The Writer and the World: Essays Read online

  THIS IS THE HOAX OF INDIA. We take the country too personally. We go with a sense of tragedy and urgency, with the habit of contemplating man as man, with ideas of action; and we find ourselves unsupported.

  There was a famine in Bihar. It had taken some time to prepare; and in this time the wits of Delhi had called it the “shamine.” Now it was real: thirty million people were starving, bodies wrecked beyond redemption. But famine was never the subject of conversation; there was more about it in foreign newspapers than in Indian newspapers, which continued to be occupied with the post-election manoeuvring and speeches of politicians. The Films Division made a film about the famine; in Bombay and Delhi it was discussed as a film, a documentary breakthrough. The famine was like something in a foreign country, like the war in Vietnam. It was something you went to; it tested the originality of artists.

  The civil servant in Calcutta said: “Famine? Can that be news to us?” The editor in Delhi said: “Famine? Can I turn that into news every day?”

  It was the pattern of Indian conversation. After the frenzy, the reasoned catalogue of disasters and threats—China, Pakistan, corruption, no leaders, devaluation, no money, no food—after this the frenzy burnt itself out, and the statement was made that it didn’t really matter, that it wasn’t news. The young poet I met in Delhi had made the statement in a long English poem on which he had been working for months. The poem was a dialogue between historical India and spiritual India; its subject was “the metaphysical timelessness” of India. The absurd words had a meaning. The poet was saying, with the civil servant and the editor, that there was no disaster, no news, that India was infinitely old and would go on. There was no goal and therefore no failure. There were only events. There was no tragedy.

  It was what, in his own stylish way, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was telling the inaugural meeting of his Spiritual Regeneration Movement. The red-and-black cotton banner hung out on the Delhi Ring Road, next to the Indian Institute of Public Administration; and inside, in the shuttered gloom, the Maharishi, small, black-locked, bearded, in a cream silk gown, flowers and garlands about him, sat cross-legged before the microphone, backed on the platform by his American, Canadian and other white disciples on chairs, the men in dark suits, the women and girls in silk saris: India, it might be said, getting a dose of her own medicine from the West.

  The Maharishi reproved his reverential middle-class Indian audience for running after “isms” and failing to keep in tune with the infinite which lay below flux. No wonder the country was in a mess. The reproof was rubbed in by the glamorous figures on the platform who went one by one to the microphone, now raised, and gave witness to the powers of Indian meditation, the key to the infinite. A youngish, grey-haired Canadian was described by the Maharishi as a man who had given up drilling for oil to drill for truth. He gave his witness; and then, apparently on behalf of the world, thanked India. So that at the end it was all right. Everybody had just been talking; there was no problem; everything was as before.

  The infinite, metaphysical timelessness: it always came to this. From whatever point they started—the Maharishi had even mentioned Bihar and glancingly attacked the folly of giving land to ignorant peasants, as though that would solve the food problem—there always came a moment when Indians, administrator, journalist, poet, holy man, slipped away like eels into muddy abstraction. They abandoned intellect, observation, reason; and became “mysterious.”

  It is in that very area that separates India from comprehension that the Indian deficiency lies. To see mysteriousness is to excuse the intellectual failure or to ignore it. It is to fall into the Indian trap, to assume that the poverty of the Indian land must also extend to the Indian mind. It is to deal in Bengal Lancer romance or Passage to India quaintness. It is, really, to express a simple wonder.

  Because it is the simplicity of India which disappoints and in the end fatigues. There is a hoax in that quaintness. The barbaric religious rites of Hinduism are barbaric; they belong to the ancient world. The holy cow is absurd; it is, as Nirad Chaudhuri suggests in The Continent of Circe, an ignorant corruption of an ancient Aryan reverence. The caste-marks and the turbans belong to a people who, incapable of contemplating man as man, know no other way of defining themselves. India lies all on the surface. Once certain basic lessons are learnt, it is possible to make everything up, to chart conversations, to gauge the limit of comprehension. It was even possible for me to anticipate much of what was said at the inaugural meeting of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. Where there is no play of the intellect there is no surprise.

  The beatniks of America, Australia and other countries have now recognized India as their territory. Their instinct is true. Five years ago Ginsberg left America to make an initial exploration. He found the local Indians friendly; they were flattered by the attention of someone with a name so bright and modern; it was another tribute to the East from the West. Now the beatniks are everywhere, withdrawn, not gay, and sometimes in moving little domestic groups: papa beatnik, mama beatnik, baby beatnik, the man protected by his beard and jeans, the thin young woman more exposed, the dirt showing on her sandalled feet and on the tanned but pale skin of her bony, finely wrinkled face. They are guests in temples (the Sikhs feed everybody); they thumb lifts on the highways and travel third on the railways; sometimes they compete with the beggars in cities; they attach themselves to the camps of holy men, like the one I heard about in Hyderabad, whose big trick was to pull a prick (I never found out whose) out of his mouth. In India they have rediscovered the wayfaring life of the Middle Ages.

  There is a difference, of course. The maimed to the maimed, the West returning mysteriousness and negation to the East, while the humiliating deals are made in New Delhi and Washington for arms and food: it is like a cruel revenge joke played by the rich, many-featured West on the poor East that possesses only mystery. But India does not see the joke. In March the glossy Indian Hotelkeeper and Traveller introduced a “Seers of India” series:

  India’s seers and sages have something to offer to the world outside. To some of the materially affluent but psychologically sick and spiritually rudderless foreigners from far-flung corners of the world, India’s saints and sadhus provide irresistible magnets of attraction. India, steeped in spirituality, has a singularly unique facet to project to the world outside which at once commands attention and admiration.

