Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  “Go where Glory awaits thee;

  But, while the fame elates thee,

  Oh! Still remember me” (Moore)

  may express part of the feelings, the parting feelings of your brothers.’

  The scroll is dated 1 November 1941. As I read it in the deep silence of a room unopened for years, a sense of the surreal gripped me. I could imagine the day when the scroll would have been presented to my father: eager students seated in rows in the school hall, oiled hair carefully combed; my father on the dais in a western tie and suit, a garland of marigolds around his neck; city leaders jostling to greet him; solemn speeches; the citation read to pin-drop silence, followed by thunderous applause. I thought too of the stupendous nature of the transformation in the centuries leading up to this felicitation. In the valley of the Ganga, where the best in Indian civilization had grown and evolved over millennia; not far from Nalanda, one of the oldest centres of learning in the world; a stone’s throw away from Benares, where since the dawn of time metaphysicians had debated on the nature of the empirical world and where some of the greatest works in literature and philosophy had been written in Sanskrit and Arabic; here, in the very crucible of this legacy, was the amazing spectacle of its legatees presenting a citation in English whose words they could hardly pronounce, and quoting a poet whom they would never read except with difficulty in compulsory textbooks.

  It would be difficult to find a more revealing illustration—as absurd as it is poignant—of the consequence of Empire on the psyche of the ruled, of co-option, of the slow but sure process of ‘un-belonging’, of people becoming complicit in their own de-culturization and disempowerment.

  In the mid-1950s my father went to London to do a year’s course at the Imperial Defence College. The family, it was decided, would join him later. When he arrived in London it was the beginning of winter, and it was a new experience for him to be so alone. In India, people crowd around you, even when you want to be alone. Family, relatives and acquaintances feel they have a right to be part of your life. It is a social network that you grow up with and take as given; an invisible masonry that links the individual to the community. London was achingly different. The Indian community was as yet sparse, and the British people, although most civilized, kept social interaction with outsiders to the minimum. Indeed, they believed in leaving you to yourself. It was a cultural difference that my father grappled with inadequately and when the family—my mother, my three elder sisters and I, a year old, with a maid in tow—arrived at 7 Montague Square—the apartment he had hired—he was very relieved. My eldest sister, who was then nine, remembered that on the day they arrived, my father took the three girls to Hyde Park, while my mother and the maid cleaned the apartment, and I slept blissfully through it all.

  Almost fifty years later, when I was posted in London, I went back to Montague Square. It was an October morning, cold but sunny, with the russet hush of the onset of autumn. The square consisted of brick-red stucco homes with white windows. My parents’ former apartment was on the two top floors, overlooking a garden. Hydrangeas were abloom, a copper beech was aflame, the grass was littered with fallen leaves. A typical English lamp post, ornate in black, holding flower baskets full of begonias and petunias, stood outside the house. I was struck by the silence: not a soul in sight, doors shut, windows closed, cars silent and parked on either side of the square. It must have been much the same fifty years ago, and I don’t think my parents got used to it. Silence of this kind is alien to us. Sound is everywhere in India, by turns infuriating and reassuring.

  It was, by London standards, a spacious apartment: a living room and three small bedrooms spread over two floors; but much to my mother’s discomfiture, there was only one bathroom for the whole family, including, quite unacceptably, the maid. Homes are the most obvious expression of where a people come from; their design is rooted in a specific cultural milieu, and the needs they cater to profile a social context more vividly than most other things. My parents were not used to entering their home by using a key; very often they were locked out because they would not remember to take the key. The apartment had a minuscule balcony, and the maid wanted to know straight away if she could use it to hang the washing.

