Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Nirad Chaudhuri had spent a lifetime—and very considerable scholarship—in denigrating his own people and venerating the British. But from what Professor Raychaudhuri told us, he was never really accepted by the latter. He took great pride in speaking the Queen’s English and dressed like the most fastidious English gentleman, but remained for Englishmen an oddity, a diminutive curiosity, a relic of the past, respected for his scholarship but tolerated only for his partisanship in their favour. Tapan recalled Nirad Babu’s laughable efforts at preserving his ‘English’ image, especially when an Englishman was coming to see him. He would keep his one and only Doulton tea set ready, and dress for the occasion in an overdone manner, which would quite startle his unsuspecting guest. He would go out of his way to tell his British visitor that he never ate the food the ‘natives’ ate, although on one occasion, Tapan remembered, he had just eaten a meal of rice and machher jhol with great relish. The gardener at St Anthony’s College once ran into Nirad’s son, and jocularly remarked that he would come home sometime to have some curry. The son, well trained by his father, reacted with horror. ‘We do not eat curry in our home,’ he retorted. ‘My father always has an English breakfast with bacon and eggs.’

  Nirad’s knowledge of British history and heritage was a kind of defence mechanism to prove his Englishness. If he was serving a wine, he would begin to give its history and a comparative analysis of similar wines and their vintage, leaving his visitors not so much impressed as flummoxed. Apparently, the monthly stipend he was paid by Oxford University—where he had chosen to spend his last years in self-imposed exile—was quite small, and there was considerable uncertainty on how long it would continue. He was unsure too how long he would be able to retain the house allotted to him. These insecurities only accentuated his desire to prove his loyalty to his benefactors, and while he was at his imperious best in overwhelming the fawning Indian acolytes that called on him, he was reduced to a somewhat pathetic supplicant before his white friends. Sometimes his efforts to impress them and to be counted among them would lead to unexpected consequences. A member of the House of Lords, who met Nirad at a time when he was in dire need of pecuniary help, was quite taken aback by the expensive wines and spirits served at the octogenarian’s home. The truth was that although in financial distress, Nirad Chaudhuri would spend exorbitantly on such things to impress his English friends. None of his books sold more than 5000 copies, not even in England, a rather despondent showing for a man who became the biggest apologist of British rule and civilization.

  Nirad Chaudhuri’s was a caricatured reaction. He saw the appalling mimicry and mediocrity that characterized the lifestyle and mannerisms of the Indian brown sahibs, especially since he was not born to that background. He decided, therefore, to become the true brown Englishman, and use this to expose the shallowness and superficiality of those who claimed to be British in their upbringing and exposure. He famously dedicated his first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, to the British Empire, and spent an entire lifetime educating himself on the intricacies of British culture, reading the classics of English literature, learning Latin, understanding the difference between port and sherry, and all the trivia that could establish him as the true Indian inheritor of British civilization and culture. There is little doubt that he succeeded, and became a pucca brown sahib, far more knowledgeable than his peers who superficially aspired to the same status. But in the process he became a caricature himself. He did not use his vast intellectual resources to chisel an authentic identity for himself. Instead, he chose to become the most flamboyantly learned mimic of an alien civilization, and allowed his life and writings to be conditioned more by a desire to put a certain class of his own countrymen in their place than to introspect, from the point of his heritage and milieu, on where he really belonged himself. To reject your cultural inheritance out of genuine conviction, after having argued and fought with it and shown up its flaws and hypocrisies, is one thing, and to blindly follow an alien culture out of a sense of inferiority is quite another. The former is an act of courage that may lead to necessary reform and correction; the latter mere caricature that will diminish both the individual and an entire society.

  My mother spent the last two years of her life with me in Cyprus, where I was posted as India’s high commissioner. Cyprus too has been a British colony, but it was interesting—and my mother noticed it first—that while the Cypriots spoke to us in English, their natural language of communication among themselves was Greek. The island’s major papers were in Greek, and the few English papers were brought out for limited circulation, mostly by expatriates. My mother spent a great deal of her time in Cyprus translating into English the folk songs relating to marriage from the region around Allahabad, where she was born. Her worry was that this intangible heritage would be lost forever to her grandchildren. They knew almost nothing about it, and she was afraid that after her this treasure of meaning and ritual, so redolent of the soil, would never be sung or practised again. In the Introduction to her book, which she completed a few weeks before she passed away, she wrote:

  Whenever my son and his wife were home in the evenings in Cyprus, the family would sit together till dinnertime. My son termed the time thus spent together as the ‘happy hour’. On one such evening, hearing me hum a tune to myself he asked me what I was singing. I told him that it was a folk song—a sohar, which is normally sung at the time of the birth of a baby in the family. He asked me to sing it aloud, which I did. When the song was over I asked him if he understood what the song said. He replied, not entirely. It was then that I realized how my children had been removed from their roots, and how much they had been deprived of the wealth of emotions, laughter, the meaning of relationships and simply the earthly wisdom contained in these songs. To some extent I blamed myself for not having kept them in touch with the old traditions, the culture of which one could be rightly proud of, and the values and ‘sanskars’ which enrich one’s life … The modern generation has a hundred new priorities, and remembrance of things past is not one of them. But I believe it is important for people to know their cultural roots and the rich tapestry of the traditions to which they are heir, in order for them to step authentically into the future.

