India (3 page)

No leader of comparable authority or esteem had risen among the castes for whom Dr Ambedkar spoke. He had remained their leader, the man they honoured above all others; he was almost their deity. In every Dalit house, I had been told, there was a photograph of Dr Ambedkar. It was a photograph I had seen many times, and it was strange that a better photograph hadn’t been used. The Ambedkar icon was like a grey passport photograph reproduced in an old-fashioned newspaper process: the leader reduced to a composition of black and white dots, frozen in an image of the 1940s or 1950s, a plumpish man of unmemorable features, with the glasses of a student, and in the semi-colonial respectability of jacket and tie. Jacket and tie made for an unlikely holy image in India. But it was fitting, because it went against the homespun and loincloth of the mahatma.

The Dr Ambedkar idea semed better than the idea about the telephone directories. There had, indeed, been a religious stillness
about the people in the line. They had been like people gaining merit through doing the right thing. The Dr Ambedkar idea made sense of the flags and the emblems of which I had had a memory. The people I had seen were honouring their leader, their saint, their deity; and by this they were honouring themselves as well.

Later that day I talked to an official of the hotel. He asked for my impressions of Bombay. When I told him about the Ambedkar crowd, he was for a moment like a man taken aback. He was at a loss for words. Then, irritation and unhappiness breaking through his well-bred hotel manner, he said, The country’s going from bad to worse.’

It was a version of what I had heard many times about India. India had changed; it was not the good and stable country it had once been. In the days of the freedom movement, political workers, honouring Gandhi, had worn homespun as an emblem of sacrifice and service, their oneness with the poor. Now the politician’s homespun stood for power. With industrialization and economic growth people had forgotten old reverences. Men honoured only money now. The great investment in development over three or four decades had led only to this: to ‘corruption’, to the ‘criminalization of polities’. In seeking to rise, India had undone itself. No one could be sure of anything now; all was fluid. Policeman, thief, politician: the roles had become interchangeable. And with money – the money of which the crowded, ugly skyscraper towers of Bombay spoke – many long-buried particularities had been released. These disruptive, lesser loyalties – of region, caste, and clan – now played on the surface of Indian life.

The Dalits, for instance. If they had still been only the mahatma’s harijans, children of God, people for whom good things might be done, objects of sentiment and a passing piety, an occasion like the morning’s Ambedkar anniversary wouldn’t have given anyone thoughts of a world about to undo itself. But a certain amount of money had come to the people once known as harijans, a certain amount of education, and with that there had also come the group sense and political consciousness. They had ceased to be abstractions. They had begun to do things for themselves. They had become people stressing their own particularity, just as better-off groups in India stressed their particularities.

And the Dalit particularity was perhaps not the most important one in the city of Bombay. Just outside the hotel was the Gateway of India. This was a British monument: a high, magnificent arch, commemorating the arrival in India in 1911 of the King-Emperor, George V. The imperial associations of the arch were now absorbed into the poetic idea of the gateway; and the paved open area around it was a popular afternoon promenade. On either side of that imperial monument simple and quite small signboards had been put up, with one word in the Devanagari script, black on white – giving the name of the city as
Mumbai
rather than ‘Bombay’.

Those
Mumbai
boards spoke of an internal fight. Bombay was a cosmopolitan city. That was how it had been from the start, and that was how it had developed; it had drawn people from all over the sub-continent. But, in independent India, Bombay had found itself in the state of Maharashtra; and in the mid-1960s a Maharashtrian regional movement had started. This movement wanted Maharashtra to be for the Maharashtrians. In the beginning the movement’s hostility had been aimed mainly at poor migrants from South India; but other people had felt threatened as well. The movement was known as the Shiv Sena, the Army of Shiva, taking its name from Shivaji, the 17th-century warrior-leader of the Maratha people. The newspapers had been critical; they called the Sena ‘fascist’. But the Sena had not ceased to grow. Two years before, it had won control of the Bombay Municipal Corporation.

