by Paul Scott
‘It was a bloody shambles if you ask me. It amuses me when I hear Dad say to people his son was at Dunkirk, as if that was something to be proud of. My lasting reaction is one of anger, but undirected anger because no one person or even group of persons could be held responsible more than any other person or any other group. I suppose it was our old friend Nemesis catching up with us at last. I lost one good friend. I went to see his sister the other day. Ridiculous how one gets involved in these trite melodramatic situations. We both hated it. When I got back from hospital Dad gave me a couple of letters from you that he’d saved up. We had a bit of a row about that. I was worried what you’d have been thinking, not getting any answers. At first he said he hadn’t wanted to bother me, and that you’d understand anyway that I was otherwise engaged. Then he admitted he’d read them and thought them full of a lot of “hot-headed” political stuff. Hari, I only tell you this so that if you ever write letters to me care of home again you can bear in mind that they might be read. He’s promised not to do that ever again, and sees that it was wrong, but he’s got some funny notions in his head nowadays. I don’t want to hurt the old boy but in lots of ways he seems like a stranger to me. And that’s a cliché situation too, isn’t it? So cliché that I almost distrust my reactions to it. But there are so many things he says and does that get on my nerves. He keeps a Times wall map, and sticks pins in it like a general. The pin that’s stuck in Dunkirk has a little paper union jack on it. I have an idea it represents me. Write and tell me some sensible things.’
Sensible things? On the day Hari received this letter he had been in the District Court listening to the appeal against conviction of a man accused and found guilty in the magistrate’s court at Tanpur of stealing another man’s cow and selling it to a man who had given it away as part of his daughter’s dowry. The accused man said that the cow had become his property because its owner refused to stop it wandering on to his land and it had fed constantly free of cost and consumed fodder in excess of its market value. The appeal was based on the grounds that the Tanpur magistrate had not admitted the evidence of two witnesses who would swear to the fact that the convicted man had given the original owner repeated warnings of his intention to sell. Judge Menen dismissed the appeal and Hari then left the court because the next and last case was an appeal against imprisonment under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code, and Hari’s editor never published reports of such controversial matters.
‘Sensible things?’ Hari wrote back to Colin. ‘I suppose that in wartime especially you can reckon it sensible if not actually fair to imprison a man for speaking his mind. But this is not a purely wartime measure. It is a long-standing one provided for in a section of the criminal procedure code. Section 144 enables the civil authority to decide for itself that such and such a man is a potential local threat to public peace, and thus to order him to stay quiet on pain of arrest and imprisonment. If he disobeys the order he gets prosecuted and punished under section 188.I believe he can appeal as far as the provincial High Court if he has a mind to. I was at the District and Sessions Court on the day your letter came. I left the court just before the Judge (an Indian) heard such an appeal, so I know nothing of the actual proceedings. But I saw the prisoner on my way out, waiting with two constables, and recognised him as a fellow called Moti Lal. He recognised me too and said, “Hello, Coomer,’ and was then hustled in through the door prisoners enter the court by. The last time I saw this man he was working as a clerk at my uncle’s depot at the railway sidings. I made inquiries when I got back to the office. It seems my uncle sacked him a few months ago, ostensibly for inefficiency. But I guess from what my editor told me that the real reason was that my uncle heard from someone that Moti Lal was mixed up with what you could call the underground side of the Congress Party. I asked my uncle’s lawyer, a Brahmin called Srinivasan, what Moti Lal had actually been arrested for. It seems he was always “inciting” workers and students to strike or to riot and had disobeyed an order prohibiting him from giving a speech at a meeting of senior students at the Technical College. He was also suspected of being the leader of a group of young men who were printing and distributing seditious literature, but no evidence was found. Anyway, he got six months. And his appeal was dismissed. An ex-colleague on the Gazette – a fellow called Vidyasagar who now works for a radical newspaper called The Mayapore Hindu told me about it when I met him in court yesterday.
‘Vidyasagar is a pleasant chap whom I rather like but have a bad conscience about. The first few weeks I worked on the Gazette the editor sent me round with him practically everywhere, and then sacked him. Vidya took it well. He said he guessed what was in the editor’s mind when he was detailed to show me the ropes. He said, “I don’t hold it against you, Kumar, because you don’t know anything.” He chips me a bit whenever we happen to meet and says that given time I might learn to be a good Indian.
