India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  I travelled up in the air-conditioned lounge car of the Shantiniketan Express. It was arranged like a drawing-room with sofas and arm-chairs. Its decorative motifs were Buddhist, and one railed-off part of the car might even have contained a shrine area: a reminder of the Buddhist faith in the regions to the north. I was the only passenger in the lounge car; this explained the fearful price the bell captain of the Calcutta hotel had paid on my behalf. But the effect of luxury was absent: the lounge car was used as a sleeping room by lower railway staff, and three of them were snoring away on sofas.

  The land was rice land, the level, treeless land of a delta, with green and brown fields. The green fields were full of water, with rice plants in different stages of growth in different fields. In some fields seedlings stood in the water in bundles, like little stooks, before being planted out in rows. The fields that had been reaped were brown and dry; sometimes stubbled, sometimes cleared and ploughed; sometimes with spaced-out mounds of darker, new earth, to revive the soil, waiting to be ploughed in. Water was being lifted in many different places from field to field, sometimes by electric pumps, sometimes by means of a long, flexible sleeve, lowered by hand into a field with water, then lifted and poured into the other field. Every kind of activity connected with the growing of rice was to be seen on this wide, flat delta: this went on for mile after mile, and it was hard to understand how there could ever have been famine here. But then, near Shantiniketan, the land began to dry out, began to look like flat desert, and unfriendly.

  Chidananda was at the station to meet me. Twenty-six years on, we were like actors coming on in the third act of a play, exiting young at the end of act two, and reappearing with powder or flour on hair and eyebrows. He was in casual Indian clothes (and not in the grey boxwallah suit my memory had fixed him in), and he had an old Ambassador car. It was far cheaper to run here than in Delhi, he said; that was one consideration when he had decided to move to Shantiniketan.

  The short lane leading out of the station was a tangle of cycle-rickshaws. The car was the intruder here, Chidananda said. There actually was a special railway stop for Shantiniketan, but the people of Bolpur, the stop before, insisted that everyone going to Shantiniketan should get off at Bolpur, to give their trade to the local bazaar.

  We got out into the open after a little. There were trees. Many had been planted by the university, Chidananda said, and they had helped to increase the rainfall. The shade, too, was nice; but still it was dusty, very dusty. There were no university mud huts now, just ochre-washed concrete houses. We passed the Shantiniketan temple. It was a hall of pleasing proportions, self-consciously un-ecclesiastical. But it was of its period. It had pierced walls and panes of coloured glass, and from the road it looked Edwardian, and a little gaudy.

  Chidananda showed some of the houses Tagore lived in when he was at Shantiniketan. Tagore, Chidananda said, became bored very quickly with a house, and liked to move from house to house: the poet’s privilege, the founder’s privilege, and perhaps also the self-indulgence of the Bengali aristocrat. I had some feeling as well of the great man licensed or at play in Shantiniketan: there were some university buildings that Tagore had designed himself, attempting a blend of Asian motifs, Hindu, Indian, Chinese. Strange to consider now, the romanticism and self-deception behind that pictorial idea; yet at the time there would have been passion mixed up with the play, the need – against the old and apparently enduring glory of the British Empire and Europe – to assert Asia.

  Chidananda’s unfinished house was at the edge of the university area. The house, of brick, was to be on two floors. The ground floor was almost complete; about three months’ work remained to be done on the upper floor. The land around the house was open on three sides. Chidananda had chosen the spot for the privacy and the silence and the fresh air, none of which could now be had in Indian cities. But the main reason why Chidananda had come to Shantiniketan was that – with all its changes: it was now a university like any other in India – it was connected with the special Bengali culture he had grown up in. The soil was sacred to him, as it was sacred, though in a different way, to the simple Indian tourists who came. These tourists came, not because they knew the poetry or the work of Rabindranath Tagore, but because they had heard of him as a holy man, and it was good to visit the shrines of such people.

  Chidananda’s father had been a preacher for the Brahmo Samaj all his life. The Brahmo Samaj was a kind of purified or reformed Hinduism which the father of Rabindranath had elaborated in the 19th century. It was an attempt to synthesize the New Learning of Britain and Europe with the old speculative Hindu faith of the Vedas and the Upanishads. It was a direct development of the ideas of Raja Ram Mohun Roy of Bengal (1772–1833), the first modern Indian reformer and educationist. The quality of men like Roy and the elder Tagore cannot be easily appreciated today, when the goods and inventions of Europe and America have changed the world, and simple people everywhere have to make some accommodation to the civilization that encircles and attracts them. In the late 18th and early 19th century Europe, in India, was less a source of goods. In the static conditions of Indian civilization at the time – with all its pressures towards old ways, old virtues – it required exceptional intellectual power to recognize the new gifts of Europe.

  Chidananda said, The Brahmo faith brings together the essence of the Upanishadic teaching and some Christian forms. Such as a form of service – a service on Sunday morning and Sunday evening. You would sit in pews in the larger churches, and there would be a pulpit. The service would alternate between spoken rituals and prayers, and hymns, many of which were written by Rabindranath Tagore, some by his father. It was Rabindranath’s father who devised the mode of the service. The Brahmo separated Upanishadic monotheism and the thought of a universal spirit, which was formless, from Puranic Hinduism – idolatry, many deities, mixed with animism, casteism. It believed in the education of women and the ideals of democracy, and the abolition of the caste system.’

