The Last Englishmen
Page 15
On his arrival in Tangail a nearly unbearable tension hung in the air, as if the entire district might explode. Even the local police were on edge. But when the rains came, the flat, shimmering world of heat and dust vanished overnight. Paddy and jute fields filled with water. Swollen rivers coursed through the countryside. Once planting was done, country boats were provisioned and suddenly village life was on the move. There were visits to relatives, singing parties, and exchanges of presents and gossip. In Calcutta, there was no escaping the pestilence that came with the rains; one simmered in a stupor that passed for stoicism. In Tangail it was blissful.
Carritt followed the villagers’ lead, making his inspection rounds in a rickety and leaky government barge. The crew lived on the front deck and roof; at the back, his servant, armed guard, and cook. He shared the main cabin with an assistant police inspector, fresh out of public school, who did little but drink away his boredom and sexual frustration. It was during this rainy season, listening at night to the cries of jackals, the badinage of boatmen, and the sounds of village festivities carrying across the water, that Carritt fell in love.
He fell in love first with the Bengali people. Then he fell in love with the gentle light on the waterways at dusk, the rippling curtains of rain splashing the riverbank. And as he watched the silken currents of the Brahmaputra make their way through loosening skeins toward the Bay of Bengal, he realized he no longer regretted not having served in the North-West Frontier Province. And with this realization he began to reflect upon all he had seen as an ICS officer in Midnapore, in Calcutta, and in Tangail. Too busy learning the ropes or hunting snipe, Carritt had never pulled back to regard the Raj with an impersonal eye. Now he did.
He began to see how power happens.
When a third district officer in Midnapore was shot on the football field at halftime, matches were suspended. The DO had been using them to cultivate informers. After six Indian Army battalions were transferred from the frontier to establish order, military intelligence began to bypass the local magistrates. Special tribunals tried political cases without juries, in front of politically reliable judges. Bespectacled youths were condemned to death on the testimony of paid informers. If Carritt dismissed a case for lack of evidence, the police simply appealed to a higher court, leading to far harsher sentences than he would have imposed had he believed the charges in the first place.
Every once in a while Carritt would strip off his clothes and dive naked into the center of the river’s current. The crew was aghast. The rivers were infested with crocodiles. The assistant police inspector was horrified. Carritt was letting the white man down. He ignored them both, returning to his chair feeling refreshed.
While posted as a special officer in the Political and Home Department in Calcutta, one of Carritt’s duties was to administer the camps where political prisoners were held. Where Midnapore criminals had languished in shackles between festering ankles, or fetters that chained them to the walls of their cells, the five hundred détenus lodged at the jails of Deoli, Hijli, and Berhampur received his speedy attention. Every petition for medicine, family allowance, and reading material was swiftly addressed. Complaints about police abuse were thoroughly investigated and invariably dismissed. In this way the consciences of the Indian members of the regional assemblies were assuaged and the appearance of English impartiality, fairness, and decency sustained. Carritt knew better. A police officer had once described to him with great relish how a condemned political prisoner had responded to the tortures inflicted upon him.
In Writers’ Building, the ugly red-stone block of offices housing the government secretariat in Calcutta, Carritt was no longer master of a district. He was simply a writer, one more popinjay among the secretaries, additional secretaries, deputy secretaries, and undersecretaries desperate to grab the next rung on the professional and social ladder. Whatever the amount of gold braid on his ceremonial uniform—and as a third-class special officer Carritt didn’t have much—they were all writers. How many spies, watchers, and informers were on the books of the Political and Home Department? No one was saying. The rule among writers was simple. They signed what the police told them to sign, where the police told them to sign it.
After Tangail he had been promised a plum post in Calcutta. This prospect had contributed to his introspection and restlessness. During those long and lazy days on the river, Carritt, who rarely read more than month-old copies of the New Statesman, began reading the standard editions of Marx and Lenin. Gabriel, the youngest of the golden Carritt boys, once the love object of Wystan Auden and now a full-time worker in the Communist Party of Great Britain, had sent them to him.
Carritt’s superiors had initially looked upon nationalism as a more serious threat than communism, but with each new circular from the Bureau of the Public Prosecutor, the list of banned titles by purportedly Communist authors grew: Revolt on the Clyde, by William Gallacher, Reporter in Spain, by Claud Cockburn, Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed, and Coolie, by Mulk Raj Anand. Even suspicious titles, such as Maxim Gorky’s The Mother or a biography of Genghis Khan, could be seized for study. In time the police became more learned in Marxist philosophy than the political prisoners at Deoli or Berhampur.
But though such works were prohibited under the Sea Customs Act, ADO Carritt’s book parcels were never tampered with. He continued his education while on home furlough. In the Welsh hills and in wayside pubs he now debated the scourge of capitalism and the evils of imperialism with his brothers, all keen hill walkers. The coming conflict would not arise between Germany and England or France, he learned, but between the working classes and bourgeois capitalist imperialism. Before Carritt returned to India, Gabriel introduced him to Ben Bradley of the League Against Imperialism.