‘But I’m not sure I know what a good Indian is. Is he the fellow who joins the army (because it is a family tradition to join the army), or the fellow who is rich enough and ambitious enough to contribute money to Government War Funds, or is he the rebellious fellow who. gets arrested like Moti Lal? Or is the good Indian the Mahatma, whom everyone here calls Gandhiji, and who last month, after Hitler had shown Europe what his army was made of, praised the French for surrendering and wrote to the British cabinet asking them to adopt ‘a nobler and braver way of fighting’, and let the Axis powers walk into Britain. The nobler and braver way means following his prescribed method of nonviolent non-co-operation. That sounds like a ‘good Indian’. But then there is Nehru, who obviously thinks this attitude is crazy. He seems to want to fight Hitler. He says England’s difficulties aren’t India’s opportunity. But then he adds that India can’t, because of that, be stopped from continuing her own struggle for freedom. Perhaps then, the good Indian is that ex-Congress fellow Subhas Chandra Bose who makes freedom the first priority and is now in Berlin, toadying to Hitler, and broadcasting to us telling us to break our chains. Or is he Mr Jinnah who has at last simplified the communal problem by demanding a separate state for Muslims if the Hindu-dominated Congress succeeds in getting rid of the British? Or is he one of the Indian princes who has a treaty with the British Crown that respects his sovereign rights and who doesn’t intend to lose them simply because a lot of radical Indian politicians obtain control of British India? This is actually a bigger problem than I ever guessed, because the princes rule almost one-third of the whole of India’s territory. And then again, should we forget all these sophisticated aspects of the problem of who is or is not a good Indian and see him as the simple peasant who is only interested in ridding himself of the burden of the local money lender and becoming entitled to the whole of whatever it is he grows? And where do the English stand in all this?
‘The answer is that I don’t really know because out here I don’t rank as one. I never meet them, except superficially in my capacity as a member of the press at the kind of public social functions that would make you in beleaguered rationed England scream with rage or laughter. And then, if I speak to them, they stare at me in amazement because I talk like them. If one of them (one of the men – never one of the women) asks me how I learned to speak English so well, and I tell him, he looks astonished, almost hurt, as if I was pulling a fast one and expecting him to believe it.
‘One of the things I gather they can’t stand at the moment is the way the Americans (who aren’t even in the war yet – if ever) are trying to butt in and force them to make concessions to the Indians whom of course the British look upon as their own private property. The British are cock-a-hoop that Churchill has taken over because he’s the one Englishman who has always spoken out against any measure of liberal reform in the administration of the Indian Empire. His recent attempt following the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France to lull Indian ambitions with more vague promises of having a greater say in the running of their own country (which seems not to amount to much more than a
dding a few safe or acceptable Indians to the Viceroy’s council) only makes the radical Indians laugh. They remember (so my editor tells me) all the promises that were made in the Great War – a war which Congress went all out to help to prosecute believing that the Crown was worth standing by because afterwards the Crown would reward them by recognising their claims to a measure of self-government. These were promises that were never fulfilled. Instead even sterner measures were taken to put down agitation and the whole sorry business of Great War promises ended in 1919 with the spectacle of the massacre in the Jallianwallah Bagh at Amritsar, when that chap General Dyer fired on a crowd of unarmed civilians who had no way of escaping and died in hundreds. The appearance of Churchill as head of the British war cabinet (greeted by the English here with such joy) has depressed the Indians. I expect they are being emotional about it. I’d no idea Churchill’s name stank to this extent. They call him the arch-imperialist. Curious how what seems right for England should be the very thing that seems wrong for the part of the Empire that Disraeli once called the brightest jewel in her crown. Liberal Indians, of course, say that Churchill has always been a realist – even an opportunist – and will be astute enough to change coat once again and make liberal concessions. As proof of this they point to the fact that members of the socialist opposition have been brought into the cabinet to give the British Government a look of national solidarity.
‘But I wonder about the outcome. I think there’s no doubt that in the last twenty years – whether intentionally or not – the English have succeeded in dividing and ruling, and the kind of conversation I hear at these social functions I attend – Guides recruitment, Jumble Sales, mixed cricket matches (usually rained off and ending with a bun-fight in a series of tents invisibly marked Europeans Only and Other Races) – makes me realise the extent to which the English now seem to depend upon the divisions in Indian political opinion perpetuating their own rule at least until after the war, if not for some time beyond it. They are saying openly that it is ‘no good leaving the bloody country because there’s no Indian party representative enough to hand it over to”. They prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma), are constitutionally predisposed to Indian princes, emotionally affected by the thought of untouchables, and mad keen about the peasants who look upon any Raj as God. What they dislike is a black reflection of their own white radicalism which centuries ago led to the Magna Carta. They hate to remember that within Europe they were ever in arms against the feudal status quo, because being in arms against it out here is so very much bad form. They look upon India as a place that they came to and took over when it was disorganised, and therefore think that they can’t be blamed for the fact that it is disorganised now.
‘But isn’t two hundred years long enough to unify? They accept credit for all the improvements they’ve made. But can you claim credit for one without accepting blame for the other? Who, for instance, five years ago, had ever heard of the concept of Pakistan – the separate Muslim state? I can’t believe that Pakistan will ever become a reality, but if it does it will be because the English prevaricated long enough to allow a favoured religious minority to seize a political opportunity.
