India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  One of the yellow-tinted lithographs was entitled ‘The Plunder of the Kaiserbagh’. It had been done later in England, and was an illustration of Russell’s text: ‘It was one of the strangest and most distressing sights that could be seen; but it was also most exciting … Imagine courts as large as the Temple Gardens, surrounded with ranges of palaces, or at least buildings well stuccoed and gilded, with fresco-paintings on the blind windows … From the broken portals issue soldiers laden with loot or plunder. Shawls, rich tapestry, gold and silver brocade, caskets of jewels, arms, splendid dresses. The men are wild with fury and lust of gold – literally drunk with plunder … I had often heard the phrase, but never saw the thing itself before. They smashed to pieces the fowling-pieces and pistols to get at the gold mountings and the stones set in the stocks. They burned in a fire, which they made in a centre of the court, brocades and embroidered shawls for the sake of the gold and the silver … Oh, the toil of that day! It was horrid enough to have to stumble through endless courts, which were like vapour baths, amid dead bodies, through sights worthy of the Inferno … suffocated by deadly smells of rotting corpses, of rotten ghee, or vile native scents; but the seething crowd of camp followers into which we emerged in Huzrutgunj was something worse. As ravenous, and almost as foul, as vultures …’

  Two days before, Russell had got ‘a small bit of loot of very little value’: a portrait of the King of Oude, which he had cut out of its frame. He had taken the portrait from a room in the Badshahbagh, ‘a large walled garden and enclosure, amid one of the finest of the King of Oude’s summer palaces’. A small piece of loot, after horrors: the protective ditch around the Badhshahbagh ‘was filled with the bodies of sepoys, which the coolies were dragging from the inside and throwing topsy-turvy, by command of the soldiers; stiffened by death, with outstretched legs and arms, burning slowly in their cotton tunics … We crossed literally a ramp of dead bodies loosely covered with earth.’ More dead soldiers were being burned in the rooms inside. ‘It was before breakfast, and I could not stand the smell.’

  A more substantial piece of loot came to Russell from the Kaiserbagh: ‘a nose-ring of small rubies and pearls, with a single stone diamond drop.’ He had a chance that time of getting an armlet of emeralds and diamonds and pearls as well, but the soldier who had looted it wanted 100 rupees in ready cash, there and then, and – ‘Oh, wretched fate!’ – all Russell’s money was with his Indian Christian servant, Simon, who was in the camp. Russell heard later that a jeweller – whether in England or India is not said – had bought the armlet from an officer for £7,500, a very large sum in 1860.

  The ruins of the Residency still had the power to enrage Rashid; he would have found it hard to bear this account of the looting of his beloved Lucknow. And harder perhaps to bear Russell’s accounts of Lucknow before its destruction, ‘more extensive than Paris and more brilliant’. From the top of the hunting lodge in the Dilkusha, this was the view: ‘A vision of palaces, minars, domes azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long façades of fair perspective in pillar and column, terraced roofs – all rising up amid a calm still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads … Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and beautiful as this …’

  Of the Kaiserbagh, which even in that ‘wilderness of fair architecture’ Russell saw as ‘vast … a blaze of gilding, spires, cupolas, domes’, there remained only the wing where Amir and his mother lived with their establishments. Rashid had told me more than once that in the old days there were no streets around the palace, only gardens, and it was only from Russell’s book that I began to understand to what an extent royal Lucknow had been a city of palaces and gardens.

  Across the river from my hotel – beyond the higher dry shelf in the channel with the huts now of the swimming clubs, the black buffaloes on some mornings, the sheets and the many-coloured clothes spread out by the washermen to dry, where I had seen the deep perspective views of an aquatint by the Daniells – on that bank there would have been the Badshahbagh, the Royal Garden.

  ‘Such forests of orange-trees, such trickling fountains, shady walks, beds of flowers, grand alleys, dark retreats and summer-houses … in which were now revelling some of the Welch Fusileers.’

  There was a similar – perhaps French-inspired – elegance in the many courtyards of the Kaiserbagh, the main palace.

  ‘Statues, lines of lamp-posts, fountains, orange-groves, aqueducts, and kiosks with burnished domes of metal … Lying amid the orange-groves are dead and dying sepoys; and the white statues are reddened with blood. Leaning against a smiling Venus is a British soldier shot through the neck, gasping … Court after court the scene is still the same. These courts open one to the other by lofty gateways, ornamented with the double fish of the royal family of Oude, or by arched passageways, in which lie the dead sepoys, their clothes smouldering on their flesh.’

  It is ironical that – as with Bernai Díaz del Castillo’s account of Montezuma’s city of Mexico in 1520 – the first account of the splendours of 19th-century Lucknow should also be an account of its destruction. It is ironical, yet not unexpected: the history of old India was written by its conquerors.