  The girls, then ten, seven and five, adapted more quickly. They were admitted to the neighbouring St Mary’s school and picked up a British accent in two months. My eldest sister won a prize in History and English; even in those days she thought she spoke better English than her British friends. At school, there were instructions that they should not be served beef at lunch; therefore, usually, there was very little to eat, only bread, mashed potatoes and spinach swimming in water (but the saving grace was a wonderful pudding of custard and cake). My sister still recalls her ecstatic discovery of Enid Blyton, and her even greater thrill when she saw The River of Adventure on the recently introduced black-and-white television. Another distinct memory is when her whole class was taken out to stand on the street to wave to the Queen. When she came home she exclaimed to my mother: ‘Oh my God, I saw the Queen!’

  Although my father had learnt so much about the English people, he felt like a stranger in their country. It would have been difficult for him to explain why if he’d been asked. He spoke good English, he was part of an elite service set up by the British, he dressed like them, and there was so much historically that was common ground. A group photo taken at the Defence College has him standing in the second row wearing a three-piece suit, surrounded by much taller, beaming white men. There is a smile on his face, but I can sense uneasiness in his stance, as though he is on probation; there’s a demeanour of insecurity in the way he is withdrawn into himself. He was not made to feel unwelcome in any way, but cultures are ultimately opaque to the outsider, and there is a subterranean stress of not belonging, an effort to adjust that is mostly unable to bridge the gap of difference. My mother often told me how much she missed home during that one year in England. The constantly grey weather did something to her soul, she said. What one misses when in a different cultural milieu is both quantifiable and elusive. A sudden gesture, the tone of a voice, a musical note in the distance, a stray face in an unknown window, a ray of the sun, almost anything can suddenly, irrationally, recall memories of home. There was a calendar on the wall on which she struck out each day that passed.

  My father wrote poetry, and the interesting thing is that although he had been a student of English literature all his life, he wanted to be published only in Hindi or in Urdu. I once asked him why not in English, and he said he could never really be sure of himself in English. The full import of what he meant eluded me as a child, but came back to haunt me in later life. His published collection of poems was called Pulkaavali. Its imagery was full of the monsoon clouds, the yellow of mustard fields, the blooming of the harshringar, the ochre splash of an Indian sunset, the stillness of a summer dawn. His poems spoke of the love of Radha for Krishna, of the magic of the blue god’s flute, and of death and yearning and separation and the joy of union, but always against a canvas where the Ganga was in the background and the Purvaiya, the east wind, blew gently over its waters. It was as though for the expression of his deepest creative instincts he withdrew to the world which he had consciously excluded from his overt self all his life.

  And yet, such was his lot, that no one world could be complete in itself. Like so many of the colonized, he was condemned to live a life of perpetual dichotomy, of not being fully absorbed in what was effortlessly his own, while trying almost all his waking hours to cultivate what could never fully become his own. I once saw a report he had written as a young district officer. His British superior had made notations in the margin, correcting language and grammar. Whether his superior had meant it as an assertion of authority or was merely doing what any professional in his position would have instinctively done, we can be certain that Badrinath would have felt inferior. This sense of inferiority was an inherent part of the colonial structure, but it did not provoke rejection of the colo
nizer’s language and ways or even cause significant resentment. It was as though an entire people and race had lost the ability to reawaken and make a fresh beginning. For a vast number of Indians, especially of the elite and middle classes, such dichotomy, often not even felt consciously, became the only reality. The man who in his private moments wrote so lyrically of the celestial love between Krishna and Radha now looks at me from a framed photograph, dressed in fashionable tweed coat and tie and brogues and a leather hat.

  Pictures reveal far more than the moment they capture. There is one of my nana, my mother’s father, dating back to the 1930s. It was taken when he was appointed a judge of the Allahabad High Court. He’s posing for the photographer, formally seated on a Queen Anne chair, and looking, except for his brown skin, every inch an Englishman. It was not easy for me to identify the different elements of his extraordinary dress, but I could make out a well-cut long coat, a white ruffled shirt with the cuffs spilling out of the coat sleeves, black stockings held up with garters, white gloves, a sword in scabbard at his waist, and on his feet, pumps with ornate circular buckles. My maternal grandfather’s home was a sprawling bungalow in the colonial style. The rooms in the front were British in format, with a formal drawing room and dining room, a library with only English books, and a kitchen for ‘angrezi khana’, with a khansama in charge. At the back was an aangan, and abutting it a rasoighar in the hands of a maharaj, where only vegetarian food was made in the traditional style on an open wood fire.

