The Jewel In The Crown (The Raj quartet)

by Paul Scott

  Laxminarayan was interested in the letter signed by Hari Kumar, but when he replied, ‘By all means ring, although I have no immediate vacancy,’ he had no intention of employing him. In fact he had been told by the absentee proprietor, Madhu Lai, who lived in Calcutta, to reduce the overheads and produce a more rational percentage of net profit to total investment. His own private view was that the Gazette’s circulation would be increased if the paper could be seen to commit itself to the cause of Indian nationalism. He knew that the Gazette was anathema to the members of the local Congress sub-committee, and that it was a bit of a joke to the English. He believed that he could sell it even more widely among the English if he could get up their blood pressure. The bulk of its present readership – self-consciously westernised Indians and snob English – would not be lost, because they were sheep by definition. But he reckoned that over a twelve-month period he could add five or ten thousand copies to the weekly circulation if Madhu Lai ever allowed him to make the paper a repository of informed and controversial local and national opinion – non-Hindu, non-Muslim, non-British, but Indian in the best sense.

  Laxminarayan conscientiously believed in his paper. Believing in it was a way of continuing to believe in himself and frank criticism of its shortcomings was a more rewarding occupation than criticism of his own. He had found a way of substituting positive thought for negative action; which perhaps was just as well. He was too deeply committed to the compromise of early middle age to be able to rekindle – in a practical, sensible way – the rebellious spark of his youth. Certainly it was just as well from Hari’s point of view. When Laxminarayan first met him it took no more than a few minutes of conversation for the smothered demon in the older man to kick out, to attempt – impotently – to take control of his judgment. The demon disliked Kumar: the manner, the voice, the way the fellow sat, with his head up, his legs crossed, one black hand resting on the other side of the desk – an embryo black sahib, talking with a sahib’s assurance, the kind of assurance that conveyed itself as superiority subtly restrained in the interests of the immediate protocol. The demon only stopped kicking because Laxminarayan’s internal flanks were inured to the pain of the demon’s spurs and because he saw, in Kumar, a potential asset, an asset in terms of the type of periodical Mr Madhu Lai wanted the Gazette to be. And when Kumar handed him some papers, written proof of his talents as a sub-editor – paragraphs and columns that he recognised as extracts from old issues now transformed into the simple, clear, standard English that in times of stress even eluded the overworked editor, he knew that he would offer Kumar a job and probably get rid of one of the boys who worried him but for whom he cared most, one of the boys who had little talent but a lot of heart and would in all likelihood turn out eventually to be an embarrassment.

  *

  Laxminarayan. These days he lives in a bungalow that once belonged to a Eurasian family who left Mayapore in 1947 – a bungalow in the Curzon road. He is now an old man. He is writing a history of the origins of Indian nationalism that will probably never be finished, let alone published: his apologia for many years of personal compromise. He recognises that the policy of Madhu Lai paid off because the Mayapore Gazette has enjoyed an uninterrupted existence. Left to him, to Laxminarayan, it might have been done to death in 1942, in which year The Mayapore Hindu was suppressed for the third or fourth time. But he is amused, now, at the Gazette’s Hindu-National basis – its air of having always supported the causes it has become locally popular to promote. Its new owner is a Brahmin refugee from Pakistan. Its new editor is the owner’s cousin. With regard to politics at the centre it gives most space to the speeches and activities of Mr Morarji Desai. It plans, next year, to publish itself in a simultaneous Hindi edition, as a first step towards dispensing entirely with English. This, more than anything, saddens Mr Laxminarayan who throughout his life has had what he calls a love-hate relationship with the English language. It is the language in which he learned to think his revolutionary thoughts, and the language which so readily lent itself to the business of making the cautious middle-way he took look and sound like common sense instead of like a case of cold feet.

