The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

  ‘Well, you see, he had us by the hip, or at least had by the hip those of us who appreciated the subtlety of the English language. As a member of the sub-committee – and he had had the foresight to send us a copy of his letter to the District and Municipal Boards – as a member of the sub-committee who considered his submission I argued for an hour over the significance of the words “impression” and “exclusion”.

  ‘Perhaps to you Congress is synonymous with Hindu. To us – originally – it was always the All-India Congress – founded, incidentally, by an Englishman. But since there have always been more Hindus than Muslims in India, it has also always gone without saying that its membership is and was predominantly Hindu. This did not in itself make it a party of Hindu policy. Unfortunately, there is always an unmapped area of dangerous fallibility between a policy and its pursuit. Do you not agree? Well, surely as an Englishman, a member of a race that once ruled us, you must agree? Was there not an unmapped area of dangerous fallibility between your liberal Whitehall policies for India and their pursuit here on the spot? What had Mr Stead to do with official English policy without irrevocably violating it by his personal passions and prejudices? Do you not agree that the Mr Steads of your world kicked and swore against every directive from Parliament and Whitehall that seemed to them to be reprehensible? As reprehensible as it would be for the garrison of a beleaguered fort to wave the white flag when plenty of ammunition was still to hand? Did not such people always feel themselves to be the quantity left out of the official equation, the unofficial but very active repository of the old sterling qualities they thought the politicians had lost sight of or never had? Don’t you agree, my dear fellow, that those of your compatriots whom you have observed this evening, by and large, are still in the grip of some traumatic process that persuades them to ignore the directives of your government at home to export or die? Don’t you think that we should get on better with the Russians and the Americans?

  ‘Well, so it was, you understand, with members of the Congress. Perhaps even in a greater degree because the official Congress policy wavered between the extremes of that curious unworldly man and our sophisticated Kashmiri Pandit who realised always and perhaps still realises that half a cake is better than no cake at all.

  ‘So why should you expect the Congress to abide by rules no one else ever abided by? In countless places like Mayapore it became narrowly exclusive. In the same way that Stead became narrowly impenetrable, and your compatriots in the lounge-bar have become narrowly insular, needing the money they earn, the money we are quite prepared to pay them, but affecting to despise the people they earn it from.

  ‘Forgive me. Lili is signalling me to shut up. But I am an old man. I am entitled, am I not, to say what I think? – and of course to stray from the point. I was telling of the Deputy Commissioner’s letter and the perfect English flexibility of that sentence: “It is perhaps unwise to leave an impression on their minds of the kind of exclusion Congress itself is rightly at pains to eradicate.”

  ‘He was not only calling us to reaffirm the official party line which held Congress to be a body representative of all India, but pointing out very subtly what in our hearts we knew, that many of our local activities were contrary to the party line, if you judged the party line on its highest originating level, especially when those activities were directed at children. “It is perhaps unwise to leave an impression on their minds.” This made us think of the kind of minds we left an impression on. The minds of children. Once we had to face the fact that we were acting as adults who knew the rough and tumble of everyday party politics, but acting in a world of children who didn’t, also we had to face the fact that these children for a long time now had equated Congress with Hinduism and the singing of Congress songs and the salutation of the Congress flag as an act of defiance not only of the British Raj but of Muslim national aspirations. Because it was we, their elders, who had simplified the issues in this convenient way.

  ‘Unfortunately my arguments in favour of supporting the Deputy Commissioner’s submission, my arguments in favour of dropping the morning ritual in our district schools, were defeated by a five to two majority. And I was deputed, as a disciplinary exercise, to draft the committee’s reply to Mr White. I remember only one sentence because the rest of my draft was torn to shreds, and this sentence alone remained as mine. Let me repeat it. It makes almost no sense out of context, but the interesting thing is that the Deputy Commissioner recognised its authorship. When he next met me he quoted it: “The salutation of the Indian National Congress flag should not be susceptible of any narrow, communal interpretation.” He said: “I quite agree, Mr Srinivasan. At least, on one point your committee answered my letter.” From that moment we were friends, which is why when he heard that I was lunching with Mr Desai and the Minister for Education he invited me to accompany them when they went to his bungalow to discuss the extension of primary education in his district. By then, as you probably realise, our provincial ministries had got over their teething troubles. But of course it was already 1939, although none of us could have guessed on that evening he took us to the club that by the end of the year the Ministry would have resigned over the ridiculous point of order raised on the Viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany. Or guessed that we should then get thrown back on to the old personal autocratic rule of British Governors with a nominated council. That evening when we went to the Gymkhana it seemed as if the whole world was opening up to us.

