigger places the corollary of the injunction would be audible: ‘and the things which are Caesar’s include his responsibility for our welfare and his duty to bring the errant to book’. Bring to book, notice…not make better. That was the concern of some finer ethos than Caesar’s: Hinduism perhaps, or else Islam. And meantime the Zila Sahib was there to see that the flimsy fabric of civil order enabling men to till the soil or open a shop should hold together.

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9 ABOUT PRINCES

1. THEIR CHAMBER We were in touch with the Princes; for between them and ourselves there flowed a two-way traffic of rights and obligations. But with the subjects of the Princes we had no contact; each Prince being an autocrat in his subordinate realm. His absolutism to be sure might be tempered, and was, but tempered by usages and traditions inseparable from and implicit in the ancient notion of Raj. Lower down, under the heading of ‘A seventeen-gun Prince’, I have introduced Dholpur, and my picture is not only of a Native State in India; it is of India in a native state. As a result of this curious relationship, we had driven and maintained a sort of lane between the Princely States and our Provinces. Where it ran could be known from any handy atlas; States were yellow on the map and Provinces were pink. Pink signified the three-fifths of India where we were directly dealing with the inhabitants, nearly three hundred million of them; and yellow the remaining two-fifths supporting about ninety million souls whose welfare was not, save in the last resort, our responsibility but that of their Rulers. It was a lane which nobody was supposed to cross. Perhaps I should say had been a lane nobody was supposed to cross. For the Great War had changed everyone’s perspective; and the MontaguChelmsford Report, which came out shortly after it and established the principle of responsible government in ‘British’ India, was candid enough to warn the Princes that the nationalism we were sponsoring on our side of the lane must affect, and might govern, the future on theirs. Let them be wise in time, and ensure that in the new order of things they would have their subjects behind them. ‘Hopes and aspirations,’ declared the Report in a more graphic image than is customary in such documents, ‘hopes

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and aspirations may overleap frontier lines like sparks across a street/ But the curious relationship not only shut off princely India from the areas of our direct control: it militated against the least lateral movement between States themselves. The Prince looked upwards to the Paramount Power and downwards upon his own subjects: what occasion had he to look sideways? In the preceding chapter I tried to recapture the feel of The District, and I think I said I was barely conscious of other Englishmen in parallel positions in authority somewhere else; the more ‘Indian’ I became in my methods the less I needed to believe in somewhere else. And after all, I was only Indian in a chameleonic way; whereas the Prince was innately so. To me at any rate it is not difficult to appreciate his sense of isolation from other States over which others ruled. No, you could not prevent sparks flying across the street. What you could do was to get together and reduce the accumulation of inflammable material that lay about in heaps and upon which those sparks might alight. With the object of catching up on events, therefore, a Chamber of Princes had been inaugurated by Royal Proclamation in 1921 as an assembly permitting the Rulers to take counsel in concert for the protection of their own interests. This used to meet annually in its own Hall of Debate in the Council House at New Delhi, and if I say something of its composition it is not to burden the memory with figures that have long since lost their relevance, but to illustrate the central theme of my chapter: which is, that the Indian Princes ranged from glittering potentates at one end of the scale to colourless hereditary landowners of quite modest condition at the other. Since there were between five and six hundred States to consider, it was a ticklish business composing that Chamber. In the end, a dynastic salute of not less than eleven guns having been accepted as the basic qualification, 108 Princes took their seats in their own right; and an additional 12 entered as the elected representatives of 127 other Rulers next in order of importance. Under the cupola, Princes now sat side by side who had never exchanged a nod of recognition in their lives; and of the ‘globetrotters’ among them who had once earned Curzon’s cutting criticism, certain decided that a pied-à-terre in the capital would prove more rewarding in the long run than a grand house in Park Lane.


2. THREE ON THE FRONT PAGE In the England of my boyhood ‘Ranji’ was a name to conjure uith. In fact this name, not of course the whole mouthful of it ‘Maharaja Jam Sahib Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji of Nawanagar’, but ‘Ranji’ for short, was worshipped by vastly more people in England than in India itself where his hold was only over half a million subjects, if that. For he was the Prince of Cricket, the batsman of the age, teacher (not the pupil, mind) of C.B.Fry, constantly knocking up two hundred runs and more. He was a Prince, besides, had we but known it, who really did seem to arrive at the fusion of his two worlds. In first-class cricket, in his beautiful country house at Slough, in Ireland where he had a salmon river, and at the Front during the Great War—for he was of the race of Rajputs—he was in his element. But also, and no less conspicuously, he was at home in Nawanagar, the smallest details of whose administration he had at his finger-tips and where he would go unattended about the villages to confer with headmen and listen to grievances. Here, admittedly, I am depending entirely on what those who knew him could tell me. But knowing my informants was something, and I cannot doubt that the Ranji who did famously as a cricketer did famously as a Prince. Not unexpectedly, then, did the Chamber welcome him as its Chancellor, for all that Nawanagar was hardly of the first or even second weight; and nowhere near, say, Baroda or Gwalior or Jammu-Kashmir—let alone Hyderabad or Mysore—in standing. Cricket, since I have used that hinge, was the recreation of several of Ranji’s peers, I might add, and from one at least of them present homage must not be withheld. I mean the Maharaja who played in gold-embroidered slippers and flowing robes, and invariably celebrated his birthday with a match at which, no less invariably, he made as many runs as his years of life. But perhaps a worthier competitor with Ranji, if it comes to a showy innings, was his fellow Rajput and contemporary the Maharaja of Bikaner. He fought in China, in France, in Egypt, and his commanding looks and doughty attributes brought the full flavour of mediaeval chivalry into the world councils of the day: into the Imperial War Conference of 1917, into the Peace Conference of 1918, into many a session of the League of Nations, and into the Round Table Conference. I used to hear these two Princes freely described as leading statesmen and it may be that we were too ready to award laurels to Princes simply in the hope of demolishing the myth that Native Rulers were by definition

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dissipated sots. But this said, we surely have to give those who deserve it their due in whatever walk they proved themselves. I think for example, of Bhopal who always went after tiger on foot and with a .270 because, as he maintained, a rifle of heavier calibre rendered the contest uneven. I think of Shri Man Singh of Jaipur who practised and practised his polo until his handicap was 7. And so it is with the ‘statesmen’ Princes we are discussing. To me the wonder was that they, and a handful like them, achieved as much as they did; that Ranji was by no means satisfied by cricket, nor Bikaner by those legendary sand-grouse shoots of his that drove us to dub him King of Bikaner by the Grouse of God. Perhaps a verbal image can rescue us: they and their runners-up by the time they reached full manhood were clothed in the armour of experience. In the nature of the case, a young Prince of lineage was born with one foot in affairs of state. He might of course withdraw it—many did. But also he might, to please a grandmother or impress a Viceroy, pull the other after him; and then, almost without knowing it, become engrossed in what he was doing. As Erasmus said, what you pursue shapes you: Studia abeunt in mores. However that may be, Ranji and Bikaner became world figures. Were there others? One must not, I think, expect the Rulers of the really sizable principalities such as Hyderabad and Mysore to compete successfully, for these made a practice of handing the helm to the best available Indian talent in the sub-continent. Nor in this place will I name the Prince who was known more widely abroad than any of them. I treat the Agha Khan separately because the anomaly of his position—to be explained when I come to it— makes it impossible to regard him as on a par with the rest. Everything considered I would pick on Alwar to complete my trio. My choice of a Ruler who misruled a State hardly the size of a decent District and who is nowadays remembered, if at all, for his fiendish defects and not for his qualities may appear surprising. However, I have here on my side a serene observer of men and affairs; one who, if polite to a fault, as all of us who have memories of him will agree, was the least fulsome of men: H.A.L.Fisher, no less. Temporarily deserting the academic grove for politics, Fisher had been invited to assist in the passage of the ‘Montford’ Reforms through the House of Commons and had been brought into close association with Alwar at a stage when this Prince was to all appearances about to play a leading role in his country’s fortunes. This comparatively young Indian (he was in his middle thirties) startled political London by his platform oratory and his scintillating conversation. He attended meetings, he


arranged intimate dinners for Lloyd George, it might be; or F.E.Smith another night; or H.G.Wells; or Fisher himself; and so on. And this is what Fisher said of Alwar—it is surely worthy of record. He said he was one of the outstanding speakers of his age, he said that not Bryce himself could have been more intelligent. Alas, Alwar’s was a strange case, a positively Stevensonian Strange Case: a Prince that would do good thwarted by a Maharaja in whom evil was present. And the Maharaja it was that prevailed. First the provoked populace rose in revolt: and then the very nobles rebelled against him. The Paramount Power stepped in and removed him from his throne. 3. A SEVENTEEN-GUN PRINCE ‘Chameli, a…a…a…!’ ‘Jasmine, come, come, come,’ I repeated it after him. Too loud,’ he said. ‘Try again, almost under your breath. Her hearing is miraculous.’ This time she came, halting at every step and staring hard, came right up to me and nibbled at the chapati in my hand until she had finished it. Then, as though galvanized, wheeled round and galloped noiselessly away. Noiselessly, for the sambar or Indian deer not only walks and trots but gallops without sound. Funny, but the hinds with fawns had been so much less shy than Chameli, had queued up, then advanced singly, each pulling up at intervals and stamping to summon her young to her side, and seeming to know that she must not crowd but await her proper turn. ‘How long has this taken you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, ages now,’ my host replied, ‘ages. Ever since I gave up shikar. You see, we’re dealing with the most timid creature the jungle holds. Those hinds you saw, they know me and answer to their name. They were fawns alongside their dams for the first couple of years…’ We turned and walked away in the direction of the lake. How very unlike a Jat my companion is, I thought to myself. The Jat is sturdy, obstinate, homo rusticus himself; not gentle, reserved, refined. Yet Jai Deo must be Jat to the core, otherwise he could not have been where he was. For Dholpur had been created two centuries before by an exclusively Jat insurrection against the fanatical Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and was a ‘Jat’ State, one of two in all India. It was a small principality of Eastern Rajputana touching the Agra District of the United Provinces; but

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territory and standing were not always linked in princely precedence and Jai Deo, more formally His Highness the Maharaja Rana, was honoured by a personal salute of seventeen guns. We came to a little landing-stage, roughly knocked together, where a smart motor-boat was moored. He had to show me this because it was a new toy. When we had cast off, he accelerated towards what I took to be the opposite shore. In fact we were heading along a neck of water which led into the body of the lake. Gaining this, he put on still more speed. I could see two or three punts, obviously disused shooting punts, ahead of us and as we drew level with these their occupants stood up and bowed very low. They were soon reseated with a bump as our wash went under the shallow bottoms. His ‘civil service’ he told me, in attendance. Yes, it was brand new, this launch, delivered from Bombay only a few days ago. ‘Let’s do it again.’ We circled and, throttle wide as it would go, raced past the bobbing punts a second time. Again the civil service rose to the occasion and again subsided in sudden disequilibrium. He slowed down, then shut off the engine so as to glide to our mooring. He had calculated it nicely. ‘Shall we go indoors?’ he said. The house to which we now made our way was not dignified with the name of palace, that I remember, nor did it resemble one. It was a Victorian mansion constructed of the fine-grained red sandstone that was, and long had been, quarried in abundance from the low ranges of hills lying towards and extending into the United Provinces—and of which, of course, Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s capital, had been built. I knew those desolate hills. Agra itself was only thirty-five miles off, and once I had ridden the distance out to, or very nearly to, the Dholpur border. I have never forgotten that ride because on a section of it, for the only time in my experience, wolves went with me. A couple would lope parallel, two hundred yards away, for a mile or so, then fall back; after which another couple would yield to the same curiosity, for I suppose it was that, and escort me for a further stretch. But until the day I am describing I had never crossed into the State of Dholpur or even met its Ruler. I was staying the week-end, I was the only guest and this visit was to prove the first of three. I thus have a reasonably vivid recollection of a certain sort of Native Prince. I do not suggest he was typical. On the contrary before this chapter is out I hope to have shown there was no stereotype for Indian Princes. I cannot remember in detail the dinner that night, or dinner on any subsequent night: the meal must have been without ceremony


and without significance. I fancy this somewhat secluded man attached no value to the table and I merely recall, and that dimly, the quiet Maharaja Rana opposite me (I am sure we were face to face) in achkan and turban, toying with the dishes. Much clearer to me is his study to which we went afterwards for coffee. It was a sensible Waring and Gillow décor, leather upholstered armchairs, fitted bookshelves, a serviceable writing desk on which stood a silver-framed photograph, signed, of King George V. I commented casually on this. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘though I’m against such things as shooting now, I was keen at one time, and the equerries included me in the parties His Majesty liked so much at Sandringham. I went there through London.’ That ‘through’ was a rather Jat way of putting it. ‘But I believe,’ he went on, ‘what I preferred even then to killing birds was visiting the farms and pheasantries, going round the kennels and stables. Shall we sit by the fire?’ He went to stir it and throw a log on it. While he did so, I glanced at his shelves: the novels of Scott, the collected works of Tennyson, of Wordsworth; that bible of imperialism, Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883), and of course Lyall’s British Dominion in India. All of them books of his father’s day, the books a youth at one of the Chiefs’ Colleges—his, I think had been the Mayo College at Ajmer—was expected to treasure and perhaps to read. For his father, mindful of Curzon’s strictures on the princes at the turn of the century, had vowed no son of his should join ‘the horde of frivolous absentees’, and had followed the Viceroy’s advice in educating his boys in India instead of abroad. His Highness was now forty-four, a widower as I understood who had not yet remarried: and neither then nor later on was I to meet or catch a glimpse of anyone of the opposite sex under that roof. Dholpur, then, on the eastern fringe of Rajputana was preponderantly peopled by those sturdy Jats who have entered my pages more than once. Among the Hindus of northern India none had stronger claims to be the backbone of the peasant, just as the Rajputs were of the military, structure. They had been there nobody knew how long. Were they, as some authorities insisted, of Scythian origin? So, obviously, if one had theories to test as to the ancient body politic north of the Vindhyas, Dholpur was an ideal place to begin. There were Jat villages galore in British India, plenty in the Agra District which I had left that very morning; superficially many a village in the Khairagarh Tahsil under my charge was indistinguishable from the villages on the Dholpur State side of the boundary. But beneath the surface there were differences. In Dholpur the erosions of modern history had not occurred. To start with, you jumped back two hundred years and

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antedated the social and political changes deriving from the British presence. Then, you jumped back much further and antedated the Muslim Conquest. Today there was only one Muslim in the place (do not take me up on this), and he lay in a tomb within the fortified Sarai which Akbar had put in the little town. You could even argue plausibly that the village communities to which the Maharaja Rana is proposing to conduct me next morning were not unlike those ‘miniature republics’ on which Megasthenes the Greek had reported. They enjoyed a degree of self-government unthinkable in ‘British India’. You had in effect a Raj on the ‘native’ pattern, which merely collected the revenue from a host of tiny oligarchies, each of them administered by its hereditary headman, its Council of Five, and its Gam balahi best translated as ‘O.C Untouchables’. The state police was rudimentary; the criminal court (enforcing our British Indian law) relatively idle. Chastisement, summary and condign, was the prerogative of the Five. I felt I was in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land that week-end. Dholpur, I say it again, was an ideal place; being a small community of likeminded cultivators in which a middle caste set the tone. Ideal— but only viable in the twentieth century under the aegis of a greater Raj than its own which guaranteed its immunity from attack, gave it a branch railway from Agra, a telegraph connexion with the outside world, and supplied such few functionaries as were required. I have hoped, by recording my debt to this unassuming Seventeen-Gun-Salute Ruler, to dispel the notion fostered by Hollywood and the international press of the day that the Princes were one and all addicted to the gratification of disreputable whims. In truth, many of their Order—though not, one is bound to concede, a sizable majority—were comparable with the landed aristocracy of Europe at its very best; and certain, the chosen few admittedly, exhibited, as did Jai Deo of Dholpur, my Jat among Jats, a total empathy with their subjects and a total disregard of social renown. 4. TWO MORE PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY It was quite usual for officers in the Indian Civil Service to be loaned to Native States for the overhaul of some specific department of the Ruler’s administration. I tumbled to this during my very first weeks at Mirzapur, for my Collector had recently returned to the United Provinces from Rewa, one of the Central


India States, after several years of absence. I was too bewildered by my immediate surroundings to be curious about conditions on soil that was not British, nor was my teacher, wisely, inclined to be informative. All I remember hearing about Rewa from him was that the Maharaja had a single ambition, ignoble as it seemed to me, viz., to bag a thousand tigers—and had got into the five hundreds. ‘And if you want to know more about the States (this without noticeable enthusiasm) you had better get yourself into the Political.’ ‘Political.’ An extraordinary use of the word, I found it. But it dated, like so much of our jargon, from Company days. In the beginning, the English at Fort William were largely heedless of the internal affairs of Bengal: the only branch of politics they dabbled in was negotiation with the native princes. And thus ‘political’ became synonymous with ‘diplomatic’—and it remained so till the end. Reverting to more modern times, then, it was the Political Department of the Government of India that took charge of the standing relations between the Princes and the Paramount Power. In the sequel my own service was destined to be lived out in ‘British India’ in the narrower meaning; and therefore my contacts with Princes were chance—or if not quite chance, then the next thing to it. I knew the ruler of Dholpur because his State happened to adjoin my Agra District; two others I came to know through the routine of my duties at Bahraich and Delhi respectively. I did make an official visit to Hyderabad, the premier State, but after India’s independence; so it is not even a postscript in this place, because the curious relationship I am endeavouring to document had been ruptured by that time. I came to know the Kapurthala family simply because the Maharaja had the status of landowner in the Bahraich District. The property formed part of a grant made to his ancestor in recognition of loyalty at the moment of the Mutiny of 1857 and was superintended, amateurishly, by one of His Highness’s five sons. Kapurthala was a Sikh State (though you would not guess this from the shaven chins of the Maharaja and the sons) situated near Jullunder in the Punjab, and of small consequence. Yet—and it was often the case— the ruling house of this tiny territory affected the manners and received the treatment of royalty in London and in Paris. The Maharaja having succeeded his father as a child had no doubt been a spoilt one; and as a young man he incurred Curzon’s intense displeasure for secretly wedding the daughter of a European balloonist who was giving performances in his State. The biographies filed in the Political Department contained a more discreet allusion to this episode: ‘at one time’ the entry read, ‘morganatically married to a Spanish lady’. Any

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how the alliance lasted long enough to account for the arresting good looks of at least two of the five sons—the Maharaja Kumar I knew at Bahraich had an Ivor Novello profile—and it no doubt contributed to the distinctly continental flavour of their company. The Maharaja, I was to find, spoke French almost as often as English, en famille. Because the sons after public school in England had gone to Paris or else Vienna, none of them corresponded to Curzon’s idea of a properly brought up Indian Prince, but of the ‘Bahraich’ Maharaja Kumar it could at any rate be claimed he had kept within the particular traces over which his father had kicked. The young Rani was of the most suitable Sikh descent, and also—here again an item to which the observant Curzon was never insensible—strikingly ornamental. In sari of royal blue chiffon trimmed with red brocade and wearing her ruby and diamond bracelets and pendant earrings to match she crosses the intervening years in an instant. She presides at one of her small dinner parties—six servants in their navy and silver liveries behind our six chairs—and, a credit to the French and English governesses who had trained her, is steering the talk as a hostess should. I can be pardoned for comparing that soirée with its conversational ripples and eddies to another, a few years later, which she did not grace. This was arranged impromptu in the Maharaja’s white-and-gold train standing at the side platform at Delhi station from where, in three hours, it would be shunted and hitched to the night express travelling north. His Highness, at the head of the longitudinal table in the dining saloon is in oriental dress; evening achkan, that is, and of course turbaned as always. He is being heavily pater familias with three of his sons: the Maharaja Kumar of my Bahraich days; and Captain Amarjit Singh; and a third son, I forget which. He tended to glare at the best of times and this involuntary habit gave him a positively fierce aspect now in the hard luminosity of the arc-lamps pouring in from outside and overcoming the shaded and diffused glow within. The short whippy cane he invariably carried lay alongside his plate and you waited for him to rap one of his sons over the knuckles with it. All three of them, so bouncing and cocksure on their own, kept their eyes lowered and said ‘yes, father’, ‘no, father’ while the two table servants came and went silently. The five of us inside the luxury car were walled by the thickness of glass from five hundred outside. Along the opposite edge of the platform was drawn up a local, packed as Indian trains are packed; bare elbows, bare feet, scores and scores of them, protruded from the carriage windows. And between us and that train, waiting for the next, were rows of sleeping forms muffled


from top to toe like corpses in shrouds; and, interspersing them, blanketed huddles of men, women and children, jabbering, drowsing or yawning noisily. Threading a passage through this patient acre of humanity went the bhishti, ‘the man from paradise’, bringing water to the thirsty, the insistent sweet-meat vendor with his tray, the beggar proffering his bowl and plangently proclaiming his right to alms. The world over we are rich travellers and poor travellers, this is a truism. It is simply that in India the contrast between us is more blatant than elsewhere. Or perhaps ‘blatant’ is wrong. In India the contrast does not even register. That night in the railway station where grandeur and misery were fellow passengers, neither had eyes for the other. The two servants in blue and silver uniform had not pulled down the blinds. No need; nobody would look out and nobody would look in. Except absent-mindedly. It was a casual link, again, that I had with Udaipur. I had no work there, no authority, and had not earned the hospitality of an hour let alone the days I spent in the Guest Annexe on Lake Pichola. Since the institution of the Chamber, the Maharana had wanted some lodging in the capital and the unpretentious Udaipur House on Rajpur Road which answered this need was a hundred yards from where I lived as Deputy Commissioner. When the Chamber was about to open, or in Horse Show Week, or on the date of the Garden Party or some other vice-regal reception, I would observe him arriving from the station in a rather incongruous motorcade. Two or three shabby cars conveying a picturesque retinue would be heading it, and be followed by a not less worn-out vehicle. In the centre of the back seat of which, alone and rigidly upright, his eyes fixed straight before him—for in Delhi he had no reverences to acknowledge—his hands clasping the hilt of a carved ceremonial sword, would be seen the unchallenged Lord of All Rajputs who claimed descent from the very Sun in the Sky. Presently I learned, and it seemed significant, that none in fact called him by those high-sounding titles; to his barons and to his people, and indeed to British officials, he was the Bapji, ‘Father dear’. And if his pose was rigid as I remarked, that was because he was partially paralysed and compelled to sit thus stiffly in all his public appearances. But a flexible mind more than compensated for an unbending body and rendered the Ruler of one of the most traditionally feudal of States one of the most unaffected of men. I discovered this for myself through a small incident involving a sentry. Princes generally liked to have a sentinel posted outside their residences and these sepoys sometimes forgot that in British India their status was that of

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door-keepers not praetorian guards. I could remember how at Allahabad once, where a pious Raja had rented a house close to my own for the period of the Magh Mela, I had heard a commotion and gone across to find one such guardsman shot dead in the sentry-box with his own rifle. He had pointed it at a couple of inquisitive and probably jeering Muslims of the town who had twisted it back on him and the thing had gone off. This time it was nothing so serious: merely an altercation between the Udaipurwala and some local idlers. I took along a Police Inspector with me, a Delhi Muslim, to attend to the details. A decorative aide-de-camp wearing a close-fitting pugaree, a beard trimmed and parted in the Rajput style, and a richly ornamented sword, showed us straight in. And during the next twenty minutes four persons of unequal station in life were treating each other as equals. My Inspector was in the seventh heaven. ‘What a grand man, Sir!’ he said excitedly, as we came away. And then, ‘speaks chaste Urdu also.’ The quaint turn was not inconsequent. I had heard it so often on the lips of those born within sound of the Muezzin’s call from the Great Mosque that I knew it for what it was: a formula of unstinted praise. Boatmen of the Prince’s barge were rowing us from the lake-side Palace out to the islands, and presently we could look behind us LBI—F* and take in the architectural luxuriance of Udaipur rising sheer out of the waters: cupolas, octagonal towers, loggias, bays, open and closed galleries, pillars and stairways. In the interior of the Palace there had been dazzling coloured mosaics to admire and lobby after lobby to walk through. There was a solitary anachronism that I could notice: a tiny gold-plated train, locomotive and coaches, to run round the table in the central dining hall. The Tsar it was who set this fashion, I believe. In Russia in 1932 I had seen a similar one among the imperial relics at Leningrad, and I dare say this toy is on show to tourists today among the relics of fallen royalty in Udaipur. Otherwise it was selfconsciously on old ways that Udaipur stood, in old attitudes that the dynasty still expressed itself. There was a certain latticed window, for example, in one of the apartments of which much was made. It was the frame to a tale so redolent of olden days that I shall retell it as it was told to me. Most likely a government guide recites it to visiting groups now in the very words of the baron who acted as my cicerone. From that window you could see across to where the lake narrowed towards a valley in the enclosing hills, and long ago the young Maharani had sat at it with bated breath uncertain what to hope for and what to fear. Her lord had made a drunken wager with a dancing-girl that she would not walk the


width of the lake at that point on a tight-rope: the prize of success to be the half of his kingdom. The girl had chosen the steady light of evening as the hour of the ordeal; and the hour, purpling and gilding the hill slopes, had come. My baron’s ancestors knew that the Maharana, being a Rajput if a toper, would not break his word should the wager be won, and to save the State from ruin they arranged that the rope should be twitched at the vital moment. The Maharani at the latticed window could see the assembled crowd and just make out the speck moving across space. She had, at that distance, to imagine the shriek and the splash when these came, but the shudder that ran through the spectators was hers as much as theirs. That drama had been enacted two centuries back. Yet, as my baron knew and I knew, it could be matched in the present: at the very date of my stay in Udaipur there were Indian Princes somewhere or other forfeiting their thrones for dancing-girls. Nowhere in the India of my memory was the continuity with days of yore so palpable as here. Not all States were old—many, indeed, were of the day before yesterday—but Udaipur was very old. It had been founded twelve hundred years earlier, and that was why its Maharana was Chief of Rajput Chiefs, why his Thakurs, barons, had pedigrees five feet long. In the streets I did not notice a single suit of European cut; I saw handsome, tightly turbaned heads and those trimmed parted beards everywhere; processions of Rebeccas, each with a couple of pots, one upon the other, balanced on her head; usually an elephant or two; always horsemen girt with ornate swords. Udaipur had been like that for centuries and centuries. It had held itself proudly aloof from the Delhi of the Mughals, and was, you could not help feeling it, aloof from Delhi still. And as for Bombay and Calcutta, they had not been heard of in Udaipur. 5. THE PRINCE WHO WAS PONTIFF You saw an astonishing variety of headdress in every street of every Indian city, yet you might look in vain for an ordinary clothcap. Or so I would have contended until slipping in by a side entrance a certain February morning on my way back from Cutcherry I noticed one hanging on the hatstand in the outer hall. I could catch voices from the drawing-room, a halting dialogue in Hindustani between Kalloo and somebody else, but not what was being said. I went through.

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The Agha Khan got up nimbly from an armchair, beaming broadly beneath surprised looking eyebrows that had not greyed with his hair. ‘I only came to drop a card,’ he began, holding my hand as he spoke, ‘but your bearer told me you’d be back in a few minutes, so I waited.’ I had not counted on his visit, but I had certainly half expected it. The English papers lately had reported his intention, now the War was over, to tour the scattered territories where his followers were settled, starting from his Sect’s headquarters; that is, from India, and more exactly, from Bombay. And some days ago, or possibly weeks now, the thirteen-year-old Sadruddin, his younger son, had been brought to Agra and placed in a family I was acquainted with. It had not cost me an effort to see the boy and enquire how he was doing. I am recording all this in order to dispel any idea that the progress of a prominent Prince, whose every move in smart society was copy in the West, would be heralded by a flourish of trumpets among us in India. In India he was the Pontiff of a Sect. He was other things as well, I admit: he was Protector Emeritus of Muslim India—he had laid the foundation stone of the League in the old days and had powerfully buttressed the walls of Aligarh; he was still salaamed as a man is apt to be who is thought to have the ear of those in high places. But in the last resort it was on his sacerdotal office that his credit reposed— and this was only exercised in respect of a minute and heterodox fraction of India’s Muslim people called the Ismailis. The gossip columnists of Europe and America could never discover quite who those were—and understandably. Even on the scene you had to possess an enquiring mind if you would place them. In my chapter about the IndoMuslims I steered almost clear of Islam as a religion on the ground that it was not specifically Indian. That consideration holds good here, and I shall only say enough of the Ismailis to account for their treating India as their principal home and for their spiritual allegiance to an Indian Prince. It is a chequered story. Within thirty years of Muhammad’s death his Community of Believers had become involved in a civil war resulting in the Sects which divide Islam to this day: the Sunnis who adhered to the Community’s ‘Custom’ (Sunna) of acknowledging successful leadership; and the Shi’ites, a minority ‘Party’ (Shi’a) who protested the sole legitimacy of sultans—Imams as they designated them—belonging to the house of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law. Then, in the eighth century, a schism occurred within the ‘Party’ itself, when a faction rejected one Musa al Kazim as seventh Imam in favour of his elder brother Ismail. The


Ismailis, so named from their devotion to this person, are thus an extreme wing of the Protestant minority in Islam. Now, these Ismailis presently spread westwards and established a dynasty in Egypt, and it was there that a dispute over the Succession split them into two sub-groups. Once again the claims of a second son, Musta’li, were pitted against those of an elder son, Nizar. Worsted in this quarrel, the ‘Nizaris’ willy nilly withdrew from Egypt, and set up in Persia under their leader Hasan Sabbah. Thanks to the Crusades, we are here treading on more familiar ground, for this ferocious character is none other than the Old Man of the Mountain of our story books and Marco Polo’s narrative, who terrorized the Middle East with his Assassins from Alamut, the ‘Eagle’s Nest’, his rockfastness in the Elburz. But the day came when Alamut fell to the Mongols. Once again the Nizaris went on trek, and after centuries of trickling migrations through Afghanistan and the slopes of the Pamirs towards Hunza and Gilgit—leaving everywhere they went a sprinkling of converts —fetched up on the West coast of India. Where their spiritual successors, Hindus by blood, mercantile by leaning, today constitute under the name of Khojas the nucleus of the Agha Khan’s following. And meanwhile the Musta’lis, ousted in their own turn from Egypt, were wending their way slowly east via the Yemen towards the same destination to end up in Gujarat, where modern India knows those converted to their confession as Bohras, which is Traders’. In neither of these thriving business communities were numbers anything but small; I used to hear the Bohras put at 150,000 and the Khojas at about twice that figure. The peasants of the Sect tilling their terraced little fields on the mountainside way up beyond Chitral were evidently very much fewer still. So I doubt if the Indian Ismailis greatly exceeded half-amillion. No, the numeric weight of the Sect, although not its central office, lay outside India, whether in strung-out settlements along the converging lines of migration mentioned above or in East Africa where unremitting missionary endeavour in modern times had carried the original Nizari message as far afield as Lake Tanganyika. India, then, had come to be the base of the Ismailis, but how in heaven’s name had an ‘Indian Prince’ come to be their pontiff? The story belongs to the annals of the British Raj. Not much more than a hundred years had elapsed since the then Imam of the Sect, a person descended from Ali by his wife Fatima who was daughter of the Prophet, came into political conflict with the Shah. He fled the country and sought our protection in India. To transfer one’s whole family and entourage at sudden notice from the region of

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Qum to Bombay cannot have been easy in the year 1838, and one thinks it could hardly have been accomplished at all without that chain of Ismaili communities which the earlier émigrés had forged. The fact that this newest émigré was actually able to render valuable services to the British Army in Afghanistan on his way proved the existence and the worth of devoted disciples along the route. And it was of course this aspect of the matter that impressed us. It was not long before the refugee was officially designated His Highness Agha Khan I. My visitor, then, was Agha Khan III. Now in his late sixties, he had been very young and the darling of his mother, when his father died. So the years of his pontificate had been long; and because of the Great War and the political changes in India which followed it, eventful. What I remarked of certain of the other Princes applied to him; immersed in his unearned authority he had become proficient in the art of exerting it; heading delegations, attending conferences, speaking for the Princes as a body, notwithstanding that most of them were Hindus. Above all he had been voicing the aspirations of the Muslims of India as a whole. Anomalies in the position of the Indian Prince who had no thimbleful of Indian blood in his veins and no square yard of Indian State territory were glaring, and here was one more: he championed the very people for whom his redoubtable forerunner, the Old Man of the Mountain, reserved the Assassin’s blade in this world, fire and brimstone in the next. Nehru—and it came rather richly from a Pandit who did not object to a beef-steak—called him a heretic publicly, and heretic undeniably he was. But the Muslims in general slurred over that—and after all it was their business, not the Pandit’s. I remember sometimes a wry smile, certainly, and a murmured ‘not strictly regular’, but that was about the sum of it. Jinnah himself, I would be reminded, Jinnah the architect of the Muslim nation-to-be was a Shi’ite if (heavily accented in the speaker’s voice) anything, and therefore ‘heretical’. So where did you stop? The fact was that the Agha Khan was tolerant of other people’s tenets—to be which, most cultivated Indo-Muslims would tell you, is not such a bad mode of approaching God. It followed that under such an urbane successor to the Master of Alamut doctrinal differences within the Sect were hardly likely to arouse the old passions; and, anyhow, eight hundred years crowned by material security in a common Newfoundland had apparently gone far towards healing the breach. In the India we knew, it was unthinkable that Khojas and Bohras should be flying at each other’s throats.