  ‘What am I now?’ (he would ask you, if you went to see him at his home where he is surrounded by grandchildren whose high-pitched voices seem to come from every room and from the sunlit garden which – as the English would say – has been let go). ‘Well, I will tell you. I am an old man who has lived through one of the greatest upheavals of modern history – the first, and I think the most passionate, of a whole series of upheavals, rebellions against the rule of the white man which have now become so commonplace they are almost boring. And I came through it without a scratch. A veritable Vicar of Bray, you understand. Retired now on pension. Honorary life member of the Mayapore Club where good Hindus forgather. Young journalists come to see me when they hear that I steered the Gazette through those stormy pre-independence waters and say, ‘Sir, please tell us what it was really like in the days of the British.’ Just like your own young people may occasionally say, What was it really like during Hitler and Mussolini? The old colonial British have become a myth, you see. Our young men meet the new Englishmen and say to themselves, ‘What was all the fuss about? These fellows don’t look like monsters and they seem only to be interested in the things we are interested in. They are not interested in the past and neither are we except to the extent that we wonder what the fuss was about and aren’t sure that our own government is doing any better, or even that it is a government that represents us. It seems more to be the government of an uneasy marriage between old orthodoxy and old revolutionaries, and such people have nothing to say to us that we want to hear.’

  ‘I gave Kumar a job and later got rid of a fellow called Vidyasagar who was arrested in 1942 with several other members of the staff of The Mayapore Hindu, and was then put in prison. I was asked to take some steps in that disagreeable business young Kumar was involved in at the time of Bibighar. I’m afraid I refused. No one asked me to use my good offices in the cause of poor Vidyasagar who was given fifteen strokes for an infringement of prison regulations. Not that there was anything I could have done for either of them. But it stuck in my throat that when both of these boys were arrested, for different reasons, only Kumar had people to speak for him, people to ring me up and say, ‘Can’t you get Hari out of jail? You were his employer. Can’t you do something for him? Can’t you prove he was nowhere in the vicinity of the Bibighar?’ People like Lady Chatterjee. And that fellow Knight at the British–Indian Electrical whose consciente probably bothered him. Even the assistant commissioner, Mr Poulson, sent for me and asked me questions about what Hari Kumar’s political affiliations really were. I said, ‘Mr Poulson, he is like myself. He has none. He is a lickspittle of the Raj.’ I was angry. I did not see why I should raise a finger to help him. If the British couldn’t see for themselves that he was innocent, who was I to intervene? He was more British than they were.’

  A week after Hari got his job on the Mayapore Gazette he received a letter from Colin Lindsey. It was dated towards the end of July 1939. Colin apologised for not having written for so long. ‘A few months ago I joined the Territorial Army and your own last letter reached me in training camp,’ he explained. ‘We were pretty busy. If there’s a war – and the odds are there will be – I shall put in for a commission; otherwise I get a kick out of just being an acting unpaid lance-corporal. (They made me up in camp, this summer.) I expect you’ll be thinking of the army too, won’t you, Harry? I mean if anything happens. I’m told the Indian army is quite an outfit, and no longer officered only by the British. Maybe we’ll meet up in some dugout or other, like Journey’s End!Sorry you had such an unpleasant experience at that factory or whatever it was. I can’t understand why your aunt’s inlaws wouldn’t stump up to see you through the ICS. Dad tells me a friend of his says Indians can become High Court Judges even, so the ICS seems to be the thing. That or the army. I recommend the latter. It’s a great life. And h
onestly, Harry, you’d make a first-rate platoon commander – which is what I want to be if the war ever gets going. Then you could waggle a couple of fingers at that fellow Stubbs who was obviously other rank material only. Like me, at the moment! I’ve got a feeling that by the time you get this I shall be in France. Why the hell does it always have to be France? The feeling in my own unit is that the Jerrys ought to come straight over here. Then we could really show them a thing or two. Major Crowe, our CO, reckons that with all that guns-and-butter stuff the poor blighters are half-starved anyway and haven’t got the strength to shoulder a rifle, let alone manhandle their artillery. Dear old Harry! Wish you were here. Then we could be in it together. For my money it’s the only thing to be in, these days. The fond parents send their love.’

