by Pico Iyer
I am entirely Indian myself, by blood, though born in England, and yet I never saw the incongruous merging of those cultures in their prime, or even the protracted divorce that followed upon their falling apart. But even for me, and even fifty years after what is known as “Independence,” a large part of the romance of India lies in the culverts and civil list houses, the cantonments and canteens that still dot the hill stations and tropical valleys of the subcontinent. In their day they stood for occupation, even oppression. But now, soothed by history’s progress, and standing for a liaison that neither party sought, they speak for something more wistful, to do with the colonizer colonized. And language—the words that startle and bewilder on every side—hints at something that official historians and politicians overlook. As you walk past an “Officers’ Mess,” across from a sign for the “Bombay Colour Sergeants,” you feel yourself in somewhere unique, not quite past and not quite present—the realm of Indlish, or Englian, or whatever you wish to call a curious marriage of inconvenience. (Zee TV in India actually broadcasts its news in what is called “Hindlish.”) On my trip across the subcontinent last year I was able, with some effort, to work out what “Free Foot Service” might be (in a temple, no less), and even to deduce what “fingers” stood for, on a menu (a shortened form of “finger chips,” or those kind of potatoes the British are always loath to call “French fries”); more than once I found out, the hard way, what it is to have a meeting “preponed” on you. But always I felt that I was speaking a language quite different from the English being spoken all around me (more Indians, of course, speak English than Englishmen), and came to feel that the one companion who’d been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away into a corner and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips.
The hybrid forms of this unlikely tongue first came into being, it seems, when the merchants and adventurers of the East India Company arrived in India in the seventeenth century, bringing with them their words, their enclaves, and their aversion to all messes not of the officers’ kind. Very soon Shakespeare and the Bible were being recited around India. And yet—such is the logic of empires everywhere—the more the seeming invaders held on to India, the more India, somehow, held on to them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, fully twenty-six thousand words had traveled in the opposite direction, from the subcontinent back to England, and many of them referred to goods as indispensable as your pyjamas or your punch. Deeper than mere words, of course, were all that the words conveyed, as Mother England stocked up on cashmeres and mangoes and loot.
To talk about Empire today is to break very quickly into a contention of “us” against “them.” But in its heyday it could never have been the black-and-white affair that polemicists recall (brown, more likely, and shifting, and full of unexpected greys). And today words are how we see the evidence of cultures flirting with one another and mingling and stealing into one another’s chambers; the signs of India—CAUSEWAY AND CROWDED LOCALITY AHEAD or POULTRY CARE CLINIC—are how we see how each was haunted by the other, and how the very sense of rich and poor got challenged and upended. Any Briton who reclined in a sense of superiority over the natives had, in Emily Eden’s apt words, the assumption “jungled out” of him, so that soon he was no longer sure whether he was in the light or in the shadows.
As I stepped into an ill-lit office in New Delhi last year, I found myself greeted by a mildewed copy of Hobson-Jobson, the great old cobwebbed lexicon of British India that began life as a series of letters and took its name, improbably, from an Englished version of “the wailings of the Mohammedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of Moharram—‘Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!’ ” And as soon as I opened it up, I was in another realm (more human and more mongrel than in the history books), learning that “ducks” referred to “gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service” and a “Lady Kenny” was a “black ball-shaped syrupy confection.” A “James and Mary,” I read on, was the name of “a famous sand-bank in the Hoogly River behind Calcutta.” The aged book inflected every last sense of “pish-pash” and offered the precise implication of “pootlynautch.” But more than that, it showed how foreignness and its opposite danced so close together that soon it became hard to tell one from the other. “ ‘Home,’ ” it says, in one of its more poignant definitions, “in Anglo-Indian and colonial speech . . . means England.”
For many Britons abroad, no doubt, home came quickly to mean something else, in-between, or nowhere at all: when the Englishman Fowler, in Graham Greene’s Quiet American, tells a Frenchman that he’s going back, the Frenchman says, “Home?” and Fowler says, quickly, “No. England.” And in Britain these days the home that many new writers commemorate is somewhere on the backstreets of Bombay. Hobson-Jobson can tell you the exact social standing designated by a “burra-beebee,” it can offer a good definition of “ticky-tock,” but it cannot begin to clear up more complex ideas of belonging.
