Later, especially after the war, people went to India, and so at last we could get details of our private India. There was more to say about the railway stations: the cries, for instance, of the vendors of bidis and pan and cigarettes. But the people who brought back these stories had been made by their birth abroad, their education and travel; they could assess themselves, in a way the mattress-maker wouldn’t have understood; and this gave them another way of looking. The mattress-maker’s way of looking was lost; I could never understand the India he had come from.
I WAS IN INDIA when I was planning this chapter. One day I saw, in the literary pages of an important southern newspaper, a review of an autobiography of a man who in 1898 had gone out as a labourer on a five-year contract to Surinam, the Dutch territory in South America. Surinam was Dutch Guiana; Dutch Guiana was next to British Guiana; and British Guiana was culturally close to us in Trinidad. It was an extraordinary piece of luck, coming upon a book from Surinam by a contemporary of the mattress-maker, and from the same part of our private India! The same landscapes held in remote memory, the same weather, the same calendar, the same ideas of human possibility, the same languages: a little miracle, if the book was what it said it was, a little bit of the past recovered.
The title of the book was Jeevan Prakash, “The Light of Life”: religious and high-flown and not a little vain: from my own point of view, a let-down. The author, Rahman Khan, had been born in 1874 in the United Provinces. He described himself as a Pathan, but that might have been only a matter of remote ancestry. Many of the Pathans of his childhood worked for Hindu merchants. There seems, from his book, to have been a composite Hindu-Muslim culture of the region; this composite culture has now vanished. Rahman, remarkably for a Muslim, knew Hindi very well, and was able to read the Ramayana, one of the two epics of India, a sacred text. Later in Surinam, long after his contract labour was over, he was still enough of a Hindi scholar, in his own account, to teach the Ramayana to Brahmins and pundits in the benighted Dutch plantations.
He had written his book in Hindi in the early 1940s in Surinam. He thought of himself as an Indian religious scholar, and he believed this gave him a certain standing in the Indian villages of Surinam—And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, / That one small head could carry all he knew. There would have been some local and family support for his writing; but my feeling (from my knowledge of Trinidad) is that people who reverenced him for his learning and his writing might not have always wanted to read him; for these people reverence would have been enough.
I don’t think his book could have had much of a circulation. It would have had far fewer readers than Walcott’s 1949 book of poems. Surinam was a backward colony and its population was small, probably half the population of Trinidad. The Indian population of Surinam would have been only half the general population; and it wasn’t a reading population. The book would almost certainly have faded away if it hadn’t been rescued many years later by some kind of political-academic interest, concerned here as in other Caribbean colonies with promoting local culture and pride. The Light of Life, rescued in this way, had been translated into Dutch. This Dutch text, translated into English by some Surinam-Dutch academics and given the sensational title of The Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Labourer, had been published by a small Indian publisher and had made its way to the serious review pages of The Hindu newspaper in India. Many accidents had lengthened the life of Rahman’s little book.
It is a primitive piece of book-making. It begins with a plea for forgiveness for writing an autobiography: he is only, after all, “an insignificant soul.” There follows, as an introduction to his story, a history of India in fifty-five short paragraphs, each paragraph reading like a school note that Rahman might have taken down from a teacher at his school in India sixty years before or—his memory is prodigious—remembered from a basic history text book of that time: a British text book, it may be, Indian history in these notes being, principally, a list of Muslim emperors, and then a list of British governors. British rule in India is regarded as something settled. Rahman is a complete colonial, loyal always to the ruler. The Light of Life ends with a poem in Hindi in praise of the Dutch queen, Wilhelmina, “Maharani Queen Wilhelmina Sahab Bahadur”; if Rahman had stayed in British India something as loyal to the British sovereign, and as fulsome, might have come from his pen.