‘Then why depart so quickly, Your Highness?’ I trotted this out in Persian—it was a standard phrase—and felt a tinge of disappointment when it seemed not to register. We sat down. He resumed, bland as before. They would be staying two or three days at the Cecil Hotel, his wife the Begum (who was French), a companiongoverness, and himself; sight-seeing really and all very private. Only one small ceremony was planned in Agra for, as I would know, the Ismailis hereabouts were very few. The Begum (I believe I have this right) had never been in India before, and so of course there had to be the Taj Mahal—by moonlight, too, unless he was mistaken. And could we fit in a talk? About the way things were going. Suddenly he grew grave: ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear!’ He got up again, and again I noticed how spry he was for his age. We had settled for dinner the following evening. ‘En petit comité, though, if that suits,’ he had stipulated, ‘the Begum has hardly any English yet.’ We went towards the great porch where I now saw a borrowed car to be waiting. My departing guest had easily the longest attested genealogy on the face of the earth, and protocol very likely provides for the ceremonious rendering of his jewelled fillet to the personage thus exalted. I fetched his old tweed cap, and I infer I did the correct thing. For he took it, bowing solemnly over it and saying: ‘May your hand not pain you.’ He said it in Persian (how else could it be said?). The descendant of the last of the Grand Masters of Alamut was, it will be seen, a genial man. To the outer world he was also a man whose private performance and public office appeared to offer a most startling contrast: a pontiff whose see, so far from being holy, was frequently of the earth, earthy; was even of the turf, turfy. That world knew an Agha Khan captured by the camera in the paddocks of British racecourses; knew an Agha Khan whose embonpoint was weighed and balanced in the scales against gold or silver or maybe humbler coinage donated by his votaries, an Agha Khan toasting Miss France at a fashionable dîner de gala in Cannes; a flamboyant Agha Khan, verging on the loud, spotlighted a trifle too much. But the Ismailis, whose affair it was, did not mind; their Leader, being in the succession, was sinless. Certain Ismailis, shown a photograph of the Agha Khan in the act of raising his glass, would answer that the picture might be a fake, or the cup not contain wine, or that, containing wine, this was transmuted in essence before passing his lips. But most Ismailis would not bother to defend a position held against all comers these eleven or twelve hundred years. They would simply

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smile rather disarmingly at you, and hand the piece of paper back. At Buckingham Palace Indian Princes used to expect the guard to turn out as they entered the gates. I had forgotten this item, and so my sentries were caught napping when the guests passed through mine. It was still not so very long since the Press had conferred on Mademoiselle Yvette Labrousse the title of the loveliest woman in Europe or since the Agha Khan had given her that of his Begum— the third in sequence, for he did not subscribe to polygamy. Report of her beauty, then, had preceded her, but one was not prepared for this to be statuesque. A very young woman had walked like a Greek goddess, nobody could miss it, straight into the part of consort to a religious leader. I must be very careful not to convey a wrong impression here. Wavelets of hilarity rippled the surface of the evening I am describing. The Agha Khan had been held up on the Riviera through the war years till the Liberation of France, and I had to hear the ruses he and the Begum employed to keep the famous diamonds from the Germans —but was left to guess whether those flashing in the light of my very ordinary chandelier were real. The Prince of the Turf volunteered, I remember, the detail that versed as he was in the ritual of ‘saddling up’ he had never actually been in the saddle in his life—if you excepted his childhood with his donkey on the sands at Johu outside Bombay. The thought took him back, evidently, to the age of ease and elegance. ‘Three weeks ago we had a free-for-all scrimmage for our places in a rickety, draughty, noisy cylinder. And when I think of the comfort of my cabin with its brass bedstead on the old P & O at the turn of the century!’ But under this sort of thing deeper currents were running, and you felt them. The Begum had made her submission to Islam, and I hear the Agha Khan reciting a Qasida of Qa’ani in praise of the Creator; while she listens with rapt attention, nodding now and again as he helps her out with a French translation. The Derby at that minute did not matter a scrap to him, it had never mattered to her. I doubt if she ever learned whether it was Blenheim or Mahmoud that had brought it off in ‘36. My next and last meeting with him was to be in England and if this falls strictly outside my picture the fraction that protrudes beyond the frame is of a piece with my canvas. It was a golden June in I forget which year—it was certainly after he had won the Derby with My Love. He was in the foyer of the Ritz to which, as the world knew, he was no stranger. And he was wearing properly pressed white flannels with a tweed jacket that matched, not a


doubt of it, the old cap. He was going to Whitechapel, to the Mile End Road, where—although the world did not know this—he was no stranger either. From a ship that had just docked they had brought an Indian in a bad way to the London Hospital, some sort of Indian anyhow, an ‘Ismaili’. So the Agha Khan was going to sit at the bedside. My doctor brother who went with him to the ward told me about it afterwards. ‘You remember about that Indian the other day?’ he said. ‘Well, he set out on his journey with absolute serenity.’

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1. THE ETERNAL CITY Delhi is Far Away, is Seven Cities, has a Palace that is Paradise. The three old sayings are probably no longer on people’s lips as they were even within my memory, but I do not doubt they can still be heard in the patter of the professional guides. They are convenient pegs on which to hang the tale of India’s capital, so I will use them now. ‘Delhi is still far away’ was a proverb rather like the Latin dictum about Corinth which it does not fall to every man’s lot to reach. The thought was not of spatial distance—how could it be? Militarily, economically, in terms of tourism, Delhi has always been on the map, the very reverse of remote and anything but inaccessible. Herein, on the contrary, was the key to its destiny. To Delhi, as to that other Eternal City—both history and prehistory confirm it—all roads led. It stood at the exit of a corridor running from the northwest passes between the Himalayan range and the Rajputana desert, a corridor which as soon as it has gained the Jumna valley opens into the Gangetic plain towards the east and on Central India towards the south. From Delhi the conqueror, the merchant, the curious traveller could push on without impasse to the Bay of Bengal; or, if he preferred, turn south to the Deccan, Maharashtra, Gujarat—and retrace his steps just as easily whenever he wished. Archaeological discovery and the persuasive, if not entirely conclusive, voice of traditional literature combine to demonstrate Delhi’s perennial pull. The archaeologists assure us that its story goes right back to the Indus Valley Civilization, which is to say that it dates from the middle of the third millennium B.C. And coming to the Epic period, which present-day scholars would place around 900 B.C., there is circumstantial evidence to be gathered from the

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Mahabharat. We had a chance to see in my sixth chapter that the matchless Bhagavad Gita or ‘Lord’s Song’, that sort of Sermon inserted in the body of the great epic was sparked off at a ‘Zero hour’ fixed for a decisive battle to be joined precisely hereabouts. Indeed modern scholarship does not hesitate to picture Arjun and his brothers holding their court in their palaces on the mound of the Purana Qila—or ‘Old Fort’ as your taxi driver will translate it for you today—and racing their war chariots for fun or practice on the level ground between there and the War Memorial Arch! For beneath that very mound (it has always tempted me to christen the Bhagavad Gita the Hindu Sermon on the Mound) is the debris of the dust of Indraprastha. Then, too, we know that our city was a famous enough capital by the age of Alexander, and though it was apparently no more than a provincial one both under the Mauryas —Asoka’s imperial capital being Pataliputra, which is Patna—and under a whole series of successor dynasties, its star was going to rise again. I mean under Prithvi Raj. We are drawing near in our dates to the advent of the Muslims, to whose early incursions I alluded in my seventh chapter. Prithvi Raj fell in the field in 1191 opposing the advance of Muhammad of Ghur; and Delhi, having lost its fighting raja, now endured the loss of its temples as well; and became the capital of rulers who set about building mosques. Mosques to the greater glory of God—and palaces to their own; on sites that might be shifted (but never very far) in one direction or another at the will of each fresh occupant of the throne. A brandnew Delhi resulted from every successive move, calculated to outshine but not to eclipse the old. First the Qutb site around the limits of the former Lalkot; then that of Tughlakabad; then the area called Jahanpanah or ‘The Refuge of the World’; then the fortress palace of Firozabad; then Humayun’s city adjoining the already mentioned Purana Qila; and finally the Grand Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad. That adds up to Seven, but more remarkable than the diversity this numeral suggests was the stubborn identity it never quite destroyed. The third of the old sayings is actually an echo of a Persian inscription that is to be seen in the Palace, now called the Fort; more precisely in the pavilion of white marble, within which is the hall of exquisite and lavish beauty where Private Audience used to be given. It reads like this—‘If there be a paradise on the face of the earth it is here, it is here, oh! it is here’. Strictly, that sentence is the boast of the Palace as such, but by extension it is the boast of the Mughal capital at its zenith; of the city, namely, of Shahjahan, seventh in the list we drew up above. In this city the Palace was the citadel from which all else


radiated, on which all else converged. Immediately around it the household troops were encamped; then, on the line of the present Lothian Road, the patchwork of bazaars commenced. And driving a broad swath through these ran the central avenue known as Chandni Chowk, ‘Silver Street’, silver as the moon, the richest thoroughfare in the world, saturated with history and not seldom soaked in blood. Half way up it, in fact, and opening onto the market lane, the Dariba, is the Gate called Bloody to this very day. I will have to return to it in another chapter and recount how that Gate in 1942 lived up to its name. But bear a little now to the south if I am getting my points of the compass correct, and after a short distance two very tall, very slender minarets, then three white marble domes and, presently, a magnificent flight of stone steps will come into view. We are confronting the Jama Masjid, Delhi’s cathedral mosque, the greatest in all India. Shahjahan was ‘Shah of the World’ and this was his ‘Abad’, his Abode, where he mounted his Peacock Throne in the year King Charles mounted the scaffold. It supported, the historians reckon, two million inhabitants, and was thus a city without example in its day. Before I can report the Delhi I knew, a significant gap waits to be closed. If the place, as I have been arguing, was ‘indicated’ from the start, why were we ourselves so slow in making it the capital of our Indian Empire? Admittedly, when Shahjahan’s city arose in a dazzling magnificence that became the talk and the envy of London and Paris—this is the stage I had arrived at above—we had no more than, say, a score of factories in the land and about ninety employees; we were still petitioning the Emperor for coastal settlements, we were hat in hand. Admittedly, when we did get to Delhi as a military power in 1803 we were still ‘John’ Company, and the currency continued to be struck in the name of the pathetic, blind Shah Alam whose realm, said the mocking jingle, stretched from Delhi to Palam (where the Airport is). Admittedly, until the very date of the Mutiny which was to dislodge him, old Bahadur Shah, vague in mind, soothed by the optimistic prophecies of his holy men, was King; on whom it was polite to pay a courtesy call. But granting such earlier impediments, why that time-lag from 1858 till 1912? The answer is that following its siege and capture—for these were the price of mutiny—Delhi had suffered a collapse that was not less nervous than physical. The most populous areas had been demolished by the cannonade; mosques and palaces, if standing at all, were scarred façades. The King had been tried and packed off to Rangoon for the remainder of his days; the social élite had largely emigrated to Hyderabad in the Deccan. The

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British, unready to forgive the wholesale extermination of their compatriots in the Daryaganj quarter of the town and a fiendish massacre of captive English women and children in the Hall of Public Audience of the Palace, had been bent on taking it out of the Muslims; especially the Muslims. Let those who wanted to stay on in the now devastated Delhi do so—and dream about their past. I cannot f orget a particular family, ci-devant well connected, but long since retired within itself, which used to invite me to its modest home in Deputy Ganj, that suburb for whose layout considerably before the upheaval of 1857 a Deputy Commissioner —thus an official in whose footsteps I was walking with the delay of one century had earned lasting credit. Grandmother Zubeida Begum, usually visible on these occasions, was they told me, ninety-three and had lived in the Palace as a girl, and—I am able to testify to this preferred the quaint Persian idiom of the phantom Court to the Urdu speech of everyday life. A willing listener at the tea-table of these surviving links with Mughal India, I could not help reflecting how absurdly ‘out of it’ the historian is in his college rooms or at a favourite desk in the India Office Library. And on the other hand how disgracefully casual the clod-hopping Collector I was could show himself in the society to which he, as nobody else in the whole wide world, had the entrée. After a few minutes, out would come a loose folder of old photographs, yellow and curling at the edges. Most were portraits of great uncles paternal or maternal; direct descendants one and all, I would be assured, of Tamerlane himself. But several, taken out-of-doors, documented the horror of the bombardment of a sector of the city towards the Jama Masjid. These puzzled me the first time I saw them. Fops and dilettanti, fainéants save in the harem and the chase, how could anyone in that set have even known what a camera was in 1857? Or knowing, been adroit enough to use so cumbersome an apparatus in the confusion of the calamity, exposing the plate when still wet—for that was the collodion process—and developing it straightaway after exposure? Longlashed Mu’azzam, thirteen and just coming in from school, chimed in with an explanation. The Eurasian we had in our service took those,’ he volunteered. ‘Some Wilkins,’ he added, naming him. It was just plausible, I imagine. Not a Sahib. Not, that is, accepted by those who lived in siyle in Civil Lines beyond Kashmir Gate and might be watched almost any evening, escorting mem-log in taffetas and crinolines as they drove in barouches and buggies to their parties and balls. No, a subordinate with a sing-song intonation who carried a tripod on his shoulder in lieu of a rifle during the emergency. Some Wilkins. This, or some other


resourceful man like him, had been present in the streets of Delhi with his camera when the lamp of the Mughals flickered and went out. One of his ‘stills’ has stuck in my memory. The Mosque is there, ill-focussed to be sure, in the background; while in the foreground there are blurs leaning inward from the left, and grotesquely elongated shapes suggesting, but no more than suggesting, human beings, are streaking away from them towards the right bottom corner. ‘Look’, the boy prattled on, fingering these blurs and these shapes as doubtless his parents and the parents of his parents had done down the years, ‘look on the toppling walls of our houses, look at us fleeing for our lives.’ ‘And what,’ his father would ask me despondently at these sessions, ‘are we to do with those lives now that we have escaped with them?’ What indeed, except to draw pitiful pensions on the last Saturday of the month from my Treasury or to hope that little Mu’azzam would be selected when a bit older for a junior clerkship in my gift? Iqbal, that most admirably articulate voice of the Indo-Muslims in the twentieth century, has given expression to the melancholy of my hosts and all their class. I think of this couplet, much quoted, from his Bang-i-Dira (Song of the Highway) which I recall with ease but cannot render worthily: ‘Paint in all the colours, let me picture their array; Sadden me with stories, let me weep the vanished day.’ I must not lose my thread. I was saying that Delhi’s black record in the Indian Mutiny rankled with us badly. For a long while we gave scant encouragement to the town’s twin needs, which were therapy of soul and recovery of physical vigour. And although as time went on we relented, a whole generation had elapsed by then; so that it was only in Curzon’s viceroyalty that things really began to look up for Delhi. The Durbar he pressed for and held shortly after King Edward’s accession, the Coronation Durbar of 1903 (exactly one hundred years therefore after the Company’s troops had ‘taken’ Delhi) was to be a demonstration to all India of her unity. Now a Durbar in Muslim India like the ancient Sabha of her Hindu kings, was a royal audience granted at the palace, and the palace was located at the seat of government. Could Curzon, a stickler for etiquette, have ignored the implication? The published records do not support me, but I believe the ‘03 Durbar to have been an open hint—and the following eight years to have been years of expectancy. The blessing urbi et orbi is pronounced in Rome. Calcutta, the quondam village near the mouth of the Hoogli, had given us our foothold in Bengal, had rapidly become

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the convenient fulcrum across which to lay the levers which would heave our position up to its present level. But it was, all said and done, an upstart among cities. It was not the eternal city. Delhi was. I shake my head consequently when I read in the standard books of the ‘utter surprise to all’ caused by the announcement George V made to the people of Delhi at the Durbar of 1911. And, as it happens, I can weigh against the official histories what several Civilians, men thirty years older than myself, who were responsible for the local arrangements, have told me. The Emperor of India would be coming here to hold Durbar in the vast amphitheatre where tented canopies, graded platforms and a throne surmounted by a golden dome were already being raised by a horde of workmen; the entire lay-out being commanded from a vantage point on rising ground nicknamed ‘Tamasha Terrace’ by the locals. His Majesty would be recognized by the crown on his head. And on the morrow of all this, you could count on it, he would show himself to his subjects exactly as Shahjahan had done from the royal balcony which gives on the level stretch between the east wall of the Fort and the river Jumna. In the Indian cliché it was the Wheel of the Days that had come full circle. It was no surprise then (this is my version) when the Emperor on the elevated dais rose and in a resonant tone proclaimed the transference of the capital to Delhi. And twenty-four hours afterwards (again as confidently foreseen) in a gesture as dear to Hindu as to Muslim sentiment ‘showed himself to the people of his chosen city. If we would honour the practice of Delhi’s rajas and sultans as I traced it in the preamble of this chapter, we were not released from a further step. Next day but one the Sovereign took this when he laid the foundation of the New Capital ‘which’ he declared ‘will arise from where we now stand’. These last four words of his were not fulfilled to the letter in the face of subsequent technical advice, and some have fastened on this detail to bolster their theory that the whole business was thought up on the spur of the moment. The statement went the rounds, was even repeated in the House of Commons, that in the flurry and the scurry of the decision an old tombstone had been made to serve at the ceremony! In actual fact the stones used were from a mason’s yard off the Chandni Chowk, and had been carefully selected by my predecessor-in-office of the day. The apathy, and this is undeniable, of the crowd which had watched the state entry into Delhi on the day of H.M.’s arrival has similarly assisted the argument of total surprise. Improperly. Of course the event fell flat; the King had not been fittingly salaamed


for the very good reason that he had not been recognized. All Delhi had assumed that the King Emperor must enter its gates on the back of an elephant—and where was the elephant? I am quite sure the Deputy Commissioner was not consulted: even in my Bahraich, on some little occasion we celebrated there, I recall as Deputy Commissioner being told I must not head the procession on horseback, that would be infra-dig. So how in Indian eyes could a man in a white helmet and riding a charger with half-adozen others around him in white helmets and riding chargers, be the King Emperor? The Indian is good for a flutter on almost anything going. Among the litigants milling about outside my Cutcherry building near Kashmir Gate, shopkeepers from Sabzimandi or Paharganj or Sadar Bazar, cultivators in from Mahrauli perhaps or the Gurgaon border, or f rom Shahdara across the Jumna, as of ten as not it would be on the outcome of their case, but it would certainly be on something. Therefore I shall persist in maintaining that half Delhi made a little money that Durbar morning on what it took to be a pretty safe bet. The aroma of stateliness was in the air. 2. DELHI RECONNOITRED My mother had written in one of her letters asking if the Vicereine was still setting off each morning for New Delhi in flat-heeled shoes and carrying an attaché case and a thermos. The allusion was lost on me. At the date, I was entering my second winter out from home and the custom was to round up the young Civilians of the Province who had done twelve months in the country into a sort of Seminar and put them through a course of lectures planned as a reasoned résumé of the duties they had been picking up from their Collectors in their respective Districts and already, to a limited extent, discharging on their own. I am not sure that the Class was of the slightest value in terms of training; nevertheless it allowed us something that would not come again: life in the company of our own batch, kindred spirits almost without exception, with just enough in the way of shared experience to enable us to swap stories, just enough of us for polo in the afternoons three times a week. A carefree cold-season then, and in the tonic air of Moradabad with the distant snow-capped mountains as a back-drop. Christmas was at hand when my mother’s letter came, a break therefore was promised, and—well, I’d not set eyes on Delhi yet, so why not now? I might not have another chance for goodness knows how long. If ever…if ever.

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There was that proverb, wasn’t there? So off to Delhi I went, a lonely sightseer with a guide-book in his pocket. A great deal had taken place there quickly: New Delhi had been built; five square miles of it, a kind of Washington, a kind of Canberra—and yet quite different from either. It was the newest city on the face of the globe and mother’s query, obscure as it was to the profane crowd of which I formed part, was only the littlest bit ‘dated’. Until just a short while previously the Viceroy had been residing in a Lodge, a mansion dignified enough but deficient in the amenities we all of us regard as minimal nowadays, beyond the Ridge in (if the expression be intelligible) the modern Old Delhi; and ‘Her Ex.’, a Spartan wife, could until very lately indeed have been seen making her way daily to what was to become the Viceroy’s House situated six miles off. New Delhi, although largely occupied by the late ‘twenties, was not formally opened until 1930. For centuries and centuries, as I have explained already, there had been at any given stage both a New and an Old Delhi: ‘new’ meaning precisely what it said; and ‘old’ indicating, if with much less precision, what had until yesterday been popularly designated ‘new’. We have seen how the sumptuous city of Shahjahan converging on the Fort, which was the Imperial Palace, was New Delhi once. And obviously the ‘Civil Lines’ and all that area round about the Kashmir Gate was a New Delhi to the British who, soldiers and civilians, were stationed there up to and long after the Mutiny, and to whom ‘Old Delhi’ for all practical purposes signified Shahjahanabad. Just one more word on this. Those famous Daniell prints which have conjured up the Delhi monuments for stay-at-homes and evoked them for ‘Sahibs’ ever since the French Revolution until now—I saw some on sale quite recently in Dover—were chiefly of sites near the Delhi that was old in 1789. I do not have to trust to memory: on the wall of my room where I write hangs an aquatint ‘Drawn and engraved by Thos. & Wm. Daniell entitled “A Baolee near the Old City of Delhi”’. A baolee—seemingly there was no call to interpret this to fashionable Londoners—is in Hindi an immense masonry well, rectangular, with a broad staircase down to the water, and with landing steps and capacious chambers in the flanking walls. Intensely Hindu therefore, redolent of preMuslim India—and nowhere near the Delhi called ‘Old’ in my time.


3. TO THE PROVINCE THAT WAS A DISTRICT Since that reconnoitre of mine a decade has slid past. Hatless, weary from the dusty, jolting route, I am at the wheel of my Buick outside a certain house on the sloping approach to the Ridge, waiting for somebody to come out. An oil-painting of that house is in front of me while I am writing this, so whenever I wish I can see the drive as it curves between flower-beds towards the verandah. At the gateway I can make out one of my sentries, smart in khaki and red, who seems to be chatting idly with a cultivator, and I’m sure that often used to happen when I was not looking. And if I cannot see, I can visualize, standing at that very same spot, dressed very like that cultivator but minus the turban—Gandhi. His rickety Ford has broken down exactly opposite my entrance and the amiable Pyarelal, his private secretary, has run in to seek assistance. But that story is for a later page. I am waiting for somebody to come out. A raw-boned giant does so, without animation. A Jat, as I can tell at a glance. He is wearing a scarlet redingote, ankle-length, loose fitting but held at the waist by a wide decorative sash. His great gaunt fingers, raised to an incipient yawn, sketch instead the barest outline of a salute. ‘His Honour is not at home,’ he says. Then airily, ‘No harm if you come back next week.’ This was Delhi, not Mirzapur or Bahraich, not the ‘Bogley Wallah’ of fiction where a white face was the object of unfeigned and gaping astonishment. Europeans were everywhere— often enough there would be one in the anteroom at this very address, waiting his turn for an interview. And another thing. How could the incoming Chief Magistrate of Delhi Province, the President ex officio of the Delhi Municipal Council be at the wheel of a car, and hatless too? The term ‘Delhi Province’ has slipped in unbidden. I must clarify. Delhi Province was not a province like the others. It stood to those—without pressing this comparison too hard—as Washington D.C. stands to the United States of America. Nor, if a District in its administrative anatomy, was it a district quite like the others (four hundred or so, let us recall) composing British India. Qua ‘Zila’ it was tiny, a quarter of what you would expect; and easily the half of its small population was urban. But qua Imperial Capital, of course, its cachet was palpable and unmatched.

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I had arrived straight from leave, my second visit home in ten years of service, and had nothing with me but a suit-case. My things, my naukar-chākar or ‘domestics’ (save for my bearer Kalloo and my Gurkha chauffeur tittering on the back seat), my horses, were following by train from the United Provinces. I knew Austin Layard to be married; I could not know that he would be so courteous to his bachelor successor as to vacate the residence in advance after despatching his household effects by rail to his own Province of origin, and to install himself with his wife and two daughters in the Cecil Hotel down the road, from where they could perform the round of farewells. Nor was he for his part to guess what my dispositions would be. There was always a curiously nonchalant attitude to housing amongst the servants of the Raj which amazed the newcomer from England or the visitor of foreign nationality. One such observer aptly suggested a tin bath-tub as the emblem of Indo-British society—flanked, as supporters, by a bhishti bowed under a goatskin and a sweeper emptying a crude commode. I have said, or anyhow hinted, that those insignia were appropriate to the Viceroy’s Lodge itself on the other side of the Ridge in the Delhi of my mother’s recollection. But I must be honest: the residence outside which I had turned up with so little formality, my home for the coming years, situated on the hither slope of the Ridge as you approach it from Qudsia Gardens, is one of those in which from time to time may be heard a hygienic rush of water. And of a piece with that easy-going acceptance of early Victorian standards of sanitation in each succeeding home, went a calm contemplation of the stresses foreseeable in each succeeding job. In retrospect this strikes me as strange, at the time it never did. Frequently you did not so much as meet your predecessor; and I do not recall telling a successor what he would have on his plate—or his asking my advice. There was no hand over of the charge in any practical sense: the code of official behaviour did not provide for this. Perhaps it was for the best; after all we were only behaving in the manner the Viceroys themselves—so far as I have gathered from reasonably pure sources of information—were inclined to do. Delhi I was saying was a Province coterminous with a District, but a District sui generis. In districts up and down the subcontinent the I.C.S. officer would be darting out from headquarters into the tahsils all the year round, and in winter would stay out under canvas for months at a stretch. In Delhi, wherever I went I would be back by nightfall: nor, nine times out of ten, would my destination have been a village; it would have been


that other and very new City in which the central bureaucracy dwelt in spiritual detachment and social aloofness from the India it governed. In twelve minutes from my own front gate I could find myself bowling along a stately boulevard 150 feet wide, lined with three rows of trees and climbing gently to the acropolis of a colossal planned area that measured five square miles and was larger, thus, than the Washington D.C. to which I have likened it. If I remember aright, New Delhi supported about 65,000 souls; these in such few and such homogeneous layers that the population might be shown diagrammatically as a flat triangle; at the apex the Viceroy and his household; then my brother Civilians in the Secretariat plus the sedentary Soldiers of G.H.Q., together with the wives and families of this combined group; then the clerical personnel of the various departments and of course their families too; and finally the shopkeepers and the domestic servants to cater for those named. A city dedicated to its important self must of its nature ooze selfimportance, and in New Delhi you could not but sense the distance at which India was being kept. Nonetheless, in so far as it was a component of an Indian District New Delhi could be brought down to Indian earth with a bump, for every district was in bloodrelationship with every other district. In this particular one I was as much the ‘Zila Sahib’ as I had been in, say, the idyllic Bahraich— even if I would hardly be so addressed hereabouts unless perhaps in fun. Of course the bureaucrats and their entourage were relatively law-abiding, not given to communal fights; and, solid by definition, they had nothing to gain from demonstrations of their solidarity in the streets. I would sometimes rein up in my rides on the Ridge and gaze across to New Delhi. Whether the principal buildings were classic or Indian in architecture, or these two hyphenated, I could never entirely make up my mind. But the residential area on the lower approach, nestling there under neat foliage, oh, that was pure Garden City with nothing oriental about it. The mark of the Indian city is variety; the mark of this one was uniformity: a congenial company of highly professional bureaucrats lived there engaged in the same occupations, exhibiting the same tastes. No, they were not unruly; but they made up for it, as I quickly learned, by their miscellaneous wants. They wanted a gunlicence or a civil marriage, or a passport or redress for the punch on the nose a tonga-wallah had given some Madrasi clerk in the office - and they turned to me. I was a commissioner for oaths and—this happened once when a plane crashed at New Delhi Airport—a coroner. I might be able to trace their lost dog; or recommend an area where

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a day’s shooting might be had—and of course go out myself and fix things with the natives in advance. But I could be tiresome, too. Drive your car recklessly (and the temptation was great) along those straight vistas, and you would see: my police would report you and I would not go out myself; I would let you take your chance before an extremely junior magistrate over there; my sole concern with the proceedings being to ensure that you did not awe him by your rank. For it was an awesome society, recollect, this of the New Delhi bureaucrats, awesome and influential. You really did know the Home Secretary, you did not have to pretend to the policeman. You could even tell yourself—and you were not far wrong—that the Viceroy himself was one of you, he too was a top official. Surrounded he might be by more than regal pomp and circumstance in a great palace, but he spent most of his time at departmental business just as you did. 4. APROPOS OF VICEROYS AND VICEREINES I am coming here to what I meant when I implied that my District was not quite so idyllic as Bahraich. What is a still youngish magistrate—I was not quite thirty-seven—to do when the wives of the European Sergeants of Police crowd into his room and tearfully beseech him to require the Viceroy to observe the speed limit? The provincial capitals of Upper India, and a few of the larger cities such as Allahabad or Cawnpore, would usually have one or two Sergeants in Police Lines. These men were invariably recruited from British units completing their stint in India, noncommissioned officers finishing their seven years in the Army who, having met the ‘domiciled’ girl of their choice, had decided to stay. They were invaluable in the rifle range and, when from cavalry regiments, in the riding school. Now in Delhi their number was considerably larger, for we used them not merely for training in Lines but as motor cycle escorts for the Viceroy on his routine outings. Ceremonial progress in the State Carriage was gentle, being controlled by the trotting horses of the Bodyguard, but the career of the everyday Rolls Royce was not supposed to be hampered by its outriders. And of late His Excellency had been inclined to scorch. Not long ago a Sergeant had come off his machine at one of those round points on the central Mall; however, he had been none too competent, I had gathered. But now here was another victim, a very bad tumble this time with injuries. And had I not myself tightened the traffic regulations in


New Delhi, and come down on all who defied them? It was true. Those smiling prospects that tempted the motorist were treacherous. The diagonal approaches on either side of the arterial roads, which were a feature of the lay-out, were screened by verdure; from them a bullock cart might lurch inconsequently into the fairway, its driver sound asleep. ‘Can’t you do something, Sir, and we at our wits’ end?’ It was not one of those perplexities in which a compromise offers itself. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I can.’ The promise kept me awake half that night—and in the event proved unimaginably easy to fulfil. My mother had died while I was yet at Bahraich and it saddened me now that I could not report such stories to cap that one of hers I have mentioned. They would have brought her a glow of pleasure (particularly since I had been at pains in each case to cast myself as the hero). Here are two more anecdotes of the Viceregal milieu: like the one I have just recounted they go down on paper no w, I believe, for the first time. Before the War but when the horizon was growing inky black with the menace of Armageddon, Dr Schacht, Minister (or more accurately ex-Minister at the date) of Economy in the Reich, paid a visit to India; as a tourist to the best of my recollection, but too much water has gone over the dam for the declared purpose of his being in our midst to matter in the slightest. I knew the Vicereine had a much prized lady’s maid of Austrian nationality to whom she felt peculiarly drawn. There was a German maid-servant at Buckingham Palace itself at the time— and I do not doubt more than one of Hitler’s generals had English governesses in their homes teaching their children. All that. Nonetheless it was clear that a conflict between private inclination and public duty would develop sooner or later. It did so with suddenness. It must have been either near the beginning or at the end of the summer season that Denys Kilburn, who was Delhi’s chief of police, had this tit-bit for me. ‘What do you think of this, Hubert? Someone has the notion that friend Hjalmar and the Austrian Mädchen may have had a rendezvous in Simla. In a tea-shop.’ ‘Good Lord! But “notion”, “may”…Everybody, every European goes out to tea in a hill station and to the same tea-shop because there is only one in the place. Sounds liks I.B. (Intelligence Bureau) stuff to me.’ ‘It is.’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I’m in two minds. Each was being shadowed…yet a tête-à-tête… I really don’t know. But doubt falls on the girl from now on, that’s certain.’