  The British had made Allahabad the capital of the North-Western Provinces in 1858. A new and separate Civil Lines was laid out then, north of the old city and physically severed from it by the Calcutta–Delhi railway line, also constructed at this time. The old city was left to fester in the primeval rhythms of the past, a warren of mohallas and narrow and crowded lanes, while the new had broad boulevards and bungalows in large compounds, civic amenities, a shopping area for Europeans and an imposing Gothic cathedral. It was the aspiration of upwardly mobile Indians to renounce their linkages with the old city and find a place in Civil Lines. My grandfather succeeded quite well, building his home on Elgin Road.

  The name of the road was not changed for years after 1947. Till well into the 1960s my grandfather’s address was Elgin Road, and my father’s in New Delhi was Queen Mary’s Avenue. There was no need to repudiate a past, or even interrogate it, when so much of it remained a part of the present. But as I look at the picture of my grandfather again, I wonder whether he felt the slightest sense of incongruence in garters and a long coat. Can clothes change a people, or can people wear another culture’s signature costumes without anything being lost or compromised in the process? Even in the twenty-first century, it is a relevant question to ask. I have always found the most adept foreigner looking slightly awkward in a dhoti or pyjama-kurta or in a sari. There is nothing wrong in the fit or in the way the garment has been worn; just an indefinable sense that something is laboured, just that trace of self-consciousness that renders the interaction inauthentic, as if the clothes were never meant for that person to wear. I myself never saw my grandfather in anything but a dhoti and kurta, because after he retired—and that is when I met him—he wore nothing else. Was the man in the stockings and the ornate buckled shoes the same as the one in the dhoti-kurta, I would ask myself. Obviously, it was the same person, but what was the cost for him of inhabiting two worlds that were so vastly different? For the best part of his life he read the judgements of the Queen’s Privy Council, conducted his court in English, was addressed as ‘My Lord’, built an excellent library of English books, sent his son to study in England, and wore western clothes. But in his old age he wore only a dhoti-kurta and only read the Ramayana.

  The versatility of people should not be overrated. A people and a society are not like quick-change artists who can adopt and discard one persona for another in an endless, harmless game. There is a cost to this process, a toll that it takes, and consequences that linger on much longer than one thinks. I have vivid memories of my grandfather, sitting on his bed, legs folded under the folds of his dhoti, shoulders hunched over the open pages of Tulsidas’s Ramayana, reading aloud in a sing-song voice. What was the suppressed gene that resurfaced in him after such a long period of neglect, taking him back to a tradition that pre-dated the British? And, if its hold was so strong as not to be extinguished, what was the cost to him of the adjustments he had made to suppress it in deference to British influence, allowing the long coat and garters to have greater primacy than his dhoti-kurta?

  In recent times, vast parts of the world have seen the most remarkable process of co-option, where loss is actually perceived as gain by the victim, and the erosion of original identity and the assumption of another is very rarely perceived as caricature until much later, if at all. In some, a reverse process sets in, a desire to return to one’s roots, to become what one was always meant to be. It is as if the play is over, and the long coat and garters can be put away, and people can go back to being their real selves. But if the sense of loss is mostly driven underground in the victim, the mimicry and the incongruity is noticed only by the foreigner, sometimes with smugness and approval, at others with derision and ridicule.

