India: A Million Mutinies Now

by V. S. Naipaul

  This is from a very long journal-letter he sent back to his patron, the second Earl Spencer, in 1787, towards the end of his fourth year in Bengal: To what shall I compare my literary pursuits in India? Suppose Greek literature to be known in modern Greece only, and there to be in the hands of priests and philosophers; and suppose them to be conquered successively by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Tartars, and lastly by the English; then suppose a court of judicature to be established by the British parliament, at Athens, and an inquisitive Englishman to be one of the judges; suppose him to learn Greek there, which none of his countrymen knew, and to read Homer, Pindar, Plato, which no other Europeans had even heard of. Such am I in this country; substituting Sanscrit for Greek, the Brahmans for the priests of Jupiter …’

  William Jones made more than the £30,000 he had set his heart on; he amassed nearly £50,000. It took him almost 11 years to do so. The thought of the money would have comforted him; but the money itself did him no good. His wife went back a sick woman to England. The year after, when he was getting ready to follow her, he died, and was buried in Calcutta. He was forty-eight.

  He, and people like him, gave to Indians the first ideas they had of the antiquity and value of their civilization. Those ideas gave strength to the nationalist movement more than 100 years later. And those ideas travelled very far. In Trinidad, in colonial days, and before India became independent, those ideas about our civilization were almost all that we had to hold on to: as children we were taught, for instance, what Goethe had said about Shankuntala, the Sanskrit play that Sir William Jones had translated in 1789.

  What luck that bit of knowledge should have come our way! Sanskrit was considered a sacred language; only priests and brahmins could read the texts. William Jones had to get the help of a Hindu medical man to translate the play; and even in our own century pious people could get fierce about the sacredness of the language. Nearly 200 years after William Jones had translated the play, someone in independent India asked Vinoba Bhave, an imitation-Gandhi, seen by some as a kind of spiritual lightning-conductor for the country, what he thought of Shakuntala. The idle fellow replied angrily, ‘I have never read the Shakuntala, and never shall. I do not learn the language of the gods to amuse myself with trifles.’

  It is a wonder that, with this internal destructiveness, the play survived; that some knowledge of our cultural past should have come down to us. For every Indian the British period in India is full of ambiguities. For me, with my background – the migration from that overpopulated Gangetic plain 20 or 25 years after William Howard Russell had crossed it in imperial, Times-correspondent style, with servants and tents and access to the staff mess of headquarters; and the darkness which for so long blocked my own past as a result of that migration – for me there are special ambiguities.

  It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a depressive’s exaggeration, or a far-away colonial’s exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts – of law and freedom and wide human association – which give men self-awareness and strength, the accidents which have brought us to the point where we can in a way meet William Howard Russell, even in those ‘impressions made on my senses by the externals of things’, not with equality – time cannot be bent in that way – but with something like lucidity.

  So I could go only part of the way with Rashid in this contemplation of the recent past. I had no idea of a state of glory from which there had been a decline or a break; and I had no easy idea of an enemy. Growing up in far-off Trinidad, I had no idea of clan or region, none of the supports and cushions of people in India. Like Gandhi among the immigrant Indians of South Africa, and for much the same reasons, I had developed instead the idea of the kinship of Indians, the idea of the family of India. And in my attempt to come to terms with history, my criticism, my bewilderment and sorrow, was turned inward, focussing on the civilization and the social organization that had given us so little protection.

  People in India didn’t feel as I did. Perhaps – being in India, and having to order their day-to-day lives there – they couldn’t feel or allow themselves to feel like that. But in Delhi this time I met a publisher whose sorrow went beyond mine. His name was Vishwa Nath. He was in his seventies. His family had lived in Delhi for 400 years. There was a story in his family that during the Mutiny, at the time of the British siege, they had had to abandon the family house and take refuge somewhere else. One episode out of many: Vishwa Nath’s thoughts, as a Hindu, went back much further than the Mutiny, went back centuries.

  He said, ‘When I read the history of India, I weep sometimes.’