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Denys was right. The only certainty was the doubt. ‘Has Her Ex. been told?’ ‘Not yet, but will be. And I hope I don’t have to be present.’ ‘What a hope! You won’t be let off, not if I can help it.’ I could not have done without Denys either then or at any time in the Delhi days. Winchester and the Grenadier Guards had not perhaps left their conventional imprint on the eccentric bachelor and social recluse. With a wit that was a joy to his syces and the sweeper, he could be devastatingly sharp with the toffs of bureaucracy, and, to be candid, the latter were not always appreciative of this monk whose use of the rapier was so ready and so superb. When it came to their wives, however—and these, if a meiosis be allowed, counted in New Delhi—there were few who did not consider his company, supposing them clever enough to have secured it, less than delectable. We did not talk of a ‘pushover’ in those distant years but that is exactly what it was going to be. I could sit back and watch it happen. ‘Best to try it out on Ruby Hill (Her Excellency’s secretary),’ I suggested, ‘and win a potential ally in limine.’ In limine—that is rather the way Denys and I did talk, I’m afraid. The little drama (for it merits the name) was acted out as I felt confident it would be; a scene of understandable incredulity; a scene of touching loyalty; a scene of resigned acceptance; and each in such rapid sequence as to bring the bothersome business to a quick close. On an earlier page I suggested that you can predict what an animal, so-called wild, will do in a given situation. My second anecdote does not belie this proposition, it is simply that we did not grasp the situation to which the animal was responsive. On the outer side of Viceroy’s House the confines of New Delhi are quickly reached: almost in a minute you are on the edge of a rather drab landscape intersected by a few nullahs, dotted by a few patches of scrub. Not all, not much of India is Tigerland as you might infer from reading the romantic novelists, and here the cover was just rewarding enough to satisfy the occasional jackal. My astonishment was therefore great to get news, khabar in our jargon, one winter’s morning that a patrol circling somewhere at the back of Viceroy’s House at daybreak had been hailed by a peasant shouting ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ The man’s name and village had been taken, and I decided to question him myself. When I arrived at the place I found a fellow cultivator of his had also sighted the tiger, but my interrogation of the pair bore no fruit. In Mirzapur, in Bahraich, the cultivators would have known what to notice and hence what to tell me: was it the sinuous glide of the long tail


when both limbs on either side move almost in unison, or was it the deliberate prowl in quest for food? Signs were there, perhaps, of a dust bath taken in the powdered soil of a cart track, signs of scratched up soil not quite concealing the tarry, viscid dung? Restive movements of the beasts in village so-and-so, and the staring fear in their eyes? Of these and such things, nothing. For to all that belongs to the forest, men hereabouts were strangers. ‘Have you missed any cattle—or a goat, perchance?’ ‘No, Sahib.’ ‘How do you know it was a tiger?’ ‘By its stripes.’ ‘Where was it going?’ ‘Following the bed of that nullah.’ ‘Let’s do the same.’ Alas, no pug marks. ‘How far did you keep it in view?’ ‘As far as the Viceroy’s House.’ ‘Went in, I suppose,’ I said unkindly. This we cannot tell you true.’ I can hear their simple Hindi now. When I got back I gave a ring to H.E.’s Military Secretary. ‘Here’s something for a sticky dinner party. You’ve a tiger crouching behind your back wall—if he is not already having a drink at one of those fountains in the Mughal Garden.’ We hung up laughingly, and I was not prepared for it when M.S. rang me back in twenty minutes. It had crossed my mind that the tiger might possibly have escaped from a cage…and yet that was improbable too. Many rajas kept private menageries but they did not travel around with them. Or could it have come south from the Siwalik Hills? In the year I spent at Dehra Dun as Assistant Superintendent I had heard of tiger crossing from the jungle into that low range. But what could have induced it to trek —I had laid my ruler to the wall map—another ninety miles via Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar to this unpromising larder? Wherever he’s from, I thought, the poor creature must eventually provide food for himself—or for carrion crows. And either way my people would report. I could leave it to them. But here now was H.E. ‘extremely intrigued’ and ‘remarking half-jokingly’, M.S. said, that he would love to go down as the Viceroy who bagged a tiger from his study window; and ‘impatient of further word’ from me. I would have to move f ast. I ordered a party of Mounted Police to proceed there, to search the hollows and the brushwood, to miss no scrap of natural or man-made cover. We drew a blank. But next morning—twenty-four hours, therefore, from the alert—a

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villager came across the prints of paws; not far, either, from the ‘House’. I have perhaps not mentioned that my motor-car’s number plate in Delhi was D.I.; this absolved me as Zila Sahib from practising what I preached as Chief Magistrate, and I was very quickly examining those ‘pugs’, and—having had my gentle tick-off—letting the Viceroy see them for himself. They were on the gradient down into a depression where the surface, being sheltered from the noon sun, was not so hard baked; they were badly defined but each compensated somewhat for the imperfection of the others. Lord Linlithgow had a habit of supporting his chin with his fist and turning his shoulders as well as his head when he addressed you. ‘Smallish, I’d say. Might tape nearer 8ft. than 9ft.’ ‘Tigress possibly,’ I contributed, ‘or if a male, then immature.’ But where was the kill? I could not help scanning the sky for vultures. By the third or fourth morning—although in my experience it takes a good deal longer than that for an incapacitated tiger to starve —I began to think we could call it a day. And not without a distinct sense of relief by then, for I did not want an anti-climax. Shankar, the cartoonist of the Congressbacked Hindustan Times, had been cruel to H.E. latterly, and certain of my callers, old style gentlemen representing their Wards on the Municipal Council, would emphasize that this sort of thing was most ‘unseemly’ in Indian eyes. I can refresh my memory because Shankar had presented me with a bound collection of his work and I have it on my desk as I write. I did not (and do not) consider his caricatures to have been guilty of bad taste by the laxer standards of the West; this gifted and, when you met him, quite charming man was doing with remarkable flair what his employers paid him to do. Nonetheless there came back to me one of the illustrations in the copy of Tartarin de Tarascon we had had at home; it was of the kind a child looks at and remembers his whole life through. But now it was not Alphonse Daudet’s celebrated chasseur tarasconnais, girt with accoutrements, that I saw trying conclusions with the emaciated toothless cringing waif from a bankrupt circus nearby. It was a Viceroy plastered with plaques, a robed Proconsul responsible for the continent supporting our British Indian subjects in their hundreds of millions, who was aiming point blank at a mangy little black-andyellow barred cat on the doorstep of his home. It ended there. Never a second glimpse of the Tiger of New Delhi; never a kill; never a carcase for the vultures to peck at and disembowel; nothing. Only, I fear, a twinge of disappointment in a Viceroy’s breast.


5. HOME OF THE VICEROYS The inconsequent trail has led to the doorstep of the home of the Viceroys. Lutyens had planned the entire lay-out of India’s new capital, as L’Enfant before him had planned his on the banks of the Potomac, but he had not himself been responsible for everything that had risen upon the site. The design of certain of the central buildings—such as the two Secretariat blocks flanking the processional way and also the Council House where the Legislative Assembly and the Native Rulers would sit—had been entrusted to his colleague, Sir Herbert Baker. But the Palace was his own conception and execution, and is fit to rank as the supreme achievement of this prince of architects. It has had its hostile critics; but having looked at it very nearly daily for seven consecutive years I can only conclude that these are hard to please. To me it seems that a classic severity of outline receives its salutary reproof in a richness of detail: that if you complain that the effect is too Italian or too something else for the environment, what about all those Jalis or perforated screens, those Chhajjas or jutting masonry lips that cheat the sun, those Chhatris or umbrellas that by tradition were held above royal heads— architectural features surely as Indian as can be? That I was slow to reach this judgment will be seen in a minute, and even today I have lingering reserves about Herbert Baker’s contribution. But when I recall the broad boulevards that link so happily this New Delhi of ours with the Delhis that others before us had built and abandoned, and especially the grand prospect called Kingsway that ties the Viceroy’s House to the Purana Qila, then all is forgiven. We have to do here, I believe, with something that ranks among the most romantic of our imperial projects. Throughout the decade which ended in 1930 when New Delhi was ‘opened’, three thousand or so masons would be shaping red sandstone from the quarries of Dholpur, raising a city with the very freestone of which Agra and Fatehpur Sikri and Shahjahanabad had been built, a city worthy to succeed those. And does it not ennoble the endeavour that we built what we knew we would surrender? ‘Do you live in New Delhi or Old Delhi?’ My neighbour at table had opened with the dead-end gambit I was learning to dread. ‘Old Delhi thank God!’ I replied. I had been looking forward to spending the afternoon differently; at home; in Old Delhi. I ought instead to have felt sympathy with my hosts whose social obligations were so immeasurably more burdensome than my own.

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They were compelled to give two official dinner parties a week and two official luncheons, and those dinners might easily run to eighty or ninety covers. Such larger parties would be held in the Banqueting Hall and preceded by an elaborate ceremony: you would all be lined up in two rows facing each other; curtains would at a signal be opened at the end of the room to reveal the Viceroy and Vicereine standing side by side; the National Anthem would be played by the band in the adjoining apartment; and Their Excellencies then stepped forward to meet their guests. And of course there would have been a seating plan on an easel in the vestibule, and an A.D.C. posted alongside it whose duty it was to ensure in advance that you could get yourself to your proper place without a pilot. Lutyens had restored great and historic castles in his time and understood that the grandeur of palaces should not stop at the portals but penetrate and pervade the interior. The Banqueting Hall, the Throne beneath the Dome, the Ballroom with its chandeliers and ornate ceiling—wherever you turned was evidence of his minute attention to the décor. He had even, you felt, allowed in imagination for those who would complete it—the colourful army, resplendent in their turbans and skirted red coats, now padding barefoot over these thick carpets and glistening floors or sitting cross-legged and silent at intervals along the passages. Today’s was a small lunch, mid-way between an official and a family occasion. I ought to have felt honoured, not grumpy, what was the matter with me? ‘Actually I knew you lived in Old Delhi,’ my neighbour resumed. ‘That is why they put me next to you. I want to go there.’ I looked at him more closely. His manner was somehow impish and he was very old—by the standards we had in the Raj. The Finance Member, now, across the table—what was he? Fifty, fiftyone? And H.E., I suppose about that too. But my interlocutor could give the seniors in that company fifteen or twenty years. He had by this time torn the back off his menu card; his pencil was poised and by the tilt of his head, he was evidently about to record the profile of the rather formidable memsahib seated opposite. ‘Well, quite easily arranged. Name your day and hour. I’m not like the slaves over here anchored to office from 10.30 to 4.30.’ Meanwhile he was advancing by lightning strokes with his mischievous likeness, and I curse myself that it did not occur to me to bespeak it there and then in exchange for a conducted tour of Shahjahan’s City. Only then did it even occur to me to squint at the place card of this elderly jester: ‘Sir Edwin Lutyens.’


Well, well, I thought, a model of how not to address a man who has built a city—thanking God I didn’t live in it. Had I only known it, I could have taken comfort in what he himself had once said of Simla. When he lifted up his eyes unto the hills what came to him was not help but shock. ‘If I was told the monkeys had built it,’ he had exclaimed, ‘then one could only say: what wonderful monkeys —they must be shot in case they do it again.’ But to return to our lunch. I found myself confessing that what I disliked about New Delhi boiled down to its newness—which, given time, would take care of itself. ‘Ah, but would not all kinds of horrid accretions spoil it, though, one day?’ he mused. ‘But there is one thing more,’ I hammered away at it. ‘Nobody has had any yesterday here or looks forward to any tomorrow here. You can be a Delhi-wallah, you can’t be a New Delhi-wallah.’ I was being more ponderous than the occasion warranted, but happily he cut me short. ‘You know why I’m here? No? Then I’ll tell you. To inspect the recent vandalism committed in these halls, and vet the work of restoration. It was outrageous what she did, that woman, outrageous. She had no right.’ He was alluding to the previous Vicereine who had made tasteless additions to his designs in the State rooms. ‘But my mind is now at rest,’ he sighed contentedly. Indeed he was already revolving in it a little dedication for a memento in the shape of a glass goblet he intended presenting to his hostess. The latter delicately forbore from bruiting it abroad at the time, but the family has since released it. So perhaps I can be pardoned for citing it: To Her Excellency The Marchioness Linlithgow Whose Presence dignifies Whose sovereign touch repairs the wounds Inflicted by mistaken zeal upon The Viceroy’s House at Delhi. and this was signed ‘By him who has most reason to be grateful.’

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6. MY DELHI But let me get back, as I did every evening when I had been out, to that Delhi I preferred to think of as mine. If I had drawn up a balance sheet of my situation it would have read like this. On the debit side: no camping, that would be the prime sacrifice; no pigsticking on Sunday mornings as, say, at Agra; no ‘station’ polo either; instead, the chairmanship of sundry committees handling matters on which I felt absurdly ill-qualified to give sane guidance, such as that of the Zenana Hospital for Women or that of the Orphanage. But then my entries would have moved across to the right, where there was much compensation for loss. I was as free as I had been in any of my Districts for the excellent reason that I was still in one. In a Chief Commissioner’s Province under the Home Department of the Government of India I was no more subject to controls than in the major Province from which I had come. To miss this is to miss the flavour of the I.C.S. in the Districts. Five or six miles away in the Secretariat I might have had finicky bosses telling me what to do—worse, telling me what not to do. I might have had on my desk that delicious circular which reminded every superintendent of a department that it was his duty to note on the file all the reasons for opposing what was put forward. And, further, I relied on a picked Indian staff: there being no provincial cadre, my officers came on loan from elsewhere (in practice, because of the language consideration from the Punjab or else the United Provinces) and were, as I say, picked. Now this Delhi I am describing was also in its turn two territories for purposes of administration: the old and the less old: the former being the Municipality over whose council I presided in the Town Hall (I shall come to that lower down); and the latter, known as the Notified Area, comprising the Civil Lines which the British had laid out and occupied while yet a Mughal King sat on the Delhi throne. Since I was President of the Notified Area Committee too, I had an excuse perhaps for prefixing the possessive ‘my’ to the Delhi which was other than the new imperial capital. Turn left from my entrance and you went through the Kashmir Gate to the Cutcherry; which housed my huge antiquated court-room with its quiet gallery behind, from whose windows stretched an uninterrupted view to the Jumna. Continue on your way, and you would soon find yourself in front of the Red Fort on which the whole of Shahjahan’s city, as I have described it above, converged. Or if instead of turning left from my door posts you


went straight up the incline, you were on the Ridge in two minutes, where once upon a time Kings had gone a-hunting. The black partridge called there even now; I would often hear him on my morning rides. A tantrack went along the crest, winding in and out among the boulders and the scrub between Hindu Rao’s House and Flagstaff Tower and other sites associated with the Mutiny. And if I passed the emplacements, still visible, of the batteries that had bombarded the Mughal City, I must drop on Cavalry Lines (Delhi University today) where my own horses were probably the last to be seen and certainly the last to be stabled. Committee-work, I was saying, took up much time. But some of it, at least, was sheer enjoyment: I was concerned, for instance, with the All India Cattle Show and the annual Delhi Horse Show; while the Hardinge Library Committee, whose President I was, opened doors of quite another sort which must otherwise have remained closed to me. The variety and intrinsic interest of these calls, then, compensated for the lack of touring under canvas that was so central a feature of normal district life. But I must come to my principal committee which was the council of the Delhi municipality. On taking up my office I believe I would have placed this item without much hesitation in the left-hand column. I grew to place it unhesitatingly over to the right. I will try to explain why. In the field of local self-government India had for quite a period now been ridden on a loose rein, and the big cities I had known were administered by their own elected representatives sitting under an elected chairman. In this particular, as in so much besides, we managed differently in Delhi. I think I am correct in asserting that nowhere else in all India did an I.C.S. man combine the functions of chief magistrate and mayor. In theory I might have to arrest, try and imprison all my councillors! In practice my anxiety in that direction was negligible; the occasional scuffle on the floor of the House provoked by the heat of debate invariably ended without bodily hurt or lasting indignation. I did indeed more than once have to ask f or a strong detachment of mounted police to cordon off the Town Hall, but that was to hold back organized gatherings of would-be intruders and not to coerce the councillors. On the contrary the last thing the latter wanted was uproar—they wanted their oratory to be heard. The D.M.C. was a deliberative assembly; the seating in the unusually fine chamber, its furnishings, its rules of procedure were those of parliament anywhere, and those whom the Wards had chosen saw and fancied themselves as parliamentarians. It was the easier for them to do this in that their speeches were reported not simply in the vernacular press of Upper India but in

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such national newspapers as The Statesman and the Hindustan Times. This rather exaggerated spot-lighting of our proceedings, while it unquestionably raised our tone and improved our style, encouraged a disproportionate output of words. A member representing a predominantly Muslim quarter was expected by his constituents to perorate, before sitting down, on the abiding iniquities of Hindu tyranny, a Congress-minded member felt compelled, irrespective of the question tabled, to end with a gibe at the Government and something even nastier about the Muslim League. The President of course was empowered to control extravagances of the sort, but the President was also there to take the sense of the House…and this manifestly was how the House wanted it. If I remember my Roman History, the Senate always humoured the Elder Cato: whatever the motion, Carthage had to be destroyed. Nor, to be candid, once I had got the hang of them and slipped into the mood of them, would I have missed these fulldress debates for worlds. The Delhi men spoke the King’s Urdu still—and the language of the D.M.C. was Urdu (here at any rate was something above the mêlée, the priceless patrimony of Muslims and Hindus equally) and it was an illuminating experience to listen, and, with the passage of the years, to appreciate or at all events begin to appreciate how the more accomplished among our speakers—an Asaf Ali, say, of the Congress or a Harish Chandra of the Hindu Mahasabha (I deliberately select two who exhibited the extremes of political and religious fervour)—handled this instrument at their common command. Where else but in the Delhi Town Hall would I have had the chance? Here, then, was compensation for the more homely garrulity of elders at the Chawpal of some village in a rural District. And precisely as I might on my winter tours in such a setting have accompanied the headman ‘to look at the spot’ (that was the invariable demand in the countryside) where something had gone wrong or, alternatively, it was feared might go wrong, so nowadays I would visit the particular Ward in the borough, the member at my side as cicerone, and a pack of his closest supporters hemming us in, all talking at once. I will not pretend that excursions of the kind taught me much about the gullies and the bazaars of Delhi that I might not have picked up just as quickly and less laboriously with my own officers for tutors. But I do insist that I enjoyed a special relationship with the city councillors which derived from my status as Mayor. Not a few of the councillors were openly hostile to British rule: one, the Asaf Ali mentioned above, was actually a member of the Congress Working


Committee; another, Shankar Lal was a mill-owner worshipping both Mammon and the Mahatma; and a third, Deshbandhu Gupta, was editor of a virulent vernacular daily called Tej; and so forth. Yet I was in and out of their homes on occasion, would receive their Christmas greetings, their polite and even friendly letters. So all in all, I could be forgiven for telling myself that the plusses in Delhi outweighed the minusses.

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11 WHEN WAR CAME

To convey the part played by India in the Second World War is as much beyond my purpose as it would be beyond my power. I shall only paint my own small picture of the Delhi I knew during those years. But because a picture takes its meaning from what lies outside its f rame let me just consider where India stood in our Empire— for her position had been gradually altering—when war came. Counting from the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms about which, as I have told on an earlier page, Dr. G.P.Gooch had done his best to enlighten me at a week-end house-party, it was now twenty years. The Reforms had aimed at the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the Empire, and the Act embodying them had provided for a review of progress in a decade. The Nationalists let out an indignant cry at such slow going, and to appease them the review was in the event undertaken rather sooner. It went by the name of the Simon Report, after the distinguished parliamentarian who presided over the Commission which drew it up. It was acknowledged to be masterly and before very long consigned to a dusty shelf in the library of British political science. I remember two things connected with that Report: being told by Malcolm Hailey, the Governor of my province, that I ought to read it; being told a little later, by a Hindu politician who had been in contact with Simon, that no Indian could meet him without disliking him. Founded on a single and accidental meeting years afterwards in England my own impression was of handsome unsmiling features and a most searching dark-eyed glance; of a cold man. I think I saw what my Indian interlocutor had meant, but to be fair there is no evidence that Simon disliked those who disliked him. Maurice Baring hit him off in this clerihew: Sir John Simon Is not like Timon;

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Timon hated mankind, Simon doesn’t mind. I skip the details of what came next: two Round Table Conferences assembled in London and dispersed; a specific pledge to work towards Dominion Status for India was given; and then, a peak in an undulating landscape, the 1935 Act was passed. This contemplated an initial stage of practical autonomy in the Provinces which would henceforward have cabinet ministers responsible to elected assemblies; and, as a second and culminating stage, a Federal Government composed of the representatives of ‘British’ India and ‘Princely’ Indiacon jointly. The joker in this pack was not hidden: the Governor General in Council would retain the portfolios of Defence and External Affairs. Churchill denounced the whole thing as ‘a gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work, a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies’. Others, and these included the Viceroy charged with its implementation, thought it a brave attempt to lead India to independence as a united country within the imperial fold. Now the initial or ‘provincial’ part of the Act had been brought into effect more or less smoothly; and a Congress which at the first blush condemned it as a ‘Charter of Slavery’ had up on reflexion decided to play—and gone forward to win the elections in six or seven out of India’s eleven provinces. But the alluring rainbow of Federation receded. The Congress Party was to boggle at the withholding of those two key departments of Defence and External Affairs; the Muslims were to grow from now on increasingly apprehensive of Hindu majority rule; the Princes were to cling to their prerogative—which was to dress by the right and stand smartly to attention—without budging. So far as stage two of the Act was concerned the prospect was not simply bleak, it was blank. To the nationalists, Defence was a portfolio which ought to be theirs; to the man in the bazaar or village it was not a subject of discussion, nor of thought even. But if you did ask about it, and well you might as the spectre of war drew closer and closer, what was the answer? In 1939 the Indian Army numbered about 150, 000 and there were besides something like 50,000 British troops in the country. During the previous twenty years, which were ones of mounting political fever, we had in fact been steadily reducing the armed forces, and this was not so paradoxical as it might appear. The Indian Army, we must remember, was successfully insulated from all taint of politics, and to reinforce the civil arm in policing the subcontinent its strength was adequate. Defence,


however, was another matter. Could we be happy, on the basis of the figures just cited, in assuring our Indian subjects that they might sleep secure in their beds each night because the Union Jack would flutter at the masthead as usual when the sun was up? It was not merely that this army was smaller than it had been in 1914; this army had no armoured divisions and no up-to-date weapons such as sub-machine guns and anti-tank guns. This army had virtually no air support. It was not merely that we were bluffing the Indians —we had bluffed ourselves. I am sure I was among those who would have rounded on any doleful Jeremiah who had dared to insinuate that there was no longer any such thing as The Thin Red Line holding our Empire together. But had the accent perhaps moved from red coats to blue jackets? Not a bit of it. I believe I am correct in stating that with twelve months or so between us and Armageddon the Admiral commanding-in-chief responsible for India’s maritime frontiers and for the safety of the intense shipping in and out of ports of which Bombay and Calcutta were only the greatest, had no minesweepers, no shore batteries, no searchlights. Today this is all so incredible that one is shy of putting it on paper for fear that memory has played a mischievous trick. It seems worth while, then, quoting one item of the kind for which a document happens to be in front of me and will speak. In July 1939 the Government of India received a request from the Chiefs of Staff in London for the loan of India’s Anti-Aircraft Battery. ‘Loan’ is lovely in the context: the image you form is of a pair of rather stiff ladies, grand but on their uppers, the one getting impressive invitations but with no tiara and the other with the tiara but no invitations. The Viceroy’s reply to the Secretary of State was: ‘We shall, I feel certain, come under sufficiently heavy criticism here if the emergency finds us with one A.A. Battery only. If it finds us with none, the position would be difficult to a degree.’ Lord Linlithgow when he entered public life had not deprived the world of a dramatist. But then to dramatize was not the function of a Viceroy, and particularly of this one who had been brought so uncomfortably close to the Indian realities of 1939. His style, admittedly, was not to everybody’s liking. It was not to Mr Attlee’s. The Leader of the Opposition repeatedly taxed him in the Commons with his lack of ‘imaginative insight’. One rejoinder to that accusation I heard in

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Delhi, too far from Westminster unfortunately to be audible to Attlee, came from an unaccustomed quarter. G.D.Birla, the millionaire industrialist and financial backer of the Congress, was not a Delhi man, but he had a mansion in the new imperial capital and I would come across him occasionally—and find him, incidentally, one of the easiest of all the enemies of the British Raj to discuss politics with. I can hear him speaking of the members of the choir of which Attlee was at that time chorus master—and I think he had met a good number of them in London—and saying: ‘I am glad we have Linlithgow as Viceroy rather than Attlee or any of that Labour lot’ And of course you could hardly visualize Attlee buying a large horse in England in preparation for his high office and taking it to the zoo in Regent’s Park to accustom it to elephants. Or, arrived in India, putting on a white helmet and a black frock coat to receive the Royal Salute astride this swaggering creature. Or, indeed, leading the way to the dinner-table at Viceroy’s House to the rousing strains of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. In any event, whether on the target or going wide, the shots from the Labour Opposition in the House of Commons were from popguns. The criticism, fair or unfair, was conventional and only amounted to this, that the Viceroy ought to be getting on with Federation faster. Churchill’s private opposition was far more dangerous: his wish was to stymie the whole plan. The Princes, as I said, were supposed to accede to the Federation, and there was he with his chin well down into his wing collar warning them against it. ‘I should be ready,’ he growled, ‘to take on my own shoulders the responsibility of persuading them to stand out of it’ By 1939 it was clear that the Princes had been alerted. Blame was later laid on Linlithgow for failing to press ahead while the going was good. But if the reasons I have set out are accepted, it never was good. Be that as it may, there was something else now to attend to, more urgent than Federation. 1. SEPTEMBER 1939 In recounting that little episode of the Tiger of New Delhi in my last chapter I mentioned that the Viceroy suffered from immobility of the neck muscles. I omitted to explain that this disability was the legacy of polio in boyhood. It was of course a gift to Shankar the cartoonist, and none was more ready to laugh at the result than the victim. Portrayed once with two outsize chins, Lord Linlithgow protested in a personal message to the artist that he was wrong:


he had three, he said, not two. As I turn the pages of the collection of cartoons which is at my elbow at this minute, I think I know which one was the cause of the merriment. It was all goodhumoured; but it was less than fair to treat, as did too many, this muscular inflexibility as the outward and visible sign of a corresponding moral attribute. His mind could, on the contrary, be flexible—immeasurably more so, for instance, than that of his principal military adviser, Cassels. The Commander-in-Chief was a cavalry general brought up to scan the North-West Frontier for Russians, and unwilling to turn about and face South-East from where with remarkable prescience Linlithgow foresaw the attack on India would be delivered. It was the experts who were unbending. All he could do as Viceroy was to hang on to those eight A.A. guns. You would suppose therefore that by the time September came he stood in little need of lessons from anybody concerning the realities of 1939. This was not however the view of the Editor of the English-owned Statesman, a troublesome character named Moore, who fustigating him for carrying out the social programme as though nothing had gone wrong, wrote of ‘Lord Linlithgow’s laboured continuance of apparently unrelished opulences’. I think the immediate issue was a Garden Party at the fag-end of the Simla season which most people had rashly assumed would be automatically ‘off’, only to be sharply set right in the matter. To have your presence courteously requested in copperplate on stiff goldcrested paper was to be summoned. Denys Kilburn could claim to speak with some authority on the point, and since his experience forms part of the life we led I will digress to relate it. Finding such invitations irksome, he had begun to ignore them; and was reprimanded one fine day for his absence. His spies informed him how the check was kept: guests had to bring their cards and surrender them to an A.D.C. at the entrance who would fling them into an urn, from which they would be retrieved afterwards and compared with the list of those issued. Having in his capacity as chief of police unrivalled influence on the viceregal ground floor, Denys caused the vase to be shifted slightly nearer a window; through which in future his orderly would be instructed to toss the necessary evidence of attendance into the receptacle. But to resume. We might be, we were, at war; but grey toppers and picture hats were de rigueur on that September afternoon. And as Christmas approached, thoughts turned to the splendour of the customary ceremonial at the races in Calcutta. The Bodyguard entrained at Delhi as usual, a string of horse-boxes hitched to the ‘Special’. As usual the Viceroy and Vicereine in a

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pageant more colourful than Royal Ascot itself drove in the State landau behind the lancers resplendent in their scarlet and gold down the course to the stands, bowing in response to the acclamations of a crowd habituated as long as they and their parents and their grandparents could remember to this annual tamasha. The decision had not been lightly taken nor would it be lightly rescinded. Here is His Excellency defending it: I think there is probably a good deal of importance in retaining even in times of stress such as these a sufficient degree of public appearance to indicate that we have not retired into our shell and sunk into the depths of depression. The words, as always with him, were pedestrian, the heart from which they were spoken, as always with him, was valiant. Dictated by the place, which was India, and the time, which was the historic winter of 1939/40, his attitude was psychologically sound —or so it seems to me. He was putting a brave face on things. To unroll the Broad Red Carpet just as before, implied that the Thin Red Line was holding as it used to do. I can well recall Haji Rashid Ahmad, the elected Vice-President of the Delhi Municipal Council, coming to me at the Town Hall with half-a-dozen of the City Fathers, Hindu and Muslim and including one Congressman in the regulation homespun Khaddar, to applaud ‘your’ determination to carry on ‘regardless’. They were selfishly interested, I do not deny: the first big social function of the cold weather was in the offing and they were on the invitation list and saw themselves setting out from their respective city wards for the Viceroy’s Palace with suitable publicity. I concede, too, that a couple of years later when confidence in our capacity to prevail over our enemies had been shaken, certain of those stalwart burgesses of Delhi were pondering Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s thrust that the war would not be won by those who changed into dinner jackets every evening. But that is to anticipate. India, though exposed to the blast, was not yet feeling it. Without the least sense of unfitness therefore, did I join the bright throng that balanced tea-cups and manipulated its icecreams in the Mughal Garden at the back of the Viceroy’s House at that first wartime party in New Delhi. If any of us had qualms, it was on a different score. On 3rd September when the Viceroy proclaimed India to be at war with Germany none of her sons had been taken into consultation in advance. Nor, constitutionally, was there need to confer with a soul. But some things are desirable without being necessary; and


since we had, as I said earlier, promised India her Dominion status, here, surely, was a chance to treat her just for an hour and just in this one respect as though she enjoyed it already: striking, as it were, a note of a chord about to follow. At that stage there would not have been a single leader averse from offering his party’s support of England against the Nazis. But the way we had done it, the war was our war, not India’s. Even as it was, we all but had everyone with us. In an emotional interview with the Viceroy, the very next day, or perhaps it was on the 5th, Gandhi dwelt on the war, regarding it, he said, with an English heart. As he conjured up Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament in charred smoking ruins, he broke down and wept. But then came the weighing up of the pros and cons: after a few weeks’ hesitation the Congress ministries resigned. It meant that their fight, instead of being against our enemies, would be against our rule. However let us not be too mealy-mouthed about this. Materially it would not have made a pennyworth of difference to the war effort if the Congress, India’s governing class on probation, had decided to support it. Materially I dare say it would, on the contrary, have hampered us. When political experiment is in the air, you accept a lower standard of efficiency; but now we could return to the worship of the gods we had forsaken. There was indeed to be a blot on our escutcheon during the war years. I mean the appalling Bengal Famine of the winter 1942/43. You could not get away from it, this was due to administrative failure not crop failure. But wait, was it not inescapably significant that it occurred precisely in one of the two or three provinces—the socalled nonCongress provinces—where ministers had contrived a curious pattern of give-and-take alliances between competing groups in order to adhere to office and the enjoyment of the patronage that went with power? Upon the whole, those years witnessed the last spectacular performance of the pure bureaucracy in which there was no dividing line between policy and administration; of a machine driven by some hundreds of Englishmen and serviced by a million or so Indians whose loyalty no words of mine are fit to describe; a performance in which the teeming multitude acquiesced, unmoved by the alarms and excursions of war but haunted by the abiding dread of a shortage of the simple necessities of their lives; of grain, of cloth, of kerosene, of sugar. By the time it took its curtain and bowed itself out, this bureaucracy had raised the biggest non-conscript army the world had ever seen, and rendered a mediaeval India selfsupporting in an impressive gamut of supplies that ranged from