  What was pain for Rashid was also pain for me. I couldn’t read with detachment of the history of this part of India. My emotions ran congruent for a while with those of Rashid; but we grieved for different things. Rashid grieved for the wholeness of the Lucknow world he had been born into, the world before partition. This world would have had elements of old Muslim glory: the glory of the Kings or Nawabs of Oude, and before them the glory of the Moguls. There was no such glory in my past. Russell’s journey from Calcutta to Lucknow lay in part through the districts from which, about 20 or 25 years later, my ancestors migrated to Trinidad, to work on the plantations there.

  That was the lesser India I was looking for in Russell’s book. It was the India only glancingly referred to, always assumed: the India that, in Russell’s pages, went on working during this time of war, working in the fields, constructing fortifications, clearing away corpses, looking for positions as servants: an India engaged, without ever knowing it, in subduing itself. On the Grand Trunk Road near Benares long lines of cotton-laden country carts creaked one after the other to Calcutta: trade and business going on in the British-run city. The human groups on the road, indifferent to the terrible war, gave the impression of being at a fair. The people who worked the fields were separate from the war; they took no part in the wars of the rulers.

  From Russell’s book I learned that the British name for the Indian sepoy, the soldier of the British East India Company who was now the mutineer, was ‘Pandy’. ‘Why Pandy? Well, because it is a very common name among the sepoys – like Smith of London …’ It is in fact a brahmin name from this part of India. Brahmins here formed a substantial part of the Hindu population, and the British army in northern India was to some extent a brahmin army. The Indians who were now being used to put down ‘Pandy’ were Sikhs, whom the British had defeated less than 10 years before.

  With that British army marching to Lucknow to put down the mutineers was a host of Indian camp-followers. Russell said they were mostly Hindu. The Muslims among them were domestic servants; the Afghans sold dried fruit. Among the Hindu camp-followers were merchants and their wives and families, travelling with their store-tents. There were drovers, looking after the sheep and goats and turkeys for the army; and there were any number of porters, ‘whole regiments of sinewy, hollow-thighed, lanky coolies’ carrying chairs and tables, ‘hampers of beer and wine, bazaar stores, or boxes slung from bamboo poles’.

  Russell, as special correspondent of The Times, was attached to the staff mess of the British headquarters, and the mass of army servants ensured that dinner on the march was as formal as ever.

  ‘It was about 5 o’clock P.M., when a wheeling multitude of kites and vultures soaring above the dust, announced that we were near a
n encampment, and very soon the joyful sight of a plain full of tents met our eyes … Our servants came out to meet us, and I alighted at my tent door … On entering everything was in its place just as I left it. Our mess-dinner was precisely the same as at Cawnpore; and it was hard to believe we were in an enemy’s country.’

  Russell noted the ‘high delight’ with which these Indian camp-followers – making life so comfortable for the British army – ‘were pouring towards Lucknow, to aid the Feringhee’ – the foreigner – ‘to overcome their brethren’. He saw a parallel with the spread of ancient Roman power. Even the mixed speech of the camp-followers he saw as a symbol of conquest.

  None of this was easy for me to read. I had had trouble with My Diary in India when I had first tried to read it. I had trouble with it now. I made three or four attempts at it, and found myself rejecting it, for literary reasons. I found it Victorian and wordy. I thought the writer too much of an imperial figure, travelling too easily through a world made safe, and taking that world for granted, almost as much concerned with himself and his dignity and his character as a special correspondent as with the country he had travelled to see, and the people he found himself among.

  But these judgements, arrived at from scattered readings, always foundered on the quality of Russell’s descriptive writing. The trouble I had with Russell’s book was like the trouble I used to have, when I was a reviewer, with good books with which I was nonetheless out of sympathy. Such books were hard to write about; they could make one twist and turn, until one acknowledged their quality. So it took time for me to yield to the Russell book, to take it at its own pace, to accept its purpose; and then I found it very good. His aim, he said, was ‘to give an account of the military operations’, and also ‘to describe the impressions made on my senses by the externals of things, without pretending to say whether I was right or wrong’.

  The trouble I had with the book was a trouble with history, a trouble with the externals of things he described so well. There was such a difference between the writer and the people of the country he was writing about, such a difference between the writer’s country and the country he had travelled to. The correspondent’s job for The Times; the British army telegraph, which he used to send his ‘letters’ to the paper; the talk of railways and steamers – Russell’s world is already quite modern.

  He had been on The Times since 1843, when he was twenty-one; and the first war he had gone to have a look at was the Danish War of 1848. Now – calm, experienced, going out to this Indian war – on the steamer from Marseilles to Malta he finds himself among English people going to many places. ‘To trace their destinations from Malta would be to cover the East with a wide-spreading fan. There were men for Australia, for China, the dominions of the Rajah of Sarawak, for Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Java, Lahore, Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Ceylon, Pondicherry …’ For these people much of the world had already been organized; and many of them were equipped, like Russell himself, to understand and to move into new parts of the world.

  That impression of an energetic, spreading civilization is heightened by Russell’s careful modesty, the character he gives himself as an observer who is conscious of his special reputation but at the same time knows his limitations. He will not compete with other experts; he will not describe again what he knows others have described. So he refuses to say anything about the wonders of ancient Egypt, or to say one word about the ‘much-vexed’ Mediterranean. Until he sets out on his march from Calcutta, his tone is allusive; he is writing for his equals; he is an imperial traveller, travelling in a well-charted world.