  This was the faith that Chidananda’s father served all his life. The decision to do so came to him at an early age.

  ‘My grandfather used to take my father to the Sunday service of the Brahmo Samaj from the time he was ten years old. This was in the town of Chittagong, now in Bangladesh.’ Chittagong: now associated with the poverty and natural disasters of Bangladesh, but to the Portuguese poet Camoens 400 years ago one of the fairest cities of rich and fertile Bengal: Chatigão, cidade das milhores de Bengala.

  ‘At fourteen my father decided he wanted to become a Brahmo. My grandfather had never foreseen such an outcome, and he was outraged. My father left home one night. He literally walked and – to use a modern term – hitchhiked, on bullock carts and boats, to reach Shillong up in the hills, 500 miles away. In those days there was still quite a living tradition of wayside hospitality. My father told me he would walk or go by bullock cart all day, and at evening he would go to the nearest house and ask for shelter for the night, and it would be given.

  ‘He went to Shillong because he knew some Brahmos there. They then helped him with his education, and he went to college with a lot of well-known people, among them Satyajit Ray’s father, Sukumar Ray, a great humorist and publisher.

  ‘My father never graduated. He did what in those days was called “First Arts”, the first two years of college, and he became a missionary of the Brahmo and was paid a small allowance. Quite soon thereafter he met my mother and fell in love with her – in Ganga, in Bihar, where my mother’s father was a well-established doctor. When my father asked for his daughter’s hand, the doctor agreed. And my father remained a poor preacher all his life.’

  For someone of this background – and perhaps for all devoted Brahmos – Shantiniketan was holy ground, for a special reason.

  ‘Rabindranath’s father was travelling through this area in the 1840s. It was like a desert, and he liked the place very much. There was one tree, and he sat under it, and that day he decided to found an ashram on the spot. It
was to be modelled on the ancient brahmacharya ashram – where you practise celibacy during your student days and learn at the feet of your guru. He did found the ashram, and a long time afterwards Rabindranath founded the university, Vishwa-Bharati, India’s World University. There is a raised platform under the tree where Rabindranath’s father sat. That is considered the most sacred spot at Shantiniketan.

  ‘What Raja Ram Mohun Roy began as a reform movment early in the 19th century Devendranath Tagore made into a religion. It transformed the Bengali middle class. Rabindranath Tagore expanded that religion into a culture. And that culture became Nehru’s politics. Because Rabindranath channelled it into a culture, and didn’t restrict it to religion, it was soon absorbed by the wider middle class. Today the Brahmo Samaj is still technically there. But the life has gone out of the institution – and into the wider society.’

  Chidananda first saw Shantiniketan in 1940, when he was nineteen. He was living with his family in the neighbouring province of Bihar, and his father suggested that he should go and spend a holiday there. He stayed in the guest house. He shared a room with an Indonesian teaching batik at the university. It excited Chidananda to be with someone from abroad, and he was also excited by the Indonesian’s name, which was Prahasto. This was a name straight out of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Chidananda immediately had a greater idea of India and Asia; and he felt – what Tagore intended students at his university to feel – that in going to Shantiniketan he had gone to a place that was part of the world, not just of India.

  A few days later Rabindranath made a speech at the temple.

  ‘It was very early in the morning, December, quite cold – there were few houses in Shantiniketan then, much more open ground – and we sat on the cold marble floor in the glass temple, with pieces of glass of various colours. When the sun came up it threw all kinds of colours on the faces and clothes of the people. We all sat there and waited for Rabindranath.

  ‘He was wheeled in. Then he got up from the wheelchair. He was very tall, but bent with age. He walked in on his own. He was in a white dhoti and koortah and shawl. I was impressed by that sight. It was like an evocation of ancient India, a romantic feeling of encountering a sage from olden times. He sat on a very low stool. Everyone else was seated on the marble, without any spread.

  ‘Then the singing began. No modern instruments, all traditional instruments. No harmonium, though – Rabindranath disliked it because it has a fixed scale, a western scale, and it is impossible with it to sound the semi-tones or micro-tones which are important to the Indian system of classical music. Then they sang a hymn, one of Rabindranath’s hymns.

  ‘He read from a prepared text, in Bengali, with Sanskrit quotations. He was a very big man, six foot two, and he looked very strong, and I was struck by the contrast between his voice, which was thin and high, and the largeness of the man. I had expected a deep, rich voice. It took a few minutes to overcome that feeling. But very soon the spell of what he was saying took over. This was December 1940, and the war was very much with us. The subject of his address was the crisis in civilization – he was concerned about the movement towards self-destruction.’

  So Chidananda was introduced by Tagore to a way of thinking about the world. It was one of the blessings of the Indian independence movement, that many of its leaders should have been men of large vision, capable of looking beyond their Indian cause.