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precision tools to floating docks; rendered a mediaeval India that much better equipped to face her future as an independent State. 2. MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS The first thought that occurred to me, as to many others in the Service, was to get into uniform, and since lucidity deserts one at such crises it appeared to me that my claims were exceptional enough to override the general rule that none of the I.C.S. would be allowed to join up. I had no wife, my parents were not living, I was (if only by a few weeks) nearer thirty than forty and for the past ten years had spent most of my waking hours observing, and often enough marvelling at, the behaviour of Jats, Rajputs, Punjabi Musulmans and, thanks to my time in the Doon, the men from the hills, martial races all. I had shot at Bisley in my teens, had even, armed with sabre and lance, a trooper in the cavalry unit of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, trotted alongside the 2nd Life Guards on manoeuvres at Lulworth Cove. I had forgotten that this last testimonial might not carry great weight: the 19th Lancers, the only regiment of the Indian Army still mounted, had already been warned that their horses would shortly be taken from them. But wait for my trump card: languages. I was held to have both Urdu and Hindi, and could aspire to interpret in these; and in French into the bargain if need be. I saw myself therefore in well pressed khaki, sporting if not red tabs then at least green ones on my lapels. At Whitehall had I signed the Covenant, to Whitehall would I address my plea for discharge. The reply, which I have in a tin box somewhere, was, in the graphic expression of Upper India, ‘tooth-breaking’: I was to mind my own business, a directive which my immediate controlling authority had without doubt made perfectly clear to me already. But one of us there was who would not take no for an answer: or rather, knowing what the answer would be, did not ask. He had been a protégé of mine on his first arrival in the country, having been sent to me at Agra in 1937 for a spell of training. He was very nearly the last of a breed, therefore. I had found him a young man of endearing qualities with a love of argument which he would carry to the length where you could only say: ‘Oh! Ian, I give up.’ His surname was Bowman, he was a Scot but his soft voice had— peculiarly noticeable this, in India—a transatlantic cadence. I had not been his superior many days before I discovered where he had acquired his highly developed technique of controversy—and his accent. His father had occupied the Chair


of Moral Philosophy at one of the Canadian universities, I think Toronto, and his own upbringing had been there. Well, then, when war came I was not surprised to be treated as a confidant. He was going to try the Admiral in Bombay, as I gathered, there being a decent chance of his acceptance by the Indian Navy. I must have misunderstood, for what Ian does, taking a few days casual leave, is to travel third class to Pondicherry and join the French Foreign Legion. Hauled back in the nick of time, it was to me that he was brought en route for Simla, there to be judged. The destination suggests that we were in the summer of 1940 by then. Anyhow, my instructions were to take him off the train at Delhi—trains were beginning to run slow and late in India as in England by that date—and place him on another, if not the same day then the next, for Kalka where the line stopped at the foothills. I still remember walking impatiently up and down the platform looking along the stretch of metals every now and again with crinkled eyes. At last! Ian got out with a plain clothes man on either side of him, and I was glad for the sake of the Raj that I was the sole witness to the surely unprecedented spectacle of an I.C.S. magistrate in custody. To embarrass the custodians as little as possible, Bowman had chatted about everything except his own predicament during the interminable sleepless hours of the journey ‘up country’; and they supposed him, as I learned on taking one of them aside, to be what his blond colouring and fresh complexion might well suggest, a German youth; or if not an enemy alien then a Tommy on the run from his regiment. The police officers were to go off and get some rest, since another wakeful night was ahead of them, and report to me at 8p.m. At the lunch table we spent a pleasant hour talking deliberate banalities, and then I got up to go. ‘I’ll see you at tea,’ I said, adding, without meaning it seriously, ‘promise not to do a bunk.’ ‘I cannot promise,’ replied Ian in that soft voice, looking at me steadily. I called out to my stenographer and told him to cancel my engagement. I saw it was 2p.m. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘for six hours, Ian, I just sit here and twiddle my thumbs while you tire the sun with talking and drive him down the sky.’ When asked later on, as I knew I would be, for an opinion, I recommended his release before he caused us real trouble. He would disobey the rules from now on, sulk, do no work. The unsatisfactory undergraduate (which he rather resembled) can be sent down by his college: with Ian you had no sanction—he ached to be sent down. Authority relented, and off he went to the war and fought the Japanese. When peace came he sought me out, neither Soldier nor Civilian now, and we were able to disagree

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thoroughly and enjoyably about things in general in a final session before our ways separated for ever. There was no governing class in India—the I.C.S. monopolized the role of such a class. But had we perhaps encouraged the emergence at least of army families up and down the provinces; of families, that is, whose sons could in the normal course look forward to a military career? No, we had not. Of the ‘martial races’ of India we never stopped talking, but these only guaranteed the supply of Sepoys, as everybody knows. The mistake was to our discredit and, as we had begun to realize rather tardily, to our grave disadvantage. We sought to rectify it by founding the Indian Military Academy at Dehra Dun, but that was not till 1932. When war broke out there were about 1,000 Indian Officers in the Army, not more, and the task suddenly presented itself of increasing this number to the extent demanded by land forces likely to be multiplied by— who could guess by how many? The need was so immediate that young men from the Dominions were being commissioned, and I need not say how galling that was to the overwhelmingly large section of upper middle-class society which had studiously kept aloof from political agitation. But soon Emergency Commission Selection Boards were set up in each Province. In the case of Delhi the members were: a former ViceChancellor of Delhi University; the Chief of Police; a representative of General Headquarters; and myself as Chairman. And I had powers to co-opt either a Hindu or a Muslim gentleman at my discretion. Formal directions, expressed in brisk military phraseology, informed us how, when and where to submit the names of selected candidates; the qualities demanded and their relative grading being, if I remember, left to us. We drew up a standard interrogatory of our own, but members were free to depart from it. Above all things we bore in mind that the average young man in front of us would have been born to middle-class parents in that part of Upper India, if not in Delhi itself, and be a stranger to many of the attitudes taken for granted in the West. All went smoothly for a whole year and then we had wished on us an Army Psychologist. This person upset our apple cart, but we endured him for a while. Until at one sitting he put the candidate, an obviously promising type, the question ‘Are you married?’: and the youth was. He then asked ‘Are you happily married?’ I could stand it no longer and barked ‘Question overruled!’ And then to Denys ‘Would you put another, please.’ Denys asked, What would you do if you saw a tiger walk in through one of those doors?’ ‘Run out quick through the other,’ the answer came pat. Everybody except the peeved Psychologist applauded. Bravo, Shabash! And I


wrote against the lad’s name ‘Selected.’ After this I received an incorrectly addressed letter from H.Q. intimating that the Army Psychologist, an Officer acquainted with methods of selection whose suitability was beyond dispute, had reported unfavourably on my Board’s way of doing things. Would I please in future be guided by the advice of the specialist. All my members (except the Headquarters representative who, though not concealing his disgust, was junior to the signatory of the rocket) handed in their resignations. Before my messenger could arrive at New Delhi to deliver these, I had phoned to GHQ to someone I knew there saying my Board would of course consent to serve on if the thorn were removed from its flesh. For the next two sessions we got along without psychology; and thereafter were given somebody nice and amenable. By the sort of procedure I have, I hope not too facetiously, described, material was supplied for the making of some 15,000 Officers by the end of the war on top of the 1,000 we counted at its outbreak. And in the same interval, this seems the place to repeat it, the Indian Army which these young men officered was expanded from well under 200,000 to about 2½ million; the largest army, as I have already insisted, of which history has record to be raised without conscription. Stung by this achievement on our part, a Congress leader who was a true AngloIndian according to my use of that term parodied the old Music Hall song thus: ‘We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships and tumpty tum (I forget what he filled it out with) we’ve got the mild Hindoo.’ Recruits in India of course came almost exclusively from the villages, and since our rural population was of no great size Delhi’s contribution was correspondingly small; albeit the quality, typical of a Jat community like ours, was high. My Revenue Assistant (my lieutenant, that is, for rural affairs, ‘Revenue’ as we know, pertaining in India to land) assured our liaison with the fulltime recruiting officers, and I seldom came into it at all. My only concern, a bit distant maybe, with recruitment came about otherwise. Broadcasting was something very novel in those days and the transmitting station in the capital itself, operated by the government-organized All India Radio, was hardly three years old when war broke out. However, in those three years an important step had been taken. We were well situated for experiment: we had the trained staff which most Provinces lacked and the trial area we commanded was both compact and under our noses. We could place community receivers at selected centres and dash out with ease to observe how much of the given fare the

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villager was willing to stomach. Rustic audiences naturally had no appetite for any but the lightest, most digestible food. We found three minutes or five at the very most enough for an item, and learned to alternate the grave with the gay: three minutes of hygiene earned five of music. Delhi Province had in consequence been chosen for an intensive course of rural lectures in the winter of 1938–9. On to this ready-made scheme we now grafted regular pep-talks on the war and occasional recruitment appeals; all of which incidentally had a considerably wider reach than my own jurisdiction, extending to such of the Punjab villages and those of the U.P. as had been furnished with receiving sets by their respective Rural Development departments. In the composition of these programmes I had a share; and sometimes also in their delivery. I was not entirely a beginner in this second regard for I had broadcast to an urban audience already. It had started with a series entitled ‘Englishman Speaks’ and I have cause to remember my first talk. The broadcasting house was a converted uppermiddleclass residence in Rajpur Road. I had read the script aloud twice to my Chief Reader, and half-an-hour before the ordeal had walked back and forth along the Ridge mouthing it with emphatic movements of jaws and lips. For what reason I cannot think, the room into which I was shown by the courteous Madrasi stationdirector was pitch dark except for a spotlight that fell on a table. It was also stifling and an electric fan whirred overhead. My chair, it was explained—we were all rather naïve in those distant days— was set square with a red bulb on the wall facing me: when the light went on I was to begin, preferably without clearing my throat; and when it went out I would be off the air. I heard the door close behind me and was now alone. I laid my watch on the table and waited. Duly the red light glowed and I got off to a decent start. And then the light flickered and vanished. However, it came back presently and I started all over again, hoping I was doing the right thing. Worse was in store. My careful rehearsals had not been under a ceiling fan and now my flimsies—I suppose my hand was momentarily off them—were lifted from the table and blown across the room. I had to get down on all fours to retrieve them. At least they were stapled together and I managed to re-find my place. To our normal activities strange accretions were added as the years followed on: A.R.P.; Civil Defence; the National War Front, which was an organization of volunteers created to combat defeatism; and Rationing. If we sometimes tackled these with less than perfect efficiency, it should be chalked up in our favour that


we invariably found ourselves with less than the requisite amount of straw for the making of our bricks. It would take too long to enter into details, and indeed I doubt if I could remember them; but salient incidents there are that still surface easily in my mind. I see for instance my City Fathers in their tin hats and important armbands, each in command of a contingent from his Ward, lining up on parade in the grilling heat of high summer. We have been, if the expression may be applied to, for the most part, ponderous figures, on the tips of our toes this particular day. Understandably, for the florid somewhat heavily built man in a bush shirt walking at my side down the line is none other than the brother of the KingEmperor. Then there were those three splendid fire-engines we received at last from home, and the arrival, greeted with relief, of three N.F.S. officers to lick into shape our hastily expanded fire fighting units. It comes back to me, too, that the Delhi firm of Grant Govan Bros., importers and exporters, had generously placed their private four-seater aeroplane at my disposal, and I can remember each time a Black Out practice was announced I would fly overhead, piloted by one of the said brothers, with Denys Kilburn and a European sergeant behind us, to judge of its effectiveness. But I am distorting the picture if I have conveyed that any of this was central. Central remained the things upon which, war or no war, the well-being of a District under the British Raj depended, and I do not apologize for repeating myself: public order, a swift justice, the prompt payment of taxes reasonably assessed, the accurate maintenance of the land records to the end that each man might be secure in the enjoyment of what was his. Everywhere these were the dominating concern of the Magistrate and Collector, and inasmuch as the Delhi I am describing was a District they were mine. So the Delhi memories that cling are not really to do with the war. Or if with the war, with the endemic war. There was that ‘between the cow and the pig’. It was no flippant Britisher but an Indian elder statesman, the liberal leader Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, my genial guru of Allahabad days, who coined the phrase. In Delhi as in every large city you had sporadic attacks of communal violence; and you had running sores. One of the latter was in the Chandni Chowk itself. A miniature enclosure it was, where the weary wayfarer might relax on the flagstones beneath an overarching tree. The Muslims treated the site as a mosque, the Hindus as an ancient temple; but neither community had seemingly made any effort to substantiate its claim in a court of law. In the municipal books, and on the town maps, the spot was

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recorded now as ‘mandir’ which is temple, now as ‘masjid’ or mosque; presumably in keeping with the persuasion of the clerk concerned. There seemed a strong probability that it was neither. Anyhow, a fakir would squat there every so often and be ejected by outraged Hindus, a sadhu would replace him and fare no better —and so it would go on. The individuals were hardly ever genuine holy men, they were mostly scamps who were willing to risk what was coming to them for the sake of instant perquisites in the shape of alms. Today it was evidently the turn of the Muslim—you could tell that as you walked along the Chowk by the ‘burqas’, the tentlike garment with eye slits, worn by a proportion of those queueing up to make their reverences to the ‘Saint’, and by the red fez here and there; as also by the contrasting attire, trailing dhotis perhaps, of the sullen spectators. We had put police on to regulate the stream of traffic and a posse of constables was posted at the entrance to the site. It had continued like this for about a week when I noticed that the worshippers issuing from the Fatehpuri Mosque at the end of the Chowk after prayers were tending to hang about instead of dispersing normally; and that the Hindu bystanders were of increasingly unsavoury appearance. The thing was building up, not a doubt of it. I decided to kidnap the ‘Saint’. But where to dump him? In Mirzapur, in Agra even, it would have been simple, but in the whole of Delhi District there was not a remote corner anywhere. However, my police inspectors were Punjabis and knew the very place that would do; two of them would pick him up—he was habitually in a drugged stupor by the small hours—and whisk him away to the secret destination. A little matter of etiquette however: my simple coup postulated the acquiescence of another authority. A telephone call to Simla (it was summer and they were all up there) would set that right. Alas, it complicated everything. The message was relayed to the Home Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, a finical man to whom it appeared, or so I infer, that the Magistrate of Delhi was about to commit an offence under section 365 of the Indian Penal Code: to wit, kidnapping, punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to seven years. I was to do no such thing, he said. I had nobody but myself to blame. I ought to have known by this time that in your own District you keep your counsels to yourself. It is the first rule and I had broken it. To the chagrin of my fellow conspirators I called the operation off: and stood aside waiting, cursing myself at intervals out loud. Until a Hindu tough armed with a knife and disguised in a Muslim woman’s burqa stabbed the ‘Saint’. Enough time to count up to a hundred; and there were corpses both in the Chandni Chowk and the adjacent


alleys, spread-eagled or hunched on the roadway, face downwards or staring with sightless eyes into the summer sky. Some of the dead had been professional bazaar bullies; but some had been about their lawful occasions, and as I went among their bodies the thought weighed on me that one at least of these Delhi-walas at some time or other, perhaps at my Cutcherry at Kashmir Gate or else here in the street, had very likely addressed me as his ‘Protector’. Or, it might be, the war was against the elements. There were the annual vagaries of the monsoon to battle with; this year it would be feeble and the crops would be in jeopardy throughout a country side scraping a subsistence from the soil; another year it would be abundant, and our riverain villages would be inundated and perhaps washed away. I am thinking of one year of that second sort and of one day in that year. To warn people of the approaching danger, we have had the mounted police careering up and down the Jumna banks upstream from the railway viaduct where the river is without flats and the cultivated fields reach down almost to the water’s edge. We have assembled all the country craft we can lay hold of, mustered all the boatmen, and we have ropes dangling from the girders of the bridge with bamboo poles fastened horizontally between them. I have one modest motor boat that is powerless to chug against the swollen, eddying current. I shall not describe the excitement and the exhaustion of those vividly remembered hours. The point I want to make here is that the War, the other war, was far from our minds at such moments. 3. TAKING TIME OFF We had to shoulder the burden of much extra work, it will have been seen, and any prospect one might have had of home leave was shelved sine die in that September of 1939. It would be close on nine years before I caught sight of the cliffs of Dover again; but free of family ties I was spared the anguish of most of my brother officers. Many had wives in England who could not rejoin them, many had wives in India who could not return home. To many their children seemed in the wrong place; if in England they were lost to their parents for an indefinite future, if in India how could arrangements be made for their education through the critical years ahead? Recreation was vital, more vital now than in peace. For exercise most of us played tennis, and the standard indoor pastime was bridge. Now at tennis I was a duffer who in all his Indian career never found a bad enough player to give him a

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tolerable game. However, of physical exercise a District Officer always had plenty. As to bridge I detested it. I had leisure therefore to devote to something begun at Allahabad and pursued at Agra: namely the plodding approach to the Mughal poets of the eighteenth century, whose names are among the most honoured on the bead-roll of Urdu literature. Shortly before war broke out I had been gratified, but also alarmed, by an invitation to contribute to a literary magazine published quarterly in Delhi called Adeeb. In the several articles I wrote I drew heavily, I must frankly acknowledge, on the Honorary Secretary of the Hardinge Library both for ideas and their expression; and when my first draft was completed and done out in the office on an Urdu-script typewriter, I would always submit it to him for a last minute ‘vetting’ before it was faired. Not long afterwards I found myself asked to be President of the Reception Committee of a Mushaira and deliver the opening address. A mushaira in the golden age of the Mughals had been a gathering at the house of some noble to enable poets to recite their own lines. Since the noble was almost by assumption a poet of sorts himself, these assemblies brought professionals and amateurs together rather in the manner of the literary salons and the musical evenings that graced the world of wealth and fashion in the capitals of contemporary Europe. Nor had the modern mushaira departed markedly from tradition: the host might not be so noble nowadays, the poet not so highly esteemed in society, the company not so limited in size, not so select. But otherwise the conventions were jealously guarded. That the gathering now announced had a reception committee and was billed to take place in the Delhi Town Hall, merely meant that the occasion was being stepped up the ladder from the rung of the soirée to that of a publicly advertised event. My committee drew up an invitation-list of poets and an invitation-list of guests; and on top of this the City Fathers were given tickets to distribute to suitable residents in the borough. And we asked Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru—the liberal leader was noted for his knowledge and love of the Urdu classics—to come up from Allahabad and act as Chairman. It did not look as though there would be an empty seat in the hall. During the next five or six weeks every hour I could snatch from work went into the preparation of that address. The content did not bother me. I could begin by welcoming the bards, many of whom would have come from distances; from Lucknow and the United Provinces generally, from the Punjab, from a Native State or two. I could then extol their language as the undivided patrimony of Muslims and Hindus alike, and, an Englishman,


remind them that what happened to the older Standing Speech (so it was termed) of Northern India when the Muslim conquerors descended on Lahore and then, in a second wave, on Delhi was happening to our own island’s language at that very juncture—for the date as near as matters was 1066. Their resultant idiom, I would insist, was, like our own, of peculiar vigour because able to ring the changes on the two component elements in its make-up. Having said this, I would simply illustrate with some pieces that everyone would know and, I could be sure, applaud. But I was far from confident of my ability to put it across. So I got my script copied by a calligraphist in very black ink on sheets of ultra-stiff paper and went through it time and again until I had it practically by heart. I delivered it, they applauded. The press, including the pro-Congress Tej was flattering and the next number of Adeeb printed the speech in full. My audience, I concluded, had obviously regarded my performance much as Dr Johnson regarded a woman’s preaching: that is, like a dog walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. I was therefore understandably astonished to be pressed by the organizers to repeat my ‘act’ in the following year. I consented but on the firm condition that this should not go on. On my desk while I write this next paragraph lies the memento of another extra-curriculum exercise in the Town Hall. It is a volume of verse by Sarojini Naidu entitled ‘Scented Dust’. The war was probably not yet out of its phoney phase when Mrs Naidu called on me to assist in arranging a public meeting of Delhi women whom she proposed to lecture on woman’s rightful place— the exact words escape me—in India’s life today and tomorrow; something like that anyhow. A theme as trite as could be at the present, it was bold forty years back, and to respectable sections of Delhi society undeniably disturbing. Sarojini Devi had quite rightly guessed that my municipal councillors would be unenthusiastic. Had I as their President, she wondered, so much as set eyes on the wife of any one of them at our not infrequent social reunions? And then the Secretary, Khan Bahadur Mumtaz Hasan Qizilbash, such a perfect gentleman, was a conservative Shi’a who believed there was only one place for a woman and that was out of sight. So this very upper-class, now elderly but extraordinarily energetic lady, bubbling with vivacity and visibly squirming with humour, rattled on with a funny phrase for everything and a nickname for everybody. Gandhi had just come up to Delhi from Wardha or somewhere to see the Viceroy, and the entourage—she was in it herself— had hired a whole third-class coach for him. It costs a fortune to keep that old man in poverty,

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was her quip. The Mahatma was Mickey Mouse, and Lord Linlithgow was I wish I could remember what. But I had better introduce her. This Girton girl, President of the Indian National Congress when I was still an undergraduate, and Delegate to the Round Table Conference at London in 1931, had entered the public domain after youthful excitements and successes in the field of letters. She had attracted notice and been ‘taken up’. She had brought out a collection of poems called ‘The Golden Threshold’ with a preface by Arthur Symons and another, no less enchanting, called ‘The Bird of Time’ with an equally apposite preface by Edmund Gosse; and—after a wide gap filled by politics—this book I have mentioned as being my private souvenir of the visit she paid me in Delhi. She was a model Anglo-Indian in the sense I employ this term throughout my pages, and she takes her place with Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru’s sister, and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur in the trio—it was hardly more—of women who shone brightly in the political firmament. All three leaned heavily on the privilege to which they had been born, all three captivated you—or that was my experience—by their ways, all three were a perpetual nuisance to an imperial power which was easy-going and upon the whole tolerant of their activities. If all three were enemies of our rule, could we exactly blame them? If all three were Anglicized to a degree which set them at a palpable distance from all but a small fraction of their sisters, whose fault was that but ours? Whether under a different star Sarojini Devi, poetess, would have developed her easy gift into a real talent nobody knows. To remind myself of that gift I am turning some of her pages. Hear and judge this for example: What longer need hath she of loveliness, Whom Death has parted from her lord’s caress? Of glimmering robes like rainbow-tangled mist, Of gleaming glass or jewels on her wrist, Blossoms or fillet-pearls to deck her head, Or jasmine garlands to adorn her bed? Evidently she knew how to strike the authentic lyrical note, but no less evidently time was not on her side: the fashion in English poetry which allotted music a more honourable place than meaning was on the way out when she began. However, to discuss this is idle: she had decided that writing poetry was a waste of energy when there was something more exciting to be done.


I roped in the doctor in charge of the Zenana Hospital who was a Madrasi lady; a social welfare worker, a Miss Sorabji, who was a Parsee; and Mrs Chaterjee wife of Dr. Chaterjee of the University, who was of a family of Bengali Christians. As will be seen, Delhi’s own daughters were beyond the reach of my lasso, being hardly in the open at that time. Ah! one conspicuous exception there was, Mrs Asaf Ali, Hindu wife of the well-known Muslim Congressman who was beside her husband in the amphitheatre, albeit less constant outside it, caustic tongues would add. Sarojini Devi had not approached her, so I formed my own conclusion. Over the teacups, then, I explained that the staff would attend to the seating but the rest I must leave in their own hands: in the Town Hall we had no female employees on the pay-roll. The lady doctor said she would bring two or three of her nurses along to help, and Mrs Chaterjee undertook to persuade some women from her church to act as ushers. ‘But, my dear young man, won’t you be there to present me to the audience?’ Mrs Naidu asked. I agreed, but on the cowardly stipulation that I should slink off immediately afterwards. When the day came the hall filled punctually and quietly. About half those assembled were enveloped in voluminous burqas; even among the Hindu element the majority were clearly from behind the purdah. But I noticed with relief that there were at least a score of chairs on the platform, which indicated that my three helpers had co-operated loyally. I introduced the speaker with a consciously anodyne allusion to the role she had played on the stage of a ‘progressive India’, and motioned her forward. There was no clapping, but that was out of modesty. She began—in English. ‘Urdu! Urdu!’ shouted one after another of the hitherto tonguetied congregation. I hear her lame reply even now, lame and somehow so out of character in a woman of her sparkle and wit. ‘Not in Urdu, Urdu m .’ Three words in the vernacular. And then she looked round helplessly, and again it was out of character. Anyhow, there was help in that semi-circle behind her; after a bit of whispering two ladies stepped to the front—an interpreter and a co-interpreter. The talk got to its feet again and advanced—but with a disastrous limp! Was the contretemps due to my neglect? I knew that Mrs Naidu was of Bengali extraction but she had resided for years, I was almost sure, in Hyderabad where her husband had been in the Nizam’s service, and Urdu was the language there. And then there was this bigger Why. Why, having twitted the City Fathers with their custom-ridden mentality

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did she imagine she could get away with English in her discourse to these house-wives whose days revolved within the capsule of joint-family or seraglio? This incident set me wondering why the Congress leadership, having ignored the problem of a national language, was even now so reluctant to come to grips with it. India’s society, everybody knew it, was multilingual, but by the grace and favour of history one language there was which was neither regional nor the deposit of a religious community—and this was Urdu. Gandhi himself had declared as much in one of his published essays. You would suppose therefore that men and women passionately concerned to lay the foundations of the new edifice of India would have jumped for joy at the thought of the ready-mixed cement that was to hand. Instead, they were treating it like an inconvenient heap of rubble that needed clearing. Myself I do not doubt that a certain blame attaches in this to the exclusive ‘AngloIndian’ milieu—the Nehrus, Sarojini Naidus, a few others—which called the tune. But had not the Congress, it will be asked, latterly and with considerable noise adopted Hindustani as its language for the conduct of business? And was that not tantamount to naming it the language of Independent India? Admitted. The leaders had indeed adopted Hindustani (a sort of ‘Basic’, being the ground shared by Urdu and Hindi at the more unsophisticated levels of expression), but adopted it with duplicity. This was patent from an escape clause in the relevant Article of the Party’s Constitution providing for the use of English ‘whenever permitted’; which was another way of saying ‘always’. Was I then deploring the high store the Indian National Congress leaders set by the English language? On the contrary. Like every Indo-British official of my time I believed this to be among the precious gifts we had made to India. But one there was yet richer—Unity. This was a sacred value in the service of which nothing, nothing must be left untried. However, let me say my piece out. Around then I was introduced to Dr Zakir Husain, and I remember what this Muslim Congressman, an outstanding educationist close to the counsels of the High Command who would in the sequel become world known as President of the Indian Union, told me. It was Gandhi who, having started off well (he meant, of course, in his just appreciation of Urdu’s unique worth) had presently ‘queered the pitch’ for this language that was so healing and so binding in its influence, by accepting the chairmanship of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, a communal organization if ever there was one, Hindu to a man in its


membership and publicly pledged to the sanskritization of the language. What, I have since wondered, would have ensued if Gandhi had behaved logically instead of paradoxically? What if (say, after the 1935 Act and anyhow before the Congress ministers took office in 1937) he had pronounced Urdu, the non-regional and non-communal Urdu, to be the All-India language? It would have brought instant relief to the anxiety of the great Muslim minority, have been proof of the Congress’s respect for Muslim sentiment, a guarantee of the will to preserve intact the vast area of common culture that history had hallowed. It would have anticipated many of the arguments of those Muslims who from 1940 onwards began to think in terms of a divided India. Would it, would it even have snatched the Indian people back, just in time, from the precipice of Partition?…But all this is now such stuff as dreams are made on. 4. TAKING MORE TIME OFF ‘A Mr Brown, Sir, wants to see you,’ said the City Magistrate. In the paradisial Bahraich there had been no Mr Browns; indeed not a single Englishman in all the 2,654 square miles of my jurisdiction. Even in Agra the ‘Sahibs’ were not thickly represented and the chances were I would have known who Mr Brown was in advance. I would have come across him at the Club, if not within the still more tightly closed circumference of our Tent Club. Does anyone nowadays remember what a Tent Club was? Its members were the pig-sticking set. In the season we would go out every Saturday evening, sleep under the stars, or in some grove, with our hunters tethered in a line at the foot of our row of camp beds, and after a gigantic breakfast of steak and onions be merrily away long before the rim of the sun showed over the horizon. Having chased the wild boar for several hours, we would manage quite often to be back in time to put in an appearance, washed and brushed up, at Evensong in the Garrison Church. This concluding rite was something of a rush but we made the effort because our Honorary Secretary who kept scrupulous tale of the Tent Club ‘gests’ could prove from the book that such piety paid. When I wrote to my mother about these goings-on and boasted, most imprudently, that the Hoghunter’s Annual 1936 had praised me as an indefatigable ‘spear’, she had let me know in reply—it must have been among her very last letters—how vexed she had been to learn of my brutal amusements. Of course there is no real answer to Wordsworth’s

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Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels but at all events this was no tame or enervating pursuit, and was arguably as wholesome a pastime as any other within the reach of our coterie. Be that as it may, of this distraction Delhi now deprived me and I was never to resume it. However, to adjust the balance the choice of company was wider; and, presently, as the war ceased to be remote and encroached on India itself, evacuees arrived from Singapore, Rangoon and other places to swell numbers. For example the Cecil Hotel, presided over by the redoubtable Miss Hotz of whom all the servants and most of the guests stood in reverential fear, instead of catering for casual tourists as in peacetime, now received and sheltered until further notice as heterogeneous a clientèle as could well be imagined from which enemy aliens and Indians alone seemed to be excluded. To say that the wartime contingent was yeast to pre-war dough would be a wrong way of putting things, but I do say that it lent an agreeable variety to the circles, inner and outer, in which one could move. ‘A Mr Brown, sir, wants to see you. He is at the Cecil Hotel.’ Well, so was everybody, The ex-husband of Mrs Simpson (future Duchess of Windsor) was, a daughter of H.G.Wells was, all sorts of other celebrities, it seemed, were, and now…this Mr Brown. When he turned up, my impression was of a frail intellectual, grey-haired, bespectacled, very slight in build, not the pukka sahib type, not the sort you would see on a horse, anyway. He looked unused to the Indian heat, for he had doffed his jacket, loosened his collar and rolled up his sleeves above the elbow. And he had gone to the City Magistrate by mistake, apparently not understanding that in India we magistrates were, as in ancient Rome, maximi, medii, and minores. The other thing I noticed was he could not say ‘r’. What did he want, I wondered. He told me he knew India (I trust I concealed my astonishment), loved her as he loved his own country and had come back to her once more. ‘If you prefer New Delhi to Mughal Delhi/ I hear him saying, ‘we shall have nothing in common.’ He had come out first, he continued, as a subaltern to join the 17th Cavalry, ‘it must have been around the date of your birth’, and for years that had been his world, there was no other, and then…‘You are YeatsBrown,’ I interrupted, tumbling to it, ‘you are “Bengal Lancer”!’ He had retired, I believe, from the Indian Army shortly after the Great War, was Assistant Editor of The Spectator by the mid‘twenties and turning out best sellers in the’ thirties. With the


Hollywood version of ‘Bengal Lancer’, I remember his telling me, he had nothing whatsoever to do, but as I had neither read the book nor seen the film I could only infer the sense of this remark. That is in parenthesis. His purpose in coming to me now was to help him pick up the threads, the cronies of his own generation having all passed on. Held up in India indefinitely, he was anxious to make a virtue of necessity, collect up-to-date information, meet people, and so on. Was it a feasible idea to…? ‘I’m as attached as you are,’ I broke in, ‘to the Delhi of the Mughals, so let’s s go to it.’ Within a matter of days he received an invitation to the home of Mirza Khairuddin in Daryganj, senior representative of the exroyal house, and that exuberant young man—he was about the only one of them not satisfied to ‘sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings’—drew up a programme of sightseeing. He was a strapping youth: a champion weight-lifter, whom I had once teased about his bulk, nicknaming him the Mughal Monument. He now rather charmingly signed the programme ‘“Khair”, Monumental Guide.’ We next looked up the gentle and scholarly Rai Bahadur Raj Narain, of a Hindu family scarcely less characteristic of Delhi’s forgotten élite who with nothing but time on his hands was only too glad, as he phrased it, to walk with his English visitor in the vestiges of the glory of the Hindu Kings. And, thirdly, for the sake of objectivity I got hold of a Mr Mukherji, an acquaintance in the Archaeological Department, dedicated, single-minded, who likewise undertook to walk the enthusiast off his feet. Yeats-Brown could hardly believe there were such people as these, and one or two others like them, that he was able to encounter, so courteous, of such dignity he found them, so utterly removed in their lifestyle, as we now say, from the Indians who got into the news. When he had succeeded in returning to England a year later, we corresponded, and by chance I have kept one of his letters as a LBI—H book-mark. In this he reminds me of our excursions and refers to those three companions who trudged round with him in quest of the Seven Cities, and whose names would probably have deserted my head otherwise. My own small contribution had been to collect a few facts and figures from records in my Office or from volumes in the Hardinge Library, and this information, he wrote, would go into a book he was working on, to be out with luck in 1944. In due time a copy of his Indian Pageant arrived, and it is in between the pages of this that Francis Yeats-Brown’s letter reposes after all these years.