  Yet days out of Calcutta, moving at first in a horse-drawn covered cart, he seems to have gone back a century or two. Just days away from the comforts of Calcutta, he is among people to whom the wider world is unknown; who are without the means of understanding this world; people who after centuries of foreign invasions still cannot protect or defend themselves; people who – Pandy or Sikh, porter or camp-following Hindu merchant – run with high delight to aid the foreigner to overcome their brethren. That idea of ‘brethren’ – an idea so simple to Russell that the word is used by him with clear irony – is very far from the people to whom he applies it. The Muslims would have some idea of the unity of their faith; but that idea would always be qualified by the despotism of their rulers; and the Muslims would have no obligations to anyone outside their faith. The Hindus would have no loyalty except to their clan; they would have no higher idea of human association, no general idea of the responsibility of man to his fellow. And because of that missing large idea of human association, the country works blindly on, and all the bravery and skills of its people lead to nothing.

  It is hard for an Indian not to feel humiliated by Russell’s book. Part of the humiliation the Indian feels comes from the ambiguity of his response, his recognition that the Indian system that is being overthrown has come to the end of its possibilities, that its survival can lead only to more of what has gone before, that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before; that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell’s march.

  Nine years after Russell’s book was published, Gandhi was born. Twenty-one years after that, in 1890 (when Russell would have been sixty-eight years old, with three more My Diary war-books to his name, one in 1861, My Diary North and South, about the American Civil War, another in 1866 about the Austro-Prussian War, and a third in 1870 about the Franco-Prussian War), in 1890 Gandhi was a law student in London, coping as best he could with the bewilderment of a cultural journey the opposite of Russell’s Indian journey in 1858. Ten years after that, in 1900 (five years after Russell had received a knighthood), Gandhi was in South Africa, campaigning for the rights of Indians who, 20 or 25 years after the Mutiny, had been sent out as indentured immigrants to many of the former slave colonies of the British Empire, to work on the plantations. And then in 1914 (seven years after Russell’s death: the 86 years of the newspaperman’s life entirely contained within the period of imperial glory), Gandhi was getting ready to go back to India, wondering how to get started there, how to make use of the political-religious lessons he had learned in South Africa.

  From 1857 to 1914, from the Indian Mutiny to the outbreak of the Great War – it isn’t long, and great things are seeded in that time. But look back over the 100 years before the Mutiny: right through this period there is an unvarying impression of a helpless, trampled-over country, never itself since the Muslim invasions, wealth eternally squeezed out of it, with a serf population always at work, in the fields, building fortifications, for kings that change and kingdoms with fluid, ever-shifting borders.

  ‘I shall never cease thinking, that rational liberty makes men virtuous; and virtue, happy: wishing therefore ardently for universal happiness, I wish for universal liberty. But your observation on the Hindu is too just: they are incapable of civil liberty; few of them have an idea of it; and those, who have, do not wish it. They must (I deplore the evil, but know the necessity of it) they must be ruled by an absolute power; and I feel my pain much alleviated by knowing the natives themselves … are happier under us than they were or could have been under the Sultans of Delhi or petty Rajas.’

  The words are by a great 18th-century British scholar, Sir William Jones. They come from a letter he wrote in 1786 from Calcutta to an American friend at the other end of the world, in Virginia. Seventy-five years before William Howard Russell’s journey to India, Sir William Jones – at the age of thirty-seven – had gone to Calcutta as a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court. There were no railways or steamers then, no short cut through Egypt; the journey to India was around the Cape of Good Hope, and could take five months; one ou
t of three letters between India and England was lost. Sir William Jones wanted to make his fortune in India. For five years he had angled for an Indian appointment, for the great money it offered. He hoped, once he was in India, to make £30,000 in six years; he was obsessed by that figure. Such were the sums to be made out of the servility and wretchedness of India – trampled over, but always working blindly on.

  His talk – to his American correspondent – of liberty and happiness was not disingenuous. William Jones loved the idea of civil liberty, and was a supporter of American independence. He had made three visits to Benjamin Franklin in Paris; and at one time he had even thought of going out to settle in Philadelphia. He was of modest middle-class origins (one grandfather a well-known cabinet-maker). Though he was a lawyer and a fellow of an Oxford college, and famous as an extraordinary scholar of eastern languages, he always in England needed the support of an aristocratic patron. That was why he wanted the £30,000 from India: for his own freedom. And he was unusual: he gave back to India as much as he took. In Bengal, while he did his important and original work on Indian laws, and regularly sent back his money to England to add to his growing hoard, he was also – for no money, for love, learning, glory – going deep into Sanskrit and other languages, talking with brahmins, recovering and translating ancient texts. He brought many of the attitudes of the 18th-century enlightenment to India. In the cultural ruins of much-conquered India he saw himself like a man of the Renaissance in the ruins of the classical world.