And so simplicities begin to fly out the window, as opium became the largest export of British India and the opium of the masses began flowing in the other direction. These days, I suspect, every Englishman worth his salt—every tycoon or pundit or thug (all the words come, of course, from India)—knows what a guru and a mantra is, and what yoga connotes, and has very possibly partaken of them himself. India began by sending its verandahs to England, its bungalows and juggernauts, and very soon was following up with its avatars, its notions of karma and nirvana.
“They gave us the language,” says a character in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, “but it is only we who know how to use it.” And though that has the somewhat strident sound of agit-prop, it does remind us of one way in which the conqueror got taken over. Jane Austen has been embangled and set down in the drawing rooms of Calcutta in the work of Vikram Seth, and Dickens has been given a spin and relocated to a dusty Bombay apartment block in the novels of Rohinton Mistry. The Empire never left, it’s tempting to conclude; it just settled down in a backstreet in Madras, and started to tell its story from the other side.
To travel through India today, therefore, especially if you are following it through its English-language signs, is to see at every turn one culture getting under another’s skin, and into its heart and mouth and dreams. And the effect is intensified because the cultures of South Asia seem never to throw anything away, but simply take it all in and stir it up into the mix. You may occasionally be able to make out what is being said to you—DO NOT CROSS VERGE or WATCH FOR SHOOTING STONES—but any resemblance to the language you know is largely coincidental. As I went up into the Himalaya last year, past mouldering Anglican churches whose plaques recalled gallant soldiers killed by a bear (IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DEATH), I was given instructions at every turn: IF MARRIED DIVORCE TO SPEED or DO NOT NAG WHILE I AM DRIVING. The value of the injunctions was only faintly undone by the fact that I still don’t know what many of them mean (NO DUMPING ON BERMS or WATCH FOR OCTEROI).
And even when, by some miracle, you can follow the words, they seem to bite their own tails by being placed in sentences that do everything they can to undermine their own solemnity. Indian English, when it is not overly formal, comes at you with the fatal tinkle of an advertising man who’s got his hands on the Ten Commandments: there’s always a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the lofty sentiments are placed inside the jingly singsong of a children’s ditty. A decade before, traveling across my stepmotherland, I’d been struck by the signs that said LANE DRIVING IS SANE DRIVING or NO HURRY, NO WORRY, but now they had been joined by half a hundred others, trilling, RECKLESS DRIVERS KILL AND DIE, LEAVING ALL BEHIND TO CRY (or, a little more potently, RISK-TAKER IS ACCIDENT-MAKER). As I drove out of little settlements crammed with such instructions, the signs offered brightly, THANKS FOR INCONVENIENCE. And the majesty of such slogans is only slightly diminished by the fact that five hundred million Indians cannot read a word of any language, let alone the Jinglish commemorated on its roads, and show no signs of being swayed by LET US SOLICIT THE
SERENITY OF SILENCE (BLOW HORN IF YOU MUST).
It can seem as if a whole new language had been dreamed up by a clergyman in cahoots with a mischievous schoolboy. They’ve drawn their inspiration from Lewis Carroll and pledged themselves to turn V. S. Naipaul on his head. Never use one word when thirty will suffice, they seem to say. Never use a simple locution if a complicated one will serve. Honor your “felicitations” as if you were an “affectee.” If you don’t blow your horn, after all, who will?
“The ceremonies should be quite pompous,” a friend declared, with sweet innocence, as I stepped into a marriage hall in Bombay, and I recalled that one memsahib who had never sailed back to England was Mrs. Malaprop. And when I opened The Times of India (“Invitation price: 2 rupees,” it declares, inscrutably, on the cover), I found a whole section devoted to “matrimonial notices,” in which prospective brides were glowingly described as “homely” and “artful” and “wheat-coloured” (which, in the crazed logic of Indian English, means domestically minded, culturally inclined, and fair-skinned). Even at Hare Krishna Land, the center of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the sign at the entrance extolled its guru’s “large propaganda program” and, inside, in the center’s school, a smaller board offered tips on “Blooming Manners.”
