Verdict on India

BEVERLEY NICHOLS was in India for little over a year but into that period he packed a great variety of experience. The result is a book which is dynamic, disturbing and of real value to all those who have asked themselves the question ‘to Quit or Not to Quit.’ One of its most remarkable features is its revelation of the manner in which orthodox Hinduism still dominates the modern scene, spreading religious fanaticism through politics, art, medicine, and even the film industry. Many of Mr. Nichol’s conclusions will be at variance with popular tradition, for example, his description of the recent famine in Bengal and its tragic cause. A section of great topical interest is devoted to the unborn empire of Pakistan, for which Mr. Nichols presents the most lucid and convincing plea yet published in this country.

VERDICT ON INDIA

For

Jimmy Drawbell and Alex Hawkins

In memory of many happy hours

of

Work and Friendship

Other books by

BEVERLEY NICHOLS

Fiction

SELF

PATCHWORK

PRELUDE

FOR ADULTS ONLY

CRAZY PAVEMENTS

EVENSONG

REVUE

MEN DO NOT WEEP

General

TWENTY-FIVE

THE STAR-SPANGLED MANNER

ARE THEY THE SAME AT HOME?

WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST

CRY HAVOC!

THE FOOL HATH SAID

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

NEWS OF ENGLAND

GREEN GROWS THE CITY

Philosophical: Chronicles of Allways

DOWN THE GARDEN PATH

A THATCHED ROOF

A VILLAGE IN A VALLEY

Omnibus

OXFORD-LONDON-HOLLYWOOD

Drama

FAILURES

MESMER

VERDICT ON

INDIA

by

BEVERLEY NICHOLS

RS. 9/12

Copyright

CONTENTS

      AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

THIS book is the record of over a year’s intensive study of modern India. The accent is on the word ‘modern.’ It is an endeavour to trace the workings of the Indian mind not only in politics but—inter alia—in art, in literature, in music, in medicine, in journalism, in the cinema, and, of course, in religion.

It has involved journeys of many thousands of miles, on foot, by car, by bullock-cart, by aeroplane and occasionally on a stretcher. I have not attempted to describe these journeys except in so far as they illustrate the main theme.

There are two reasons for this foreword.

The first is to stress the fact that Verdict on India is, as the pavement artists used to say, ‘all my own work.’ It is not ‘British propaganda’; it does not represent the ‘official point of view,’ whatever that may be; it is not sponsored by the India Office. I have never met Mr. Amery, nor seen him, nor heard him, nor communicated with him or with anybody connected with him, unto the third and fourth generation.

It is necessary to insist upon this point because almost from the day I set foot in India the national Press chose to regard me, to my considerable astonishment, as ambassador of Empire, envoy incognito, armed with all manner of secret weapons of diplomacy and intrigue. It was fiercely asserted that I was in the pay of the Government—playing the role, presumably, of a sort of rococo Stafford Crips. One paper so far lost its sense of humour and proportion as to announce that I had been offered the post of Viceroy.¹

The facts, alas, are less glamorous. I came to India, originally, as a correspondent of Allied Newspapers; a long and serious illness interrupted this connection; I stayed on as an independent observer; and when I felt that I had observed enough, I wrote this book. It is a completely individual expression of a personal point of view.

The second reason for this foreword is to apologize, in advance, to the many Indian friends who offered me kindness and hospitality . . . in particular to the Hindus. It is inevitable that most of them will hate it from the first sentence to the last. In some ways I hate it myself, if only because it is so totally different from the book I had wished to write. I came out to India with high hopes and ideals; I left . . . but you will see that for yourselves.

¹ Bombay Sentinel, May 5th, 1943.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

THE ELUSIVE INDIAN

‘HAVE you ever met an Indian?’

The question was startling. What did the man mean? Met an Indian? I had been in the country for nearly a year, and had travelled thousands of miles; from the snows of the North-West Frontier to the lush fringes of Travancore, from the hills of Hyderabad to the markets of Madras, from the flesh-pots of Bombay to the famine-bowls of Calcutta. At last I had come up here to rest in the shadow of the Himalayas.