  When my mother died, her loved ones—her children and their spouses and her grandchildren—were around her. The doctors had told us that there was nothing they could do to save her and that the time had come to let her go. In her last moments, those who belonged to her chanted in unison the Gayatri mantra: ‘Om bhur bhuva svaha, tat savitur virenyam, bhargo devasya dhimahi, dhiyo yo nam prachodiyata.’ We sang too a bhajan from Tulsidas’s Ramayana which she was very fond of: ‘Shri Ramchandra kripalu bhajmana harana bhav bhaya darunam.’ At the cremation ground, as her body was set to flame, I kept thinking of the second line of that bhajan: ‘Nav kanj lochan kanj mukh kar kanj pad kanjarunam,’ and I still recall vividly that the stray, even irrational, thought came to me, as I fed ladles of ghee to the pyre, that no Indian could ever compose in English—however great his or her mastery of that language may be—such an effortlessly sublime line of linguistic fluency, simplicity and beauty.

  2

  The Imperishable Empire

  On a beautiful spring morning at the end of March 2005, Renuka and I set out to pay obeisance at the grave of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay at Westminster Abbey: he had, after all, played a pivotal role in shaping British India, and continues to exercise enormous influence over the Indian Republic even today. Stepping into the cavernous church from the bright light outside, we took some time to take in the soaring vaulted ceilings, the profusion of arches, the richness of the stained-glass panels and the ornate decorations. A life-size statue of Charles John Earl Canning, KG, Governor General and First Viceroy of India (1856–62), greeted us very near the entrance. According to his tombstone, he had shown ‘great fortitude and wise clemency’ during the ‘perilous crisis of the sepoy mutiny’, thereby winning the lasting gratitude of his countrymen. It
was strange reading these lines, uncontested and unqualified, in twenty-first-century Britain. The Abbey is littered with similar graves, some very beautifully decorated, with life-size statues in final repose, hands joined in prayer, of military men who had distinguished themselves in helping to win and sustain the British empire.

  We pressed on, past the tomb of Henry VII and his personal chapel, and the tombs of Edward III and Richard II, stopping briefly to admire the Coronation Chair, until we reached the Poet’s Corner, where Macaulay is buried. An entire galaxy of the great names of the English language—Dryden, Longfellow, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll—are buried around him. Macaulay’s grave was a simple black slab of granite, on which was etched in gold lettering: THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY, BORN AT ROTHLEY TEMPLE, LEICESTERSHIRE, OCTOBER 25, 1800, DIED AT HOLLEY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL, DECEMBER 28, 1859. In terms of tribute there were just two lines: HIS BODY IS BURIED IN PEACE, BUT HIS NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE. We stood there in silence. I could not bring myself to walk over the grave, as so many others—mostly tourists—were doing. Across, near the graves of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, stood a statue of Shakespeare. The face of the bard, framed in a ray of light refracted from the massive stained-glass panel above, seemed to look down approvingly at the last resting place of a man who had done so much for the propagation of the English language.

  Lord Macaulay sailed for India in February 1834 on a ship called The Asia. During the journey he remained largely aloof from the other passengers, and was thankful for being left alone. Not gregarious by temperament, he was proud of his intellectual credentials and scholarly achievements, and did not suffer fools gladly. Before he was eight, he had written a remarkably well-argued essay on the desirability of converting heathens to Christianity. This was not surprising given that his father, Zachary Macaulay, was the editor of the evangelical magazine The Christian Observer, and wanted his son to serve the Church. Young Macaulay went on to join Cambridge, and a brilliant academic career there was followed by a half-hearted stint as a lawyer, until in 1830 he achieved his real ambition, which was entry to the House of Commons. In Parliament, his speeches on the Reform Bill and his great skills as an orator soon earned him the reputation of being the Burke of his times. In 1832 he was appointed one of the commissioners of the Board of Control for India, and, as a result of his hard work, became its secretary soon after. At the end of 1833 he was nominated to be a member of the Supreme Council to govern India, an offer he accepted immediately, not only because it carried a princely salary of £10,000 a year, but also because it would help him fulfil his cherished desire to give to the subject Indian people European knowledge, so that ‘they may in some future age, demand European institutions’. If this were to happen, it would be an enduring victory even if the sceptre were to pass away from the British empire. For, as he said in a famous—and prophetic—speech in the House of Commons, ‘There are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.’ 1

  Now, as The Asia sailed towards distant India, towards a people he believed were ‘sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition’, Macaulay settled down purposefully to rediscover the glories of his own culture and heritage, and to recharge his civilizational batteries before he dealt with the natives. He read insatiably, re-examining the Iliad and the Odyssey, devouring again Virgil, Dante and Petrarch, admiring once more the prose of Gibbon’s Rome, and rereading—unbelievably enough—all the seventy volumes of Voltaire.