  That first visit of Chidananda’s to Shantiniketan lasted two weeks. Less than a year later Rabindranath died. Chidananda, like many Bengalis, felt that Shantiniketan without Rabindranath was nothing; and it was 46 years before he went back again. He went back, in fact, only after he had decided to go and live there. To make that return journey, he did what I had just done: he took the train from Howrah station in Calcutta, and got off at Bolpur two and a half hours later.

  ‘That station lets you into the very worst of the Bengali small-town atmosphere – ugly, noisy, crowded, full of the kind of deprivation I see in the style of urbanization in our country, the deprivation of mind, of basic needs. The station had changed much more than Shantiniketan had changed.

  ‘I went through the chaos of Bolpur. I knew I was going to Shantiniketan, where there would be open spaces and quiet surroundings and trees. It didn’t trouble me too much – because you can’t wish away the reality of your country. It was good to know it had a hidden heart beyond all this chaos. I’ve been practising yoga for about 15 years now, and it’s helped me tremendously to arrive at this mental state – in which I could take an enormous amount of chaos and confusion around me, for a while, without losing my own peace of mind.

  ‘So even on that first visit I found I liked the place. Some months later I bought some land, as much of it as I could afford, and I began to build right away. An old architect friend, a retired man, a Bengali, drew the plans. He knew the area, the climate, the wind direction.

  ‘It’s a changed place. I don’t expect it to be what it was. You can’t go back to the old days when people here lived in mud houses and went about barefooted by choice. But I feel that, coming back here, I have come back to more free ways of thinking, living, acting. It doesn’t make me feel shut in. I’ve been reading the Upanishads again – a renewed inclination. Formally, I’m an atheist, but I’ve reached a state where I separate spirituality from theism and religion. To me the Upanishads represent man’s effort to understand the universe and himself at the very highest level of spirituality.

  ‘Here it’s only two and a half hours away from Calcutta, but I feel I’ve come a very long way from my previous incarnation. The boxwallah incarnation which you saw in 1962 was quite far away from the roots of my culture and upbringing.’

  Chidananda had wanted, when he was a young man, to be a teacher. At one stage he had even wanted to be a Brahmo missionary, like his father. But then his wish to prove himself in the world had led him to advertising and then to the tobacco company.

  When the news came that he had got the job, everyone congratulated him. But his wife said, ‘Why do you want to take this job? Don’t you realize we will become a different kind of people?’

  Chidananda said, ‘In 1962, when you met me, I was looking after the company’s advertising, which was one of the biggest advertising operations in the country. The company itself was a kind of tobacco monopoly dating from the British times. Anything that was made was sold, almost regardless of its quality. I will give you this idea of the complacency of that boxwallah world. There was a highly paid staff manager who spent a large part of his time measuring the carpet that a particular category of officer should get, and discussing the colours of curtains with the wives.

  ‘The boxwallah was manufactured into a highly peculiar animal. The system was created to answer the needs of the British, their life-style, their ways of eating, sitting, sleeping, shitting. The Britishers who came out here for the company looked upon their time in India as a stay in a hotel, where everything was provided – down to the last towel and last spoon – in preparation for the time when they would go back home and buy themselves a house and wash their own clothes. Even servants were provided.

  ‘Within six weeks of joining, I wrote a report saying that the name of the company should be changed from the Imperial Tobacco Company to the ITC. All it caused at the time was laughter.

  ‘Like the administration of the British Empire itself, the commercial empire, which was an extension of the first, separated a handful of Indians from the rest and made them into an integral part of the system of governance. The object was to make them identify more with British interests than with Indian interests. This was done in a very subtle way. The British would unhesitatingly serve Indian officers whether in political administration or commercial administration. I don’t think this happened with other empires, and it still doesn’t happen with foreign companies operating in India. French or American or Japanese companies almost never have one of their nationals serving under an Indian.

  ‘The company was highly
hierarchical. There were two distinct classes, officers and men. We, the officers, would have chauffeur-driven cars, and our wives would be provided with separate cars to go out shopping – choosing carpets and curtains. There were colleagues of mine who would straighten their tie if the chairman telephoned, or send the car home to get a fresh jacket if they were going out to lunch. And, of course, at work the officers had separate lavatories.

  ‘My wife got quickly used to the comforts and loved them. I enjoyed the luxury of the life – it would be hypocrisy to say otherwise. And I must say that way of living left a mark on the nature of our needs in later years.

  ‘My problem was that because of my interest in literature and the cinema I was constantly associating in my private life with people who were utterly different. At the end of the day’s work I would go to the office of the Calcutta Film Society. I had founded that along with Satyajit Ray in 1947, the year of independence. Our main work was sticking envelopes and writing addresses. We were lucky to have a fan over our heads – in a dingy office of a film distributor. Here we discussed the greatness of world cinema.

  ‘Ray was closely associated with our work. With his enormous height and his wide shoulders, he came to remind me a great deal of Tagore, and I now see him as the last great representative of the Tagore era. But, unlike Tagore, he has a big, booming voice. He is swarthy; Tagore had fair, delicate skin. In his culture, his Indianness, his universality (not to be compared with fashionable cosmopolitanism), his honesty, Ray has some very Brahmo virtues.