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The Times withdrew their correspondent soon after the outbreak, and it must therefore have been at the very beginning of the war that ‘Sandy’ Inglis introduced me to Ella. We British had been so lax in peacetime towards foreigners (Russians excepted) as to encourage a certain negligence on their side in such matters as registration and passports. But we were tightening things up now willy-nilly, and Ella, being an alien, had come up against some difficulty or other. She was of the company of lady-travellers, and this band in my experience usually did tiresome things under the shield of imposing credentials. Rosita Forbes’ style had been histrionic: I remember my bearer reporting in consternation her refusal to swallow the smoky cup of tea offered her at 7a.m. and her insistence on ‘the juice of three oranges!’ I remember at 7 p.m. her theatrical account of ‘her ride into the sunset with the Assistant Superintendent of Police’. And Freya Stark’s visit (this in the late stages of the war) was to be soured by the wayward purchase of a motor car for re-sale in Peshawar or somewhere, an offence under wartime regulations even if you are staying with the Viceroy. But back to Ella whom Sandy had invited me to meet at supper so that she could explain what she needed. Many of us in Delhi in 1939 knew who Ella Maillart was. She was the intrepid young woman who had traversed the land of the Kirghiz between Tien Shan or ‘Celestial Mountains’ and Qizil Qum or ‘Red Sands’ which border on the eastern shore of the Sea of Aral. It is not enough to glance at those romantically named regions on the map. One requires also some practical familiarity with the harsh terrain of Central Asia they designate, in order to appreciate what such a journey, five or six consecutive months of it, must have demanded in terms of mental and moral resource quite apart from physical endurance. And not content with that, she had set out again, this time in association with Peter Fleming, and accomplished a second journey of roughly equal duration beginning at Peking and ending up at Kashghar. From here the pair of them had come down to Delhi—which accounts for such inkling as we had of Mademoiselle Maillart’s past exploits. Probably a certain public at home knew more than we did; for, if I remember rightly, the two travel books Turkestan Solo and Forbidden Journey in which she chronicled her expeditions had appeared before war broke out. What she was doing in India now I supposed I should learn at supper. Ella, who was Swiss, had a passport problem, as I have said. This, however, was in her eyes of small concern, and what she wanted to see me about was something else. Having dashed through Delhi without stopping at the finish of that second


journey a few years previously, she was now bent on exploring it. The passport matter was easy to arrange, its holder being known to us already and persona grata. Against ‘signes particuliers’ in the document the space was blank, I saw. In fact she had distinguishing marks, they hit you: she was ‘type nordique’, she was ‘hardie’, she was ‘sportive’. Besides—and you could not miss this either— there was something for which you could find no adjective at all. As to the other request, I was of course inured to this and fairly well up in the technique of complying with it. Before many days had passed we had ‘done’ several of the better known sites with some thoroughness. She was the model reporter, I found, displaying an insatiable thirst for information, asking the pertinent questions and quick at getting the gist down on paper. Always, she told me, she had had to augment her ‘viatique’ in this fashion: but, alas, now the market for articles, and especially in French, of the sort she did, had collapsed, and she was fauchée. After one of our outings we repaired to the Cecil Hotel for lunch and I was able to hear about some of the other things she had done, I mean apart from the two stupendous journeys that had placed her among the great travellers: climbing in the Alps, sailing a small boat round the Mediterranean, spending six months in Moscow learning Russian in preparation for the Turkestan adventure, and a year teaching at a girls’ school in England to bring grist to the mill. Perhaps it was the ex-schoolmistress that acted at the moment for her eye lighted on the wrong spelling of some culinary term in the menu and out came a pencil and some very audible ‘tut tuts’. Miss Hotz, bustling round as usual at mealtimes, bore down on us in a dudgeon as if hotel property were being disfigured. I was on Miss Hotz’ side over this, and fear I showed my irritation. But Ella was my guest and also it was becoming clear to me, she was worried and selfquestioning at this time. She was quite evidently of those who detest the Machine Age and it was for this reason the East had stolen her wits away. It was Hinduism that was the immediate pull, and her idea was to join an Ashram—she named a Swami of repute in the South— where she intended to do the chores, clean pots and pans, cook, anything—and see what happened. In a week or so she went off to it, taking her rucksack, her miniature medicine-chest and her precious Leica, sum total of her material impedimenta, and I believe remained at the Swami’s feet throughout the war conducting a long and difficult search for her true vocation. In peacetime Delhi each of us had always known what the other was doing: now we did not always know. Theodore Gregory of course was Economic Adviser to the Government of India, you

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could look him up; ‘Gregorius’ moreover, many had heard it, had got into Hitler’s bad books and won the honour of inclusion in the celebrated Black List of the Führer. But what Evelyn Wrench was doing we were never certain. One of the high-ups in the newspaper world, it seemed; behind The Spectator; great on the Commonwealth; tremendously in with the Americans; the EnglishSpeaking Union was practically his invention; and so on. I first met him over some fuss we had about the European community arming itself—it was 1942—when there was an outbreak of pillage and arson in the City, and certain of the Cecil residents started organizing themselves against a situation they thought was getting out of my control. I went to his room rather wondering what reception I should get: Would he prove a sort of Harmsworth or be like the Berry brothers perhaps, or a Beaverbrook even? I was set at ease by his instant willingness to accept my opinion and his promise to see to it that some of the more excitable spirits calmed down. But what so astonished me that it returns to me after all these years was the faint lavender and old lace flavour of the speech and manners, the appearance even, of the delightful couple, elegant and serene, the Wrenches were when others—not many, indeed, but some— among the strangers to India housed at the time in Old Delhi were so jumpy. Those who are lucky enough to have known them will, I believe, understand what I am probably failing here to put into words. Another of our group was the brilliant and enigmatic Guy Wint, Oxford historian, ambulant student of Asian affairs who would alarm me with a battery of questions at the end of a long hot day. Why did he ask them? He appeared to me—and I think also to himself—to know so much more about the given subject than I did. His stamina matched his intellectual vigour and I would often catch sight of him in the midsummer heat, an incongruous broadbrimmed black hat on his head, walking with his short rapid steps to the corner on Alipur Road where the bus for New Delhi marked ‘Private’ would pick him up (only the old Sahibs, and not too many of those, had their own cars). On that same road again—this picture has recurred to me many times since —I used to see a figure of even more phenomenal fortitude, a wartime Brigadier on a bicycle. What prewar Brigadier would bend low over the handlebars defying the loo, the scorching dry wind, and pedal like fury towards General Headquarters at nine o’clock every morning? One day he came into my room unannounced—and to the point without preamble. He intended to learn Urdu. He would get up daily at five and put in some hours at it before the sluggards in New Delhi were astir. Could I recommend a teacher? He was a Professor of Greek, he


added: not just some pukka sahib like the rest of them at GHQ, I was meant to understand. Having taken the hint, I found a welleducated scholarly Muslim for him, not a regimental ‘munshi’, and from the first lesson his progress was astounding. Within weeks the teacher had reported to me wide-eyed in admiration; and within six months Powell—that was the Brigadier’s name— was discussing some verses of the poet Ghalib with me. But in the meantime he had asked another little service of me. On this occasion our meeting was out of Office, on a Saturday evening, and I remember the irrelevant detail that we devoured a mound of ham sandwiches as we chatted. He wanted me to introduce him to two or three U.P. households, people of the lettered classes, not over ‘Anglicized’, essentially Indian in culture and tradition, who would be willing to provide him with a bed and whose table he could share. The addresses were to be within reasonable range of Delhi so that he could descend on his hosts whenever he got short leave of absence from GHQ. In the event I gave him three introductions. With one of these something went wrong, I remember, but in the other two cases the plan worked to perfection. If Powell could do other things in the way he mastered Urdu—and presumably that was so, considering that he had attained to a University Chair in his twenties and now risen from private to brigadier in record time, then, I felt, whatever he took up he would attack with fanatical zeal, assail it remorselessly, worry it like a terrier. Would he, like a terrier, tire of things and drop them? Some present day critics of the Rt. Hon. Enoch Powell have lamented that he does indeed drop both causes and colleagues. Of such matters I know absolutely nothing. I am content to consider it my fortune to have spent the better part of one year not on terms of friendship, certainly, but in close contact on and off with that powerful and ingenious mind. Later on in the war we had Noel Coward amongst us. His prestige was rated sufficiently high by the powers that be to justify an aeroplane for himself, his grand piano and his accompanist, and so on occasion this master of entertainment would drop from the clouds upon New Delhi. Entertain he certainly did—but the wrong audience. On us his songs, perfect within their trivial limits, worked their brittle miracle, and we went about for weeks afterwards—especially those who had not succeeded in attempts to meet him off-stage—imitating Noel’s breathless overpunctuated talk. But in the forward areas his turns brought puzzled frowns to the boys of 19 and 20 he was supposed to entertain and whose feelings moved in another key.

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By good fortune a more sober and earnest, also a more continuous, delight was available to us, for we had as a permanent resident a gifted professional pianist in Clifford Huntsman. His Saturday night recitals in New Delhi were something, absurd as this may sound, to which we had been totally unaccustomed in the piping times of peace; Indo-British society having been, one cannot say too Philistine but simply too exiguous to support concert halls and the executant musicians to perform in them. Needless to labour it, none in the little list I am compiling at random bore the slightest resemblance to the Quai-hai of either caricature or—why not say it?—historical fact. That Huntsman did not, the following story, which he hugely enjoyed telling us, was proof. Travelling long distance on one occasion in this land where all trains were crowded trains, he could not but notice that his fellow-passengers positively spilled from the carriage windows and some even appeared to have corded themselves between doorhandles and running-boards. At dinner he found himself sharing the restaurant car with one companion, a colonel. Being British, they did not exchange a syllable that night but at the breakfasttable next morn ing the colonel, halfway through the meal and after an apologetic cough, volunteered the comment: ‘Seems we’re the only people on the train.’ Some in the above list I knew over a long period but none of them, as I think I have stated or implied, did I know intimately. Indeed not only in this section but throughout my chapters I have felt that friends were not to be treated in a marginal manner; whereas acquaintances might be convoked when and to the extent that my context needed them. From this method, indeed, I have had to depart occasionally: a Hugh Bomford here, a Denys Kilburn there, has been spotlighted upon my stage. But momentarily, and it is not, so to speak, as my friend that my friend fulfils the role I assign him. This is precisely the case with my next and concluding vignette. One of our wartime duties was the detention of enemy aliens and my friend comes into this picture because he was an enemy alien. Not that the description fitted. Father Leone had said farewell to Florence a good twenty-five years previously and had been genuinely astounded when I once asked him if he had ever considered going back. The life of this Capuchin missioner until God should call him was among India’s poor and India’s sick. His rather prominent forehead was pitted by small-pox; a small-pox attributable, according to the report of the health authorities, to his stubborn refusal to take precautions (what precautions could he take short of abandoning the particular village?); but by him to


divine favour: the marks it left were stigmata. The Blessed Virgin Mary herself had become visible to him one night in that stricken hovel there on the Muttra border (not in a dream, he would insist to me, nor when the fever had taken its hold) and, smiling, nodded her encouragement. Nevertheless of his native Tuscany he was not really rid: nor ever could be, and I used to listen to him singing its praises. Oh, I must go and learn the beauties of the Italian of the ‘bel Paese là dove il si suona’. In my time at Agra we would generally be able to squeeze in an hour’s Dante at weekends, of a Sunday preferably, and since my transfer to Delhi I had missed those readings sadly. It must have been in the sweltering heat of the second summer of the War, anyhow some while after we had complied with Churchill’s injunction to ‘lock the lot up’ that I decided to take a breather of two or three days in order to visit my friend up in the prisoners’ camp at Mussoorie to which he had been sent on arrest. We managed to arrange several long walks together, for the regulations permitted outings at fixed hours and under suitable surveillance. And then I came back by the night train from Dehra Dun. As I alighted from my carriage at Delhi I was tapped on the shoulder by a European Sergeant ‘Just come along, will you,’ he said, taking my arm. He led me to the Railway Police Office, sat down at his desk and took a sheet of paper from a drawer. I stood before him, my chin doubtless dark with stubble and my slept-in khaki shirt and slacks showing perspiration patches. ‘Savvy English?’ he began, against the human clamour and the metallic clatter of the great station outside. Then ‘Name?’ ‘It’s your name, Sergeant, I’d like to have,’ I replied, ‘to pass it to the Senior Superintendent of Police. I’m sure he’ll want to compliment you on a smart job.’ 5. ANOTHER VICEROY’S HOUSE Whenever I see the name Wavell in print or hear it spoken I think neither of his military achievement which I am quite incompetent to assess nor of his viceroyalty concerning which I could hardly assemble the coherent pattern from the detached fragments of information that alone came my way in the Delhi provincial round. I think of a sturdy figure in a bush shirt and spotted muffler, of a man in whose rugged countenance there was strength without ruthlessness; rather, indeed—and it was a strange combination—a kind of sweetness. I think of a preux chevalier.

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This impression derives not from scores of more fleeting chances to observe him but from two which to me are memorable, and memorable probably because they were private. One was in Agra where he turned up with his sister and left her in my house so that she could ‘do’ the Mughal monuments without hurry; the other, earlier in date, in Viceroy’s House. A Scottish laird of whom it was justly said that ‘He took great burdens and he bore them well’, had been replaced there by a soldier. Four years exactly had gone by, counting from that first winter of the war when, as I have related, we would all still go along to the palace dressed up to the nines. Four years during which much that was catastrophic had happened in Asia, much that had made it high time to tell the bearer to remove the topper from the hatstand, and put away the tails, the gold braided coatee and the knee breeches in the mothproof trunk. There had been no invitation phrased in the language of yesterday: only a ‘Why not come along to lunch on Sunday and we’ll go into it’ So what did you wear? I had a raw tussore jacket and thought that might do. Yesterday you would have been told about dress but not why you were being invited. Today it was the other way round. To a Viceroy’s House accommodating various wartime departments, to a Viceroy’s House where Red Cross work is going on in the spacious salons, where the Women’s Voluntary Service had its headquarters, and where the dreamlike ornamental grounds are occupied by an immense leave camp, you did not go simply because it was your turn. No, it was in connection with an amenity for troops, a canteen. A side-show then, but Wavell was a soldier and—in point here—his wife was a soldier’s wife; to both of them ‘canteen’ was a word with pleasurable associations. If ‘Her Ex.’ poured out mugs of tea for Sepoys—and was this a function less vice-regal than queening it in the pre-war style at some glittering reception in the ballroom?—then ‘the memsahibs’ of the imperial capital would follow suit, and men from the front accustomed indeed to the ministrations of women but in the simpler décor of a village home, could not fail to be moved by this proof of esteem. In short the Wavells had lent it their enthusiasm, and their name as well. Where the names of their predecessors were perpetuated in parks and crescents, theirs would be linked with a wartime canteen. The initiative had been due to the ‘Auk’ as we called General Auchinleck: the Commander-in-Chief. I am clear about this because he had written me as the Jack-of-all-Trades for advice on some preliminary step and then made me a member of his committee of management. The project had taken shape, donations


had come in from business circles, and someone offered us the use of his house. This, alas, was too cramped for our needs, and to secure roomy premises in wartime New Delhi was a problem, no doubt about it. The Masonic Hall suggested itself, but would the Lodge play? The Viceroy was not a Freemason (Oh: no, no, anything but! Her Ex. had confided to me) and such hints as we others, equally strangers to the fraternity, had so far dropped had produced no effect. I remember thinking that our Nazi enemies, a pair of Hitler’s generals, say, would have conducted matters otherwise, but then Wavell and Auchinleck were defending a different cause from theirs. However, I was on good terms with one Sardar Bahadur Sundar Singh, a Sikh gentleman of high ‘degree’ in Freemasonry LBI—H* who, away from New Delhi these last weeks, was now back. I had seen him, and my soundings had relieved me of anxiety. No lancer in scarlet and jack boots, no mounting of the guard these days, only a solitary policeman in the outer box by the railings. The grand sweep of the courtyard was deserted this Sunday morning, and I could not discern a chaprasi even on the entrance steps. In all Delhi, in all India, I never saw a bell-push at a front door, so how did I make my way in? It must have presented no difficulty for my next memory is of a round table laid for six in a smallish room. ‘Archie John’, the son, was with us, his arm in a sling (he had recently lost his left hand in the Assam and North Burma operations) and so was one of the daughters, Pamela; and there was one of the As.D.C. Of drink the choice lay between beer and Kia-Ora; and a curry was the plate of resistance. It was not what I had known at a Viceroy’s table; but then, too, never before, never had a Viceroy asked me about my Districts. Which had they been? How many years was it now I’d been in the Delhi administration and did I like it when I thought of Bahraich? I envy those—numerous to judge by autobiographies —who can quote entire conversations years and years later. I cannot, but it will be understood why just those questions, plainly put in the Wavell manner, are with me still. The Wavell manner, I have said. A legend attached to it in those times, and a legend always has a basis of truth. There would be dreadful silences, people said, and especially when some comment was expected. Evan Jenkins, his Private Secretary, had told me how things had gone in a tête-à-tête with Churchill at the beginning of the Viceroyalty. ‘I felt,’ said Evan, ‘like the sailor home from the sea with a parrot, and the parrot wouldn’t talk.’ But if never voluble, Wavell invariably made his meaning clear, whether to the A.D.C. or to the P.M. And I think he had never exploded with anger in the

216 WHEN WAR CAME

whole of his life. In New Delhi, anyhow, whenever a political leader had come out with something peculiarly uncalled for during an interview, or one of his staff had read out the contents, as decoded, of a peculiarly infuriating telegram from London, he used to pick up four or five pens and pencils from his desk and crunch them together with nothing nearer to an expletive than his predictable, laconic ‘I see’. The man in worn tweeds and a sports shirt was taking the afternoon off for a round of golf, so had to go and change (I could not imagine why). The son and daughter sat down to a game of draughts or backgammon, and then their father returned looking more sturdy than ever in khaki shorts. This is really “Her Ex’s” show,’ he said, shaking hands, ‘and I’ll leave you to it’ Since he had called her, I could have sworn to it, ‘old girl’ the instant before, the ‘Her Ex.’ was within sufficiently audible inverted commas. Her show indeed it was. My contribution was precisely nil, for the Masonic Hall was as good as in the bag, and the two hours that are vivid in my mind to this day, to be candid I had lived them under false pretences. The Viceroy’s dismissal (‘at shorter notice’ Lady Wavell was to say in the hearing of us all ‘than you are compelled to give a housemaid’), the whys and wherefores of Attlee’s becoming fed up with him—upon these fields I am unqualified to trench. But of this much I can remind the readers of this page: it was Wavell and not Mountbatten who persuaded the British Government to fix a date for our withdrawal from India, Wavell who convinced the British Government that Partition had become inevitable. These lines were mine, I wrote them…’ Thanks to the prodigious memory whose feats he describes for us in his anthology Other Men’s Flowers, some poet would always be at his beck and call to match his mood. May he not in the few short years that remained to him, perhaps while driving his car alone through the English countryside, or giving a satisfying smack to a golf ball, have repeated occasionally out loud that remonstrance of Virgil’s which nicely fitted his own case? For Wavell also had fashioned something for which ‘another took the applause’. Tulit alter honores. But I am recalling the man here, not his work. And from this man which of us could withhold admiration? Which of us could feel for him anything less than affection?

12 GANDHI—HIS LOT IS AMONG THE SAINTS

1. BAPU My mother, writing in 1931, reported how she had been to tea with Maude Royden who was ‘not at all dowdy and used lipstick’. I am not sure whether half a century later Miss Royden’s name is widely familiar. At the time it was: she was minister at the Guildhouse, had been preacher or assistant preacher at the City Temple, was a social worker of distinction. And recently she had been Gandhi’s hostess, I suppose at the Guildhouse, when he was in London to attend a session of the Round Table Conference. The talk, my mother said, had revolved on him and one thing had startled her much more than the use of make-up (which she herself heartily approved) in this deeply religious woman, and that was her remark that Gandhi was not properly to be equated with Our Lord, no, not with him, ‘because Jesus of Nazareth was unique in his perfection.’ There were, of course, many in Europe and America to echo Miss Royden, many, too, who without quite going to her lengths would tell you that Gandhi was the St Paul of our own days or a St Francis of Assisi who had taken Poverty as his bride or —I forget what else, there was so much of it. Remarkably, such eulogies left India out, except as the geographical area in which every now and then thousands of his devoted following allowed themselves to be beaten to pulp without lifting a hand in selfdefence. But discuss it with Indians—I think inevitably of three or four, one of them a Muslim, among my own close acquaintances— and they would remind you that to describe Gandhi’s thought and action at all you had to fall back on a string of Sanskrit terms bearing on a view of life as utterly Hindu as it is possible to conceive. In an earlier chapter attempting to assess what it means to be a Hindu, we saw how to Hindu thinking all things are graded


Mahatma Gandhi—from the painting by Oswald Birley

and how, as a corollary, finer spirits will be closely attached to what is of high grade and loosely attached to what is of low grade.


Mira Behn and Mahatma Gandhi in London, 1931 (see page 253)

Now bring in Gandhi here: bring him in on the subject of truth, for example. Truth to him has two levels: one with difficulty to be apprehended, so pure is it, and the other, which is the truth we


are confronted with in our daily affairs, a sort of inferior truth. Listen to his exact words. ‘Dip your left hand in a bowl of iced water, then in a bowl of tepid water. The tepid water will seem hot. Then dip your right hand in a bowl of hot water and afterwards in that containing tepid water. The tepid water will seem cold. Absolute truth was the constant temperature of the water; but relative truth, that perceived by the hand of man, varied.’ Truth, he is telling us, varies; it is not indivisible. The Holy Man, which Gandhi was, will know that its different aspects cannot always be reconciled. And so it must be with whatever end you deem to be good. The Freedom Fighter, which Gandhi was, will know that you cannot maximize a particular ideal without diminishing some other ideal. Is this perhaps the key to what puzzled us all in Gandhi: how, inflexible in his attachment to noble ends, he could be supple, loosely attached, not to say without scruple, in regard to the means employed of attaining them; how, briefly put, he could succeed in combining the roles of saint and politician? Before I try to bring the saint and the politician into focus, or isolate the social reformer into whom this saint-cum-politician would again and again slide to the enduring benefit of his people, I want to introduce the eccentric, the endearing but also at times exasperating eccentric, whom his entourage called ‘Bapu’, which is ‘Father’ in Gujarati; not ‘Mahatma’, not ‘Gandhiji’, but ‘Bapu’. He was in London, as I have said, at the date of my mother’s letter. London, it seemed—and particularly the East End, for he was stopping in Kingsley House at Bow—had taken a look at him and liked what it saw. Was tickled too by what it saw. His dhoti, or loincloth, always appeared bulky above his spindly legs, and the shawl hiding his arms flapped on either side as he walked so that you would think from a distance some outsize exotic bird had strayed into Whitechapel. Pedestrians who encountered him at close range and exchanged remarks with him had been aware of a smallish, neatly cropped head (he would cut his hair himself— perhaps the only Indian who did!); of ears resembling a bat’s s; of a nose that dropped suddenly from the bony ridge to the tip and had rather long nostrils; of a short upper lip barely concealed by a thin moustache; of a lower lip occasionally jutting in sign of doubt or dissent; of a smile—and the whole countenance beamed when it came—revealing both broken teeth and toothless gaps. Aware, not finally as I am listing it here but from the very start, of glittering eyes peering through glasses, holding the vis-à-vis in a kindly glance and—not to be missed—sizing him up.


I was able, it may have been two or three years later, to cap that picture. I was able to inform my mother that the Londoners who had taken to him in the Mile End Road had been denied one laugh which was ours, from time to time, in India. If only his Cockney acquaintances could have met him on one of his prodigious tours across the plain! The procession tramping towards them along the soft and dusty margin of the metalled highway would have declared the following order of march: heading it, a posse of constables from the local police-station, then the amanuenses and the pressmen, then the ‘menagerie’ as the entourage was nicknamed, then Bapu himself, staff in hand, huddled in a blanket against the winter air and stepping out at a brisk pace; and at the tail, a grave porter bearing on his head the personal commode. Gandhi had a near obsession with his bodily functions. Indeed certain humourless pilgrims, turning up all the way from the United States to worship at the shrine, are reliably reported to have been put out when the provoking sage would talk to them about nothing but enemas. Diet with him was a subject of constant study: he performed prolonged experiments with groundnut oil, soy bean oil and coconut milk; and observed a Panch Vastu (Five Items) vow which restricted his regimen to the said number of vegetables and-or fruits in the course of the day. And sharp was the scolding if the least mistake was committed by the devoted women responsible for his meals. From cow’s milk he had, as everyone knew, abstained these long years because it inflamed the passions. In the beginning his health had suffered from this abstention, until a compromise, the unkind critic might term it a Gandhian compromise, had suggested itself. After some shilly-shallying he was able to reconcile himself to the drinking of goat’s s milk as a substitute. Then he found it did him good if someone would rub oil into his scalp at the end of the day and someone else rub ghi, the clarified butter of India, on the soles of his feet. Then he became convinced that the cure for his high blood pressure was to have a cotton bag containing wet earth placed on top of his head. And then those monologues. His collected speeches and the articles dictated to his weeklies, Young India and the Harijan, now in process of publication by the Government of India, are likely to run to fifty volumes! Small wonder if the ‘menagerie’ listening to his moralisings six days a week looked forward to each Monday when his tongue rested in strict silence and when, as somebody remarked, Bapu’s Inner Voice got its chance to put a word in. Hindu to the core, he would go into raptures over the cow: were she sick, the barrister-at-law was ready to acquaint the rustic


owner with the proper remedy for the given ailment. For the horse, the dog, and every other animal his solicitude was guaranteed, for was he not, in his own phrase, ‘at one with dumb creation’? Since there is little evidence that he had ever had anything to do with either horses or dogs, and still less that he had a ‘way’ with them, the claim sounded a bit complacent and I know I would never have permitted him to treat my mare Shireen, had the occasion arisen! I know he could never have attended to the demands of our Briard bitch as my wife is doing while I write these very lines. All in all, these and other cranky ideas, these nostrums went down well with most of the following; and by an inner minority they were tolerated as the expression of a lovable personality. Fond of his own legend and alive to the uses of publicity, Bapu had allowed much of what I am here relating to become common knowledge. For the rest I am indebted to a credible witness, if ever there was one. The singular circumstance which brought me, a run-of-the-mill official, into the very bosom of the ‘menagerie’ occurred late in my story and I shall reserve it for a concluding chapter. But of the little band itself that bore this flippant designation I must insert some account without more ado. In the early days of the Great War, which is to say shortly af ter his return to India from South Africa where he had tried out his famous technique of Satyagraha (of which more below), Bapu had founded an Ashram at Ahmedabad. There, assisted by a few dozen co-workers, he delivered his opening attack on Untouchability by admitting a family of India’s unfortunates into the precincts of the hermitage. He had taken a step which he was never to retrace. And second, profiting by the fact that the immediate region was among the few where traditional village occupations had not died out, he inaugurated his celebrated revival of hand-spinning. Of Untouchability and his life-long fight to abolish it, known later as the Harijan movement, I have spoken in earlier pages, and to Handspinning I shall come in a moment. Here it is the disciples who are in point. To start with, these had totalled no more than some forty men, women and children headed by one or two ascetics of repute like Sri Vinoba Bhave. But the number increased rapidly until it was nearing two hundred. It had become not only unwieldy in the process of growth but, according to my informant, infected; it contained too many social snobs at one extreme, too many halfcrazed Sadhus stupefied with bhang at the other. To these annoyances financial worries, not to say disputes, had been added, with the result that the Master decided to make a clean break with Ahmedabad. In 1933 he wound up the Ashram


there, and created a new one in the heart of India, initially in the small town of Wardha but soon afterwards in the thoroughly rural setting of Sevagram, ‘Village of Service’, which was his apt respelling of the place’s original name, Segaon. Here, henceforward, his experiments in village economies and village education were to be conducted, and here he gathered round him the select little group, motley but co-ordinated, that came to be referred to as his menagerie. Its members were, and would remain, the cream of the cream of the disciples. They ranged from the genuine ascetic to the competent private-secretary, from the Vinoba Bhave to the Pyare Lal; from the finished products of Roedean or Sherborne School for Girls to India’s cloistered and illiterate womanhood, from the Srimati Amrit Kaur of noble birth or the English devote Mira Behn to the uneducated Kasturbai who was Bapu’s wife. The fact was that Bapu demanded, and got, an efficient headquarters staff: one or two ambassadresses who could state his case winningly to Viceroys, and half-a-dozen Marthas willing to potter about in the kitchen and anoint his feet. To this milieu Kasturbai, or ‘Ba’, Mother, as they called her, who had been married to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi at thirteen and started bearing his children at sixteen, adapted herself with simple dignity. For twenty-seven years until her death in 1942 she endured the Ashram life which, not of her choosing, can hardly have been much fun. In an Indian hermitage there is a Master, there are disciples of both sexes, there is no Mistress. The second of the themes to which Bapu the social reformer, surrounded and assisted by these disciples, harnessed his pheno menal energy was, we were saying, the revival of the lost practice of hand-spinning. Soberly judged this was not to be bracketed with the Harijan cause; it was, frankly, the most notable of his fads, and ‘fad’ is how the Congress and the intelligentsia at large concurred in describing it. Quite early on, in the ‘twenties, he had persuaded himself that hand-spinning and handloom-weaving were the panacea for rural ills; they would yield an income in the off season when there was no work in the fields, yield moral dividends into the bargain since they would cure idleness. He was no countryman, and naïvely confessed he had never set eyes on a Charkha, a spinning wheel, at the time. However, Bapu was never one to be daunted by his own ignorance. He took his stand by regeneration; and this in the literal sense of bringing back into existence the spiritual and material values that had lapsed. India’s salvation consisted in a return to the simplicity of her past. ‘The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors,


and such like all have to go,’ he declared sweepingly. India had no need of them, the Charkha would satisfy her wants. Understandably such intimations of Utopia exasperated educated opinion, and so eminent a figure as Rabindranath Tagore ridiculed the Charkha programme publicly. The Party, too, as mentioned, jibbed at it—or did so until the leaders tumbled to something which had been absent altogether from Bapu’s mind: namely that the end-product of the Charkha which was Khaddar or Khadi, ‘homespun’, could redound to limitless political advantage. It was decided that Congressmen throughout the land should from now on clothe themselves in an essentially Indian style. And so Khaddar in due course ‘refashioned’ a nation-wide section of society; an urban middle-class section of society. In the beginning, unlooked-for difficulties had to be overcome, for neither spinning wheels nor spinners to act as teachers were easy to find; and but for the ardour of Bapu’s disciples in the Ashram the thing would never have got under way. They set the example; the nationalist leaders followed it, and presently everybody who was anybody in Congress was doing his daily stint of spinning as a matter of Party honour. And a pretty comic sight they presented, I was once told, these dutiful politicians propped on cushions on the ground in front of their wheels! What of the villager, though, the villager on whose budget, and on whose soul as well, the Charkha was calculated to confer benefit? Alas, he did not take to it. If you asked him about it, he would look awkward and grin. If you pressed him, he would answer that men never used it, only the women had done so; that anyhow he had more than enough to occupy him in the slack season. Could you really wonder if he continued to walk to the nearest bazaar when he wanted cloth? 2. AN INDUBITABLE SAINT Gandhi with his gift for the apt phrase referred to the poor, unprivileged mass of his people as ‘my principals’. How did they in their turn look upon him? A solitary Englishman under canvas was in a position to ask them. They would not always answer intelligibly, but sometimes they did, and the reply would be arresting. So listen to the humble Hindu peasants who are seated every evening under a tree, or round the fire if it be mid-winter— there was hardly a village where you would not see a little group of them. And bear it in mind that with them no sharp line is drawn between the supernatural and the familiar. Only here and there will one of them know how to scrawl his name; but they will