  He was fourteen at the time of Gandhi’s salt march in 1931. Ever since then he had worn Indian homespun.

  He said, ‘Gandhi made us a nation. We were like rats. He made men out of us.’

  Rats!

  But he was speaking almost technically. ‘Man as a species has been trying to kill off rats all through his existence on the earth, but he has never succeeded. Even in New York they haven’t succeeded. Similarly, we have been subdued, subjected to torture, conquest – but nobody has been able to kill us off. That has been the strong point of our civilization. But how do you live? Just like rats.’

  He hated the idea of caste: ‘the main reason why we are slaves’. And he had what I had never had: a clear idea of the enemy. The brahmins were the enemy – yet again, and more than 1000 miles north of the anti-brahmin politics of the South.

  ‘The brahmins let the country down, during all those dreadful invasions by the Mohammedans. All through, they went on chanting their prayers, their havans: “God will protect us.” ’

  With his homespun and his nationalism, his sense of history, and his reverence for Gandhi, there was his – seemingly contradictory – rejection of religion. The mixture made for a special passion, and Vishwa Nath’s passion came out in the magazines he edited and published in four languages. His women’s magazines were especially successful. Woman’s Era was a fortnightly in English. It had been started 15 years before, and it had damaged the older English-language women’s magazines. It sold about 120,000 copies now; it was the best-selling women’s magazine in English. Vishwa Nath thought he could take it up to half a million.

  I don’t believe I had ever looked at an Indian women’s magazine. I had taken them for granted. I had been aware of them, knew some of the names. It had never occurred to me that in India they would have had a unique evolution. As soon as the idea came to me, I saw that it couldn’t be otherwise, in a society still so ritualized, so full of religious rules and clan rules, where most marriages were arranged, and the opportunity or need for adventure was not great.

  I had heard about Woman’s Era in Bombay. Its success was spoken of as something extraordinary; but people I met didn’t care for the magazine itself. It was thought uneducated and backward-looking – in spite of what I was to learn later in Delhi of the editor’s iconoclasm and reforming mission. The magazine was extraordinary because it had found a new kind of working-woman reader. A reader of that sort who spent scarce rupees on an English-language magazine might have been thought to have social and cultural ambitions. But that wasn’t true of the Woman’s Era reader; and that was part of her oddity. She was content with her old, shut-in world.

  The editor of a rival magazine, one of those damaged by Woman’s Era, said, ‘Woman’s Era is naive right through. It is the first magazine of its kind in India to cater for this new group.’

  How did she define this new group?

  ‘It has now acquired a bit of affluence, embraced consumerism. It has a bit of education. But this education has been circumscribed by their traditional thinking and by their family’s old beliefs – it’s a kind of non-education, a kind of parrot education.’

  The bookshop in the Bombay hotel didn’t stock Woman’s Era. The woman assistant made it clear that she didn’t like even being asked for it. I bought a copy from a p
avement magazine-seller. My first impression was that the magazine was dull. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might have missed it in the pavement seller’s display. It was well produced but undistinctive, with an unprovocative young woman’s face on the glazed-newsprint cover: carefully made up but unprovocative, a woman’s view of a woman. And if, without knowing the magazine’s reputation, I had looked through its pages, almost nothing would have stayed with me.

  The main article, six pages long, with posed colour photographs, was about ‘bride-seeing’. This is the custom whereby, before a marriage is finally arranged, a party from the boy’s family visits the girl’s family house, and the girl is shown to the visitors and put through her paces. Ashok, the business executive I had got to know in Calcutta, had felt so humiliated by his own experience of bride-seeing that he had decided not to do it again. He had done his own courting and made his own proposal, and kept his family out of it. Ashok could do that; he could look after himself. Not many readers of Woman’s Era were in that position, and the attitude of Woman’s Era to bride-seeing was quite different. Most marriages were arranged, the writer of the article said. As long as this was so, bride-seeing was the best way of introducing the girl to the boy; and it was not as demeaning as some people said.

