by Pico Iyer
Cricket, of course, was for decades the compressed form in which children in the distant colonies absorbed imperial ideals—“playing with a straight bat,” applauding a good sport, never doing what isn’t “cricket.” In his classic book, Beyond a Boundary (referring to the “boundaries” that cricket enshrines as well as to the ones he crossed), C. L. R. James describes how it was cricket that gave him a taste of Burke, even in Trinidad, and cricket (together with Thackeray—he knew Vanity Fair almost by heart, he says) that colored his dreams (of England, and of an arena in which the West Indies could get the better of England, and prove themselves more elegant). Even as a founder of African nationalism and a strict Trotskyite, he could recall, with fondness, how cricket had taught him the white-flannel proprieties of the “public-school code” (and could write, with undisguised admiration, of a captain of the English team who was a “Charterhouse and Cambridge” man).
As a schoolboy, in the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, James wrote accounts of Oxford-Cambridge matches of fifty years before (and later won two volumes of Kipling with his essay on Empire); and when finally he sailed for Portsmouth, in 1932, “the British intellectual was going to Britain,” as he wrote (with an irony probably encouraged by his reading). Upon arrival, of course, he learned—as the tales of passage decree—that most of his colonial masters had never heard of Becky Sharp, and had little time for black upstarts raised on old issues of Young England. Yet what is most striking about his account is his description of how the imported code of stoicism and sportsmanship—“Well played!” “Hard luck!”—had been perhaps the one unifying factor among the scattered islands of the Caribbean, and, as his fellow West Indian George Lamming would point out, at the end of the fifties, Indian cricket teams were Indian, Australian were Australian, English were English, and West Indian were “Indian, Negro, Chinese, white, Portuguese mixed with Syrian” (the Caribbean, he wrote, “though provincial, is perhaps the most cosmopolitan race in the world”). Now, of course, it’s almost impossible to tell the English team from the West Indian (or, indeed, from the Indian, or even the Dutch, or the eleven representing the United Arab Emirates, since all of them mix players called Smith with Patels and Chanderpauls). A modern-day James might not know where to place his dreams.
I thought of James, and especially his judgment (delivered with a characteristically heroic lucidity)—“I was an actor on a stage.… I not only took it to an extreme, I seemed to have been made by nature for nothing else”—the next time I saw my Indian friend, in Los Angeles, as it happened, at one of the Bombay Palace restaurants now reproduced around the globe. He had come to America in search of a new life, I inferred, and I was reminded, sadly, of how the unhappiest people I know these days are often the ones in motion, encouraged to search for a utopia outside themselves, as if the expulsion from Eden had been Eden’s fault. Globalism made the world the playground of those with no one to play with.
As my friend began talking, I felt I was hearing exactly the same lines as before, in Cambridge (“Who is Kim-Kim-Kim?” asks Kipling’s hero); it was as if he were perpetually conducting a discussion (an argument, really) with himself, or someone who said nothing in return. “I see so much hatred in England now,” he said, as if to explain his presence here. “Maybe it’s just because I’m more aware of it than I used to be, but I know bloody well I speak better English than they do, and the English won’t accept that. The English hate me for being more English than they are; they want you all to conform to some image they can patronize. But because I know more about English literature than they do, and because I believe in the good old notions of fair play and decency”—there they were again, the same qualities Salman Rushdie had claimed to expect of England—“they can’t stand me. I should have won an Oscar for the role I played.”
The sentences went in circles, much as he did; he’d lost track of where he was, I felt, playing an Englishman while he cursed the English, fleeing an India that was surely his great calling card in England.
“You see, I grew up with all these notions when I was young,” he continued, tucking into the hottest food the waiter could find, his voice as sonorous as Gielgud’s. “I remember, I used to open a page of Shakespeare’s, and read a line, and my great-uncle could always give me the next line. I think it was from there that I got my love of English literature, and the buildings, the history, all that. The men who raised me believed in all the Victorian values.”
