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To state this is to state the obvious. But in India the obvious
is overwhelming, and often during these past six months I have
known moments of near-hysteria, when I have wished to forget
India, when I have escaped to the first-class waiting-room or
sleeper not so much for privacy and comfort as for protection,
to shut out the sight of the thin bodies prostrate on railway
platforms, the starved dogs licking the food-leaves clean, and
to shut out the whine of the playfully assaulted dog. Such a
moment I knew in Bombay on the day of my arrival, when I felt
India only as an assault on the senses. Such a moment I knew
five months later, in Jammu, where the simple, frightening
geography of the country becomes plain — to the north the
hills, rising in range after ascending range, to the south,
beyond the temple spires, the plains whose vastness, already
experienced, excited only unease.
Yet between these
recurring moments there have been so many others, when fear and
impatience have been replaced by enthusiasm and delight, when
the town, explored beyond what one sees from the train, reveals
that the air of exhaustion is only apparent, that in India, more
than in any other country I have visited, things are happening.
To hear the sounds of hammer on metal in a small Punjab town, to
visit a chemical plant in Hyderabad where much of the equipment
is Indian-designed and manufactured, is to realise that one is
in the middle of an industrial revolution, in which, perhaps
because of faulty publicity, one had never really seriously
believed. To see the new housing colonies in towns all over
India was to realise that, separate from the talk of India’s
ancient culture (which invariably has me reaching for my lathi),
the Indian aesthetic sense has revived and is now capable of
creating out of materials which are international, something
which is essentially Indian.
***
I have been to
unpublicized villages, semi-developed and undeveloped. And where
before I would have sensed only despair, now I feel that the
despair lies more with the observer than the people. I have
learned to see beyond the dirt and the recumbent figures on
string beds, and to look for the signs of improvement and hope,
however faint: the brick-topped road, covered though it might be
with filth; the rice planted in rows and not scattered
broadcast; the degree of ease with which the villager faces the
official or the visitor. For such small things I have learned to
look: over the months my eye has been adjusted.
Yet always the
obvious is overwhelming. One is a traveller and as soon as the
dread of a particular district has been lessened by familiarity,
it is time to move on again, through vast tracts which will
never become familiar, which will sadden; and the urge to escape
will return.
Yet in so many
ways the size of the country is only a physical fact. For,
perhaps because of the very size, Indians appear to feel the
need to categorise minutely, delimit, to reduce to manageable
proportions.
***
In this vast land
of India it is necessary to explain yourself, to define your
function and status in the universe. It is very difficult.
If I thought in
terms of race or community, this experience of India would
surely have dispelled it. An Indian, I have never before been in
streets where everyone is Indian, where I blend unremarkably
into the crowd. This has been curiously deflating, for all my
life I have expected some recognition of my difference; and it
is only in India that I have recognised how necessary this
stimulus is to me, how conditioned I have been by the
multi-racial society of Trinidad and then by my life as an
outsider in England. To be a member of a minority community has
always seemed to me attractive. To be one of four hundred and
thirty-nine million Indians is terrifying.
A colonial, in the
double sense of one who had grown up in a Crown colony and one
who had been cut off from the metropolis, be it either England
or India, I came to India expecting to find metropolitan
attitudes. I had imagined that in some ways the largeness of the
land would be reflected in the attitudes of the people. I have
found, as I have said, the psychology of the cell and the hive.
And I have been surprised by similarities. In India, as in tiny
Trinidad, I have found the feeling that the metropolis is
elsewhere, in Europe or America. Where I had expected largeness,
rootedness and confidence, I have found all the colonial
attitudes of self-distrust.
"I am craze
phor phoreign," the wife of a too-successful contractor
said. And this craze extended from foreign food to German
sanitary fittings to a possible European wife for her son, who
sought to establish his claim further by announcing at the lunch
table, "Oh, by the way, did I tell you we spend three
thousand rupees a month?"
"You are a
tourist, you don’t know," the chemistry teacher on the
Srinagar bus said. "But this is a terrible country. Give me
a chance and I leave it tomorrow."
For among a
certain class of Indians, usually more prosperous than their
fellows, there is a passionate urge to explain to the visitor
that they must not be considered part of poor, dirty India, that
their values and standards are higher, and they live perpetually
outraged by the country which gives them their livelihood. For
them the second-rate foreign product, either people or
manufacturers, is preferable to the Indian. They suggest that
for them, as much as for the European "technician,"
India is only a country to be temporarily exploited. How strange
to find, in free India, this attitude of the conqueror, this
attitude of plundering — a frenzied attitude, as though the
opportunity might at any moment be withdrawn — in those very
people to whom the developing society has given so many
opportunities.
This attitude of
plundering is that of the immigrant colonial society. It has
bred, as in Trinidad, the pathetic philistinism of the renoncant
(an excellent French word that describes the native who
renounces his own culture and strives towards the French). And
in India this philistinism, a blending of the vulgarity of East
and West — those sad dance floors, those sad
"Western" cabarets, those transistor radios tuned to
Radio Ceylon, those Don Juans with leather jackets or check
tweed jackets — is peculiarly frightening. A certain glamour
attaches to this philistinism, as glamour attaches to those
Indians who, after two or three years in a foreign country,
proclaim that they are neither of the East nor of the West.
The observer, it
must be confessed, seldom sees the difficulty. The contractor’s
wife, so anxious to demonstrate her Westernness, regularly
consulted her astrologer and made daily trips to the temple to
ensure the continuance of her good fortune. The schoolteacher,
who complained with feeling about the indiscipline and crudity
of Indians, proceeded, as soon as we got to the bus station at
Srinagar, to change his clothes in public.
The Trinidadian,
whatever his race, is a genuine colonial. The Indian, whatever
his claim, is rooted in India. But while the Trinidadian, a
colonial, strives towards the metropolitan, the Indian of whom I
have been speaking, metropolitan by virtue of the uniqueness of
his country, its achievements in the past and its manifold
achievements in the last decade or so, is striving towards the
colonial.
Where one had
expected pride, then, one finds the spirit of plunder. Where one
had expected the metropolitan one finds the colonial. Where one
had expected largeness one finds narrowness. Goa, scarcely
liberated, is the subject of an unseemly inter-state squabble.
Fifteen years after Independence the politician as national
leader appears to have been replaced by the politician as
village headman (a type I had thought peculiar to the colonial
Indian community of Trinidad, for whom politics was a game where
little more than PWD contracts was at stake). To the village
headman India is only a multiplicity of villages. So that the
vision of India as a great country appears to be something
imposed from without and the vastness of the country turns out
to be oddly fraudulent.
Yet there remains
a concept of India — as what? Something more than the urban
middle class, the politicians, the industrialists, the separate
villages.
Neither this nor
that, we are so often told, is the "real" India. And
how well one begins to understand why this word is used! Perhaps
India is only a word, a mystical idea that embraces all those
vast plains and rivers through which the train moves, all those
anonymous figures asleep on railway platforms and the footpaths
of Bombay, all those poor fields and stunted animals, all this
exhausted plundered land.
Perhaps it is
this, this vastness which no one can ever get to know: India as
an ache, for which one has a great tenderness, but from which at
length one always wishes to separate oneself.
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...the journey goes on, until the vastness, ceasing to have a meaning, becomes insupportable, and from this endless repetition of exhaustion and decay one wishes to escape.