  ‘But this is the point I am tortuously trying to make. It was not until I came into the club with Desai and the Minister and Mr White that I really understood what it was that men like Robin White stood for, stood for against all narrow opposition. I do not mean opposition in Whitehall. But opposition here. On the spot. In Mayapore. I saw then how well he fitted the club. How well the club fitted him. Like him, it had no expression that you could easily analyse. It was shabby and comfortable. But rather awe-inspiring – I suppose because the English as a ruling class attached so much importance to it. And yet the majority of the people who were there – well, you felt that no matter how well they thought they were made for the club the club wasn’t really made for them. In the club, in the smoking-room to be exact, for the first time I saw the face behind the face of Robin White. It seemed to go awfully well with the shabby leather chairs that looked forbidding but turned out to be amazingly comfortable to sit on. And Robin, you know, looked at the servants when he spoke to them. You could see him receiving a brief but clear impression of them as men. He did not feel superior to them, only more responsible for them. It was his sense of responsibility that enabled him to accept his privileged position with dignity. That is always the kind of attitude that makes for confidence. In one dazzling moment – forgive the dramatic adjective – in one dazzling moment I really felt I understood what it was the English always imagined lay but only rarely succeeded in showing did lie behind all the flummery of their power and influence. And that is why I have always loved the club since then –’

  ‘Even now –?’

  ‘Oh well –I love it for what it was and even now it is really no different if you know what you are looking for. One always saw and sees through pretence. It is only that now that their responsibility has gone there is no longer any need for the average English person to pretend. And you have as well this very interesting situation in which emptying chamber pots into the pool can also be interpreted as a gesture of your own one-time under-privileged people against the kind of social forces that no longer work but used to keep them in their place. I mean, well, please forgive me, so many of your present-day experts are not what members of the club of twenty years ago would have called gentlemen, are they? They are what the English ladies of Mayapore would have called BOR types? British Other Rank? Well, you know, you send a chap like that to Mayapore today to teach us how to run one of those complicated bits of machinery and of course he is treated as a member of a superior race but I do not feel that he generally has much of a feel
ing of responsibility to teach, merely a need to earn a living in relatively pleasant surroundings and a feeling that what he finds so simple other people also should find simple, so that he is likely to become impatient. We cotton on very quickly to the superficial aspects of machinery, but not to its inner logic. This is what young men like Surendranath and Desai mean when they say we wasted time playing at politics. Anyway our shortcomings give the expert a feeling of considerable superiority and he also gets a bit of a kick, of which perhaps he is also slightly ashamed, to be automatically entitled to be a member of the Gymkhana. He laughs at what the Gymkhana used to represent – that old-fashioned upper-class English stuffiness and pretence – which is why I suppose he comes dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and uses vulgar expressions. He knows almost nothing about British–Indian history, so writes off everything that seems to be connected with it as an example of old type British snobbery. Which means also that in a way he writes us off too. And of course underneath all this there is this other thing, his natural distrust of us, his natural dislike of black people, the dislike he may think he hasn’t got but soon finds he has when he’s been out here a while, the distrust and dislike he shares with those old predecessors of his, but has the rude courage to express in physical action, like emptying chamber pots into the swimming pool. There is as well a more subtle complication. In his heart he also shares with that old ruling-class of English he affects to despise a desire to be looked-up to abroad, and shares with them also the sense of deprivation because he has not been able to inherit the Empire he always saw as a purely ruling-class institution. If you said any of this to him openly he genuinely would not understand, and would deny what of it he did understand. But we understand it. To us it is very clear. But clearest of all now that there is no official policy of foreign government or mystique of foreign leadership that calls for pretence in public and private life, is the fact that behind all that pretence there was a fear and dislike between us that was rooted in the question of the colour of the skin. Even when we most loved, there was the fear, and when there was only the fear and no love there was the dislike. In this odd love-hate affair we always came off worst because you see – the world being what it was, what it is – we recognised and still recognise only too clearly that you were, that you are, far ahead of us in the practical uses of practical knowledge and we still equate fair skin with superior intelligence. Even equate it with beauty. The sun is too strong here. It darkens us and saps us. Paleness is synonymous with worldly success, because paleness is the mark of intellectual, not physical endeavour, and worldly success is seldom achieved with the muscles. Well – here already is the train.’

  And presently, with a mechanical precision recognisable as one not wrought by local invention but by foreign instruction, the gates of the level crossing swing back and leave the road open to the bridge and the temple and the black town. The Studebaker (also a foreign importation, sold by its American owner for a handsome profit to a Brahmin friend of Mr Srinivasan’s in Calcutta) glides forward and there below is the sweep of the river, glittering with the artificial jewels of the night’s illumination. Obstructing the traffic that has been waiting to move in the opposite direction, from the black town to the civil lines (the old descriptive usages die hard), is another but shorter procession of carts drawn by white, humpbacked oxen. Their round eyes glint red in the headlights.

  ‘Stop!’ Mr Srinivasan cries suddenly. ‘Would you like to see the temple? It is not too late? Oh no, come, tili – let us show at least one thing tonight that is truly Indian,’ and directs the Muslim driver to park wherever he can find a place.

