India (2 page)

But writing was my vocation; I had never wished to be anything but a writer. My practice as a writer had deepened the fascination with people and narrative which I had always had, and increasingly now, in the larger world I had wanted to join, that fascination was turning into a wish to understand the currents of history that had created the fluidity of which I found myself a part. It was necessary for me as a writer to engage with the larger world. I didn’t know how to set about it; there was no example I could follow.

The practice of fiction couldn’t help me. Fiction is best done from within and out of great knowledge. In the larger world I was an outsider; I didn’t know enough and would never know enough.
After much hesitation and uncertainty I saw that I had to deal with this world in the most direct way. I had to go against my practice as a fiction writer. I had to use the tools I had developed to record my experience as truthfully as possible. So there came this divide in my writing: free-ranging fiction and scrupulous nonfiction, one supporting and feeding the other, complementary aspects of my wish to get to grips with my world. And though I had started with the idea of the nobility of the writer of the imagination, I do not now rate one way above the other.

In the practising of this new way I had to deal first of all with my ancestral land, India. I was not an insider, even after many months of travel; nor could I consider myself an outsider: India and the idea of India had always been important to me. So I was always divided about India, and found it hard to say a final word. In all I have written three books about India. They are nonfiction, as they had to be, but they are as personal and varied and deeply felt as any work of fiction could be.
India: A Million Mutinies Now
was the third of those Indian books. It was written twenty-six years after the first. It had taken the writer all that time to go beyond personal discovery and pain, and analysis, to arrive at the simple and overwhelming idea that the most important thing about India, the thing to be gone into and understood, and not seen from the outside, was the people.

The book was dedicated to a further idea: that India was, in the simplest way, on the move, that all over the vast country men and women had moved out of the cramped ways and expectations of their parents and grandparents, and were expecting more. This was the “million mutinies” of the title; it was not guerrilla wars all round. Nearly every English-speaker would have some idea of the brief Indian Mutiny of 1857 when some mercenary Indian soldiers of the British East India Company, confused and angry, but with no clear end in view, mutinied against the British. The million mutinies of my title suggests that what is happening now is a truer and more general way ahead.

This seems a reasonable thing to say now, in 2010, at the time of an acknowledged Indian boom. It was different in 1988, when I began the book. India was full of a pietistic Gandhian gloom, self-satisfied and rather happy as this kind of gloom often is in India. The talk among the talkers in the towns was of degeneracy, a falling away from the standards of earlier times: politics were
being criminalised, and there was corruption everywhere. Standard stuff, not profound, not based on any real knowledge of the country; but it could undermine one. It was the background against which I worked out my idea of the mutinies.

The idea didn’t come to me out of the air. I had done a lot of hard travelling in India in the past twenty-six years. As a writer, a free man, I had picked up a more varied knowledge of the country than most Indians, who were bound to their families and jobs. I had spent many weeks in the districts, away from the big towns. With the help and hospitality of Indian friends and officials I had been able in various places to enter, if only for a week or two at a time, the life of the bare and sometimes forbidding Indian countryside. I had been granted some knowledge of small-town life. I had not always written of what I had seen. So my experience had banked up, and the idea now came to me of expanding on that experience and doing a large book, full of people, an Indian panorama which (since I believe that the present, accurately seized, foretells the future) would contain or explain in a broad way most of what might happen in the country for the next twenty or thirty years. This was what I told my English publishers. They liked the idea; they bought it after ten minutes, quite literally; and not many days after that I found myself in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, marvelling at my ambition, and not really sure how I was to come to a human understanding of the enormous city (such an apparently impenetrable afternoon crowd just outside, moving about the Gateway of India, beside the tarnished Arabian Sea). And, of course, behind the city there was the country: memories for me, alarming now, of endless sunstruck journeys by road and rail.

I had four blank, frightening days in the glamorous hotel, during which I did the dispiriting thing of keeping a self-conscious journal with nothing to say. I didn’t like the journal form; it blurred vision. I preferred distance, and the sifting of memory. The comparison that comes to mind now is that of Ibsen, still more poet than playwright, struggling to keep a journal on his trip to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Momentous days, fabulous sights: made for a journal, one would have thought; but it must have fatigued Ibsen to be on the outside, dealing only with the externals of things; and he simply stopped. In some such way in Bombay I broke down and gave
my dour journal up; and looked around to make another kind of start.

A big board in the hotel lobby advertised a resident or “in-house” fortune-teller; I was often tempted in those four days to go for a reading, to find out whether I would do the book. I didn’t have to do that. One does more in anxiety than one suspects. The book did get started—“Bombay is a crowd” is the opening line I alighted on—and then it moved fast.

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative. The reader, once he has entered this book and goes beyond the opening pages, finds himself in a double narrative. There is the immediate narrative of the person to whom we are being introduced; there is the larger outer narrative in which all the varied pieces of the book are going to fit together. Nothing is done at random. Serious travel is an art, even if no writing is contemplated; and the special art in this book lay in divining who of the many people I met would best and most logically take my story forward, where nothing had to be forced.

I had to depend on local people for introductions, and it was not always easy to make clear what I was looking for. Many people, trained in journalistic ways, thought I was looking for “spokesmen” for various interests. I was in fact looking for something profounder and more intrusive: someone’s lived experience (if I can so put it) that would illuminate some aspect, some new turn, in the old country’s unceasing adjustment to new thought, new politics, new ideas of business. So in this book one kind of experience grows out of another, one theme develops out of another.