The autobiography proper, less than two hundred pages long, comes between the fifty-five paragraphs of the history of India and a polemical fifty-page account of a childish religious dispute with a Brahmin in Surinam. It would seem, from these “fillers,” that Rahman didn’t feel his autobiographical material was enough for a book. And, indeed, he doesn’t have a great deal to say about India outside school and family. He tells us about his family connections, his family’s rich patrons, his schools; and he talks at length and very precisely about his examinations, still important to him after fifty years (this no doubt explains his lasting memory of his history lessons). He has much more to say than my grandmother’s mattress-maker, but as a narrator he has something of the mattress-maker’s incompleteness. He has no feeling for the physical world about him. It is quite startling to see a photograph of his school in India (provided by the book’s editors); nothing in Rahman’s words suggests a fine decorated brick building, as this is or was; without the photograph we would have been free to create anything we wanted. He has no sense of the passing of time, or cannot communicate it. Once he allows himself to be recruited by the Surinam agents he is moved from depot to depot; he gives no description of these depots, judging each only according to the quality of the food given out.
But his narrative tools are suited to his vision. His world is full of religious rituals, of vows made and then carried out. He deals in wonders: men who fight tigers, men who suffer from dreadful maladies and are then cured by wise healers, both the details of the maladies and the extraordinary cures clearly remembered fifty or sixty years later. For one cure a big tortoise had to be brought to Rahman’s father’s house. It was easy enough for a fisherman to catch a tortoise. But then the tortoise had to be made to urinate; and then the urine had to be collected and mixed with the powder of a baked earthworm. Rahman’s father didn’t know how to get the tortoise to urinate. But the wise and famous old hakim, who had prescribed the cure, laughed and told Rahman to bring a stove, a pan, and some firewood from his mother. Rahman did as he was told. The firewood was lighted, the pan was put upside down on the stove, and when the pan was sufficiently heated the hakim put the poor tortoise in the pan or on the pan and pressed him down with his shoe. Sure enough, in this story, the tortoise urinated, and the urine was collected in another pan. Rahman was then sent to dig for three earthworms (three: Rahman is as precise as this, fifty or sixty years later). He brings the earthworms to the hakim, who (with a similar precision, and for an unstated reason) bakes only two and a quarter on the pan. From the mixture of the urine and the baked worm three tablets were made, and the patient (an assistant to a rich Hindu landowner) was told to swallow one tablet a day.
He was cured, of course. But it did him no good. Part of the cure was that the patient should abstain from dairy products for six months. This was not easy in India, where milk and milk sweets, curds, and cottage cheese are important parts of the vegetarian diet. The patient somehow abstained. Until one day, or late one evening, when he was tired and hungry after a day’s hard travel on a palanquin (carried by four men), he sent his servant to the bazaar to get something to eat. It was eleven; most of the market stalls were closed. The servant could only find a milk sweet. It cost four annas, something between a penny and twopence. The servant took it back to his famished master. The master was tempted. With the first mouthful of the delicious sweet he remembered what the hakim had said. He should have stopped, but he didn’t. He ate to the end and—this is an Indian story—began to prepare for his death.
He straight away, that very night, told his overtaxed palanquin men to take him back hom
e. When he got there he sent for the hakim. The hakim came and said he could do nothing: the eater of the milk sweet was going to die in two weeks. And then—in this Indian story—the hakim simply went away, leaving the patient to order his affairs and deal with things as best he could. Two weeks later the patient died. For Rahman this death (so accurately foretold), almost more than the earlier cure, was a proof of the gifts and splendour of the hakim.
Rahman had earlier had a personal proof of the man’s talent. It was at the time when they were exercised about the tortoise urine and the three earthworms. It was a Sunday afternoon and Rahman, a boy of thirteen, was playing with some friends in the doorway of his family house. Rahman’s father and the hakim were sitting in the portico. Rahman’s father called him. Rahman went and sat in front of them. The hakim held Rahman’s hand, considered the boy’s palm and forehead, counted and assessed the lines, and prophesied the boy’s future. Rahman’s father was awed. To have your future told like that, by a hakim, was to be marked and blessed; and Rahman’s father raised his arms to the sky and called on Allah in gratitude.