But Victoria, I wanted to say, had died almost a century ago, and I wondered how many of these memories had actually grown up in his nostalgic accounts to Englishmen. “When I was a boy,” he went on, “my aunt used to bring me a cable-knit sweater every year, handmade from Dehra Dun; now I’d do anything to get a cable-knit sweater. It’s funny: I suppose the only people who believe in the old values any more are a few old fogies writing for the Daily Telegraph, and talking about the loss of the country they love. So I find myself agreeing with the people I want to hate.”
Just as I was beginning to despair, a shaft of self-knowledge, and I thought how deeply Indian he sounded even in his affirmation of Englishness (so assertive, so earnest, so passionate even; besides, few Englishmen would have been caught dead talking so warmly about the Beeb or The Times or the Marylebone Cricket Club).
“Whenever things fall apart,” he said, and I was touched again, unexpectedly, “I turn to India. Indian restaurants, Indian faces, Indian news.” But he couldn’t go back, of course, until he’d made it as an Englishman, and I couldn’t imagine many Englishmen wanting to be told by him what “Englishness” really was. America was a desperate last resort.
“The Indians living in England seem to me to embody all the worst qualities of England, to do with greed and undereducation,” he said, “and none of the best. Maybe it was never really like that, but I always felt that this country stood for something, that there were ideals here.” In the made-for-export version, I thought, perhaps cruelly; in the never-never England “before the war” that both of us could idealize because we’d never seen it.
“I left England,” I said, maybe only to provoke him, “because I felt that, having gone to the ‘right’ school and college, I had no incentive to do anything; I could have been a homicidal maniac, and still, I felt, I could always get a good job.”
“Then why didn’t you stay?” he responded to this unkindness, and I realized that what I should have said was that anything can be a source of resentment in England: the details are neither here nor there. What colonialism had given me was the chance to grow up so close to the heart of Empire that I could never be enthralled by it.
But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, and, in fact, I felt he didn’t want to hear very much at all.
“I can’t help thinking they’ve changed the rules on me,” he said, and again I felt as if he were talking to himself. “They taught me to believe in one set of values, and I do; and now it’s a completely different England.”
• • •
Indeed it is, and the old, simple relation of dreamer to dream had been shaken about in the Global Age, as if by a hyperactive child in the heavens. When I got off the plane at Heathrow, on a recent trip, it was to find the London cabs swathed in ads for Fujitsu and Burger King, and the billboards in the tube stations advertising Afro-Caribbean hair treatments and an all-black production of Antony and Cleopatra (on my next trip, they were advertising a production in which Cleopatra was played by a man). The laundry list in my little hotel had a special box for “Arab Gown” (and spelled college with a d); in the Yellow Pages, a place still known as St. Bede’s Church now advertised itself, impenitently, as a “Temple of Fitness” where you could “work off thy last Supper” with “our 100 American state-of-the-art machines.”
Every myth (as the great fashioner of them, Wilde, explains in his parable of Dorian Gray) has a power to hang on long after the reality has shifted, and Little England would surely uphold old notions of “Englishness” long after Great Britain had re
ached out to the larger world; the country I’d grown up in greeted me in the tabloid’s gleeful cry, HE’S FOUND THE CHINK IN CHANG’S ARMOUR, or in the fire notice in my room—not far from a laminated card offering direct-dial service to Häagen-Dazs—warning, “Do not prejudice your safety by stopping to collect your personal belongings” (in the event of a conflagration). Cities face the same choice that celebrities do when measuring their shadows—they can either play to the cameras or turn their back on them (do a Norman Mailer, you could say, or a J. D. Salinger). England had unapologetically chosen the first course, marketing the Royal Family for all it was worth, and encouraging bagpipers to play outside the Dunkin’ Donuts parlor in Theatreland. In Keats’s house, you can buy a teddy bear wearing a sash that says I AM A RMANTIC.