The corporation building was in the confident Victorian-Gothic style of British Bombay. A wide, solid staircase, with Victorian metalwork below a polished timber banister, led to the council chamber. The walls there were half-panelled in a rich red-brown wood, and the desks and chairs were set in arcs and semi-circles around the mayoral chair. The councillors’ chairs were upholstered in green. But the mayoral chair had a saffron cover. Saffron is a Hindu colour, and here it was the colour of the Shiv Sena. Saffron satin filled the Gothic arch below the gallery on one end wall of the chamber. In front of the saffron satin was a bronze-coloured bust of Shivaji; above the bust, on the satin, were a round shield and crossed swords, also in a bronze colour.

High up on the wall at the back of the mayoral chair, and above the Gothic arches (springing from grey marble columns), were portraits of famous old Indian mayors of Bombay from colonial days. The men in the portraits were dignified; they wore wigs or
Parsi caps or Hindu turbans or Muslim turbans. The dignity of those men, and the nationalist pride their dignity would once have encouraged, had now been superseded.

The council chamber was so perfect in its way, so confident, its architectural details so considered, it was hard to imagine that it had all been negated by the simple saffron of the Sena. It made me think of the Christian cathedral in Nicosia in Cyprus, taken over by the Muslims, cleansed of much of its furniture, and hung with Koranic banners. It made me think of the Marathas of the 17th century, in the vacuum between the Moguls and British, raiding as far north as Delhi, as far east as Bengal, and setting Maratha rulers on the throne of Tanjore in the far south.

The visitor, coming into Bombay from the airport, might see only small dark men in an undifferentiated crowd, and dust and fumes; might see, between the concrete blocks, a mess of makeshift huts and the parasitic shelters those huts spawned, one kind of dependence leading down into another; might see what looked like the unending smallness of men. But here in the corporation chamber, in the saffron and crossed swords of the Sena, were the emblems of war and conquest.

It made the independence struggle seem like an interim. Independence had come to India like a kind of revolution; now there were many revolutions within that revolution. What was true of Bombay was true of other parts of India as well: of the state of Andhra, of Tamil Nadu, Assam, the Punjab. All over India scores of particularities that had been frozen by foreign rule, or by poverty or lack of opportunity or abjectness had begun to flow again. And it was easy to see how someone like the man in the hotel, who had grown up with another idea of India and its development, could feel alienated and insecure.

Some such feeling of alienation I had known myself when I had first gone to India, in 1962. That had been a special journey for me: I had gone as the descendant of 19th-century indentured Indian emigrants. Such emigrants had been recruited from the 1860s on, mainly from the eastern Gangetic plain, and then sent out from depots in Calcutta to work on five-year indentures on plantations in various parts of the British Empire and even elsewhere. People like my ancestors had gone to Fiji in the Pacific;
Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; South Africa; and to some of the territories in the West Indies, principally the Guianas (British Guiana and Dutch Guiana) and Trinidad. It was to Trinidad that my ancestors went, starting some time in the 1880s, as I work it out.

These overseas Indian groups were mixed. They were miniature Indias, with Hindus and Muslims, and people of different castes. They were disadvantaged, without representation, and without a political tradition. They were isolated by language and culture from the people they found themselves among; they were isolated, too, from India itself (many weeks away by steamboat from Trinidad and the Guianas). In these special circumstances they developed something they would never have known in India: a sense of belonging to an Indian community. This feeling of community could override religion and caste.

It was this idea of an Indian community that, near the end of the last century, the thirty-year-old Gandhi – at that time hardly with a political or historical or literary idea – discovered when he went to South Africa and began to work among the Indian immigrants there. And it was during his 15 years in South Africa that intimations came to Gandhi of an all-India religious-political mission.