  The article was, in fact, an article of advice to girls and their families about the best way of dealing with the occasion. In the first place, a girl shouldn’t feel rejected, the writer says, if after a bride-seeing a boy says no. It may be only that the ‘demand’ – the financial demand – of the boy’s family is too much for the girl’s family. To prevent that kind of misunderstanding, it is important for the girl’s parents to check out the boy and his family thoroughly, before the invitation to view. The girl’s parents should visit the boy several times. One tip the article-writer gives to the girl’s parents is to see, when they are in the boy’s house, whether servants, children, and pets like the boy.

  For the bride-seeing occasion itself, the girl shouldn’t wear too much make-up or jewelry. She shouldn’t boast, and she shouldn’t say she can do things which she can’t do. Nor should the parents try to appear better-off than they are; some families, the writer says, even borrow furniture to make a show. Then there is the question of dignity. The girl and her family are the suitors on such occasions; the boy and his family have to be won over. But: The girl’s parents should not behave in an ingratiatingly humble and servile manner.’ Easy enough to say; but how, in the circumstances of a bride-seeing, can the girl’s family keep their dignity? The writer makes one suggestion. ‘Some families insist that the girl touch the feet of every boy and his parents who come to see her. This practice is deplorable, goes against the basic human dignity, and is best avoided.’

  Still, the unfairness of the procedure remains. “Why can’t the boy sit in his drawing-room, nicely groomed and smelling of aftershave, with his head bent and his academic qualifications, job certificates, etc., in his hands?” ’ To that complaint of a girl, which the writer of the article quotes, there is no reply. Except this: if a girl doesn’t want to go out husband-hunting on her own – ‘and believe me, in our society it is an extremely difficult game’ – then the girl has to put up with the bride-seeing visits. ‘If the boy’s people put on airs and act uppity, they can be forgiven, for tradition and thousands of years of social behaviour have gone into it.’

  Later, after I had met Vishwa Nath in Delhi, I could see a little of his passion and iconoclasm in that last sentence. But without that knowledge, the sentiment appeared simply archaic, an acceptance of old ways because they were the old ways and the best ways. And, with that acceptance stated or implied (sometimes with a take-it-or-leave-it tone), the article got on with its business, which was to give the kind of instruction that might come from some worldly-wise person within the family. Dress modestly for the bride-seeing; mind what you say; watch out for trap questions from the boy’s family; be respectful towards older members of the boy’s family, and affectionate with the children.

  Instruction, instruction of the simplest sort – that appeared to dictate the tone of the magazine. That appeared to be the need the magazine was meeting. The customs, like bride-seeing, might be old; but the world in which they were being practised was new; and in this world the readers of the magazine appeared to be starting almost from scratch.

  ‘Personal Hygiene’ was a long article in the same issue of the magazine. It was illustrated with a photograph of a girl bending over a sink and throwing water at her face, and the advice it offered was of the most elementary kind. There was a little flick of irreligion at the very beginning of the text, but to spot it you had to be in the know. ‘Today, of course, whether one believes in godliness or not is not a matter of such grave concern, as is the fact that many of us fail to adopt cleanliness and personal hygiene as our chosen religion.’ Cumbersome, even imprecise; but the point of the article was the clear and simple hygiene lesson.

  There is no harm in getting dirty, but the problem arises only when we like to stay dirty … The importance of keeping our body and our surroundings clean and orderly cannot be stressed over much. Their direct result is good health, peace of mind and happiness.’ To be clean, to be ‘tidy’, was to avoid infections, and that meant spending less on doctors and medicines: it was, therefore, to avoid a certain amount of financial worry.

  Stage by stage, then, taking nothing for granted, the writer took the reader through the problems, in India, of personal hygiene. ‘An orderliness of the surroundings is the first and essential step.’ ‘Orderliness’ – a euphemism. ‘Surroundings’ – a strange word, but clearly ‘house’ or ‘apartment’ wouldn’t have suited everyone’s living space. So we begin to understand that the living conditions of the people for whom this article is meant are not always good. Some of the readers of this article would be at the very margin, would just be making do.