  At the bridgehead on the black-town side, with the Tirupati temple on the left, the road broadens into a square whose other end is marked by the holy tree and wayside shrine. On the right, almost opposite the temple, is the Majestic Cinema where the epic from the Ramayana is showing to packed houses. Beyond the square – it may be remembered – the road forks to the right in the direction of the jail and to the left to the Chillianwallah Bazaar. The square is lighted by a single standard close to the holy tree, but it is not dark because the shops are open-fronted and not yet shuttered, still open for custom, and lit by unshaded electric bulbs or glaring pressure lamps that hurt the eye to look at. Somewhere nearby – yes, from the coffee-house – there is the amplified sound of recorded music, a popular song of a celluloid civilisation – a girl’s voice, nasal, thin, accompanied by strings, brass and percussion. There are a cow or two, parked cycle-rickshaws, many people, and several beggar women who converge upon the Studebaker, carrying sleeping children aslant their bangled arms. Their eyes and the rings in their nostrils capture, lose, and recapture, shards of splintered light.

  They reach the car and surround it, accompanying it, half-running, half-walking. When it stops their hands come through the open windows. It is necessary, in the end, for Mr Srinivasan to threaten them with the police. They retreat, but only far enough to allow the passengers to alight. The driver stays with the car and he is left in peace, but the party that now makes its way back towards the temple is followed by the most persistent of the women. Sometimes, making a way through the crowd, you think they have given up. A hand lightly touching your sleeve and then tugging it proves otherwise. To look straight into her eyes would be fatal. In India the head too often has to be turned away. ‘You must not give them anything,’ Mr Srinivasan says. An observer of the scene would notice that since leaving the car the beggar women have concentrated on the more vulnerable flank of the trio walking towards the temple: the white man. The observer would perhaps notice too that the woman who makes her dumb appeal through that gesture, that brief contact with the white man’s sleeve, and who now keeps her voice down to a whisper and limits her vocabulary of begging to one urgently repeated word, ‘Sahib, Sahib,’ is the last to admit defeat, walking with the visitors almost to the entrance of the temple.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Mr Srinivasan says, ‘that you will have to take off your shoes. If you like you could keep your socks on.’

  Socks? Ah, well, risk all!

  The open gateway is fairly narrow, but it is deep because the gate is at the base of the tall stone tower that mounts in diminishing tiers of sculpted figures, the details of which cannot be seen at night. Inside the passage through the tower a temple servant squats by an oil-lamp, surrounded by chappals and shoes. With chalk he makes a mark on the soles and gives Mr Srinivasan a slip of paper. The stone floor of the passage is warm to the bare feet and rather gritty. The descent into the main courtyard of the temple is by a shallow flight of four steps. The feet come into contact with sand. There are people walking, people praying and people sitting on the ground who seem to be gossiping. The illumination is dim. In the centre of the courtyard is the square building of the inner sanctuary, with steps leading up, and carved pillars supporting an ornamental roof. Around the walls of the courtyard there are other sanctuaries. Some are in darkness; others are lit to show that the god or goddess is awake. The figures, often no bigger than dolls, are painted and garlanded. A bell is rung in the main sanctuary: by a devotee of Lord Venkataswara warning the god that he seeks admittance. Slowly the trio of visitors walks round the courtyard until the entrance into Lord Venkataswara’s sanctuary is revealed. A man with a shaved head, bare chest, and the string of the sacred thread looped over his light brown shoulder stands near a pillar. He is one of the priests of the temple. The black-skinned, loin-clothed devotee stands at the open doors of the sanctuary in an attitude of prayer – both arms raised above his head, the palms together. The short length of rope attached to the tongue of the iron bell that is suspended from the roof still moves. It is possible to get only a glimpse of the inner sanctum: a gleam of gold, silver and ebony, in the heart of the stone. There is a bitter-sweet smell in the air. The sand beneath the feet varies from grit to velvet softness. Through the river entrance comes the smell of the water.

  There are trees in the courtyard. In the day they afford some shad
e. Behind the main sanctuary is the sanctuary of the sleeping Vishnu. The stone of the sanctuary floor is rubbed black and shiny. Inside, in the dim light of the oil-lamps set in the walls the carved recumbent god sleeps through an eternity of what look like pleasant dreams. He is longer than a lying man would be. He is part of his own stone pallet, carved into it, out of it, inseparable from it. He is smooth and naked, with square shoulders and full lips that curve at the corners into a smile. The eyelids are shut but seem always to be on the point of fluttering voluptuously open. Once this imminent awakening has made its impression, the stiff limbs begin to suggest a hidden flexibility as though, at least, the god may be expected to ease the cramp of long sleep out of them. The delicately carved but powerful hand would then drop from the stone pillow and fall aslant the breast. And then perhaps the full lips would part and he would speak one word, speaking it softly, as in a dream, but revealing a secret that would enable whatever mortal man or woman happened to be there to learn the secret of power on earth and peace beyond it.

  ‘I am sorry we cannot take you into the holy of holies,’ Mr Srinivasan says, ‘although I might swing it if I can convince the priest that you are a Buddhist. But perhaps some other time. Lili is looking tired.’