  *

  ‘One time he spoke to me of a letter from that boy Lindsey’ (Sister Ludmila said). ‘Why did he treat me as a mother-confessor? This I never earned. He spoke in that way he had, of believing in nothing, which was not natural to him, but was what he had acquired. ‘Sister,’ he said, ‘what would you have done if you had received a letter from an old friend that showed you suddenly you were speaking different languages?’ I do not remember what I replied. Unless I said, ‘There is only God’s language.’ Meaning, you understand, the truth – that this language matters and no other. He did not hold himself entirely free of blame for what happened because when he wrote he did not tell Lindsey what was in his heart. Perhaps he did not tell him because he could not. Did not tell him because he did not know himself.’

  *

  From the Mayapore Gazette Hari received sixty rupees a month, the equivalent of just over four pounds. He gave half to his Aunt Shalini because Uncle Romesh Chand reduced her allowance on the day Hari began work for Mr Laxminarayan. The sixty rupees were paid to Hari as a sub-editor. If Laxminarayan published any of Hari’s original reports he was to pay him at the rate of one anna a line. For sixteen lines, then, Hari would earn a rupee.

  All this he told Colin when he replied to young Lindsey’s letter. He was looking, perhaps, for a way of showing Lindsey that in Mayapore the threat of German ambitions seemed very far away, and Lindsey’s curiously pre-1914 heroics strikingly out of tune with what Hari felt about his own immediate obligations and clearly recollected as the contempt for war which he and Colin had shared, or at least professed to share. Something had happened to Colin. It puzzled Hari to know what. There had been a time when they agreed that it might be necessary to pursue a line of conscientious objection to what they called compulsory physical violence in the interests of a nation’s political and economic aims. Now, here was Colin talking nostalgically about Journey’s End. Did the wearing of a uniform so corrupt a man? And what, anyway, in Colin’s case had led him voluntarily to put one on? Colin had once said that patriotism, like religious fervour, was a perversion of the human instinct for survival. Chillingborough was a forcing house of administrators, not of soldiers. To an administrator a soldier represented the last-ditch defence of a policy: one to which, on the whole, it was shameful to retreat.

  ‘I’m glad,’ Hari wrote, ‘that you’re finding life in the TA not too wearing –’

  That English subtlety! It struck him even as he wrote the words that they could be read either as manly understatement or bitchy criticism.

  ‘– and I suppose if things come to a head India will be in the war too. Which will mean me.’

  He sat and thought for a moment. He did not feel that it would mean him at all.

  ‘It’s difficult to apply a theory when faced with a situation that calls for some kind of positive reaction,’ he continued. ‘I suppose you’ve been faced with one in much the way that I have.’

  He remembered the time when Mr Lindsey had described Adolf Hitler as a bloody housepainter, and later as a man who, ‘anyway, got things done’. He also remembered that during Munich, which had coincided with his own act of appeasement of Uncle Romesh Chand, Colin had written him a letter which expressed relief that Mr Chamberlain’s common sense had averted hostilities. To Hari in Mayapore, Munich had meant nothing. He judged retrospectively that to the Mayapore English, blanketed as they were in the colonial warmth of their racial indestructibility, it had meant nothing either. He did not doubt, though, that the tone of Colin’s latest letter was an accurate reflection of a mood now shared by the English as a whole, at home and abroad. He tried to enter it himself, but could not. The inspiration for it was not to be found in the Chillianwallah Bagh, nor was it to be found in the cantonment, in the magistrates’ courts, in the sessions and appeal court of the District Judge, or even on the maidan, places with which Hari had become increasingly familiar as a result of his job on the Gazette. It was not to be found in them because he entered such places as an Indian. He entered by permission, not by right. He did not care for what he saw. He did not care for what he felt – the envy of the English and their institutions that came to fill the vacuum left by the loss of his own English identity. He found it depressingly easy to imagine Colin in the place of the young Englishman who sat as a magistrate – not precisely with the power of life or death (because his judicial powers were restricted) – but with the power to send a man who was old enough to be his father to jail for a year; depressingly easy because in this young man Colin himself could be seen, if only symbolically, in an unpleasant light. On the other hand, he could not imagine himself presiding in the place of the Indian magistrate who appeared one day in the place of the Englishman, and conducted his court with no less acidity or assurance. For the first time Hari found himself asking: What is an Indian doing sitting there, fining that man, jailing this woman, sending this case up to the court of sessions? He felt an unexpected resistance to the idea of an Indian doing an Englishman’s work. When he paused to consider this resistance he realised that he had responded as a member of a subject race. The thought alarmed him.