  Lord Macaulay, who is undoubtedly the colonial era’s single most influential figure in initiating this process of co-option, was quite appalled when he saw Shakespeare being performed by native children in Calcutta. ‘I can conceive nothing more grotesque than the scene from the Merchant of Venice, with Portia represented by a little black boy,’ he wrote angrily. ‘The society of Calcutta assemble to see what progress we are making; and we produce a sample of a boy who repeats some blackguard doggerel of George Colman’s, about a fat gentleman who was put to bed over an oven … Our disciple tries to hiccup, and tumbles and staggers about in imitation of tipsy English sailors …’3 The Shakespeare Society at the elite St Stephen’s College in Delhi, where I studied too, came to my mind when I first read Macaulay’s pained reaction. Upper-class Indian boys performing Shakespeare with eloquence and confidence, without any knowledge whatsoever of theatre in their own languages, against the backdrop of sets recalling medieval English castles, very much like ‘little black boys’ trying to be Portia. In London, I remember seeing a crossover production of Twelfth Night. The English actors spoke their lines naturally; the Indians were louder, more enthusiastic, but embarrassingly unclear.

  The Indian who read the citation presented to my father must have had the same difficulty with the lines of Moore, although few in the audience would have noticed. However, to the foreign observer the caricature always come through vividly. In his short story ‘The Head of the District’, Rudyard Kipling ridicules Deputy Commissioner Girish Chunder De as ‘the fat black eater of fish’, who is ‘more English than the English’, his head filled with ‘much curious book-knowledge of bump-suppers, cricket matches, hunting runs and other unholy sports of the alien’. I cannot fault Kipling’s reaction. An imitation is by definition subject to evaluation; those who belong effortlessly to the original have the right to see the difference, to comment on the copy, to satirize the effort, to publicly encourage and privately ridicule the mimicry. Kipling, who spoke about the ‘white man’s burden’, and was an unrepentant imperialist, would have been quite pleased that children in many Indian schools still learn his poems by heart, and that the house within the J.J. School of Art campus in Mumbai where he lived till the age of five is being converted into a museum.

  Amin Jaffar, the young and brilliant curator who was till recently with the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, spoke to me about the obsession of the Indian royalty with westernization. In the 1890s a British painter was to make the portrait of the Maharani of Vijayanagara. When he arrived he was surprised to see the lady dressed entirely in western attire. She had had the dress copied from an English magazine. The British artist, who felt that Indian textiles were superior, had to work very hard to persuade her to dress in traditional clothes. The Maharaja of Bikaner would
insist on wearing the medals given to him by the British even on tunics made of Indian muslin. According to Amin, a study of old portraits shows that our erstwhile royals would almost invariably wear western footwear even under a fully traditional dress.

  In independent, democratic India, the absurdities and anxieties of the co-opted have continued. I remember the morning when in grade three at the elite, ‘English-medium’ St Columba’s School in New Delhi, I participated in my first elocution contest and recited, much like the little black boy who had irritated Macaulay more than two hundred years earlier, a passage from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. My mother who was in the audience, dressed in a sari with a red bindi on her forehead, told me later that she had been as nervous as I about the correct pronunciation of Mephistopheles! The way the tongue sits on a word is a sure sign of belonging. The English language is especially treacherous because it is not phonetic. After decades of speaking it, and having lived with it as my first language, I’m still unsure of the correct pronunciation of some words.

  The great myth is that ‘great’ languages are infinitely malleable, that you can indigenize them with impunity, speak them with any inflection, break and make words in any way you want. Yes, languages do acquire local colour, but there are limits to their mutilation and to what they can accommodate without loss of meaning and significance. And change is best introduced—and absorbed and sustained—by those to whom that language belongs. For all the easy declarations many of us make about English being an Indian language, the fact is that it is not. We use it, it serves a purpose, it is of great benefit in the globalized world and should be available to everyone, not just the elite. But it is false and damaging to forget how it was brought to and imposed on India. Many of us have mastered it now, and ‘read, speak and dream’ in it, but which one of us did this as a conscious choice? By mixing Hindi, Tamil, Bengali or Marathi words and phrases with English, we don’t make that language our own. The emotional and cultural life of an entire subcontinent—the romance of our songs and poetry, the complex web of the extended family, the particular realities of our geography and climate—is alien to a language that has been with us barely three centuries. For much of what is central to our psyche, English has no words.