Bradley had been arrested and tried in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Twenty-four men, mostly Indians, had been charged with acting on the orders of the Comintern “to deprive the King Emperor of the sovereignty of British India.” During the four-and-a-half-year trial, the Communist line on class warfare was systematically explained from the stand. When convicted, the sentences of the Meerut conspirators ranged from transportation to twelve years’ imprisonment. But as it was feared they would wreak even more havoc as prisoners, their sentences were overturned. After their release, many went underground; Ben Bradley had returned to England.
The day after Carritt arrived in Bombay he went to a photographer’s shop deep in the crowded lanes of Bombay Bazaar. Purposefully dressed in shabby clothes, he felt faintly ridiculous. The two toothless old men behind the counter became alarmed when he asked to speak to S. S. Mirajkar. Mirajkar had been one of Bradley’s codefendants in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Carritt was meant to ask for his photo to be taken and inquire into Mirajkar’s health. They were then to make inquiries and provide him an answer when he picked up his prints. That way they could check the face in the photo against the one they’d been sent. When Carritt failed to follow protocol, they fell at his feet in supplication.
Mirajkar had just left! They didn’t know anyone named Mirajkar! Mirajkar had just that morning been arrested!
When Carritt tried to produce Bradley’s letter, they pushed him out of the shop and locked the door behind him. When passersby became curious, he returned to his hotel to weigh his options. He could put the entire thing out of his mind and quietly take up his Calcutta post. But Bradley told him that if he failed to establish contact, as a last resort he was to go to the archbishop’s residence and ask to see Reverend Michael Scott.
The manicured lawn and flower border of the residence made him feel just as conspicuous on Malabar Hill as he had in the bazaar. At first the sharp-eyed chaprasi refused to relay his message, taking him for a suspicious character. Then he was made to wait on the veranda until Reverend Scott arose from his siesta. No sooner had Carritt sat down to explain himself than the chaprasi reappeared to convey His Lordship’s hope that the reverend’s guest would honor them with his presence at dinner.
Carritt had hoped to leave that night for Calcutta, but Scott insisted they meet the following day at Juhu Beach so that he might be more fully “put into the picture.”
Hatibagan, 139 Cornwallis Street, Calcutta,
April 17, 1936
The rise and fall of empires was a much-visited subject at Sudhin Datta’s Friday night adda. With the proliferation of dictators, fascists, and tyrants around the world, new issues of Parichay were in great demand. The contributions of a newcomer named Susobhan Sarkar on current affairs were now hotly anticipated. Basanta Kumar Mallik, avid consumer of samosas and tireless purveyor of his theory of conflict, had found in the young Susobhan a most able sparring partner. The adda’s secret diarist never failed to follow their exchanges closely. Susobhan was just as steeped in learning as Mallik-da, he found, but he had rare personal qualities. Unlike Mallik-da he was forbearing of the more eccentric members. And he was humble. Until Sudhin induced Susobhan to write for Parichay, he hadn’t considered himself a writer. Now he was called upon to elucidate everything from the history of pre- and postrevolutionary Russia to the disparate origins of the Bengal Renaissance. His critical appraisal of Arnold Toynbee’s three-volume A Study of History was eagerly discussed.
On this particular evening in 1936, the conversation began on a rather esoteric note: what influence did religious belief have on the framing of imperial ideologies? Susobhan floated the idea that Hindus, believing in the existence of many gods, were more broad-minded than the Calvinist monotheist. Yet their polytheistic tendencies had a drawback, too, leading many to worship Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Kamal Pasha, Reza Khan, Sun Yat-sen, and Gandhi simultaneously.
There followed a lot of pointless talk before global politics resurfaced. This was happening more and more. The 1933 collapse of the Social Democrats in Weimar Germany, and the fall of four successive governments in France in two years, had not struck adda members as unduly alarming. Mussolini’s dream of resuscitating the Roman Empire with the dispatch of a general to Eritrea had been greeted with hoots of ridicule. Eritrea! But Susobhan had lately begun to use his Parichay essays to express his indignation at British inaction over Mussolini’s Abyssinian adventures and Hitler’s forays in Spain. A general consensus soon arose that France and Germany would go to war only if England desired it. By turning a blind eye, England was acquiescing to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s muscular expansionism.
The subject of communism’s prospects in India was also coming up a lot, largely due to another recent arrival from Oxford. Hirendranath Mukherjee always arrived with a retinue of young admirers at his heels, young men who could be counted on to parrot his opinions. The more senior adda members found Hiren-da something of an upstart but were keen to hear what he knew about the April 1936 Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress. Nationalist politics were also getting a more extended hearing.