all know, having imbibed it from childhood, about the avatars. Will know, having had it recited to them a thousand times, that the Lord spoke, saying ‘When lawlessness is abroad, I bring myself to bodied birth. I come down age after age’. Avatar, a learned word to us, is the easiest of words to these simple souls; it is merely a ‘descent’ whether a bird makes it or an aeroplane or—Vishnu. And in the present instance it was Vishnu himself that had made it. I can still hear how they pronounced it, two syllables on their lips, autār. ‘Vishnu,’ they are saying, ‘has come down’. But what about the educated? The Babu, for example, what did he think? In India —and the reminder is needed—when you say ‘babu’ you are not being contemptuous; on the contrary you are being correct, even respectful. And respect this man merited, for without about one million of him the edifice of the British Raj could not have remained standing for twentyfour hours. The Babu mattered. Suppose then I had tackled the steadier of the Hindu clerks on my office pay-roll, graduates several of them might be and anyhow of consequence in the quarter, each probably with a manservant to bring him his tiffin at noon. I can guess pretty well what their answer would have been: ‘Sir: we are not illiterate cultivators and we don’t take Gandhiji for an incarnation of God, no; but he is living closer to God, Sir, than we people, much closer.’ Thirdly, what did the sophisticated think, the nationalist élite on whom the task would soon devolve of con structing Independent India? The most notable of them came out in the open on this issue at a wellremembered juncture. It was January 1934 and Gandhi was halfway through one of his fantastic tours, thousands of miles of it, collecting money for the Harijan cause, when an earthquake shook and devastated considerable areas of the Bihar province. It was so violent that the Daniell engravings I had on the walls of my rooms in the old Collector’s House at Allahabad, an eight- or ten-hour train journey away, swung on the hooks. When news of the tragedy was brought to Gandhi he promptly issued a pronouncement that the calamity was a punishment for the sin of Untouchability. Nehru, who had taken the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge could not stomach this, and did not mince his words. In a scornful rejoinder he deplored the airing of antiquated views ‘opposed to the scientific outlook’. The public then attended to a curious debate in which the refractory lieutenant never had a chance. The laws of God were unknown, Gandhi argued, and hence there was nothing to disprove the causal connexion between the disaster and Untouchability of which, for his part, he had received intimation. Nehru gave up. India, or most of it, was persuaded that the population of Bihar had been visited by the


wrath of God. The intelligentsia, then, of which Jawaharlal Nehru was a shining exemplar, was averse to the veneration of the saint. But it was, notwithstanding, patently prepared to revere the saintly character; and this reverence, almost awe, was of such depth that in crisis after crisis within the Party Gandhi emerged as its undisputed master. How did it come about in our twentieth century that a whole society set this man apart from his fellows and above them? I think because every Hindu, whatever his station, had been conditioned by his religious upbringing to dwell on saintliness, much as we in Europe did in the Middle Ages but do no longer, and subconsciously to await its embodiment. In the person of Gandhi he sensed just that blend of renunciation of desire and service to mankind which Scripture taught him was the mark of sainthood. Now according to hallowed Hindu teaching, these coupled attitudes of renunciation and service could not be stoked save by a rare fuel which is tapas. I was to notice in any talks I had about Gandhi with Indian colleagues that tapas always cropped up. Literally ‘heat’ in Sanskrit, it is the ardour which impels. Looking back I have no doubt that my companions were right: this was the quality which sustained him in those attitudes. But an attitude, all said and done, is a posture with reference to something, not that something itself. That would be for the saint to choose, and Gandhi chose Ahimsa, Non-Violence, the anthithesis of Himsa which is Violence. He was being one hundred percent Indian here, not borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount as some, or from Tolstoy as others, would have us believe. Ahimsa lies deeply embedded in ancient Hindu piety, being pin-pointed in the Mahabhamt as ‘the highest duty.’ Moreover, to come very near home, it was the way of the Jains whose company Gandhi, born in Kathiawar which is a stronghold of the sect, much frequented in his youth; it is the Way of the Jains who must not be farmers lest they harm the earth with the plough, who cover their mouths with a veil to save insects of the air from injury. Of course, no more than ‘Charity’, which is perhaps its nearest equivalent in English, is this Ahimsa a passivity —let not the ‘A’, the ‘Non’ of Himsa mislead! On the contrary, Gandhi insisted, it is a forceful, aggressive and, in the last resort, irresistible activity. Being an activity it has to be put into practice, has to be applied; and its practical application in life is Satyagraha. The term, a neologism meaning ‘Truth-Firmness’, he hit upon to express a technique of his own invention. Satya is a ‘truth’ or ‘that which is’, or ‘the real’, and about this there must be ‘firmness’. The least wavering, and


the cause, Ahimsa, is lost. And to the pilgrim who employs this exacting technique Gandhi gave the name Satyagrahi: Mr Valiantfor-Truth, if you like, progressing towards a beckoning bliss. Progressing towards it, for there is no suggestion that Ahimsa is an end; it is a duty, a mission. The goal, whether for Gandhi or for his disciples, is nothing less than Moksha, that state of ultimate Salvation in which, as Hindus hold, there is release from birth and death. It was in pursuit of this goal, Gandhi declared, that he lived and moved and had his being. If these concepts seem to us strangely fluid, let us remember they are Hindu concepts; if the resultant doctrine is a counsel of utopian perfection, remember it was enunciated by a saint. As the world knows, Gandhi was dubbed the ‘Mahatma’ (usually translated ‘Great Soul’)—the title had caught on as irrevocably in the West as in India itself. I have read somewhere that it went out of vogue in the later years of his life, but this is not so. Mahatma Gandhi ki Jay, ‘Victory to the Mahatma!’ was the slogan of the ‘42 rebellion as I intend to relate presently, and I heard it chanted as vociferously as ever in the very last act when the ‘Mahatma’, victim of the assassin’s bullets, was being borne on his bier through the avenues of New Delhi en route for the Burning Ghat. What is true is that he himself came to dislike the title. And why, after having accepted it for many, many years he changed his mind about it can, I fancy, be understood if we recall who it was that conferred it on him in the first place. It was Rabindranath Tagore in a letter written to him in 1915. Now Tagore had followed through in the succeeding years, and very publicly indeed, not with the praise of this ‘Mahatma’ but with blame and, what was worse, sarcasm. Gandhi grew to suspect that the rival sage had had his tongue in his cheek, all the time, and the galling fact was he might have detected the irony from the start. Strictly ‘Mahatma’ means ‘Great Spirit’ not ‘Great Soul’, the Greek pneuma not the Greek psyche, and could only be applied to one who has, in the perfect tense, attained the Moksha which is total liberation. The Bhagavad Gita had said it: ‘These [Mahatmas]…have come to Me, they never again return to birth…they have reached the last fulfilment…have taken on the nature of God’. The mockery had been thinly disguised. 3. THE CALL OF THE ARENA This indubitable saint was fired, we saw, with a burning resolve to serve his people. Now the chief service of which it stood in need,


was moral regeneration, and Gandhi’s ‘constructive programme’, as it was known, of hand-spinning, basic education, the removal of Untouchability and the rest, was consciously framed to effect this. However, in India’s case such a reform of character was thwarted; morale, he insisted, could not revive in an atmosphere of political subjection. To express what he was after, there was an ancient term Swaraj meaning ‘self-discipline’; and then, lo and behold, the very word came to his rescue for in the old Sanskrit speech this had signified ‘independent sway’ as well as ‘self-control’. Thus Swaraj was the heaven-sent device appropriate to India’s banner from now on, her watchword in the moral cause and in the political cause indiscriminately. And just as the political Swaraj was the necessary concomitant of the moral Swaraj, so this saint in the lineage of the Rishis of old was of necessity a politician. Of the individual and collective comportment he expected to flow from his Swaraj he gave enough indication to reassure the high and mighty. He staunchly defended the caste system, and the accumulation of capital was not among the activities he deplored. No social equality in private communications was thus calculated to supervene, which pleased old-fashioned Hindus; no socialism either, to the relief of the magnates contributing to Party funds. In fact, no ‘ism’ of any description—not even ‘Gandhism’, he liked to add with a twinkle. To be sure, his ideal of an India of selfgoverning villages was pooh-poohed by nationalist leaders enamoured of the apparatus of parliamentary democracy and ‘sold’ on the prospect of an industrialised society, but for them, too, Gandhi was the leader who matched up to the moment. Again and again I would hear it said by his admirers and detractors both, that the agitator was a completely different person from the visionary. But let us dismiss such nonsense. Emphatically we have to do with a man who to his dying day, when he fell victim to political assassination with ‘Ram! Ram!’ the name of God on his lips, was ‘in character’; we have not to do with —the phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson is tempting—‘a fellow who was two fellows’. The celebrated Gandhian fast, popularly associated in the West with his career in the arena rather than the cloister but in fact common to both, illustrates this to perfection. It was, being Gandhi’s, a thoroughly Hindu fast, hallowed by the ages and now harnessed to actuality. From ancient times there had been a practice known as ‘sitting put’ (dharna baithna), and I have never met a Hindu, educated or uneducated, who could not tell me what that meant. It meant sitting doggedly, and fasting unto death if need be, at the doorstep of an obstinate debtor until he paid up or you died; in which second case he would have your


ghost to reckon with for the remainder of his days! Dharna baithna, in short, was twisting an opponent’s mind instead of his wrist to get something out of him, and as a method of distraint requiring courage, ruthlessness and persistence it appealed to the Gandhi who was so richly endowed with these qualities. It appealed to him also as a method capable of application far outside the private field; that is, in the social field: in the political field itself. So we watch the fasting and praying Gandhi treating a sinful Hindu society as a debtor unwilling to discharge a crying obligation to the Untouchables. We watch the fasting and praying Gandhi casting the British Empire in the role of the debtor who owed India her freedom and would not pay up. That Western observers should fall for Gandhi’s personal magnetism was understandable—we on the spot fell for it ourselves. Less comprehensible, however, was Western gush about his celebrated modus operandi, his employment of ‘the Force which is born of Non-Violence’. Just now we saw him drawing inspiration from the Way of the Jains, but perhaps I did not bring out the degree to which they too, like the Saint in his turn, operated a kind of shuttle service between the Ahimsa of the individual and the non-violent attitude of the collectivity—with no jolt in thought or action. Historically, in their case it had paid off. Historically, the peaceable Gujaratis, faced with the martial Marathas who harried and pillaged them, had behaved very sensibly; and that model community in their midst who were the Jains, spearhead—if the expression be allowed—of the non-violent onslaught, the Jains who eschewed agriculture because the plough hurt the soil, had raised themselves into a proficient and incidentally very affluent commercial community. The Gujarati Saint not only knew all about this, but perceived that the scene was nowadays being restaged at national level: an unarmed society was being vexed by a martial race; in this instance, the British. And no other weapon than the Non-Violent agitation was to hand. The Congress command was open about this: there was scarcely a leader who would not tell you his Party adopted Non-Violence as a tactic, and Nehru never concealed that they were making a parade of what they did not believe to be a virtue. Lord Irwin as Viceroy—and his sympathy with Gandhi was extreme—had judged him to be the victim of unconscious selfdeception over the whole thing, and this may well have been the case in the earlier phase. But it is doubtful whether Gandhi clung to his faith as the years and events unfolded; whether, for example, he believed, as he pretended ad nauseam in the opening


days of the War that soul force, moral authority, resolutely exerted would reduce Hitler to repentance. And there must, one can only suppose, have been moments when he despaired of its power to move the comparatively tender-hearted English. What Gandhi was thinking in petto we could not know of course, but we could draw our own conclusions when, as happened time and again he called a movement off, put the blame rather disingenuously on the Satyagrahis who had not come up to scratch, shook the dust of the arena from his feet and—for the immediate while, anyhow— refreshed his mind and spirit in the unvitiated air of moral reform. Over the span of the years a magistrate in my shoes was inclined to prefer Tagore’s summing-up to the gentler judgment of Lord Irwin. To Tagore—and plenty of us in the I.C.S. wished we had thought of this ourselves—Gandhi was a man ‘of natural cleverness in manipulating recalcitrant facts.’ It was perhaps an unkind hit by a rival whose nose was out of joint, but it was a hit. Of what man could it be more aptly remarked that while clinging tenaciously to his purpose he got round whatever stood in the path? Fervid for his goal, he was never so attached to his way that he was not prepared to abandon it in favour of some other. If you plotted Gandhi’s course on a chart it would resemble the very ivy to which the Roman poets ascribed the two epithets ‘tenacious’ and ‘ambitious’ —the latter in its primary meaning of going round things! This Gandhi had no special field: his thoughts and actions were coterminous with life. But whilst he wrote indelibly upon the page of history, it was in what I have termed above the unvitiated climate of moral reform, and not in the noisome atmosphere of politics with which the outer world connected him, that he triumphed. In politics his achievement was to set the tone, and no more. India was being shepherded at a measured pace towards independence by her foreign rulers, and this would have come when it did without Gandhi. Indeed it can be plausibly, if inconclusively, argued that Gandhi by sedulously confusing the bid for freedom with the revival of inherently Hindu values shattered the dream, his own as much as anybody’s, of national unity after we had gone. But in that other area of his endeavour, there he raised a monument more durable than brass.


4. DO OR DIE ‘Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give you. You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is: Do or Die.’ In this stirring call, worded, as will be seen, by a master of the English language, there was no ambiguity. But lest any should be in doubt as to its meaning it was repeated in plain, emphatic Hindustani. And there was this also about it that to Hindus a mantra is of holy alloy; it is a sacred text, a spiritual instruction. It was uttered on 8 August 1942, and the occasion was a meeting of the All India Congress Committee in Bombay. None of us was really taken aback. During the last couple of months Gandhi—for the author of the mantra was none other than the Apostle of Ahimsa—had been working himself up into a mood of, in his own phrase, ‘open rebellion’, and doing this, as he did everything, with no small publicity. Had he not just three weeks previously written in his weekly Harijan that although he did not ‘want’ bloodshed as a direct result of a show of strength, if this did take place it could not be helped? His position could not have been more nakedly stated. Thus the Gandhi who had broken down and wept as he pictured Westminster Abbey in ruins had suffered a sea-change, and most noticeably since the preceding spring. In March the British Government had made India an unequivocal promise of Dominion Status immediately hostilities should end. This was remembered as the ‘Cripps offer’ after the envoy, member of the War Cabinet and a personal friend of Nehru, who had proceeded to Delhi in order to explain it viva voce. It was rejected with contumely alike by the Congress Party which demanded that power should be handed over to them without more ado, and by the Muslim League whose idée fixe by that time was Pakistan. The subsequent report to Parliament that whereas our spokesman had flown many thousands of miles to meet the Indian leaders, these had moved not one step to meet each other, reflected the situation; but of course it fell far short of acquainting the nation with the underlying reason for the mission’s failure. This was that the offer came two-and-a-half years late. Had it been made in September 1939—that is, before we looked like losing the War, and before there was any talk of Pakistan, it would beyond a shadow of doubt have been accepted. But by this date—what? Not only had all hope of India’s unity been blasted, but the war had gone from bad to worse. Rangoon had fallen a bare fortnight before Cripps


touched down at Delhi airport; on the very morning the negotiations opened, news came of the Japanese occupation of the Andaman Islands, an outpost of British India; and a few days later bombs were raining on the seaboard towns of the Madras Presidency. So while the Muslim Leaguers, apparently divorcing the war from their minds altogether, were vowing that by God they would have Pakistan, the Congress ‘high command’ convinced themselves that we were promising what it would never be ours to grant, that India was on the verge of suffering the fate of Malaya and Burma, that the offer was ‘a post-dated cheque on a failing bank’. That biting phrase is always attributed to Gandhi himself but one does not quite hear him uttering it. It is much more in the style of the glib young journalists of, say, the extremist National Herald. Class it perhaps with, and let it be counter-balanced by, the more hearten ing rejoinder, apocryphal likewise, that also went the rounds in those dark hours: that of our Sepoys arriving up country wounded or on leave, who, when told by defeatists dressed in Khaddar, the homespun symbol of defiance of our rule, that the Japanese would be in Delhi in a few days, flung back: ‘Not with this bloody awful train service, they won’t’. So Cripps had been sent packing, and ‘the chief servant of the nation’ turned his back once and for all on the realities of Indian politics. He could not wait any longer, he declared, for freedom: the Congress was ‘to take delivery’ of the British Raj, and then promote unity. The bombs, which had been falling on Chittagong aerodrome and the Imphal bazaar and cantonments, would cease to fall because the Japanese would no longer have any motive for dropping them. Such, in sum, was the position on that 8 August 1942 when Gandhi’s mantra was received by the Congress following: which is to say, by a cross-section of Indian society ranging from some of the most talented and high principled in the land to the rabble in the back streets of twenty cities and harbouring between these opposite poles the organized left wing revolutionaries. ‘I want freedom immediately,’ Gandhi had declared in his speech: ‘this very night, before dawn…’ The hour accentuated the urgency of the words, for it was close upon midnight as he uttered them. It was between one and two in the morning that he got to bed and he was having oil rubbed on his head in the usual way when the telephone rang. Some well-wisher on the line had heard a rumour that Bapu was going to be arrested. Gandhi had made one extraordinary pronouncement that night, and now he was to make another. ‘Never,’ he said—and I am citing the words as they were repeated by the disciple who was at his bedside—‘never! It’s


impossible after what I have just been saying in the meeting.’ Then he went to sleep peacefully and unconcerned. At daybreak he was arrested together with the Party’s ‘high command’. Simultaneously the All India Congress Committee and the provincial branches were declared unlawful associations. We picture the dawn drive to Victoria Terminus where the saloon special was drawn up. The destination was Poona—and the prison in Gandhi’s case was to be the Agha Khan’s palace. As Kalyan Station flashed past and receded, the rebels were politely motioned to the dining-car where a slap-up breakfast with waiters, menus and the rest of it had been prepared. The senior guest characteristi cally disapproved of these frills; but, and again characteristically, allowed the reigning Martha to bring him something along the corridor to his compartment 5. DOING OR DYING IN DELHI Gandhi’s rebellion made sense if you assumed, as he did, that the Allies could not win. If the Raj could be wrested from us before we went under, then clearly India’s position vis-à-vis the Japanese would be changed for the better. He had devoted little thought to the operation he had taken upon himself to direct, for it was not his habit to do much homework. Apparently everything was left to the general staff, and very sedulously it had applied itself to the job. The brunt of the attack fell on our lines of communication; which is to say, on the United Provinces and Bihar. Mobs destroyed some two hundred and fifty railway stations, at least that number of post offices, and upwards of one hundred and fifty police thanas. For a time Bengal and Assam were cut off from the rest of India, and the units, Indian in their large proportion, defending the north-east frontier were deprived alike of their means of reinforcement and their sources of supply. Two adjacent areas were affected as well; namely, the Central Provinces and Delhi itself. It was in the former and, ironically enough near Wardha where, as I have recounted, Gandhi had his famous, rather cranky Ashram and where, therefore, his doctrine of Ahimsa, Non-Violence, might if anywhere have sunk in, that a crime of extreme savageness was perpetrated. At the outlying little centre of Chimur the Sub-Divisional Magistrate, the Circle Inspector of Police, the Naib-Tahsildar and a humble Javan in a khaki tunic and scarlet pagri—their very designations belong to a page of our history that has long since been turned—were offered their lives if they promised to join the Congress. They refused, and


were then murdered in cold blood. The loyalty of the civil services and the police, of which this was only a sublime example, marked the whole insurrection—and governed its issue. None of this surprised the ‘clod-hopping’ Collectors in the Districts whom twenty years of intimate association had taught to trust their subordinates absolutely. But suppose things had been otherwise. Suppose those subordinates in their hundreds of thousands, magistrates, revenue-assistants, clerks, chaprasis etc, had been untrue to those whose salt they had eaten—and presum ably Gandhi was counting on that to happen—then the scales of the balance of War would have been tipped to our disaster. On the morning after the Bombay arrests, a dozen or so demonstrators held up my car as I was going to office at my usual hour, and started banging the bonnet and roof with sticks. When I got out and shouted at them to desist a couple of them ripped my shirt half off. However, let me explain, in extenuation of this incivility, first that our shirts in India tore very easily through overmuch laundering and second that these demonstrators were not real rowdies but simply overwrought adolescents. Of course they had recognized my car by the ‘D.I’ number-plate, of course they had waylaid me of set intention, but they seemed not to have thought further ahead than that. In Hindustani you can say a person is pukka (lit. ‘cooked through’) or that he is kachcha, and it was obvious that these youths were ‘half-baked’, did not do anything properly. Certainly did not scrag me properly. My orderly dealt one of them a heavy cuff and I jumped back into my car. My Gurkha chauffeur went into gear, accelerated sharply, and sent two or three of the others sprawling in the roadway. A mild enough scuffle therefore; but on past showing such exhibitions of juvenile effervescence heralded an offensive by the Congress Party’s lower echelons in concert with the underground revolutionary groups. We were about to live laborious days. In a chapter about Gandhi I must not describe what happened next in any depth; but neither, in a chapter about Gandhi must I ignore altogether the response of his following, in many cases his perplexed following, to the mantra he had given them. Let me just recall in a sentence that the Delhi Province was administered by the Home Department of the Government of India through a Chief Commissioner, Arthur Vivian . at this date; that the Province was territorially coterminous with a ‘District’; that qua District it had like any other District its Zila Magistrate; and that like the more important among the Districts up and down the continent it ranked as a Brigade Area with a couple of battalions usually present for the District Officer to call upon in an


emergency. In a previous chapter I was saying something of the additional duties, Civil Defence, A.R.P. and so forth created by the War. These had by now so multiplied as to allow little time for much else, and some weeks back, consequently, I had been relieved of magisterial work by a Punjab Civilian, W.G. Lebailly. His arrival had made us one up on peacetime strength; but, alas, this new colleague was to be laid low by a severe head wound in the very first hour of the insurrection. If, then, what I now recount sounds like a District show, well, that is what it was. Because every so often I managed to get through to ‘Mike’ Askwith at the end of a telephone, because every so often he and I corresponded orally through our Indian subordinates, somebody—and I neither knew nor cared who—in the imposing Imperial Secretariat over the way could attempt to piece things together if he wished. But at no stage, either during the revolt or when it was over did the Viceroy nor any member of his Executive Council, nor any Permanent Secretary, nor the Commander-inChief (though I had had troops out in the streets of Delhi for a whole week) require me to explain why I had done this or why I had not done that. Herein was the flavour of a system that had lasted a hundred years without change—and was about to perish. When order had been restored it fell to me to draft the official report on the Delhi rebellion of 1942, and eventually this will be accessible in the archives to whoever cares to read it. Meanwhile I can but select patchily from a picture which, vivid as ever here and there, has almost faded in other places. It was three days after the warning little episode of my own on the Alipur Road— time, that is, for the agreed signals to be sent out and received— that the hour struck. A mob of many thousands materialized out of nothing in the Chandni Chowk. Whether New Delhi as the seat of imperial rule would be the next target, or a target at all, of the rebels was to be seen; but the odds were against this. It sheltered no canaille, it hated the profane crowd, its richer Congressmen, industrialists and mill-owners, had been shocked by Gandhi’s mantra. Broadly, the standing arrangement in case of civil disturbances was to seal the exits from the bazaars both towards New Delhi on the one side and towards Civil Lines, the Kashmere Gate area, and Qudsia Gardens—those old evocative place-names of the Mutiny—on the other; also at the same time to alert the commander of the troops stationed in the Red Fort. This ‘riot scheme’, as we termed it, had instantly been brought into effect. From that stage on we should simply have to react to developments. Delhi Congressmen consisted of the respectables


who could be counted on to wait and see which way the cat jumped and the riff-raff of the back streets barely better than goondas, hooligans, who—why speculate on what they would do? They were out in the Chandni Chowk now, and by the look of it interpreting the Mahatma’s exhortation as a licence to kill. I have good reason to remember that opening hour: there was first the message that Bill Lebailly had been knocked out in an initial clash with the insurgents, and there was another to say Denys Kilburn who had chanced to be in the City’s central police station, the Kotwali, was trapped there. It was a Hindu merchant who had sounded this second alarm, the police wires having been severed, and I pick here on an early proof of what, in Delhi anyhow, was to mark the sequel: namely, that secure society, while revering the saint was unready to go along with the politician in this latest adventure. I hurried to the Police Headquarters at Kashmere Gate where the Deputy Superintendent, a greying Sikh near the age of retirement, was at his desk. News was coming in, he informed me, of fresh trouble spots, particularly along the limits of the Municipality fronting the Ridge and Civil Lines. The SubPolice Station there was being stormed, and at Delhi Junction two signal cabins had been burnt and some track pulled up. A large building in the neighbourhood, the Railway Clearing Accounts Office, was ablaze and two subinspectors of police had been murdered while attempting to protect it. Their bodies had been mutilated and were being paraded in front of the jeering multitude. Both were Muslims, he said, and it was no idle remark. It was none too soon for the use of troops. Happily the line to the Red Fort was functioning, and I asked for one Company to move into the City and a second Company to get ready to follow. I told the Deputy Superintendent I would go to the Chowk. Then take this, Sir/ he said, seeing me unarmed. And he handed me a lathi, the six foot bamboo pole, brass-tipped, lethal, which to the policeman as to the peasant of India is a very present help in trouble. Perhaps I was half-way to where the ‘Silver Street’ debouches when I caught a bass rumour as of a swelling sea. Under the riot scheme I had a magistrate with a platoon of armed constables near the entrance to the famous thoroughfare, and in a couple of minutes I was being brought abreast of a sufficiently nasty situation. The police had been attacked with brickbats—no need to tell me, the roadway stretching a hundred yards in front of us was littered with them—had been rushed, had opened fire. The mob had retreated, and seemed to me to be pausing, mechanically


yelling Mahatma Gandhi vivats, but that was about all. I could not doubt that the real weight was not against us, it was further up, in the very heart of the Chowk and thrown against Denys’ beleagured band. I suppose the rhythmic tap of ammunition boots crossing the metalled surface of the square behind us was drowned in the uproar, and I was facing the other way. Anyhow before I expected it a Company Commander was asking for instructions. His men and he had no experience, he began, of this kind of thing, and I fear I told him unfeelingly they were not going to like it. We had to go down the Chandni Chowk right to the end, where the mosque stood, at the tempo, half the tempo, of a dead march, I said. The police contingent would lead to begin with, but we’d probably have to pull them in. The mob, as he could see, was armed with sticks, lathis, and crowbars but there were some shot guns, too, and a few—a very few—rifles presumably snatched from scuppered pickets. And—a novel sight for him, if not for me—a hero here and there in the van was clasping a small child to his chest by way of protective clothing. Just for the form of it my magistrate shouted through his megaphone an order to disperse; just for the form, a warning that the police would be compelled to fire. Of the constables who had reported for duty that morning not a few had done so for the last time, and their surviving comrades had no room left for squeamishness. They fired and fired again with their smoothbore muskets enough times to demonstrate that their volleys were too feeble: there was some scampering back, there were twenty wriggling bodies on the ground, but no lanes were opening in that heaving mass. I called back the policemen; it was now for the soldiers. Several of these young chaps had gone very white by this time and after a first round more than one of them was flat on the road, vomiting. After a second round the crowd was visibly yielding and we went slowly forward. Ten or fifteen minutes later Denys’ people were coming out alive and Denys himself leading them. As more and more of the throng escaped into the side-alleys, doing some hasty looting as they fled, the Chowk began to clear so that I even got intermittent glimpses of the Fatehpuri Mosque down to pavement level—and of a very ugly spectacle in front of it: a serried gathering of our Muslim butcher community. They had been waiting, their long knives gleaming, to see what we were going to do. Leaving Denys Kilburn to clean up in the Chandni Chowk and attend to the City’s centre, I set off for Civil Lines in a police truck to see how our check points were holding on that side. I would circle back into municipal limits from there. The British Infantry could stand at ease until I returned. At one of the road blocks on


the slope to the Ridge I came to my astonishment upon Bill Lebailly. He had crawled from his hospital bed when nobody was looking and here he was holding off an attack, as it happened, just as we drove up from the rear. I see him still, his head heavily bandaged, astride the barricade, hear him bellowing his orders in the stentorian voice that none who knew him can forget. But unless my memory is letting me down, he had to be carried back immediately afterwards to the ward from which he had played truant. For myself, I went from there by a route that dropped towards Daryaganj and came out almost opposite the Railway Clearing Accounts Office—or rather its smouldering remains. The crowd there was excited but lacking direction, and the police, firing with deliberation were not in danger of being worsted. Young McClintock, our very junior Assistant Superintendent of Police, was in charge of them, his revolver at his hip, and I stayed long enough to be able to commend him joylessly on the accuracy of his aim. Long enough also to learn that the corpses of the two subinspectors had been burned after their mutilation. Islam does not like its dead to be burned, and Muslims in the Force would take some restraining in the coming days. And one chagrin yet. A lovely precious fire-engine, long awaited and recently delivered from England for our A.R.P., instead of fighting the conflagration had been shoved into it by the malefactors and had added fuel to the flames. It would continue for several days, the pillage and the arson and the attempts on police pickets—but diminuendo. Several days in which military patrols would be rattling through the bazaars dispersing assemblies of five or more persons; several days of curfew and the shooting at sight of any so ill-advised as to break it. This in Delhi: in eastern U.P. and in Bihar the doing or dying lasted weeks, as against our days, before the Congress Party publicly conceded, though not quite in these words, that the saint who had stooped had failed to conquer.