‘How this must puzzle you – that such an apparently domestic problem should take precedence in our minds over what has just happened in Europe. The English – since they are at war – call the recognition of that precedence sedition. The Americans look upon the resulting conflict as a storm in an English teacup which the English would be wise to pacify if they’re to go on drinking tea at four o’clock every afternoon (which they only did after they opened up the East commercially). But of course the Americans see the closest threat to their security as coming from the Pacific side of their continent. Naturally they want a strong and unified India, so that if their potential enemies (the Japanese) ever get tough, those enemies will have to guard their back door as well as their front door.
‘Working on this paper has forced me to look at the world and try and make sense out of it. But after I’ve looked at it I still ask myself where I stand in relation to it and that is what puzzles me to know. Can you understand that, Colin? At the moment there seems to be no one country that I owe an undivided duty to. Perhaps this is really the pattern of the future. I don’t know whether that encourages me or alarms me. If there’s no country, what else is left but the anthropological distinction of colour? That would be a terrible conflict because the scores that there are to settle at this level are desperate. I’m not sure, though, that the conflict isn’t one that the human race deserves to undergo.’
*
So there were no ‘sensible things’ that Hari was able to tell Colin, but perhaps it was enough for each of them that over such a distance, of time as well as space, they still found it possible to make contact. There was a saying among young Indians that friendships made with white men seldom stood the strain of separation and never the acuter strain of reunion on the Indian’s native soil.
‘What would you do,’ he asked Sister Ludmila, ‘if you had a letter from an old friend that showed you were suddenly speaking different languages?’ Perhaps it is odd that Kumar should have remembered this earlier Journey’s End letter of Lindsey’s, remembered it well enough to have it on his mind when he asked this question, as if the later one which Colin wrote after his baptism of fire asking him to tell him some sensible things was of less importance than the letter written in the nostalgic neo-patriotic mood Hari had been puzzled by. But then the unexpected side of a man’s personality is more memorable than the proof he may appear to give from time to time that he is unchanged, unchangeable. The image of Lindsey as someone who spoke a new language had made its mark on Kumar, so that later he was able to say to Sister Ludmila:
‘I should have challenged him then. I should have told him what it had really been like for me in Mayapore. I should have said, “We’ve both changed, perhaps we no longer have anything in common. It’s probably as ridiculous to believe that if I came back to Didbury now we should be at ease with each other as to believe that if you came out to Mayapore you would want even to be seen associating with me.” Yes, I should have said that. I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to think it. We continued to exchange letters whose sole purpose was to reassure ourselves that there had been a time when we’d been immune to all pressures except those of innocence.
‘When Colin came to India in 1941 and wrote to me from Meerut, I felt a sort of wild exhilaration. But it only lasted a very short while. I was resigned to what I knew must happen. If he had come straight to Mayapore there might have been a chance for us. But Meerut was a long way off. It seemed unlikely that he would ever be posted to a station close enough to Mayapore to make a meeting possible. And every week that went by could only add to the width of the gulf he’d realise there was between a man of his colour and a man of mine who had no official position, who was simply an Indian who worked for his living and lived in a native town. He would feel it widen to the point where he realised there was no bridging it at all, because the wish to bridge it had also gone. I remembered my own revulsion, my horror of the dirt and squalor and stink, and knew that Colin would feel a similar revulsion. But in his case there would be somewhere to escape to. There would be places to go and things to do that would provide a refuge. He would learn to need the refuge and then to accept it as one he had a duty to maintain, to protect against attack, to see in the end as the real India – the club, the mess, the bungalow, the English flowers in the garden, the clean, uniformed servants, the facilities for recreation, priority of service in shops and post-offices and banks, and trains; all the things that stem from the need to protect your sanity and end up bolstering your ego and feeding your prejudices.
‘And then even if Colin had been strong-willed enough to resist these physical and spiritual temptations and to come to Mayapore to seek me out, where could we have met and talked for longer than an hour or
two? Since the war began the black town has been out of bounds even to officers unless they are on official duty of some kind. I could not go to the Gymkhana. And what would he have made of the other club when it’s hateful even to me? If we had met at Smith’s Hotel there could have been an embarrassing scene. The Anglo-Indian proprietor doesn’t like it if undistinguished Indians turn up there. At the Chinese Restaurant officers are supposed to use only the upstairs dining-room, and no Indian is allowed above the ground floor unless he holds the King’s commission. We could have gone to the pictures but he would have disliked sitting in the seats I would be allowed to sit in. There is the English Coffee House, but it is not called the English Coffee House for nothing. If he were stationed in Mayapore perhaps we could meet for an hour or two in his quarters. Or perhaps he could get permission to cross the bridge and visit me in the Chillianwallah Bagh. I considered all these possibilities because they had to be thought out. And of course I saw that the one constant factor was not so much the place of meeting but the determination to meet. And what friendship can survive in circumstances like that?