Part of my luck was the decision, made for no clear reason one day in the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, to do the religiously inauspicious Indian thing and travel round India in an anticlockwise direction. To have gone the other way, north, to Delhi and Calcutta and the Punjab would have been to get to the meat of the book too quickly, to leave the rest of the country hanging on, in a kind of anti-climax. To go south first, as I did, was to deal in a fresh way with important things like the influence of caste on the development of Indian science, the little known century-long caste war of the south, the dispossession of the brahmins. This could be said to prepare the reader (and the writer) for the disturbances of the north: the British in Calcutta, Lucknow, Delhi: all the history of the past century, just below the present.

I have often been asked about my note-taking method during the actual time of travel. I used no tape-recorder; I used pen and notebook alone. Since I was never sure whether someone I was meeting would serve my purpose I depended in the beginning very often on simple conversation. I never frightened anyone by showing a notebook. If I found I was hearing something I needed I would tell the person I wanted to take down his words at a later time. At this later time I would get the person to repeat what he had said and what I half knew. I took it all down in handwriting, making a note as I did so of the setting, the speaker, and my own questions. It invariably happened that the speaker, seeing me take it all down by hand, spoke more slowly and thoughtfully this second time, and yet his words had the rhythm of normal speech. An amazing amount could be done in an hour. I changed nothing, smoothed over nothing.

Ambitious and difficult books are not always successful. But it remains to be said that in paperback in England this book has been reprinted thirty-six or thirty-seven times. I marvel at the luck.

Bombay is a crowd. But I began to feel, when I was some way into the city from the airport that morning, that the crowd on the pavement and the road was very great, and that something unusual might be happening.

Traffic into the city moved slowly because of the crowd. When at certain intersections the traffic was halted, by lights or by policemen or by the two together, the pavements seethed the more, and such a torrent of people swept across the road, in such a bouncing froth of light-coloured lightweight clothes, it seemed that some kind of invisible sluice-gate had been opened, and that if it wasn’t closed again the flow of road-crossers would spread everywhere, and the beaten-up red buses and yellow-and-black taxis would be quite becalmed, each at the centre of a human eddy.

With me, in the taxi, were fumes and heat and din. The sun burned; there was little air; the grit from the bus exhausts began to stick to my skin. It would have been worse for the people on the road and the pavements. But many of them seemed freshly bathed, with fresh puja marks on their foreheads; many of them seemed to be in their best clothes: Bombay people celebrating an important new day, perhaps.

I asked the driver whether it was a public holiday. He didn’t understand my question, and I let it be.

Bombay continued to define itself: Bombay flats on either side of the road now, concrete buildings mildewed at their upper levels by the Bombay weather, excessive sun, excessive rain, excessive heat; grimy at the lower levels, as if from the crowds at pavement level, and as if that human grime was working its way up, tide-mark by tide-mark, to meet the mildew.

The shops, even when small, even when dingy, had big, bright
signboards, many-coloured, inventive, accomplished, the work of men with a feeling for both Roman and Sanskrit (or Devanagari) letters. Often, in front of these shops, and below those signboards, was just dirt; from time to time depressed-looking, dark people could be seen sitting down on this dirt and eating, indifferent to everything but their food.

There were big film posters on billboards, and smaller ones repeating on lamp-posts. It was hard, just at this moment of arrival, to relate the romance the posters promised to the people on the ground. And harder to place the English-language advertisements for banks and airlines and the
Times of India
Sesquicentennial (‘Good Times, Sad Times, Changing Times’): to the stranger just arrived after a night flight, the city suggested by those advertisements was like an almost unimaginable distillation – a special, rich liquor – of the humanity that was on view.

The crowd continued. And then I saw that a good part of this crowd was a long queue or line of people, three or four or five deep, on the other pavement. The line was being added to all the time; and though for stretches it appeared to be standing still, it was moving very slowly. I realised I had been driving past the line for some time; perhaps, then, the line was already a mile long. The line was broken at road intersections: policemen in khaki uniforms were keeping the side roads clear.

What were these people waiting for? What was their chance of getting what they wanted? They seemed peaceable and content, even in the sun and the brown smoke of exhausts. They were in good clothes, simple, Indian-style clothes. People joining the line came almost at a trot; then they became patient; they seemed prepared to wait a long time. I had missed the beginning of the line. I didn’t know what lay there. A circus? I believe there had been posters for a circus earlier on the road. An appearance by film stars? But the people in the line didn’t show that kind of eagerness. They were small, dark, patient people, serious, and in their best clothes; and it came back to me that somewhere along the line earlier there had been flags and emblems of some sort.

I was told, when I got to the hotel in downtown Bombay, that there was no public holiday that day. And though the crowd had seemed to me great, and the line quite remarkable, something the newspapers might have mentioned, the hotel people I spoke to couldn’t tell me what the line might have been for. What had been
a big event for so many thousands somewhere in mid-town Bombay had sent no ripple here.

I telephoned an acquaintance, a writer. He knew as little as the hotel people. He said he hadn’t been out that morning; he had been at home, writing an article for
Debonair
. Later, when he had finished his article, he telephoned me. He said he had two theories. The first theory was that the people I had seen might have been lining up for telephone directories. There had been trouble about the delivery of new directories – Bombay was Bombay. The second theory was something he had had from his servant woman. She had come in after I had telephoned, and she had told him that that day was the birthday of Dr Ambedkar, and that there was a big celebration in the suburb I had passed on my way from the airport.

Dr Ambedkar had been the great leader of the people once known in India as the untouchables. He had been more important to them than Mahatma Gandhi. In his time he had known honour and power; he had been law minister in the first government of independent India, and he had drafted the Indian constitution; but he had remained embittered to the end. It was Dr Ambedkar who had encouraged the untouchables – the
harijans
, the children of God, as Gandhi called them, and now the Dalits, as they called themselves – to abandon Hinduism, which had enslaved them, and to turn to Buddhism. Before his thought could change or develop, he died, in 1956.