  *

  ‘Such a fuss,’ he wrote to Colin two months later (when, far away in Europe, the war had already begun) about the resignation of those provincial ministries which had been dominated by the Congress. ‘Of course you can see both points of view. The Viceroy had to declare war on India’s behalf because he’s the King-Emperor’s representative, and the Germans now rank as the King’s enemies. But since for some time now the British policy towards India has been to treat her as an embryo Dominion that only needs time to become self-governing, the Viceroy might at least have gone through the motions of consulting Indian leaders. Some people say that under the 1935 Act he was actually committed to consultation, but even if he wasn’t how much more effective it would have been if the declaration could have been made with a simultaneous Indian statement of intention to co-operate freely. And one can understand why with all this talk going on about British War Aims the Indians feel one of them should be independence for India immediately the war is over. Failure to state that as a definite aim, with a definite date, has led a lot of Indians to believe that independence should be insisted on now. They say that only a free country fights with a will. And they fear a repetition after the war of all the prevarication that’s been going on these last ten years or more. But I think they’re a lot to blame for the delay themselves. The Congress says it represents all-India, but it doesn’t. All this disagreement among themselves about who represents what just plays into the hands of the kind of English who don’t want to give India up – the kind of people my father always assumed would get their way. On the whole I think he was probably right. For instance, now that the Congress ministries have all resigned most of the provinces are back under old-style rule of a Governor and a council, which seems to me the very sort of thing a sensible party would have wanted to avoid because it puts them back years politically. But then I have never been and probably never will be able to make sense of Indian politics. As for the effect of the war on the English here, so far as I can see there hasn’t been any. Frankly, it’s something that seems to be taking place in almost another world – if you can s
ay that it’s taking place anywhere. To judge from the news nothing much is happening, is it? The English here say that Hitler now realises he’s bitten off more than he can chew and will end up by being a sensible chap and coming to some arrangement with France and Britain. Some Indians say that their own leaders, Nehru especially, have been warning the West for years about the threat Hitler has always represented.’

  Apart from a short letter from Colin which was written over the Christmas of 1939, a Christmas which Colin had spent at home, after completing a course of training as an officer cadet, Hari heard nothing for nearly a year. A note from Mr Lindsey in the spring of 1940 informed him that Colin was ‘somewhere in France’ and that Hari’s last letter had been forwarded to him. He said that the best thing for Hari to do in future would be to write to Colin at Didbury so that the letters could be sent on to wherever he happened to be.

  Hari could not help remembering the attitude Colin’s father had taken in 1938, an attitude he had begun to see during the past two years as proof that the man had stopped trusting him. ‘What will he do with my letters?’ he asked himself. ‘Read them? Censor them? Not forward them if I say anything he thinks might upset Colin, or if I say something he doesn’t personally like?’ The shadow of Mr Lindsey fell across the notepaper whenever he wrote. Here was a further disruption to the even flow of thoughts going out to his old friend. The belief that he and Colin were growing further and further apart as a result not only of circumstances but also of the intervention of the powerful force of the malign spirit that had driven his father to death and himself into exile, now took hold of him, but the letter he eventually received from Colin in the August of 1940 seemed to show that between them nothing had fundamentally changed. The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure; and when Hari attempted an analysis of his friendship with Colin he found it healthily straightforward. It was an attraction of like for like that had long ago outgrown whatever initial morbid or childish curiosity there had been in the colours of the skin and the magic of the genes. Colin’s letter turned back the years. Here was the authentic voice of his friend Lindsey. Reading between the lines Hari understood that Colin had not had an easy passage. This pegged them level again. The letter gave him little general information. Young Lindsey had been at Dunkirk, and since then ‘in hospital for a bit, not because I was badly hurt but because it took rather a long time to get the proper treatment and dressings, and things went bad on me, but are all right now.’ The letter was written from home on a spell of leave between leaving hospital and returning to his unit.