I was born in 1932, 15 years before the independence of India. I grew up with two ideas of India. The first idea – not one I wanted to go into too closely – was about the kind of country from which my ancestors had come. We were an agricultural people. Most of us in Trinidad were still working on the colonial sugar estates, and for most of us life was poor; many of us lived in thatched, mud-walled huts. Migration to the New World, shaking us out of the immemorial accepting ways of peasant India, had made us ambitious; but in colonial and agricultural Trinidad, during the Depression, there were few opportunities to rise. With this poverty around us, and with this sense of the world as a kind of prison (the barriers down against us everywhere), the India from which my ancestors had migrated to better themselves became in my imagination a most fearful place. This India was private and personal, beyond the India I read about in newspapers and books. This India, or this anxiety about where we had come from, was like a neurosis.

There was a second India. It balanced the first. This second
India was the India of the independence movement, the India of the great names. It was also the India of the great civilization and the great classical past. It was the India by which, in all the difficulties of our circumstances, we felt supported. It was an aspect of our identity, the community identity we had developed, which, in multi-racial Trinidad, had become more like a racial identity.

This was the identity I took to India on my first visit in 1962. And when I got there I found it had no meaning in India. The idea of an Indian community – in effect, a continental idea of our Indian identity – made sense only when the community was very small, a minority, and isolated. In the torrent of India, with its hundreds of millions, where the threat was of chaos and the void, that continental idea was no comfort at all. People needed to hold on to smaller ideas of who and what they were; they found stability in the smaller groupings of region, clan, caste, family.

They were groupings I could hardly understand. They would have given me no comfort at all in Trinidad, would have provided no balance for the other India I carried as a neurosis, the India of poverty and an abjectness too fearful to imagine. Such an India I did now find, in 1962; and, with my idea of an Indian identity, I couldn’t be reconciled to it. The poverty of the Indian streets and the countryside was an affront and a threat, a scratching at my old neurosis. Two generations separated me from that kind of poverty; but I felt closer to it than most of the Indians I met.

In 1962, in spite of five-year plans and universal suffrage, and talk of socialism and the common man, I found that for most Indians Indian poverty was still a poetic concept, a prompting to piety and sweet melancholy, part of the country’s uniqueness, its Gandhian non-materialism.

An editor of an economic weekly, a good and dedicated man who became a friend, said to me in Bombay, when we talked of the untouchables, ‘Have you seen the beauty of some of our untouchables?’ India was the editor’s lifelong cause; the uplift of the untouchables was part of his cause; and he was speaking with the utmost generosity.

There was a paradox. My continental idea of an Indian identity, with the nerves it continually exposed, would have made it hard for me to do worthwhile work in India. The caste or group stability that Indians had, the more focussed view, enabled them, while
remaining whole themselves, to do work – modest, improving things, rather than revolutionary things – in conditions which to others might have seemed hopeless – as I saw during many weeks in the countryside, when I stayed with young Indian Administrative Service officers.

Many thousands of people had worked like that over the years, without any sense of a personal drama, many millions; it had added up in the 40 years since independence to an immense national effort. The results of that effort were now noticeable. What looked sudden had been long prepared. The increased wealth showed; the new confidence of people once poor showed. One aspect of that confidence was the freeing of new particularities, new identities, which were as unsettling to Indians as the identities of caste and clan and region had been to me in 1962, when I had gone to India only as an ‘Indian’.

The people once known as untouchables lined up for more than a mile on a busy road to honour their long-dead saint, Dr Ambedkar, who in his icon wore a European-style jacket and tie. That proclamation of pride was new. It could be said to be something Gandhi and others had worked for; it could be said to be a vindication of the freedom movement. Yet it could also be felt as a threat to the stability many Indians had taken for granted; and a middle-class man might, in a reflex of anxiety, feel that the country was going from bad to worse.

The Bombay stock market had boomed. Papu, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker, had made more money in the last five years than his father had made in all his working life. Papu’s father had migrated to Burma during the British time, when Burma was part of British India. When Burma had become independent, and had withdrawn from the Commonwealth, Papu’s father, like other Indians, had been made to leave. In India, Papu’s father had gone into trading in stocks and shares on his own acount. He read the financial pages carefully and he made a modest living. ‘On the stock market,’ Papu said, ‘if you succeed seven times out of 10, you are doing well.’ Papu’s father, not a formally educated man, had done well according to his own lights.