Rahman’s India is full of this kind of wonder, where some men can go behind the play of events and study the workings of fate. The wonder of the seer follows the wonder of the healer; and in the background are the stupendous rituals of both religions. The effect is of an enticing, brightly coloured place where anything might happen; a man has only to let himself go. In Rahman’s view of the world Satan led one astray; Allah rescued one. So the devout man was always protected, and never had to live with the consequences of his actions.
When he was seventeen, and in the middle school, in a hostel far from home, Rahman decided, with a friend of the other religion, the nephew of a temple priest, to run away. In the hostel he had to cook for himself. He hated cooking; it blighted his days; he couldn’t get the peace of mind he needed to study, and he couldn’t sleep properly. In this mood he went home for a five-day school break. He slept next to his father; it was their custom. He saw that his father was keeping a moneybag under his pillow; he found out that the money being guarded in this way, ninety-five rupees, was to pay the tax on his crops. About two o’clock one morning, when he thought his father was sleeping, Rahman stole the bag and went to join his friend.
There was a small Indian kingdom with its own maharaja and its own rules about fifteen miles away. That was where Rahman and his friend thought they should go. They ran seven miles without stopping and came at daybreak to a village where Rahman had relations. They had breakfast and a bath there and later, telling Rahman’s relations they wanted to have a look at the village, began to walk to the maharaja’s kingdom. They got there at about half-past four. It was as magical a place as they expected. There was a hill, and behind the hill a fortress wall. The maharaja’s palace was at the top of the hill and had a pinnacle of gold.
The city gates were open. They went in and Rahman says they found themselves in the land of their dreams. In Rahman’s brightly coloured, Arabian Nights world anything is possible; and it is no surprise to him or to his reader that this land of dreams is just fifteen miles away from his family house. By the maharaja’s orders the city has been decorated for this month, and a fair is in full swing, with booths and sports and games and a circus. Rahman has relations in this place too; so there is a house where they can have supper (Rahman’s temple friend being given flour and pulses and his own pots and pans to cook his vegetarian food) and where they can sleep. In the morning they go out to explore the golden city. There are temples, mosques, lakes, a well-stocked zoo; and there is the maharaja’s palace.
Near the gate to the audience hall they find—a Rahman touch—a holy man. He is sitting on the ground and writing. They go up to him, ask his permission, and sit beside him. They tell him, when he asks them, that they come from afar and are looking for employment. In Rahman’s Arabian Nights world problems arise only to be resolved, especially if there is a holy man about. And this holy man tells the two young men that the maharaja of the state is kind and generous to the poor. Every day at noon a cannon is fired; the maharaja can then be approached and petitioned; the sentry at the inner palace gate will stop no one.
They wait outside the gate. At noon, as the holy man said, the cannon is fired. A bell rings; and the sentry who has been walking up and down outside the gate pushes it open. Another sentry appears and leads them to the hall of audience. The young men are ready to faint at the richness of what they find: the carvings, the silver chandelier, the carpet soft and smooth, the perfume. The maharaja’s high officials and courtiers, splendidly attired, sit with their hands in their laps. The young men are led to the presence area. They put their palms together, in the proper suppliant gesture, and bow their heads. When the maharaja appears—he is not described—they kneel. The maharaja asks them to rise. Rahman is stunned by the radiance of the ruler’s face and the jewels of his crown.
The maharaja—who does this kind of thing every day—is brisk and matter-of-fact. He asks what his petitioners want. Rahman says he wants to earn a living. The maharaja asks whether he can read and write. When he says yes, the maharaja throws (this is the word Rahman uses) a knife and a pen without a nib (clearly a reed). He asks Rahman to make a pen; Rahman does so and puts the reed pen and the knife on the ivory table in front of him. The maharaja examines the pen, writes something on a piece of paper, and asks Rahman to write his name and address on that piece of paper. Rahman does so. The maharaja directs his secretary to make a note of Rahman’s name and tells Rahman to come back on the following day at ten.
Rahman’s friend, the young man from the temple, had no schooling. He was fat and sturdy, though, and the maharaja thought that a place might be found for him in the army. He too was asked to come back the next day.