At Lucknow, Hiren-da said, Nehru had reiterated his objection to the 1935 Government of India Act. He argued that Congress should contest the coming provincial elections to take advantage of the opportunity to outline their program and educate the masses. Then, so as not to surrender their revolutionary agenda, they would refuse to take office. Hiren asserted confidently that Nehru’s decision to contest would come back to haunt him, that the entire exercise was an elaborate British trap. Viceroy Linlithgow would use the elections either to dissipate Congress’s power or divide them. The adda diarist noted that Hiren-da tended to lightly lick his lips before delivering his little bons mots.
“Wasn’t it most unwise for Nehru to become so closely aligned with Congress?” one of Hiren-da’s acolytes asked. “It was bound to stymie the spread of Communism, wasn’t it?”
Before Hiren could reply, Susobhan spoke up. “Congress provides a better platform for progressive, nationalist politics than Communism does.”
Though Susobhan was on the Special Branch of Police’s radar as a suspected radical, he was also a government servant with a family to support and could not afford to air his political sympathies openly. Chief Secretary P. C. Joshi had recently moved the headquarters of the Communist Party of India to Calcutta from Bombay, hoping to bring the various terrorist, left-nationalist, and left-student groups under the CPI umbrella. While Susobhan’s ablest students had signed on as Joshi’s foot soldiers, he was limiting his activities to slipping Joshi envelopes of money.
A divide between the recent Oxford arrivals and the older adda members was taking shape. Susobhan and Hiren-da shared the conviction that no political system yet devised by man was as benevolent as Soviet Russia’s. Sudhin Datta and Shahid Suhrawardy had signed on with the Decadent Bourgeois Party. Sudhin said he fully expected to be found swinging from the nearest lamppost the day the Great Reckoning with communism arrived. When the Comintern turned on the French writer André Gide after the publication of his book on Russia, Sudhin understood all he needed to about Stalin. The secret adda diarist was as yet uncommitted.
That evening all the young Communists came to life when Susobhan turned an obscure discussion of Kant and Hegel to Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the brotherhood of workers. Sudhin listened for a moment before interrupting impatiently.
“What could you possibly know about the life of a landless tenant farmer? It is nearly impossible to imagine such poor souls are part of our own society, much less imagine becoming one of them through the medium of communist ideology. What can bookish, middle-class bhadralok like ourselves ever have in common with them?”
A flurry of protest was swiftly countered by Sudhin’s claim that having gone hungry during his last months in Europe did not mean he knew anything about the hunger that followed a bad harvest in Midnapore district.
This was the sort of argument the adda lived for, bubbling like a pot of soup thickening on a stovetop. Tension mounted until Hiren accused Sudhin of being too class conscious.
The fat hit the fire.
“Such talk is the height of stupidity! There is no such thing as class struggle among middle-class Bengalis,” Sudhin replied excitedly.
One of the young poets was taken aback. He could feel in his bones that his bosses were exploiting him. Most definitely! Everyone began talking at once.
It was then that an Englishman, yet another recent arrival from Oxford, spoke up. From the adda’s earliest days the presence of sahibs brought a touch of novelty and a frisson of tension to their evenings. Apurba Chanda, who had accompanied Sudhin and Tagore to America in 1929, often complained that Sudhin attracted foreigners like a magnet. He was never as ebullient when they were present. Otherwise Apurba liked to boast of how he, a lowly babu, had outfoxed his English superiors at Writers’ Building.
Humphry House struck the adda’s secret diarist as an English version of a Brahmin pundit from ancient India, a man who married a sagelike wisdom with beautiful manners. Indeed, House had been ordained into the Episcopal ministry and was briefly a deacon at an Oxford college until a crisis of faith obliged him to resign. Twice rejected for a fellowship at All Souls, he was offered on
ly a Calcutta University teaching job, though taking it meant leaving his wife behind for a year. On the voyage out, he had been hopeful, planning to finish a book on Gerard Manley Hopkins in the peace and quiet of Calcutta.
His department head had been there to meet him when he arrived to accompany him to temporary lodgings at the United Services Club. Humphry was to stay there until he could find himself a bungalow. When he said he’d already arranged to stay on Dharamtallah Street with a friend from Oxford named Susobhan Sarkar, the department head’s discomfiture was blisteringly evident.
From that moment Humphry House was a marked man. The Special Branch of Police assigned a watcher to sit on the wall outside his bungalow, ready to pad after him whenever he went out. Humphry’s watchers tended to carry cheap umbrellas and wear heavy shoes. They would sidle up to him at the Esplanade tram stop, wiggle their eyebrows suggestively, and ask him questions.
“You are going home, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I am going home.”
“My nephew has a friend who was your student.”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you find our boys?”
“I like them very well.”
“Do you find they talk freely to you? I think they do; they talk about many things.”
“Yes, they talk about many things.”
Having weathered the hothouse of Oxford gossips like Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, and Wystan Auden, Humphry found the machinations of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Special Branch of Police laughable. He might as well have stayed in Oxford. And when Susobhan Sarkar brought him to the Parichay adda, it seemed as if he had.