To me, again, much of this was welcome. No one but an American is likely to deny the appeal of American culture, and I can still remember, as a child in Oxford, sitting transfixed before Hanna-Barbera cartoons, or Lucille Ball in all her incarnations, not because they were American but because they were better and more vivid than anything else on TV (and later, in adolescence, finding images of possibility and hopefulness in Henry Miller or the Grateful Dead that simply weren’t available in England); anyone who’s grown up on Wimpy Bars and greasy “transport caffs” can appreciate how life in Oxford was made unimaginably more pleasant by the advent of first Baskin-Robbins and then McDonald’s in the late seventies, offering clean and dependable places in which to eat that were neither cheap nor expensive. Again, in fact, like America, England seemed to have been invigorated by its visitors from abroad, and it never seemed a coincidence to me that many of Britain’s proudest new traditions—the Globe Theatre, Granta, British Airways, and the modernized Oxford colleges—had been rescued by energetic “Yanks.”
England now looked to me, as most places do, more American, more European, more Asian—more everything but its old self—and that meant that the food was better, the culture was livelier, and the grudges were buried under a new glossy sheen; everything, including the colors, was richer than before (to the point where London had even managed to “rebrand” itself as a city of young lovers whose “Cool Britannia” styles were drawing kids from around the Continent). To some extent, the island was being forced to grow less insular, more tolerant to a whole world streaming into it (the Empire in reverse), and anyone who wanted to say, as Nancy Mitford had not untypically done, “Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends” had to do so now sotto voce.
But what this convulsion was doing to desire was something stranger: I stepped into a phone booth my first day back—somewhere between Foodland and Chinatown in the heart of central London—and noticed that the little slips of paper plastered all over its windows said HOT AS A VINDALOO (advertising a nineteen-year-old “Busty Indian Beauty”) and TURKISH PRINCESS, CARIBBEAN BARBARA and STUNNING MEXICAN MODEL. Foreignness was being presented not just as a fact of life but as something tempting, to be desired as much as the traditional English pleasures (while I was making my call, a polite kid popped into the booth and slapped up two more stickers: FULLY EQUIPPED DUNGEON and NAUGHTY FRENCH MAID).
That same trip, I happened to meet two old friends from India, both of whom (several years younger than I) had graduated from one of the subcontinent’s most up-to-the-minute business schools. Nothing in England was very new to them, I suspected, because they already had Thai restaurants and McDonald’s, cell phones and Swatch watches in Bombay. Land prices in their city were higher than in Tokyo, they told me, and forty cable channels were about to become eighty; their own two-year-old daughter, who sat quietly at our table, was already familiar with the streets of Hong Kong and Singapore and Bangkok and Dubai.
We walked along Coptic Street after lunch, passing cycle rickshas moving in the opposite direction, and on the Tottenham Court Road, we passed shops advertising “Ansaphones” in their windows. TUBE STATION WORST CHAOS YET said the tabloid sandwich boards outside the Underground station, where some boys were shouting and spitting at an old homeless man.
We walked into a park so their little girl could use a slide, but the place was filled with fourteen-year-olds, mostly of Indian origin, cadging cigarettes, and a man was urinating in the bushes. The hotel nearby, with its chambers called Le Bar, Le Terrace, and Le Restaurant, seemed a better option.
The story of this transaction, of foreign romantic and stubborn Albion, has, of course, been written many times over, not least because one of the great bequests of Empire was the English language, which its colonial subjects, with their un-English energy and quickness—their outsiders’ willingness to try anything and hazard all—had turned into an anarchic new confection. Indians still recall how Macaulay, in his 1835 “Minute on Education,” proposed the creation of a class of interpreters “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”; yet by the time that Emerson visited England, scarcely a generation later, it already looked, to his outsider’s eye, as if the country, at the height of its Victorian confidence, was “an old and exhausted island [that] must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.”