  Water is important, the article says; enough of it should be available. India is a warm country, and a bath once or twice a day is necessary, ‘accompanied by a thorough and strong but gentle scrubbing, using soap and lukewarm water’. After the washing of the body, the washing of clothes. ‘Clothes which have once become wet with perspiration should be washed well before they are worn again … Cleanliness of the undergarments is extremely important as these are worn next to the skin. If they are used continuously without changing, they are likely to cause irritation of the skin, or more serious conditions.’ A full-page advertisement opposite the last page of text is for an anti-lice treatment. Daughter embraces mother; they both smile at the camera. ‘She trusts me with all her problems … and I trust only Mediker with her lice problem.’ (Lice! No wonder the young woman in the hotel bookstore made a face when I asked for Woman’s Era.)

  Simple instruction – it made for dullness, if you were on the outside. And the stories – there were five in the issue – were like fables. A fat woman goes with her husband on a posting to Korea. She is nervous of the hotel food. She fancies that the mutton is really dog-meat and the noodles are worms. She eats salad and yoghurt and a little rice for two months; she loses weight and becomes another, better person. The rich young Indian businessman, back in India to look for a wife, is frightened away by the flashy girl he had been expected to marry; instead, he chooses the humble, orphaned cousin who has been living with the girl’s family as a kind of servant. In another story the rich husband is completely won over by the simple goodness of the poor-relation aunt whom his wife is trying to hide. Simple goodness – it is the quality most people in these Woman’s Era stories turn out to have. There are references in the magazine to women reading romances, especially the English romances published by Mills and Boon. But the love that matters in these stories is family love rather than romantic love.

  Family love, articles of simple instruction on unglamorous subjects, advertisements for a Procter and Gamble lice-treatment, advertisements for antiseptic creams, water-heaters: there was nothing here to exercise the fantasy, to encourage longin
g. Who would ever have thought that this was the formula for a best-selling women’s magazine?

  Gulshan Ewing was one of the most famous women’s magazine editors in India. She became the editor of Eve’s Weekly in 1966, and took it to its great success in the late 1970s.

  At dinner in Bombay one evening, speaking informally of the Woman’s Era phenomenon, before she knew (or I knew) that I was going to take a greater interest in the subject of women’s magazines, Mrs Ewing described the kind of new reader women’s magazines in India had to reach out to. This reader did a job. She got up early, looked after her family, got them off to school and work, and then went out to work herself, in an office, perhaps. At half-past five she left her office. On the way to the bus stop or railway station she bought the vegetables for the evening meal, and cut them up on the way home.

  I was attracted by that detail of the cutting up of the vegetables on the train home. But it took only one or two suburban train journeys for me to understand that in Bombay the detail was romantic, a vision of pastoral, that suburban trains were so crowded that, far from cutting vegetables on her train, the woman office worker would have had to fight – hard – to get on the train. Later I read a whole story in Woman’s Era about a girl becoming separated from her sister during a scrimmage to get on a suburban train.

  Mrs Ewing admitted the fantasy when I went to see her some days later in her office. She had simply wanted, she said, to describe the position of the Indian working woman in the cities. I might have thought that she was being merely witty in her description; but the life of the working woman was not funny.

  ‘We’ve talked to these people, and friends of these people. We’ve had feedback. And what generally happens is that she – the working woman – she’s up at the crack of dawn, about five, to fill the water for the day. We don’t have 24-hours’ running water in most houses. Water comes on early in the morning, goes off all day, and returns in the late evening for an hour or under a couple of hours. That’s in the lower-middle-class areas. So when she gets up – tubs, barrels, whatever she can get hold of, she fills. Then she does the morning chores, filling the tiffin-carriers for husband and children, after giving them tea, breakfast, whatever. It’s mainly she who does it. Then she’s off to work herself. A very long train journey in a crowded train, usually. She hardly gets a seat.’