  The absurdity of India can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality.

  WE WERE FAR FROM THE DROUGHT and famine area. But even here no rain had fallen for some time, and on the leafless trees in the administrator’s compound the sharp spring sun had brought out the bougainvillaea like drops of blood. Twenty miles away hailstones destroyed a village’s crops. The villagers, relishing the drama, the excuse for a journey, came in a body to report. We went to have a look. On the way we made surprise stops.

  We stopped first at a primary school, a small three-room brick shelter beside a banyan tree. Two brahmins in spotless white cotton, each washed and oiled, each with his top-lock of caste, each “drawing” ninety rupees a month, were in charge. Twenty-five children sat on the broken brick floor with their writing boards, reed pens and little pots of liquid clay. The brahmins said there were 250 children at the school. The administrator said:

  “But there are only twenty-five here.”

  “We have an attendance of a hundred and twenty-five.”

  “But there are only twenty-five here.”

  “What can you do, sahib?”

  Beyond the road some of the children not at school rolled in the dusty fields. Even with twenty-five children the two rooms of the school were full. In the third room, protected from sun and theft, were the teachers’ bicycles, as oiled and cared for as their masters.

  At the next school, a few miles down the road, the teacher was asleep in the shade of a tree, a small man stretched out on his tiny teacher’s table, his feet balanced on the back of the c
hair, so that he looked like a hypnotist’s subject. His pupils sat in broken rows on strips of matting that had been soaked and pressed into the earth and was of its colour. The teacher was so soundly asleep that though our jeep stopped about eight feet away from his table he did not immediately awaken. When he did—the children beginning to chant their lessons in the Indian fashion as soon as they saw us—he said he was not well. His eyes were indeed red, with illness or sleep. But redness disappeared as he came to life. He said the school had 360 pupils; we saw only sixty.

  “What is the function of a schoolteacher?”

  “To teach.”

  “But why?”

  “To create better citizens.”

  His pupils were in rags, unwashed except by snot, their hair, red from sun and malnutrition, made stiff and blond with dust.

  Two or three and stop. The Hindi slogan on the walls of the family planning centre looked businesslike, but the centre itself was empty except for charts and more slogans and a desk and chair and calendar, and it was some time before the officer came out, a good-looking young man in white with a neat line moustache and a wrist-watch of Indian manufacture. He said he spent twelve days a month on family planning. He led discussions and “motivated” people to undergo vasectomy. The administrator asked:

  “How many people did you motivate last month?”

  “Three.”

  “Your target is one hundred.”

  “The people here, sahib, they laugh at me.”

  “How many discussions did you lead last month?”

  “One.”

  “How many people were there?”

  “Four.”

  “What were you doing when we came?”

  “I was taking food and a little rest.”

  “What did you do this morning?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Show me your diary.”

  Loose forms for travelling expenses fell out of his diary. The diary itself hadn’t been filled for two months. The young man had been holding down the job for two years; every month he drew 180 rupees.

  “Try to motivate me,” the administrator said. “Come on. Tell me why I should go in for family planning.”

  “To raise the standard of living.”

  “How would family planning raise the standard of living?”

  It was an unfair question, because concrete, and because it hadn’t been put to him before. He didn’t answer. He had only the abstraction about the standard of living.

  Birth control here; and, not so far away, the artificial insemination centre. A peasant sat on the concrete culvert of an abandoned flowerbed, holding his white cow by a rope. In a stall at the other end of the garden was the black zebu bull. Contraception, insemination: whatever the aim, nature was taking her own way in this district. It was clear what was about to happen wasn’t going to be artificial: the male villagers were gathering to watch. And the centre was well equipped. It had a refrigerator; it had all the obscene paraphernalia of artificial insemination. But the bull, the officer said, had lost its taste for artificial stimuli; which was not surprising. The bull itself was running down. Certain potent rations had been fixed for it by the authorities, but the rations hadn’t been collected. Seventy natural inseminations had taken place in the last year. But no one could tell the percentage of success, in spite of the ledgers in filing cabinets and the multi-coloured charts on the walls. It hadn’t occurred to the follow-up officer that he had to follow up.

  “What is the purpose of artificial insemination?”

  “It allows one bull to cover many cows.”

  This explained everything. The larger purpose—the gradual improvement of cattle in the district—had escaped him. Where the mind did not deal in abstractions, it dealt, out of its bewilderment, in the literal and the immediate.

  To abstraction itself, then: to the district degree college, the humanities, and the Professor of Literature. He was a tiny man in a white shirt and flagrant yellow trousers belted without tightness over a gentle little paunch bespeaking total contentment. He looked very frightened now: the visit wasn’t fair. His mouth was open over his projecting top teeth, which were short, fitted squarely one against the other, and made a perfect ivory arc. He said he taught the usual things. “We begin with Eshakespeare. And—” Then he went shy.

  “The Romantics?” the head prompted, turning it into a supporting inquiry.

  “Yes, yes, the Romantics. Eshelley.”

  “No moderns?” asked the administrator. “Ezra Pound, people like that.”

  The Professor grunted. Shoulder against the head’s table, he leaned forward over his little paunch, his mouth collapsed, his eyes terrified. But he kept up with modern writing. “Yes, yes. I have been reading so much Esomerset Maugham.”

  “What do you think is the point of teaching literature in a country like ours, Professor?”

  “Self-culture.” He had been asked that before. “Even if there is dirt and filth, the cultured mind, as Aristotle says, gets this purge. And this catharsis, as they call it, helps the self-culture. Because it is the cultured mind that even from all this dirt and filth gets the education the lower sort of mind cannot get.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  2

  Magic and Dependence

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

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

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