The children came in many forms, of course, but their complaints formed a multipart harmony. “You see, in America, a black is an African-American,” a young “Jamaican” lawyer (born in England) said to me one day, as if to a fellow conspirator. “In Germany, they’re Afro-Germans. But here, they are always Afro-Caribbeans. Never Afro-English. You and I, we could never belong; we were born here, we’re as English as Jack and Jill, but we’re never allowed to be English. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t entirely agree with her—and I knew that Indians were less sympathetic to West Indians than many Englishmen were—but I couldn’t contest the strength of her feelings. “Not that I care, mind you,” she went on, sounding very English. “I mean, look at them—who’d want to be English?”
Yet the same words had an even greater resonance, often, coming from India, if only because the largest and one of the oldest of the British colonies had been so much a part of the national consciousness that, as Jan Morris puts it, it seemed “the second focus of a dual power,” and its relations with the motherland had always been as vexed and poignant as those of two people with too much in common sharing a crowded room. If my Indian friend had been reading Tagore instead of Shakespeare, he’d have found the Bengali poet striking the note of colonial warning as early as 1878, when he wrote, “Before I came to England, I supposed it was such a small island and its inhabitants were so devoted to higher culture that from one end to the other it would resound with the strains of Tennyson’s lyre.” And my friend was already in school when Nirad Chaudhuri, in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian—the title itself bespeaks a crowded genre—dedicated to “the memory of the British Empire in India,” had noted, “Our ideas of the Englishman in the flesh were very different from our ideas of his civilization.”
Chaudhuri had moved to a house in North Oxford, a few minutes from where I was born, to berate the English for not being English enough, and to assert the force of an England that mostly existed, if it existed at all, in Indian memory, and in the copies of Wodehouse you still find in country railway stations across the subcontinent, the iambic pentameters of Derek Walcott hymning his native St. Lucia, the stern Arnoldian rules that Lee Kuan Yew took back to Singapore (a fine of ten thousand Singapore dollars for importing chewing gum, a fine of ten thousand Singapore dollars for feeding birds, a fine of…). In all these backhand tributes, there was a strain of wistfulness and fondness that you will seldom find in, say, slaves’ accounts of their masters, and even a nostalgic warmth that reminds one that it’s always easier for godchildren to respond to the virtues of an older authority figure (even if it’s a nation)—reminding him of the reasons he once had to be proud—than it is for his own children.
The classic modern account of such mixed feelings, written for the last generation to grow up under Empire’s rule,
is, no doubt, V. S. Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival, which recounts, with a clarity (and loneliness) that transfixes, all his exertions to come to a country that gave him his sense of vocation, and offered him the possibility of self-respect. Yet when he landed in England, inevitably, it was to find that to arrive, in practice, is to find you’re not wanted, and the place isn’t what you expected it to be; and that to arrive, in the long run, is to look past all the archetypes and illusions and explanations that fascinated at first, and to realize that it is a place in which to die.
The book takes in, with its eerie intensity, all the sorrows of my Indian friend, and others like him, as Naipaul reports, with a humbling candor, how he landed up in a shabby Victorian boardinghouse full of migrants like himself, and tried, in vain, to match the landscape around him to the passages of King Lear and Hardy he loved (the one thing that was changeless in England was his expectations of it); he found himself, he suggests, an exile in his dream, like the haunted figure in the empty colonnades of the de Chirico painting after which the book is named. Even the “idea of winter and snow [that] had excited me” was denied by England’s hazy grayness and in-betweens.
Yet the strength of Naipaul’s book—a register of its honesty and rigor—is to move beyond such age-old laments and circular complaints, to acknowledge that the ground under the author’s feet is shaking. The area where he landed up would become “an Australian, a South African, a white colonial enclave,” he writes, and the great metropolitan city he had dreamed of was becoming a haven for tropical refugees like himself; he’s made exactly the same mistake—in reverse—that the Europeans had made when arriving in the New World, and, heavy with expectations, claiming to see “Indians” there. Naipaul replaces “the idea of decay,” he writes, “the idea of the ideal which can be the cause of so much grief, by the idea of flux.”