13 TWO YEARS TO GO

1. ‘LOOK HERE, UPON THIS PICTURE, AND ON THIS.’ The war is over. The war is over, and in this hour of victory we address ourselves to the fulfilment of a solemn pledge. We gave it four years ago: it was that when hostilities should have ceased we would accept whatever constitution seemed good to the major elements in this country’s politics. The path to freedom is now unbarred. ‘Long, long ago in the story, indeed before the French Revolution, when a Bill was being debated in the House of Commons which sought to impose on India the kind of rule that seemed appropriate to her British masters, Burke stood up to speak. “We are on a conspicuous stage,” he exclaimed, “and the world marks our demeanour.” At that distant date, and at each successive phase in India’s political advance, it has been enough, if things went awry, to lay the blame at Britain’s door. This time it is for her own statesmen to determine her destiny; and by that same token it is they who are now on a conspicuous stage, it is their demeanour that the world will mark.’ Was this too high falutin as an opening, I asked myself as I read it through. Or would it pass? I had got out of bed exceedingly early that Sunday morning and spent an unconscionable time drafting it. The place was Agra, the period ‘the aftermath’, and the occasion —well, this had been created by a couple of hundred wartime officers, on the average my juniors by twelve to fifteen years, attached to the Central Command, whose only wish was to be off home and out of uniform. Three or four weeks previously, the night sky over the City, a mile away, had been reddened with the glow of leaping flames, the night air laden with the dull roar of battling crowds. We had been in the midst of a gruesome exhibition of


communal violence. The solicitors, schoolmasters, insurance agents, farmers, musicians (there was one—he had enquired if I could introduce him to someone with a piano), engineers, or whatever they were or intended to become in civil life had, it seemed, been studying the English-language press. They had gathered that the principal Party, the Congress, was led by Nehru, the Old Harrovian in Indian dress who was apt to fly off the handle quite frequently, while the Muslims were united in their League behind a barrister of la-di-da manner, one Jinnah, photographed in well-tailored clothes, who had a habit of saying caustic things about ‘a Hindu Raj’ and about ‘a holy humbug’. And by the way, where was Gandhi these days? He appeared to have handed over to his impetuous lieutenant, now that the latter had been released from jail. But weren’t they all Indians together, these people, and hadn’t we promised them independence? Why then the delay? The upshot had been that General Scoones, the G.O.C, pressed me to give a talk in Cantonments about what was going on. I decided the best method of filling my allotted forty-five minutes would be to develop the thesis, the surely tenable thesis, that India was a unity and then go on to account for the birth of the ‘two-nation’ theory, the antithesis so to say, which quite recently had put a sprag in the wheel to which the British, as energetically as the nationalists themselves, had for a quarter of a century and more been putting their shoulders. When I had finished, my hearers paid me the compliment of asking a lot of questions. Most of these I could answer, but one I could not. And it was crucial: What were we going to do about it? During the twenty-four months which separated the surrender of the Japanese from the date on which, forcing the pace, we left India to fend for herself, the I.C.S. in the Districts went on doing the things they had always done and doing them in the timehonoured way: keeping public order, dealing out justice that was sometimes rough but invariably ready, exacting the payment of fairly assessed taxes, maintaining the land records—all the old round. And if I have conveyed the impression above that we were distracted by the political issues of the hour, I must correct it. It was just that in certain of the larger centres we might be interrogated about the situation and invited to comment on it— and Agra to which, on returning to my Province I had to my great joy been assigned once again after an interval of eight years, was one such place. In the sequel of that stilted lecture I delivered to the officers of the wartime Central Command located there, I was to have more relaxed and much lengthier talks with several

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members of a Parliamentary Delegation out from England who were under my roof for several days, and also some briefer but equally intimate conversations with two Cabinet Ministers (their names will come lower down) who in the course of a somewhat exhausting one-day visit primarily devoted to sight-seeing took the opportunity, a novel one they assured me, of some soundings at the headquarters of an Indian District. In short, a Zila Sahib conforming to the standard, I was now and again jolted, after hours as it were, into reducing to some sort of order the untidy thoughts that cluttered my mind in those concluding months of Empire. If I am able to recover them here, that is because each one of them was born of some private experience which of its own right has remained safe in my memory. At the beginning of the previous chapter we watched Mahatma Gandhi exciting the curiosity, and eliciting the smile, of the London crowd in the year 1931; we did not follow him into the Conference chamber. Had we been able to do so, we should have listened to his intervention on the item of the Hindu-Muslim schism, and in particular to the sentence: ‘This quarrel is not old …I dare to say it is co-eval with the British advent.’ At this pronouncement—and I was told it by one of the Indian delegates and not by any member of the home team—many at the round table rolled their eyes upward to the ceiling in despair. The hackneyed charge of Divide and Rule—couldn’t the saint do better than that! But of course Gandhi was right. His performance at the Round Table Conference might be, indeed was, disappointing, and the inference he intended to be drawn from this specific remark might be, and was, false. But if he was baldly stating that Indian society contracted a certain disease after and not before a certain historical event, of course he was quite right. The English-speaking world of my mother’s generation, or at least a small and perhaps precious fragment of it, had been offered and been carried away by a little volume entitled One Hundred Poems of Kabir. The translation made by Rabindranath Tagore in collaboration with Miss Evelyn Underhill introduced the West to a mystic of the calibre of St Augustine or Ruysbroeck. I spoke of Kabir in my chapter on the Indo-Muslims, and I must bring him in again. I want to cite him because this poor weaver of fifteenth century Benares—of an epoch, that is, when India was already dominated by men of alien race and other faith—went about the countryside calling himself ‘The child of Allah and of Ram’, and twining together, as he might have woven contrasting threads upon his own loom, all that made for division in the attitudes and the practices of those around him. To this rustic


singer whose name proclaimed him a Muslim but whose aspect suggested the Brahmin ascetic, the whole apparatus of piety was an impediment to a proper religious approach. ‘The washerwoman and the carpenter’ had no need to visit the shrine of the Black Stone at Mecca, or alternatively to climb to the Himalayan abode of Shiva. O servant, where dost thou seek me? Lo! I am beside thee. I am neither in temple nor in mosque; I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash. In the countryside and in the cities of what is now Uttar Pradesh the people hearkened. The Hindu may not have relished the sentiment that ‘There is nothing but water at the holy bathing places’, nor the Muslims have echoed the psalm which dismisses the Koran as ‘mere words’. But they did think of themselves as brothers in their common humanity. How otherwise could Kabir have been permitted to tread his eclectic path so ostentatiously without being stoned or having his head chopped off ? More than once, as a matter of fact, he very nearly did fall foul of the authorities; but the Emperor of the day, Sikandar Lodi, was not among the bigoted, and on second thoughts decided to tolerate his eccentricities. Now, as I can myself testify, four hundred and thirty years or so afterwards those hymns were still being sung throughout Northern India, and an English Collector could hardly be many months in Benares or Basti or Gorakhpur before learning about Kabir and, if he took some interest in Hindi—the psalmist’s language was of the sirnplest—listening (for there would be many who were able and willing to sing them in his hearing) to the hymns in the original. Nor was he, I think, likely to complete a tour in the direction of Maghar which is situated, if I remember, about mid-way between the towns of Basti and Gorakhpur, without becoming acquainted with a peculiarly beautiful legend. It was at Maghar that Kabir died, and the legend tells how his Hindu and Muslim followers contested the possession of his body, which the former wished to cremate and the latter to bury. As they were arguing over it, the weaver appeared before them and bade them lift the shroud and look beneath. When they did this, they found in the place of the corpse a heap of flowers; half of which were then taken away and buried by the Muslims at Maghar, and half conveyed in procession by the Hindus to Benares to be burned. And now let us pursue the trail right into the twilight of our Mughal predecessors’ regime, and more especially into a society as

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polite as Kabir’s was unlettered. I am choosing Ghalib as the spokesman of the period because that is precisely what he was. His name has occurred already: he is the noble, the wit, the littérateur to whose poetry Brigadier Powell, the future Rt. Hon. Enoch Powell M.P. was ‘getting down’ with such amazing aptitude in the Delhi of my eleventh chapter. Now Ghalib, aristocrat of Turkish lineage, enjoying the patronage of the Mughal court, had a host of Hindu intimates and by example as well as precept protested all his life against everything that savoured of communal prejudice. There was a couplet of his that ‘encapsulated’, as we now say, his outlook admirably, and both in Agra where he was born and in Delhi where he mostly resided you would hear it nostalgically trotted out to the accompaniment of sighs, so that it stayed in your own ears finally. It does not translate, but approximately it went: I stand by Oneness and an end to ritual; Dismantle the communities, assemble the parts of faith. His ample correspondence is no less illuminating. Here is the scion of conquerors from Samarkand writing to an adolescent Hindu of a Delhi family whose doings and fortunes from almost as long as he could recall had been part and parcel of his own background. ‘Your grandfather and I were roughly of the same age…We were close comrades and used to play chess together; often we would sit up late into the night. His house was quite near ours, so he used to drop in sans façon…our mansion is the one that is nowadays owned by Seth Lakhmi Chand…and I can still see myself flying my kite from the roof of a house in the adjacent lane and matching it against Raja Balwan Singh’s.’ It happens, too, that Ghalib’s Delhi is adequately documented on the British side—we were, as I say, in the process of taking over from the Mughals in his lifetime—and on the whole it is a tranquil tableau that the records allow us to reconstruct. So much so that Dr Percival Spear, the historian of Mughal India and, I am lucky enough to be able to add, the companion of my own Delhi days, assures his readers that for the space of fifty years corresponding to Ghalib’s floruit there is no evidence of a single outbreak of communal rioting in the capital. It may be objected that I have my head in the clouds of literature here, that facts speak louder than letters, that had the overall Indian condition not been one of strife and discord an insignificant band of merchants from a remote island in the West


could never have ascended step by step from the status of enterprising traders to that of political overlords. If so, I mean if I have invited the criticism, then I have been badly wanting in clarity. I am not ignoring the centuries of misrule and tyranny. I am depending on literary sources (do we not do the same in our attempts to recapture the thought of classical antiquity or of the Middle Ages or of our own Shakespearian England?) purely and simply to show that before ‘the British advent’ of Gandhi’s phrase Hindus and Muslims did in fact manage to live and work alongside each other in something that approached very close to amity. During the period of our rule that spirit evaporated; not however in the initial century, not even in the middle phase, but in the last lap of the course. Gandhi, and the Congress behind him, omitted to observe that the worsening in communal feeling had not set in whilst our hold on India was tight but only when we began to relax it. The Hindu-Muslim schism was not causally linked with our presence; on the contrary, it was the prospect of our departure that was now accentuating it. Mid-way between the date of Ghalib’s rather charmingly worded letter which I was quoting and Gandhi’s 1931 diagnosis of the communal malady, a warning voice had been heard. It belonged to one whom, as I noticed on an earlier page, the better educated Muslims of India and Pakistan still look back on as their G.O.M.: that is, Syed Ahmad Khan. We have bisected a time span and similarly we could remark that the occasion too was a half-way house; halfway on the constitutional road along which we were conducting a subject people. For we were at that stage deciding to confer selfgovernment upon India at the level of the local boards and district councils. Now what Syed Ahmad Khan spelled out so long ago, at a date, say, when the parents of today’s septuagenarians were small children, was precisely what we ran into in the final phase. India being India, he said, and not being England, the introduction of representative institutions would be attended by difficulty and grave socio-political risk. Well, the ship sailed on, but less and less merrily the nearer it drew to the visible reef in whose direction the West wind was driving it. Nobody will be misled by the inverted commas within which I am going to enclose the rest of this section. When the Parliamentary Delegates and, a little later, two members of the Cabinet Mission asked me for my own estimate of India’s predicament I made no notes, and of course after this lapse of time the actual words of my reply have flown. However, if I have forgotten the words, the

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instances were of so personal a sort as to be in my mind even today. It is really these that I am editing below. ‘When I came out to India what struck me was not her diversity, of which everyone talks and writes, but the unity which underlay everything. There was that journey up-country from Bombay to begin with; there were to be, afterwards, journeys from Calcutta to Peshawar, from Allahabad to Karachi, from Delhi to Hyderabad in the Deccan. Whenever the train stopped, and this was exceedingly often, my Muslim bearer, Husain Ali, alias Kalloo, which is pure Hindi for Bruno because he was the dark one of a fair brood, would come along to my carriage to report. The signal was against us; or we were waiting on the loop for the down express to pass us in fifteen minutes; or the restaurant car would be hitched on late this trip but in time for dinner; or we could get ice at the next station; or the monsoon—that gang of coolies repairing the permanent way had told him—had been nothing like normal, a proper sūkhā, a drought, hereabouts. The tit-bits of information with which the tedium of the railway time-table was relieved might be even more complicated. How, I used to ask myself, could this lad be at home when so far from it? Put these distances on the map of Europe and realize how far. Because he was an Indian, that was the answer. In his case, an Indian from Fyzabad the onetime Mughal settlement dotted with royal hunting boxes which is also, under the ancient name Ajodhya, a celebrated setting of Hindu mythology. India had had her Conquest, it began just when we had ours, and there had been succeeding waves of invasion by men of alien culture. But it is in the nature of a wave when it is passing through a resistant medium to become weaker and fainter the further it travels. The LBI—J Muslim waves were soaked up in Indian earth. As the weeks followed on and I looked about me in the villages and the bazaars of cities I could detect nothing, positively nothing, that was without an Indian colour. India, I said to myself, is one country and all its people Indian. And now that the years have followed on—it will shortly be eighteen of them— what? Well, in this compound there are a dozen servants, Hindus and Muslims, who have been together all that time or most of that time. My bearer you know, and there is his young brother, the fair boy—both Fyzabadies. The two syces are from Fyzabad’s suburb, the famed Ajodhya, the cook is from Chittagong, all that immense way off. The gardeners are Agra men, the dhobi is from Allahabad, and the sweeper joined us in Delhi. Occasionally, but I hope not while you are here, there will be squabbling, raised voices, and they will receive an order to shut up. But never, never once, over the years has a communal fracas occurred. In Delhi there was a


painful incident leading to blows, and I will relate it for the sake of the moral. Kalloo’s wife, who had always been delicate, died of consumption; and those in charge of the cemetery went back on their word, so that when the funeral procession arrived there was no burial plot available. Bargaining started for an alternative slice of earth but Kalloo protested that the piece offered was too narrow, and the mourners returned. It was then 2a.m. (burials are commonly at night in the hot weather), and I remember this vividly because poor Kalloo came to my bedside and woke me up. “The new plot won’t do,” he said. “Thin as she was, she will not fit into it.” Why had they come back? The Muslim mourners had come back for help, and Hindu help was tumbling out. You could hear the syces stirring in their quarters, the malis coughing and cursing, and in minutes all the able-bodied of the assorted household would be at that cemetery presenting a united front to perfidy. But why take up your time with such stories? Which of us with an uncle, a cousin or a friend in the Indian Army hasn’t heard about the comradeship in arms that bridges the communal gulf in the mixed regiments and battalions; so that in the month of Ramazan, for instance, when the Muslims have to go without food and water between sunrise and nightfall, the Hindus will beg to be allowed to perform their fatigues on top of their own? And is anyone in England or in the theatres of two World Wars going to forget that Hindu and Muslim soldiers have known how to stand shoulder to shoulder, have known how to die together? ‘Something else of relevance here comes back to me while I am talking, something to do with upper-class people for a change. Still new to my surroundings, I was invited to an Allahabad house one evening where the company was elderly—or elderly to my eyes. Two Hindus, Kashmiri Pandits they were, and prominent enough for you to recognize their names, reminisced in that room about their early manhood which must have meant, say, the ‘nineties or the turn of the century. They said that whilst in the nature of things ties of kinship were lacking between themselves and their Muslim contemporaries, other ties were constant and close. They would not fail, for example, to foregather in each other’s homes to exchange compliments and congratulations when the great religious festivals came round, or, if the occasion were a bereavement, to offer their condolences and pay their last respects. The older generation, of course, in the milieu I am considering still do exert themselves to keep these courtesies intact; I can testify to that from my own observation. So far as the final homage goes, I remember how as City Magistrate of Allahabad I found myself once in a large salon, unfurnished save for the chairs ranging the

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four walls. A prominent Muslim citizen had died, a Shi’a named Majid Ali, and as we sat there silent and pensive in the domicile of the deceased I was able to glance along the rows of sorrowing friends. At least one half of these were Hindus. But for the most part, the old manners are only signalled nowadays by sighs of regret. The cultured classes harp on these things continually. One of the two elders, I think I called them that, of the Allahabad soirée, is still going strong happily, and in a quite recent conversation I had with him told me something that sets two pictures side by side. I made a mental note of it. He told me that over the entire north of India— the Punjab, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar— precisely in those areas, that is, where the communities are at the present time so painfully selfconscious, it was quite impossible when he was a young man to detect the slightest distinction either in speech or the written style as between Hindus and Muslims. Distinctions there were; but they were regional, not religious. The way people express themselves is an index of the way people feel: fifty years back you had those millions and millions of Indians feeling a cultural unity, and now they have lost all sense of this. You could scarcely name two more distinguished practitioners in the old culture that was Hindostan’s until yesterday than my two mentors of Allahabad, so what wonder if they grieved over its decay. But I still haven’t named them. I told you that you would have heard of them both. One is the Liberal leader Tej Bahadur Sapru and the other the late Pandit Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father. ‘I suppose if I had been asked at any time during the early and middle ‘thirties whether Federation was a practical hope for India to entertain I would have answered, yes. Yes, she manifestly did possess the substantial degree of homogeneity between the component elements which a federation to be a lasting success requires. Nonetheless I believe I should have had certain qualms even then, listening to what was being said. One could make allowance for nostalgia in the milieu of people like Motilal Nehru, an affluent élite that set great store by appearance and manners. But what was one to make of the terrible words spoken by Abdur Rahim, the President of the Central Assembly, before ever we had Congress ministries, before ever the Round Table Conference met? IndoMuslims, he said, feel quite at home in the Muslim countries of Asia but in India, and I’ll quote him: “In India we find ourselves total aliens when we cross the street and enter that part of the town where our Hindu fellow-townsmen live.” And there was Gandhi making matters worse instead of better. In one of his publications he wrote that it had come to his ears that a pious


Hindu had been pained to learn of his accepting the hospitality of a Muslim. This is a wrong reaction, Gandhi said: he was not penitent, he was proud to have “taken toast at the Mussalman’s hands”. Vis-à-vis the Muslims the Mahatma’s ineptitude is sometimes beyond belief. A community stemming in fact or fancy from the Mughals and sharing, or affecting to share, a cultural tradition with Cairo and Baghdad and Granada does not appreciate condescension even though it number rather less than one-quarter of the population. Which brings us to the crux. I am here on your ground, not mine, but I imagine getting down to brass tacks, democracy means the rule of the majority, and of such a rule the Muslims have had a bitter foretaste. When the Congress arrogantly claiming to stand for the entire populace took office in various provinces, Congress Raj slid imperceptibly into Hindu Raj. This, in a nutshell, is why Jinnah and the League who had in the earlier ‘thirties pooh poohed the notion of Pakistan as the chimerical and impracticable scheme of a few Indo-Muslim undergraduates at Cambridge, in 1940 performed a sharp volteface and committed themselves to the “two-nation” doctrine to which they are now wedded. ‘In the course of the last five or six years the Indo-Muslims at large, and not just an exclusive set of top people to which your Abdur Rahim, or your Muhammad Iqbal the poet, or their compeers belong, have become aware for the first time in their lives that the faith which unites them among themselves divides them from other Indians. And something else has happened which I do not think is quite grasped in Westminster—you will contradict me perhaps—and that is that it is not only Jinnah and company who want Pakistan, it is the Congress, Gandhi included, who have got over their initial horror at the thought of the vivisection of Mother India and are now saying, and saying it pretty crudely: all right, let them go. Better the Muslims outside than kicking up a chronic hullabaloo inside. Let them go, good riddance to bad rubbish. Oh, the thing has gone too far to be halted. At this moment there is a book the English-educated Muslims are reading and praising, a most scientific work, according to one of my callers who lent me his copy. It argues that men living in a dry climate, eating wheat and accustomed to camels can never enter into political union with men of a damp climate, eating rice and accustomed to coconuts. The boundaries of Pakistan thus draw themselves, and the reader is invited to study these on the maps at the end illustrating the distribution of the rainfall, the cereals, the camels and the coconuts. Perhaps I am making too much of a mere piece of silliness, so I’ll choose another example of extremism,

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one of evil augury in my judgment. They are mauling people’s mother tongues and giving even these a communal badge. From conversation and the press you’ll learn that there are now Muslim words and Hindu words. From Jinnah you’ll learn that Urdu, which he does not know, and which is not the mother speech in any of the predominantly Muslim provinces, is the national idiom of his Pakistan-to-be. Nehru, not to be outdone, has decided that foreign words—among which he does not, oddly enough, class English words—should be dropped and replaced by Sanskrit equivalents which either exist already or can easily be invented. He gave as an example the word for handkerchief which is loaned from the Persian. We must not go on calling it rumal, he said, we must learn to call it something else. Those who applauded the policy at least agreed with those who deplored it that the instance was singularly unhappy. Indians do not use handkerchiefs. Whether the visitors coming to me three mornings a week between 9a.m. and 11a.m. for these past seventeen years or so have been townsmen or villagers, Hindus or Muslims, they have all, except for an occasional toff, wiped their noses, should the need have arisen, in what to my thinking is an infinitely more hygienic fashion than the one we favour. This, very often done on the steps of the verandah before the interview, is to press the right nostril with the right thumb and blow sharply and then the left nostril with the tip of the index and blow again. The perfectionist may lightly pinch the corner of a whitewashed wall or of a door-post as he passes into the waiting room. I am trying to be funny, I know. But apart from comic relief I see no other in the sombre picture.’ 2. AT THE HOUSE IN AGRA The house in Agra had not to my knowledge been featured in any of those engravings or colour-prints that document so nostalgically for certain of us the India of the Indo-British; yet it merited, and would have rewarded, attention of the sort. The stately lines of its immense porch, the flat roof of the centre block stepping down to the somewhat lower roofing of the two wings, the deep verandahs upon which every apartment opened, all spoke of the period and the life we led in it. Ever since 1803 when Lord Lake’s army took the region, Agra had been numbered among the ‘Stations’ of upper India and by Kipling’s time was competing successfully with the select few. In the social sense Kipling would not have recognized it now. In that narrow sense I hardly recognized it myself. Fifteen years ago when first I had come here


as a junior magistrate all the heads of the civil departments, and of the colleges too, had been British. There had been a British regiment, very keen on polo; Gunners, very keen pigstickers; a battalion of the Rajputana Rifles whose officers were mad on shooting. There had been the Saturday Night Dance at the Club, there had been ‘Agra Week’. No, none of that any more. In this, the last lap of the Imperial course, I was to find myself the sole Englishman in the administration. Company, however, I would not lack; I could count on the society of the Indian heads of the different departments and of the University; and on the Central Command, that wartime enclave already mentioned, which was still there, albeit melting rapidly. Nor, as it turned out, was this the half of it. I was in for an invigorating deluge of visitors and house guests. But of them presently. I am only just back in the Province, and letting my thoughts run on the special delights denied me these past seven or eight years in the capital—that Delhi which, except when one is actually there, is

Jim Corbett (see page 256)

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Maulvi Wali Muhammad Khan of Agra. A teacher and friend over the years (see page 199)

proverbially ‘far off. The District was the thing, and the District was its old self. If the Station had dropped in the social scale, what of that? We were in October, and the cold weather touring could commence. There would be the avenues of neem trees again and the mango groves with their long shady aisles so cool after the hot sunshine; towards Christmas with any luck I would halt at


The house at Agra (see page 250)

Fatehpur Sikri and have them kindle a mighty blaze each evening in the open which would fling its dancing glare upon the walls of the deserted city; and, spring approaching, there would be the flame of the forest, which India names the Dhak, bursting into its fiery bloom. There would be the peacock spreading his train, not for me indeed but at least for my entertainment, shivering, rattling his quills only a few yards from where I sat at my camp table. I would be addressed as ‘Protector’ or else ‘Mother and Father’ by all or any of two million enchantingly unaffected peasants given to bickering amongst themselves and to ingenious lies in the face of my authority, and whose abiding and central concern was the state of the crops and the price of kerosene. The student of constitutional law might describe me as a servant of Parliament, but my conduct in Agra was unlikely to provoke inquiries in either of its Houses; the Secretary of State for India was a remote, a faceless figure; the Viceroy, a real person, would probably descend on me—but only to shoot duck at nearby Bharatpur; and as for the Congress ministers who, the war over, had taken office once more, they were a great deal too jittery to jump on the I.C.S. Provided I submitted my Fortnightly Report saying what I had done or what I had decided against doing, I should be left alone to carry on my day-to-day job as might seem to me best. In the middle ‘forties of the twentieth century the Head of the District was a throwback to a bygone age. He saw no occasion for a telephone at his elbow. Mine was on a side-table in a passage leading to the typist’s room and so far as I was concerned could remain there.

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Just one factor there was to qualify this serene prospect, and I was shutting it out from my mind deliberately. A winding stone staircase gave access to the roof of this house in Agra, and every morning at sunrise, every evening at sunset for the past—what?— one hundred and thirty years a grave chaprasi had gone up, a grave chaprasi had come down it with a folded Union Jack under his arm. I knew the two whose charge it now was; since 1932 I had known them. I would have trusted them with my life; I would not trust them to haul down that flag for the very last time. I should have to do it myself, and the sooner the better I went up on the roof and had a rehearsal when nobody was looking. You could never tell, the rope might go foul or something. The main verandah gave on to the lawn, was spacious, massively pillared, gracefully curved and paved with the beautiful red freestone quarried in the neighbourhood. But not so much for itself does it come back to me now as for the strangely assorted company that frequented it in those numbered months. Had I kept a visitors’ book (what bachelor ever did?) it would have been forgiveable to leave it ostentatiously open at a page, more than one page, I can think of. They did not come to see me, of course, the majority of these callers or guests; they came to see the Taj Mahal principally or, as one important politician put it to me apparently in all seriousness, to ‘get the feel’ of an Indian District. It does not happen—at least not to me—that those whose names are inscribed on the roll of history are automatically the easiest to recall in after years, and to be frank the person whom I most vividly remember on that verandah had a striped body, maned neck and back, high withers and low quarters; was a hyena. Zoologists maintain that he is only to be encountered on the outskirts of the jungle, in the depression of a nullah, in caves, in crevices between boulders. However, there he was on the said verandah where I was lying in a doze. A tracker in Bahraich once advised me that when a bear lumbers in your direction, if you lie down and pretend to be dead he will lollop off; but that the hyena, should he ever be your vis-à-vis, must be induced to believe the opposite, since carrion is exactly what he loves to take between his vicious jaws. You gesture, and wildly because his sight is indifferent; you yell, and loudly because his hearing is poor. Given our mutual surprise, our respective reactions were creditable. Gesticulating vigorously, I bawled to whoever was within earshot— and in the Indo-British household somebody always was—to fetch a joint of meat from the larder; and he, for his part, showed no disposition to gnaw at me meantime. My surmise is that having the most phenomenal of noses, he had quickly sensed the appetising


fare being borne towards him from the cookhouse door. This he took very daintily and then, leering visibly, made for the bushes, whence presently he favoured us with his chattering laugh. I have been describing an expatriate Englishman who has not been ‘home’ for touching a decade, has three horses whom he rejoices to hear stirring and stamping in their stalls during the night, has tiger skins adorning the walls, panther skins the floor of his drawingroom, has hog spears on a rack in the vestibule, is waited on hand and foot by a dozen silently efficient servants; in brief, is the throwback I called him to the hey-day of the IndoBritish. This considered, the role in which he is on the point of appearing will seem incongruous: he is about to play host, not for a few minutes or an hour, or a day, but for a whole week at a stretch to one of Mahatma Gandhi’s female disciples. I had never in my service been instructed to approach Gandhi in any matter. I had, and repeatedly, forced police protection on him in his comings and goings in Delhi; had—and I think I have said this earlier—issued a gun licence at the request of G.D.Birla for the use of a Sikh watchman at Birla House where he used to lodge; had come to his aid once when his ramshackle old car gave out close to my gate in Rajpur Road. That was all. Cranky admirers of his from Europe and America would wend their way to the Sweepers Colony in Delhi to pay homage, to have darshan, or ‘the glimpse’, but it had not occurred to me to join them. Thus it was a bit puzzling to account for the proposal that Mira Behn should stop with me during the halt the Mahatma was intending to make in Agra just then, and to this day I do not know if it was his suggestion or hers. Some there were who whispered all was not well in the entourage at that juncture and hinted that the presence of two great-nieces, much to be seen latterly ministering to the saint, had something to do with it. I do not know. What I know is that quite recently ‘Bapu’ had had a talk with Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, now back in office as Prime Minister of the U.P., in result of which this kindly man had created for her benefit the post of Honorary Special Adviser to Government in connexion with the Grow More Food Campaign, the very designation of which revealed what in fact it was: a sinecure designed to keep Mira Behn if not exactly occupied at any rate at arm’s length from the saint’s chevet from which she had scarcely moved these twenty years. When Gandhi had gone to London in 1931 she had travelled with him and herself been written up. The public read that Mira Behn was a Miss Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral. They read a lot else about her, some of it difficult to

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follow, seeing that a pianist called Lamond, known for his renderings of Beethoven’s sonatas, and also Romain Rolland came into it; and they read that Clare Sheridan, the noted sculptress and incidentally the cousin of Winston Churchill, who was modelling the Mahatma’s head at the time, had pronounced her to be the living image of Sainte Geneviève as portrayed by Puvis de Chavannes in his famous mural. This then was the guest I was greeting and I can see her, a sari half veiling her countenance, pausing to step from her sandals as the chaprasi ushers her in, walking barefoot across the carpet and giving me the namas or salutation performed by joining the palms and inclining the head, for all the world like a Hindu lady unaccustomed to western ways. It was on a charpoy placed near my desk that she sat cross-legged during our conversations or else on another charpoy out on the verandah. Sometimes it was in Hindi that she spoke, and she spoke it well, sometimes in English; and in whichever it was I had to remember that when she said ‘we’ I was not included. Her recurrent theme, naturally, was the Gandhian recipe for India’s ills; and the things to be done ‘once we get control’ were none of them, quite clearly, the things that Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel between them were planning to do. Such as winding up all military installations, ploughing up the airfields so as to bring vital acres under cultivation, and so on. Apropos, there was an airstrip in Agra; could I not put this to better use? Still, in spite of all, I believe we did manage to hit on occasional topics of common interest, even though I cannot recollect what these were. And of course it is to Mira Behn that I am indebted for much of the information concerning Bapu that I have put into my twelfth chapter. I had guessed that the Viceroy would want to shoot duck in Bharatpur, all Viceroys did; but I had not foreseen the agreeable adjunct to this. He would bring his sister, lately arrived from home, and leave her with me to ‘do’ the Mughal monuments under my guidance. And so it was. Miss Nancy Wavell looked the part every whit as much as Mira Behn had looked hers, but it was a different part and from the host’s s standpoint it would have complicated arrangements had their respective visits coincided. For one thing Mira Behn had displayed no wish whatever to see the Taj Mahal and the triumphs of Mughal architecture generally in which Agra abounds; for another there would have been the problem of seating, whether on the floor or on chairs; for a third the contrasting menus at table; and so forth. Both were from that class in society which had fashioned the British Raj and determined its character, but I doubt if they could have used this


bridge to cross into each other’s territory. You would not, I was saying, have required to be told that Miss Wavell was bent on sight-seeing: her appearance indeed suggested she was doing the Nile, say, at the end of last century. The 1899 ‘terai’ hat had a muslin puggaree floating down behind for good measure, and the white canvas shoes had sensible low heels. Besides which, she was furnished with a valuable mnemonic her brother had invented and passed to her before going to the duck-shoot. This went ‘Best Horses And Jockeys Seen Ascot’. I was able to recite this, with or without acknowledgment, on a number of subsequent occasions. Agra rivalled Delhi itself as a capital seat of the Mughal Emperors, but how to remember their names and their correct order? They were: Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan, Aurangzeb. If only I had some similar mnemonic to assist me in sorting out my house guests I would know for certain who came next. But never mind, I shall assume it was President Ho Chi Minh. He was on his way to Paris in the care of two or three French army officers for complicated negotiations with the government there. I need not describe his appearance: his likeness is in a hundred photographs except that he was even more undersized and emaciated than these suggest. His speech was the plucking of a banjo string but he was comprehensible both in English and in French, at the conversational level anyhow. He knew London, he told me, having been a dishwasher at the Savoy or somewhere, if I got it right. His interest, I soon discovered, was rather in actual rural conditions than in the relics of Mughal grandeur and he particularly wished to see how our fields were irrigated. So after a perfunctory glance at the Taj Mahal I took him out to some villages, driving myself and with nobody else but an orderly sitting behind us. It is always tempting to lean over the parapet of an Indian well and try, according to the light, to catch one’s own reflection in the water; and this, heads together, we succeeded in doing. My guest chuckled his appreciation. When I pictured this little scene to one of the staff officers afterwards, a Captain Cartier Bresson I think it was, I felt that I had perhaps proved a disappointment. ‘But you could push him in,’ he protested in his near English. Then there was a countess commanding the Women’s Voluntary Service who astonished me by her knowledge of Arabic; there were the Killearns from Egypt en route to Dacca at Jinnah’s instance to consider a governorship that in the event was not accepted: there was—and this memory is scarcely dimmed by time —a Marshal of France, Philippe Marie de Hautecloque, Leclerc that is, who had liberated Paris exactly two years previously. Partly because Fatehpur Sikri enthralled him, and partly because a mechanic

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was still tinkering with his machine, he stayed on an extra night, which allowed an intimate dinner followed by a long talk into the small hours as the prelude to a dawn departure. As he stood at the salute in the strengthening light he belonged in that moment to the age of the knightly virtues. His aeroplane took off, and an aeroplane it was that carried him to his death but a few months later. Then there was Jim Corbett who wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon. He came to discuss a Christmas camp he was organizing: the last, I imagine, any of us attended. I ought not to have been invited since I did not shoot nowadays. My left arm, awaiting its bone-graft ever since Shireen came down on top of me before ever the war broke out, saw to that (and, strangely, I believe I was not sorry). Jim, born and bred in India like a second Kim, knew the jungle as nobody else, and had become a sort of honorary adviser to viceroy after viceroy in this department. Tigers, he lamented, were down to between three and four thousand on the evidence he had collected and would shortly become extinct. ‘So will the I.C.S.’, was my rejoinder to cheer him up, ‘we’re down to one-tenth of that and I’m not yet sure if we’ll be a subject for protection by the game laws as I expect your tigers will be.’ And the politicians of course. Seven Members of Parliament led by Lord Chorley and including a Mrs Nicol, put some strain on the bedroom accommodation (indeed Woodrow Wyatt had to be housed in town), but their company was pleasurable enough to make me wonder on what happy principle the delegates had been recruited. Two members of the Cabinet Mission visited Agra: Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, exuding a naïve benevolence; and A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, who was sensible and full of blunt humour. You knew without being told which of them had gone to prison in the suffragette movement of 1912, and which was the football fan. Coming to India, the former wanted progress but, so far as I could gather, wanted this to be slow; the latter wanted us to hang on, so that at moments it might have been Churchill talking. I supposed—but what did a Collector in an Indian District know of such things?’ that Labour was like that; running in two currents: the one pacifist, universalist, internationalist, Girondin so to speak; and the other patriotic and all for ‘the nation in arms’—Jacobin, to complete my comparison. I was told that Stafford Cripps, the third member of the Mission, whose programme had prevented his coming to Agra with the others, was the only one of our politicians in a hurry. Had we really the face—and here the Collector in his District might be excused for talking out of turn—the face to be contemptuous of India’s hopelessly disunited political leadership


when there was such patent disarray on the Indian issue in the ranks of our own leaders, and a disarray cutting across the party allegiances? My experience as a guide taught me that the importance of the judgments passed on the Taj Mahal by visiting V.I.P.s was apt to be in inverse ratio to the importance of the persons themselves. However, there was no rule about this, or rather the only rule was that everybody had to say something. Those who were wise made it short: least said is soonest mended. There had been the case of Aldous Huxley. All readers of Jesting Pilate know what he said about this dreamlike tribute to the memory of a woman, but perhaps they do not know that he lived to regret it. When he revisited the country forty years on, he was taken aback: what Westerneducated India had saved up about him was not his literary achievement but his silly disparagement of the Taj Mahal! But back to my own guests. It was not in Lord Wavell, as is proved by his Other Men’s Flowers, to be insensitive to beauty in any of its expressions; but with that, he was a man most in character when he said nothing at all. How would he react? I never found out; for on his return from Bharatpur he had no leisure to stop overnight for the sake of sight-seeing. From among the remarks made by other sight-seers two or three come to mind. That of General Salan, for instance, remains fresh. He was the commander-in-chief of the French Forces in Indo-China and would one day be condemned to death (but afterwards reprieved) for his share in the Algerian putsch. In his published memoirs Fin d’un Empire this taciturn Tarnais from Rocquecourbe praises me for my competence as a guide, so I shall praise him in my turn. His comment on seeing the Taj Mahal was: ‘he (Shahjahan) had loved her so,’—‘il l’avait tant aimée.’ The Persian couplets delivered for my benefit by the Agha Khan at the self-same spot did not, because they could not, say more. Pethick-Lawrence said: ‘Look at it, Alexander. You won’t see anything like that again.’ Not bad, not bad at all. But spoiled by the clanger with which he followed it up: ‘the more remarkable because they (sc. Muslims) don’t believe a woman has a soul.’ Cameramen dogged our steps, but fortunately in those days news films were silent. As for Ho Chi Minh, he had merely given the high-pitched near-laugh, alternately sibilant and sucking, which is good form on occasions of solemnity or emotion east of 100 degrees of longitude, and left it at that.