  From this overdose of classical Graeco-Roman culture, his first encounter with India, when The Asia docked at Madras on 10 June 1834, was with a native who came aboard in what seemed to him nothing but a pointed yellow cap. Macaulay was rather struck by the colour and nakedness of this specimen, and, according to his own confession, almost died laughing. Still breathing the literary infusions of Virgil and Voltaire, he found everything strange in the sea of dark faces with white turbans. As he set foot on the beach, a salute of fifteen guns greeted the new member of the Supreme Council. A week later he left Madras for Ooty, to spend some time with Governor General Lord William Bentinck, who was convalescing there. He travelled the 400 miles on the shoulders of Indian men, but the scenery did not impress him, and wherever he broke journey, he observed how rulers who once ruled over territories as large as a European kingdom now fawned over him. The Maharaja of Mysore, one of the wealthiest potentates of India, insisted on showing him his entire wardrobe, and admitted proudly that his most prized possession was a head of the Duke of Wellington, which Macaulay dismissed as being probably taken from a signpost in England.

  In the cool heights of Ooty, he noticed, while sitting on a carpeted floor beside a blazing wood fire, how his ‘black’ servants were coughing all around him. On the eve of his departure, a squabble among his servants greatly upset him. Much against his wishes, he had to intervene to restore order, and noted in disgust that the natives are ‘in truth, a race so accustomed to be trampled on by the strong that they always consider humanity as a sign of weakness’. 2 Twelve bearers—six at a time—carried his palanquin down to Madras, as he reclined and read Theodore Hook’s Love and Pride. Ten porters and two police officers with swords and badges ran alongside, as the rain came down in torrents. From Madras he sailed for Calcutta, and amused himself during the voyage by learning Portuguese and reading the The Luciad twice. In Calcutta, he moved into a comfortable bungalow in Chowringhee (which is now the Bengal Club) with an army of servants.

  The future linguistic destiny of India fell into his lap almost immediately after arriving in Calcutta. The Committee of Public Instruction set up by the British had been deadlocked for some time now because it was divided five against five. One set of five members wanted education in India to be essentially based on the heritage of its classical languages, Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic; the other wanted elementary education to be in the ‘vernacular’ languages, with English coming in at the higher levels. The Supreme Council made Macaulay the president of the committee in January 1835 to break the impasse, and he took little time to do so. On 2 February he recorded his infamous minute, and in one rhetorical flourish rubbished the entire civilizational heritage of all Indians.

  In these amnesiac, post-colonial times it is important to recall the mindset of the man. Macaulay argued the case of English because he believed fervently without the slightest iota of doubt that it was the product of a superior civilization and culture. Whoever knows English, he wrote, ‘has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world put together.’ Equally, and this was directly related to his notion of superiority, he was convinced that the culture of the natives was not only deficient, it was beyond redemption. How could they teach, at public expense, he asked, ‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier—astronomy, which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding school—history, abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long—and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’? Aware that his critics may point to the centuries of refinement and literary achievement each Indian language had behind it, he was blunt in his rebuttal: ‘Does it matter in what grammar a man talks nonsense, with what purity of diction he tells us that the world is surrounded by a sea of butter, in what neat phrases he maintains that Mount Meru is the centre of the world?’ He conceded that there could be some truth in Oriental sciences, but added dismissively: ‘So there is in the Systems held by the rudest and most barbarous tribes of Caffrania and New Holland.�
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  Macaulay was convinced that the sacred books of the ‘Hindoos’ were full of knowledge only of ‘the uses of Cusa grass, and all the mysteries of absorption in the Deity’. When the ‘Hindoos’ studied their texts, all that they learnt was how ‘to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat’. There was no point thus in indulging the languages of the natives, whether classical or vernacular. English must be given primacy and propagated institutionally and immediately, and in doing so the long-term aim was crystal clear: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern: a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ This class would in time become ‘by degrees fit vehicles for conveying [our] knowledge to the great mass of the population’. 3

  Having stated his views without the slightest trace of ambivalence, Macaulay dramatically resigned, just in case his decision was not accepted, for he wanted to be no part of a system that gave encouragement to ‘absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, and absurd theology’. He need not have worried. On 7 March 1835 Lord Bentinck, with whom he had spent some time in Ooty en route to Calcutta, gave his fullest approval to the ideas contained in the minute. All public funds would henceforth be used only for the teaching of English; no new students seeking to enter Oriental institutions would be provided stipends; professorships in such institutions would not be filled; no government money would be disbursed for printing anything in the native languages; and five schools for the teaching of English would be immediately opened in the major towns of Bengal.