You do not have to be much of a polemicist to see, in this cheerful mingling of proportions, how a country of the poor can somehow make the playthings of the rich its own, and in that very act contrive to give the things a gravity and an innocence they would never have at home. India, of course, is the home of Sanskrit and of complex philosophies that little in Britain has ever matched; but what struck me, as I went through some of the least privileged parts of Bombay, was how the most ramshackle huts called themselves “Marriage Palaces” and old buses, if they did not style themselves “Stage Carriages,” had “Semi-Deluxe” written on their sides, or “Naughty” on their fronts. Even the most broken establishments (especially those, perhaps) call themselves “Honesty” or “Reliable” or “Dreamer’s Delight,” as if words still had a sympathetic magic here, and just to invoke a quality was to bring its blessing down among us.
When you stumble into a bookshop in Calcutta (the proprietor hands you his business card—“V. L. Chatterjee, B.A., A.B.F.,” or “Bachelor of Arts, Appeared but Failed”)—you begin to see that the best-selling author of the day is one P. G. Wodehouse, and the faded glory of his diction somehow confers a gay Edwardian tilt on even the most everyday of transactions in India. (“I’m sorry,” I was told when I called up the editor of a movie magazine, “Miss Sonaya is not in her cabin just now,” which made me imagine her, perhaps not incorrectly, on a cruise ship.) The young these days “air-dash” to what the newspapers typically call a “Mega Exhibition Showcase of Ideal Lifestyle,” but everything else proceeds as if nothing had ever changed; as if, in fact, everything is in the hands of some far-off gods who cannot always be relied upon. (The sign that every foreigner comes to know and dread in India, diligently posted up in every airport, train station, and hotel lobby, is INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED.) As it says without compunction in a public phone center, ANY EXCHANGE FAULT OR COMMUNICATION ERROR IS ON CUSTOMER’S ACCOUNT. THANKS.
Anyone who is tempted to laugh at all this—as who would not be?—is well advised to recall that in reality the literature of English these days is ever more in the hands of those who may be regretting the inconvenience. They took the words that Empire brought to them, and somehow kept them going, much like those coughing Morris Oxfords in the street, and even made them new. More deeply, they infused the words with a hopeful-ness and sincerity that are elsewhere just a memory. “Devotees are warned,” said the sign in Bombay’s most famous Hindu temple, “that to sit on the rocks much deep in the sea water away from the sea shore is not only encroachment on government property but is also dangerous to their lives, including valuable ornaments.”
We start, perhaps, by laughing at the follies of another culture’s misappropriations. We move towards bewilderment, as we sense that we’re not quite in the culture we left, and yet not in the one we think we’re going to. And we end up somewhere completely different, not quite irony and not quite romance. As I prepared to fly out of New Delhi last year—BE LIKE VENUS: UNARMED, instructed the sign at the airport beside me—I began to wonder how far I was really going. “Blighty,” after all, is the Hindi word for “foreign.”
1997
THE PEBBLE IN THE SHOE
Leaving the miraculous out of life is rather like leaving out the lavatory or dreams or breakfast.
—Graham Greene
The thing is, the one thing you must never forget,” the Frenchman was saying, calmly, but with a lucid passion behind him, “this place, it is not Cartesian.” The five of us were sitting in his restaurant in the hills around Pétionville; the suburbs of Port-au-Prince climb the hills, as in Southern California or the Côte d’Azur, and from behind the trees, or in one of the lavish courtyards set against its fairy lights, it’s hard to see the contours of the poorest country in the hemisphere down below. BMWs purr past and there are swimming pools in the hotels, beside the villas; at restaurants like the Frenchman’s you can dine well on coq au vin and imagine yourself in one of the finer places above Nice. A few days later, on New Year’s Eve, we would find ourselves at a $100-a-plate dinner, where all the favored souls of Haiti, in backless dresses and diaphanous scarves, to show off their tans, would feast as if they were in a boîte in Le Marais. Some were white, many were black, but all were honorary Frenchmen.