So it had all been as the holy man had said. But Rahman and his friend never went back to the maharaja’s palace with the pinnacle of gold and the glittering ruler. They had left too many clues with Rahman’s relations in two towns; and now, unhappily for them, they were plucked from the land of dreams and taken back to what would have seemed the greyness of home. The kitchen fire was lighted there for the first time for three days. Allah was thanked, and Rahman’s father fed the poor. (Always, in this account, the poor, the bearers of palanquins, perhaps, called out on these occasions from the encompassing shadows, and were religiously fed.)
IT MUST HAVE BEEN this easy escape from the school hostel to the maharaja’s city and palace, his welcome by holy man and ruler, his vision of new possibility, that made Rahman ready, when the time came, to sign on for Surinam. There was another reason. His father wished now to “tie him down,” to prevent him running away again, and he thought, strangely, that the best way would be by getting the young man married. So at the age of eighteen Rahman was married. He didn’t raise a murmur. He gives the event half a line, and doesn’t allow it to interfere with his narrative. “After the marriage ceremony and holiday I returned to school and resumed my studies in a sincere way.”
In the same passive way he allows himself, six years later, when the big occasion arises, to be led to the Surinam emigrant depot. He says at first, like many Indian emigrants, that he was tricked; but the narrative shows that he was more than half willing. Somewhere in his head there would have been a memory of a palace with a golden pinnacle and a jewelled ruler.
He doesn’t leave India right away. He spends more than six months in the depots in Kanpur and Calcutta. He could have gone to a magistrate and said he had changed his mind; he could have written to his father. But for six months he is content to do as he is told, to move here and there, noticing only the quality of food he gets in various places. In the middle of this period of waiting he does write to his father; but it is only to say that he is going to Calcutta, and he gives no address. Just before he boards the ship he writes again; he tells his father he is going to the “island” of Surinam.
Fifty years later he writes of his actions, “Holy Allah had picked me out and I was destin
ed to leave Hindustan.” It is his only explanation, and it fits his world view. In Rahman’s brightly coloured India, Satan misleads, Allah in the end rescues. So a devout man is always safe. He has no idea where Surinam or South America is, and he really has no wish to find out. He believes that on the two-month journey by sailing ship he will never lose sight of land; this means, in effect, that he has believed that the brightly coloured land of India will always be with him; there will always be protection of some sort.
But the plantation world of Surinam is grey. There are no rituals and festivals in the background; it is like the change that occurs more than halfway through Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the drab plantations, the drab unpainted estate houses with rusting corrugated-iron roofs, the drab barracks, there are strange illnesses, ghosts, mysterious balls of fire; but there are also African healers. A man from India has to make the best of this new world.
My grandmother’s mattress-maker had made the journey Rahman had made. He would not have had the means to tell me about India. He could think only about the biggest and most modern thing he remembered: the railway station. He would have been separate, culturally far away, from his children. He was as solitary as he appeared.
RAHMAN, WHO WAS never to lose his Arabian Nights idea of the world (essentially a child’s idea), was born in 1874 in north-central India, a hundred miles south of the great city of Lucknow. Mohandas Gandhi, who was to change the face of India, was born in 1869, in Gujarat, seven hundred miles or so to the south-west. Gandhi was born to a view of the world that was dimmer than Rahman’s, more earthy (no jewelled rulers, no palaces with golden pinnacles), though his people were much better off. He was born in a region of petty feudal states and his family were small-scale administrators of those states, moving more or less easily from one state to the other. It comes out in an aside in Gandhi’s autobiography that his father earned three hundred rupees a month, about twenty-five pounds. At one stage he moved from the state of Porbandar on the coast to Rajkot in the interior, a hundred and twenty miles away, a hard journey in those days: five days on a bullock cart. (Stagecoaches in England, in the great days, just before the railways, did ten miles an hour. To go back further, to ancient Rome in 80 BC: Cicero, in his speech in defence of Sextus Roscius, speaks of fifty-six miles being done in ten hours by a relay of light carriages.)
A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling Page 8