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3. THE THRESHOLD OF INDEPENDENCE India was on the threshold of independence, but India was on the brink of chaos. Never in history had the Hindus and Muslims ranged themselves like this in hostile blocs. A communal explosion in Calcutta had killed 4,000 people and injured another 15,000. The frenzy spread like wildfire to Dacca and beyond, until whole districts of Bengal became the happy hunting-ground of roaming bands of Muslims out to pillage, to convert forcibly or to kill the Hindus and abduct their women. In retaliation for these atrocities the Hindus of Bihar had fallen to butchering the Muslims of that province by the thousand. And now, as 1947 came in, it was only too evident that the Punjab and the North-West Frontier were smouldering. It could not be long before they erupted into flame. Gandhi’s Ahimsa, he had been driven to acknowledge it himself, had been but ‘the non-violence of the weak’, a technique adapted to the fight against the British; violence was the order of the day in this fight of the Indians against each other. His political authority, unquestioned for the past quarter of a century, was at an end and his utterances henceforward were to strike an anguished note. ‘Neither the people nor those in power,’ he complained, ‘have any use for me.’ The night was dark and he was far from home. Convinced at length of the gravity of the Indian case and galvanized by its urgency, the British Government came to a momentous decision. We would ‘Quit India’. We would quit by a date not later than June 1948. Agreement or no agreement between the warring elements in her society, we would not stay in India after that. Mr Attlee made this announcement on 20 February 1947, adding that Lord Mountbatten would replace Lord Wavell as Viceroy. It meant that Partition was certain, and that it would happen under British aegis. The new Viceroy arrived on 22 March and within a couple of months produced a plan for the transfer of power to two successor States: a reduced India and a Pakistan mutilated and ‘moth-eaten’ because without Assam and with only half of Bengal and half of the Punjab. It was some sort of a solution, and the parties accepted it. And into the bargain the date for the liquidation of British rule was brought forward from June 1948 to 15 August 1947. These decisions were taken by hardly more than a dozen Englishmen, not one of whom had the slightest first-hand knowledge of India’s condition, but I am far from implying that the few hundred mercenaries who have peopled my narrative up to


this point would have counselled a different course. It was not as if the British people were bent on retaining their Empire. Had that been the case, those mercenaries would even at this eleventh hour have built up a formidable union of interests anxious to cooperate with them against Congress or against anybody. But that was not what the public at home—when it considered the position at all wanted; the very thought of clinging on to India for an indefinite period could be discarded. The choice lay between a drift into civil war and—withdrawal. The plan adopted would require us, as I have said, to implement something we detested only a little less than did Gandhi himself. But even on the issue of Pakistan we could reflect that, having granted India parliamentary institutions, we must now bow to the consequences. This said, we had distinct reservations about the advancing of the date. It did not make a pin’s difference to us personally whether we lost our careers this year or next, but the revised timetable threw ten and a half million souls living in the so-called ‘contiguous areas’ of the two potential States into a panic of preparation to leave their homes for ever, and this just when Nature was at her harshest. Moreover, we could not associate ourselves with the seemingly bland assumption that the movement of these refugees in opposite directions could be supervised. For who would the supervisors be but local civil officials, subdivisional magistrates, revenue assistants, ordinary constables too, with or without sepoys from the army to aid them in the task, whose own plight would be every bit as parlous, indeed more so, than that of the moving masses they were supposed to shepherd. Without great strain on the imagination we could picture the fix of a Sikh subinspector of police in a predominantly Muslim tract at sunrise on 15 August. Or of a Muslim naib-tahsildar, say, on the Hindu side of the future boundary. The poor fellow would know that he must either get somewhere else pretty quickly or never see another dawn. In the regions about to be torn apart there was not an I.C.S. Officer who did not forecast a total breakdown of the administration and an uncontrollable slaughter in the sequence of this. And so it was. In the Punjab, mother of the most warlike of India’s sons, the massacre was of indescribable horror and on a scale which the absence of every governmental agency rendered literally incalculable. A High Court judge charged with an investigation much later put the deaths at 500,000; others have arrived at half that figure. We cannot know which of these estimates is the more reliable; cannot know if either of them approaches the truth.

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While the ‘contiguous areas’ now on the point of witnessing these massive migrations would be the scene of maximum tragedy, the countless districts forming the interior of the two new dominions would experience their own suffering. In their case it would not be the quick laceration of the knife but the festering of a running sore. As India and Pakistan were virtually at war, the members of an immense Muslim minority in the one, and of an immense Hindu minority in the other, would wake up on 15 August to find themselves enemy aliens in the land of their fathers. We should have been hard men indeed if we had not spared a thought for them. And when the moment for goodbyes arrived, a Zila Sahib in such districts would stumble in his speech with those of the stranded minority and falter in the search for a consoling phrase. By March—we are in 1947—the communal fever was mounting rapidly in the Punjab and its heat was being transmitted to the neighbouring U.P. districts: to Saharanpur where there was a Muslim majority; to Meerut where a colony of Sikhs had long been settled; to Muttra; and latterly to Agra. We had a bout of rioting just then, I remember, mildish comparatively speaking, yet serious enough to keep me in the streets all night. I recall it for no other reason than that it was then, in the Kotwali during the small hours that Hashmi, my City Magistrate, the ‘Aligarh man’ of an earlier page, and Badr ul-Islam, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, first revealed to me their private predicament. Lahore, their obvious destination, would be packed out with Muslims dislodged from the eastern districts of the Punjab; and also, from their rather exaggeratedly ‘Aligarh’ standpoint, too provincially ‘Punjabi’— They had consequently opted for Karachi as being, though remote, more cosmopolitan. They were already engaged in the attempt to secure a billet there. Serve on under a Hindu Raj they would not not after the preliminary taste they had had of it. Those Congress Ministers now! They began to pull certain of them to pieces, the Home Minister in particular, one Qidwai. A skunk. Their quality is uneven.’ I contributed judiciously. ‘Anyhow we’re having a Minister here in a few days, just to cheer you up.’ Banter of this standard between us was usual in the lulls of a riot; you could not sit there with your chin in your hand gazing at a row of grotesquely hacked corpses. ‘Who is he?’ they asked. ‘It isn’t a he,’ I replied. They knew I meant Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister. Minister of Local Self-government and Health in the Party’s previous flirtation with responsibility, she had been imprisoned with the other leaders but released later along with Mrs Naidu on personal grounds. She was now back in


office. ‘Oh, she’s quite different from the rest of them,‘ they conceded chivalrously. They were chivalrous, but also they were right. I had not wanted the visit, these tours only aggravated Muslim antipathy and were sterile administratively. But the Congress had to impress its following in the districts, one saw that. So Mrs Pandit would come in by road f rom Etawah, halt a day or two, and leave by train. I arranged for her to stay in the Circuit House which was well away from the City, and stood in beautiful surroundings on its own; we could cordon it off. The callers queueing up for interviews could be subjected to police-cum-party scrutiny, searched if need be—we had come to that. The day as well as the hour of arrival was concealed and nothing untoward occurred. But then some idiot in the Party’s local organization let out the departure programme. A nasty mob of Muslims composed largely of the town’s butcher confraternity headed for the Railway Station and demonstrated in front of it. They are shouting indecently’ Hashmi understated over the telephone. Vijaya Lakshmi’s car flying its Congress tricolour and probably preceded by two or three other cars carrying the office-bearers of the Party’s District Committee would have to pass my entrance gates. So instead of going in advance to see her off at the Station, I intercepted the motorcade and told them they could not proceed. Only the Minister could. With me. I instructed my chauffeur to drive slowly: I must look as if I was (in the Hindustani) ‘eating the air’. If my passenger was frightened, as she had full cause to be, she did not show it. I tried to remember some remark her father Pandit Motilal had made once, long ago now, when I was in Allahabad. ‘He didn’t approve of your messing about in the streets, did he? But you’re still at it’ She smiled. ‘Are they good sorts, the Congressmen here?’ she enquired, keeping the conversation going. ‘Oh, yes, considering.’ She smiled again. Her own brother’s description of the type was in my mind and doubtless in hers: urban, he had labelled them, dressed in khadi, chiefly drawn from the lower middle class. Presently the crowd came into view: it was not noisy now, only sullen. Hashmi had commanded silence. Badr ul-Islam had brought along all the Muslims I should think in the City Force, a lot of them armed, and a decent lane had been cleared right up to the Railway Station steps. I had had to rely on my Muslims that day, Muslims exclusively, to get my Hindu charge —she was still my charge, if not for very much longer through to the platform and on to the train. It was a sign of the times, it could only have happened in 1947, and as an omen it was not very pleasant.

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However I can cancel that episode with another which was pure ‘period’, 1847 say. My Number Two, Ram Narendra Singh, Rai Bahadur, old-style Rajput, pushed past the chaprasi into my room. ‘Our dākū, Sir,‘ he tumbled his sentences out, ‘he’s dossing down in some village on the border, opposite Rajakhera it is, and it’s a chance providing we’re quick.’ A dacoit is a brigand, a member of a robber band. The police had succeeded in arresting the gang which he captained but he, the leader, had eluded capture by retreating into the ravines on the edge of Dholpur territory. Murderer a hundred times over, he lived and lodged nowadays at gun-point, never long in the same locality and merciless to any who informed against him. His fame had spread through the entire province and in the colourful tradition of dacoity he had given himself a highsounding sobriquet, King Cut-Throat or the like, so much in love was he with his own legend. He was emphatically a character evoking the early British period in India and most out of place in the New Society—oh, they could be smug, the Congress—to be inaugurated in less than two months. Through the mouthpiece of the aristocratic Kunwar Maharaj Singh who was one of the few of noble birth in the United Provinces to have made his number with tomorrow’s regime and was earmarked for the governorship of Bombay, they had told me it would be ‘a feather in my cap’—his exact words—if I could nab him. I fetched my 12-bore and a pair of field glasses. Kalloo produced a thermos of iced water and a bath towel from the ghuslkhanah. The gallant Thakur had a jeep waiting, and I noticed a couple of rifles sticking out from beneath the seats. The police driver looked a tough enough specimen, and off we went, the three of us. From the map I calculated we had about the same number of miles in front of us that June morning as the Empire had days. I had no clear conception of what I would do—or come to that, of what I wanted to do. Well, I was running true to the imperial form there. The British had never had any clear conception of what they would do with India. The I.C.S. job was to attend to the administration, and one day go out doing the things we had done when we came in. When the June sun beats pitilessly on the plains even solid objects get delicately out of focus, so it was not strange if my flimsy thoughts were without contour as we bumped along the unmetalled road. And then, no warning, the driver slumped forward over the steering-wheel. We slewed, then ploughed to a standstill in the soft verge of the track. We laid him out in a scrap of shade, forced some of the iced water down his throat, splashed the remainder on to my bath-towel, wrapped this round his face and neck. We waited what was probably half-anhour till he came


round, then carried him back to the jeep. I took his place, and we went on. When we came in sight of the village—there was no mistaking it, there was no other in this barren stretch of country— I passed my binoculars to Narendra. ‘People moving about busily’, he said. ‘Women scouring their pots and pans, several men—I can’t see what they’re at’ Then he added, ‘But I think I know, Sir. They’re putting on an act’ They were trying to appear at ease for our benefit, quite forgetting that normally they would not be astir at all at two o’clock of a June afternoon. As we drove up we saw some fresh horse-droppings outside one of the huts. Our guess was confirmed: our man had been and gone. I had no heart to cross-question these poor people, extract lies from them. I was too tired for anything except to call it a day. We came away with no feather in our cap; we came away with mixed emotions, but upon the whole more relieved than dejected. And the British as a nation might speak in that strain, I fancy, of the exodus from India on 15 August 1947. So did our minutes hasten to their end.

EPILOGUE

The Last Ride Together, I decided, should be to the polo ground, out in the direction of the Taj Mahal, where Shireen’s memories like mine could race back a full sixteen years. Ginger, since the order of precedence was sacrosanct in my small stable, would come behind us, ridden by the head syce; and after him, mounted by the second syce, an elegant bay—parting gift of Malcolm Darling, the Punjab Civilian of fame, to one whose staying power in India, as things turned out, topped his own by very little. Next day, all three horses would be taking the road to Gwalior where a trio of Dutchmen operating a firm there had undertaken to provide them with a gentle retreat. Soon we were trotting past the Agra Club; the doors were closed now, its members ghosts already. And then, Civil Lines traversed, we were turning left and approaching what, if luck assists, can be a prospect of unsurpassable beauty. The heat haze of the dawn wreathes the foundations of the Fort in a muslin scarf, so that viewed from this point of aesthetic advantage the upper battlements appear to be floating on air. And that morning luck assisted. The Fort was by this date held by a solitary British sergeant with whom a rendezvous had been fixed for the following evening. I would watch him haul down the Union Jack. Tomorrow would be eventful in our national story, and with poignant moments. In my private story too; to begin the day, I would caress Shireen for the very last time. I wheeled her round and cried out to the syces: ‘Home now!’ Tomorrow all would change; why, the meaning of those two short words I had shouted would change. But today it was business as usual. No, honestly, not quite that. For the past fortnight a stream of local gentry had flowed through the waitingroom to bid me good-bye; disproving, if disproof were needed, that the district notables only came to us when they wanted something. But the stream had now run dry. There would be no more interviews: and as to my signature on the few remaining papers on my desk, well, it crossed my mind, this

266 EPILOGUE

might not seem so impressive as formerly by the time it came to be read! The only file I had called for was one upon which no action required to be taken. I had never looked at it previously; it was docketed: ‘European Cemetery’. Our cemetery was the oldest in all India for the good reason that it was here in Agra that our adventure had begun three hundred and thirty-nine years before, to Agra that Hawkins, the English sea captain, had made his way up country from the Bombay coast to salute and curry favour with the Mughal Emperor. I leafed through the file idly; I closed it. I closed it partly because there was nothing to do about it and partly because the unwonted silence which had fallen on the whole house was just then interrupted. ‘Father Leone.’ the chaprasi announced. Since my return to the United Provinces from Delhi and his own from the prisoner-ofwar camp to his Mission, our weekly and occasionally even halfweekly re-unions had been resumed after the gap of years, with the result that he had by now coaxed me through many a canto of the Divine Comedy. In those turbulent months, understandably, I had not always been able to keep the appointment; and then, coming in grimy and at some ungodly hour, I would catch sight of the slip of paper on my table: Va bene. ‘Never mind. Let’s give our Dante a rest for a bit longer.’ Lasciamo il nostro Dante reposare un altro poco. That morning he entered carrying a massive Divina Commedia with illustrations by Gustave Doré. It added no less than 61bs to the hand luggage with which I proposed to travel on the 15th, but was worth more to me than its weight in gold. In sum, the personal effects I was taking home were those I had come out with. I believe most of us could have said the same. Every stick of my furniture having been bought by the Chairman of the District Congress Committee, I was down to about six items: smallish wooden box of books; uniform case; cabin trunk; Gladstone chair (vide p.32); my Daniell prints plus, I admit, my tiger and panther skins. Narendra would see to the despatch of these few possessions to Bombay for eventual shipment. On the 15th I would get up to Delhi by train, assuming there was a train, with a haversack, a suit-case, Kurt my Lakeland on a lead, and now the Divine Comedy. Kalloo would have a bundle containing his own things. Traditionally, whenever a train pulled out with the garlanded I.C.S. aboard it would be to the accompaniment of the bangs of crackers placed on the line. I doubted if we should progress very far on this trip without hearing detonations of a less innocent sort. However, we should see. On the eve of Independence, eight of the senior staff gave me a farewell dinner. We were played out emotionally: Narendra and Hashmi barely managed to get through their little speeches.


And on the afternoon of the next day, Independence Day itself, the same two, joined by Father Leone, saw me off. To each of the three I had had cause to be gratef ul during these last couple of years, and as the Delhi Mail, accelerating by jerks, drew away from Agra, I leaned out of the carriage-window to postpone their disappearance from sight as long as I could. I need not have done that: I can still see them growing smaller and smaller in the distance, waving vigorously. Crammed into that first-class compartment, my fellowpassengers, not counting Kalloo and Kurt, were the Goanese cooks and stewards from the restaurant-car which had been invaded by swarms of cultivators enjoying a fleeting euphoria and a free ride. After Muttra speed slackened and halts became frequent, so that the Express would be either creeping or not moving at all. Villagers seemed to be getting on and of f when and where they pleased, and it was touching midnight when we reached Delhi. But at least—and it was more than I expected—terror was in suspense that day. The Indian people paused, and the many, of whom my rustic travelcompanions were typical, rejoiced like children. Soon it would be otherwise: within two or three days, train upon train would be steaming into this same Station laden with the dead and dying; within two or three weeks, Delhi itself would be seized with communal fury, and the Town Hall in which I had presided over so many debates would be burned out by the mob. But these happenings are not for inclusion here. These things belong to the story of the new dominions into which our Indian Empire had been transformed overnight. With few exceptions the expatriates who served it, appearing variously in this book as ‘the mercenaries’, ‘the I.C.S.’, ‘the Indo-British’, had by then embarked on their civil transports at Bombay, and scanned for the last time the coast, fast receding, on which the breezy Captain Hawkins had dropped anchor so long ago. My own turn for a passage from India had been delayed. I had wanted to go at once—what reason had I to stay? The mission of the I.C.S. was accomplished, I had not been on home leave for nine years. However, I was instructed to report to the High Commission now being set up in the new Dominion which was India. I was to open its Office in Bombay, and to act for a mere matter of weeks as Deputy High Commissioner for the United Kingdom there pending the arrival of a permanent occupant of the post. This unsought status qualified me for an airflight from Delhi, but unfortunately the same privilege did not extend either to my bearer or to Kurt. The place was by now ablaze with communal strife. The Muslims whose forefathers had ruled it were

268 EPILOGUE

being chased from their houses, their bazaars and their mosques by mobs yelling murder and committing it. So courageously Kalloo disguised himself as a Hindu, a Sweeper, grubby dhoti and all, and like that brought Kurt down to Bombay by rail. What had promised to be a few weeks longer in India, in the event lengthened into months, and during these I had to visit the capital several times more. Thus I came to be in New Delhi when the news of Gandhi’s assassination on the terrace of Birla House, scarcely half a mile away, flashed along the adjacent avenues. The nation reeled under the shock. At the funeral, as the bier went past us and the cry ‘Mahatma Gandhi amar hoga’e’, ‘has put on immortality’ rose from the throats of the surging multitude lining the route to the burning ghat on Jumna bank, none, I mean no foreigner, could dissociate himself from the bereaved millions. Yet each of the few foreigners present, I imagine, asked himself what the man whose head was pillowed on flowers would have had to say about all this show of grief. Would he not, after his fashion, in the Harijan possibly, have chided his people? These last months India had chosen murder. Was it hers, then, today to weep and lament over this one? Not less dispiriting, at least to me, was one other ceremony which it fell to me (and, I believe, alone of the I.C.S.) to attend: namely, the farewell parade in Bombay to the last remaining British regiment in India, the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. Moving the ceremony was, intensely; particularly when the Indian Guards of Honour presented arms in a Royal Salute, the Indian regimental bands playing God Save The King; and when, as a finale, the colours were trooped through the Gateway of India to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. But sadness hung heavily over it all; sadness not because we were going—India wanted us to go—but because the erstwhile comrades-in-arms of the splendid Indian units drawn up in front of us, the Muslim comrades, were missing. The S.S. Strathmore was now C.T. Strathmore, Civil Transport, and I was warned in writing to expect none of the comforts associated with the vessel’s former self. Meanwhile I had found a home for my lakeland terrier with an ex-Sergeant of the Bombay Police whom I had recruited as a Security Officer in the employ of our High Commission. He owned a motor-cycle and on the eve of my sailing invited me to see where he lived, some little distance out and where Kurt could be sure, he said, of nice regular walks. On my first excursion through Bombay I had been leaning back in a rather grand Victoria; on my last I was leaning forward on a pillion seat, clutching the rider round the waist. None knew his way around better than this helpful man and he would place my


bearer on a train for Karachi, where his family had gone already, as soon as I had embarked. In the morning I was seen aboard by these two, nobody else, and it was with the support of this beaming, cheerful Englishman that Kalloo went down the gangway sobbing loudly, his shoulders shaking. When the hooter sounded and the ship headed for the open sea I stood facing her bows, not looking back on India. I should have the rest of my life in which to do that.

270

GLOSSARY

Achkan, long close-fitting coat Advait,(philos.) non-dual Aghan, the 8th Hindu month (Nov.—Dec.) Ahimsa, non-violence Ahir, herdsman caste Ahmediyya, heretical movement in Islam Amar, deathless Anand, bliss Are bhai, excl. ‘Come now!’, ‘Oh, dear!’ Ashram, hermitage; retreat Atma, soul Avatar, descent; incarnation Babu, clerk; esquire (honorific) Bahut, adv. very Baithna, to sit Bandobast, arrangement Bania, moneylender Boalee, large masonry well Basti, inhabited area Bazzaz, draper Bhakti, devotion; faith Bhang, Indian hemp Bhavan, abode Bhishti, water-carrier Bhut, ghost; demon Bistar, bedding Bohras, a class of Ismailis of Gujarat Brahman, the Absolute Brahmin, the teacher group in society Buggy, light one-horse vehicle Buriya, old woman

Burqa, cotton cloak with hood Chait, the 12th Hindu month (March-April) Chameli, jasmine Chapatty, girdle cake of unleavened bread Chaprasi, an orderly Charkha, spinning wheel Charpoy, wooden bed covered with webbing Chela, pupil Chhajja, eaves Chhatri, umbrella Chilamchi, metal wash-basin Chowpal, village assemblyroom Cot, bedstead Cutcherry, court-house Daku, robber; brigand Darshan, glimpse or sight of deity Dev, sprite, goblin Dhak, Flame of the Forest Dharma, right behaviour Dharna, act of sitting doggedly Dharti, earth; Mother Earth Dhobi, washerman Dhoti, loin cloth Durbar, levee; court; royal audience Faqir, Muslim ascetic Gambalahi, the senior sweeper in village Ghariyal, crocodile Ghi, clarified butter Ghusl khana, bathroom Goonda, hooligan


Guru, spiritual teacher Hakim, highest authority (of District etc.) Harijan, a child of God; Untouchable Himsa, violence Hookah, tobacco pipe Huruf, letters (of alphabet) Huzoor, presence; your Honour Imam, Muslim prayer-leader Iqbal, prosperity, felicity Ismailis, sect of Shiah branch of Islam Jai, victory Jains, sect of Hindu dissenters Jaldi-Jaldi, ‘quick as quick!’ Jali, lattice Jat, cultivator caste, tiller of the soil Jati, caste Kachcha, uncooked; crude Karma, the ‘Deed’ Kayasth, the writer caste Khabar, news; report Khaddar or Khadi, home-spnn cloth Khana-ba-dosh, vagrant; tramp Kharif, the autumn harvest Khojas, members of an Ismaili (q.v.) sect Khnnrezi, bloodshed Kos, distance of two miles; a league Kotwali, central police-station Kshatriyas, the warrior group in society Kya hai? ‘What’s the matter?’; ‘What is it?’ Lathi, quarterstaff Log, people; folk

Loo, the hot wind Magar, crocodile Magh, the 10th Hindu month (Jan.—Feb.) Mahant, head of a Hindu shrine Mali, gardener Mandir, temple Mantra, a holy text Masjid, mosque Mauza, village Mela, concourse Mlechchha, barbarian; nonHindu Moksha, freedom from birth and death Munshi, language teacher Musalli, the ‘Righteous’ (Muslim Sweeper) Mushaira, symposium of poets Nabob, ‘Company’ servant retiring with a fortune Naga, naked and armed mendicant Nam, name Namas, Hindu salutation Naukar-chakar, the domestics Nazarbandi, mesmerism; illusion Nazir, supervisor Nullah, watercourse; ravine Panchayat, village council of Five Panch Vastu, Five items Parsees, community professing Zoroastrianism Pathshala, place of sacred study Patwari, village accountant Pipal, holy tree (ficus religiosa)

GLOSSARY 275

Pir, Muslim spiritual director Prohit, Hindu family priest Puja, worship; adoration Pujari, temple priest Pukka, baked; cooked; perfect Pundit, honorific term; learned Hindu Punkah, overhead fan Purdah, veil; seclusion of women Qadiani, member of heretical Ahmediyya movement q.v. Qasida, ode Quai-hai, lit. ‘Someone there’; n =‘Sahib’ Rabi, the spring harvest Raj, rule Rajput, a high caste, many of whose clans embraced Islam Ram, God Rishi, sage, seer Rumal, handkerchief Sabha, association; society Sadhu, Hindu recluse; mendicant Sahib, title of courtesy: Mr., Sir. Hence=European Salam, salutation Samadh, suspension of breath or sensation Sambar, deer; cervus unicolor Sangam, confluence Sannyasi, Hindu devotee Sansar, transmigration Sari, dress worn by Hindu women Sarit Kalam, fountain-pen Sat, seven Satyagraha, non-violent resistance

Satyagrahi, one practising Satyagraha Sayyidsi, Muslims claiming descent from Prophet Shabash, Bravo!; Well done! Shastri, Hindu versed in holy writ Shaykhs, one of the 4 ‘classes’ of Muslims Shiahs or Shiites, the ‘Party’ of Ali in Islam Shikar, hunting Shireen, sweet; a woman’s name Shirsasan, the Head Posture Shudra, the ‘Worker’ order in society Sikhs, lit. ‘disciples’ who founded monotheistic, casteless community Sola topi, pith helmet Sukha, drought Sunnis, members of main branch of Islam Swami, Hindu spiritual preceptor Swaraj, self-control; home rule Syce, groom Tamasha, spectacle; entertainment Tapas, fervour Tahsil, section of a District Thana, police-station Thik, correct; O.K. Tonga, two-wheeled carriage Vaishya, the ‘business’ group in society Varna, colour Vilayet, ‘Blighty’


—Wala or Wallah, suffix meaning ‘connected with’ Yoga, union; religious exercise Yogi, one who performs yoga Zila, District

INDEX

Advaitanand, Swami, 91 Agha Khan, 153ff Alexander, A.V., 256 Amarnath Pt, 'Sahir', 116 Ambedkar, Dr., 80 Asaf Ali, 18, 181, 182 Askwith, A.V., 234 Auchinleck, Field Marshal, 214 Birla, G.D., 16, 18, 187 Bomford, Sir Hugh, 44 Bowman, Ian, 192 Chorley, Lord, 256 Corbett, Jim, 256 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 231, 232, 257 Cruikshank, Col. Martin, 70 Darling, Sir Malcolm, 264 Dholpur, Ruling Prince, 144ff Evans, Horace, Lord, 132 Gandhi, Mahatma, 216ff Ginger (the author’s horse), 134 Gooch, G.P., 12 Gupta, Deshbandhu, 182 Hailey, Lord, 183 Hasan Nizami, Muslim divine, 64 Ho Chi Minh, 255, 258 Horace, see Evans Imam of Great Mosque, 113 Irwin, Lord, 229

Iswar Saran, Munshi, 81 Jayaprakash Narayan, 18, 132 Jenkins, Sir Evan, 215 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 119 Jyoti Prasad Pt., 65 Kalloo, 92, 244 Kapurthala, Ruling Prince, 148ff Kilburn, Denys, 172,187, 236, 237 Kunzru, Pt. Rajnath, 20 Layard, Austin, 168 Lebailly, W.G., 234, 236, 237 Leclerc, Marshal of France, 256 Leone, Father, 212, 266 Linlithgow, Lord, 176, 186, 187, 189 Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 176ff Lyall, Alfred, 26 Maillart, Ella, 207 Maureen, 75 Mira Behn (see Slade) Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 258 Naidu, Mrs Sarojini, 130, 201 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 130 Nehru, Motilal, 130, 247 Nicol, Mrs., 256 Pandit, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi, 48, 261-2 Pant, Pt. Govind Ballabh, 47, 124, 254 275


Paras Ram, Mahant, 94 Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 255 Pethick-Lawrence, Lord, 256, 257 Powell, Rt. Hon. Enoch, 211, 242 Prasad, Rajendra, 47 Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 196 Radhakrishnan, Sir S., 77,101 Ross Masood, 118 Royden, Maude, 216 Salan, General, 257 Sapra, Sir Tej Bahadur, 71-4, 200, 247 Scoones, General Geoffrey, 239 ‘Shankar’,176 Shankar Lal, 182 Shireen, 33, 256 Simon, Sir John, 183-5 Singh, Kunwar Maharaj, 262 Slade, Madeleine (Mira Behn), 254ff Spear, Dr. Percival, 243 Syed Ahmad Khan, 117,243 Tagore, Rabindranath, 9, 227, 229 Udaipur, Ruling Prince, 150 Wavell, Field Marshal Lord, 213ff Willingdon, Lord (illus.), 75 Wint, Guy, 210 Wrench, Evelyn, 209 Wyatt, Woodrow, 256 Yeats-Brown, F., 205 Zakir Husain, Dr., 203

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