The French were perched, though, on the edge of wilderness. In Port-au-Prince itself it is dangerous to go out of the hotels. Men walk around the central square with bloodshot eyes, and it is easy to feel that all of them, at some level, are armed and ready to kill. Haiti is often known as the first country of the Fourth World because it enjoys the rare distinction of having gone backwards since its independence, achieved through the efforts of the released slave Toussaint-Louverture. It is a poetic truth that AIDS was first imagined to come up from this ill-starred island two hours from New York; Haiti’s most famous gift is for possessions of the soul, what we call voodoo and zombies (two of the few words it’s given to English).
The Frenchman’s restaurant was a stylish place, full of nostalgia, and not only nostalgie de la boue; lizards ran up and down its walls, and a rat was visible scurrying under one of the outdoor tables, but the man, resident here for twenty-seven years, with a Haitian wife, was doing what he could to push back darkness and claim a little space, a small victory for order. He had realized, however, at what price it came. “It is what you learn here,” he was saying, an exile philosopher, over coffee, as the dinner stretched into the early hours. “It is what you must accept. The place is not Cartesian.” In Nicaragua, ten years before, during the war, I’d been taken to a restaurant upon arrival where fine lobster was available for sixty dollars a plate (and for dessert to the Café Lennon, where we could play at being Che); the center of the capital was a huge crater still empty from an earthquake many years before.
We were staying now in the Oloffson Hotel, the famous playground of the international set, where Charles Addams had designed his drawings for the Addams Family, and Graham Greene had set The Comedians; one of Greene’s ambiguous pieces of local color, Aubelin Jolicoeur, still flitted through the lobby at the cocktail hour, and rooms were named after Anne Bancroft and Noël Coward. The present owner, an exile from America, was the son of a Puritan professor from Yale (and of a Haitian dancer).
He had a band, and we (a schoolfriend and I) followed the band wherever it went; it became our way into the darkness all around. We went with the fifteen musicians to the beach on New Year’s Day, a big expedition for local men who lived in the notorious slum known as Cité Soleil. That night we went to a concert held up in the hills, towards Kenscoff; the moon passed in and out of clouds—a voodoo night, as we visitors could imagine it— and at 2:15 a.m. we were the only guests who had shown up so early fo
r the concert. The next day, it was a new nightclub opening on the edge of town, very black men in suits, old men who’d grown fat off various governments, dancing with their wives, while coffee-colored girls in cocktail dresses passed this way and that. We were doing what many in the privileged world seek to do—get a taste of the other side, the place across the mountains, before returning, with sun-browned skins and useful reminders of poverty, to our usual lives.
On arrival—this seemed part of what Haiti was about—a four-piece band greeted my American Airlines flight on the tarmac (the American flight attendants so traumatized that they never stepped off the plane: it was the only place they flew to, a frightened stewardess told me, where they were not allowed to overnight in a hotel). The chaos had begun in the plane itself, the large man next to me pulling out a flask of something potent as soon as we were in the air, while other of his fellows began running hands up any cabin attendants who walked past. (In fact, it had begun even earlier, in JFK, where all the passengers seemed to be carrying all their goods onto the plane with them. I, too, fearing what would happen to my bags if they left my sight, had tried to carry everything onto the plane, and been forced to check in luggage as I boarded.)
Once I walked past the four-piece band into the terminal, I was truly in the wilderness. Thirteen, fourteen baggage carts unloaded their booty onto the belt, people grabbed and pushed, they laughed, my hand, in the melee, began to bleed. But my confiscated case was not in sight. Maybe later, said the harried American Airlines man at the desk; the company could not be responsible for anything. The car taking me into town, once I walked out of the caged terminal (all Haiti, it seemed, gathered in the sun), gave out; the car that would bring me back the next day, in search of my baggage, would get rear-ended, as it stalled on a hill.