And now to be asked a question like that!

‘Well, have you?’

‘I don’t understand. Is there a catch somewhere?’

‘Maybe.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go down to the hospital to see a coolie with snake-bite. I’ll be back in half an hour. Then we’ll have a chota peg, and you can tell me your answer.’

I stared out over the valley. Thirty miles away the white robes of Kinchinjunga were spread against a sky of immaculate blue; they looked like a sort of celestial laundry waiting to be gathered into gigantic baskets by industrious angels. The angels would have to hurry up, for the sun was falling swiftly; already the divine draperies were being stained with gold and crimson and that strange acid green that is the secret of the Indian twilight.

Nearer home, the mountains swooped down with a rhetorical gesture to a river of dancing silver; although it was so far below, its music echoed faintly up the hillside. Between us and the river there was nothing but tea; tens of thousands of acres of tea, endless regiments and divisions of tea, trim little bushes, marching up to the very shadow of the jungle. If one wanted to make a cup of tea out of Lake Ontario there would surely be enough here to do it. The very air had a five o’clock tang; Doctor Johnson would have been in a perpetual ecstasy.

‘Have you ever met an Indian?’

What was the man getting at? There must be something behind the question; he was not the facetious sort, and even if he had been, twenty years in Darjeeling would have cured him of it. You can’t be facetious, living under the scrutiny of the eternal snows.

I began to think of some of the Indians I had met; they seemed to move before me in a pageant of astonishing diversity and colour.

At the head of the pageant, strange to say, were four murderers. They had been my neighbours in hospital at Peshawar. They were chained to their beds and you could hear the chains rattling in the night. A pleasanter group of murderers you would not find in a month of Sundays, mild of eye, soft of voice, gentle of gesture. Each of them had murdered for love or passion or honour, none of them for gold. That is the way of the North-West Frontier.

In the wake of the murderers—(for the dusk plays tricks with the mind, making it flicker from point like shadows in the valley)—marched three nautch girls. They had been the high spot in a religious procession at the palace of the Maharajah of Mysore, and once seen, they could never be forgotten, for they were so surprisingly unlike what one expected. For a whole hour we had stood on the steps, watching a turbulent river of colour; standard-bearers with palanquins of purple and jade, soldiers with rods of solid gold, shaped in the semblance of serpents, priests with many-pronged candelabras of silver, encrusted with jewels.

Then the sacred cows—elegant and coquettish, their backs covered with tapestries of crimson and azure, their great horns gilded, their faces touched with mascara and vermilion. Even their feet were tipped with gold and braceleted.

And at last the nautch girls.

‘Look!’ they cried. ‘Here they come!’

‘But where?’ I leant forward with fierce impatience; after all, one’s first nautch girl is an experience; no race of beings has been invested with a rarer aura of poetry and romance.

‘Over there. One in gold, one in purple, and one in silver. Don’t you see?’

I saw.

I saw Miss Zazu Pitts, Miss Haidee Wright and a lady who greatly resembled the late Duchess of Teck.

Now all these ladies, in their way, have shining qualities, but they would be the first to agree that they do not immediately suggest themselves as typical of the legendary nautch girl. Of course, it was not really these ladies who were dancing past, but their Indian doubles; and the reason why such comparatively mature persons were gyrating for our benefit was because the profession of nautch girl, in Mysore, is rapidly dying out. These were the best they could get.

But they were a shock, particularly the oriental Miss Pitts, who twisted her hips and wobbled her neck in a manner that may have appealed to the Hindu gods but was somewhat frightening to the Western observer.

II

This would never do.

It was nearly dark; soon my friend would come back from his snake-bitten coolie, and I had not even begun to answer his question.

‘Have you ever met an Indian?’

Met an Indian? An Indian?

How many Indians had I met? To speak to . . . at least a thousand. But it would be hopeless to try to remember them individually.

Supposing we generalized? Supposing we looked at India, as it were, from a great height, dividing the broad masses of the population into separate groups, like those fascinating relief pictures which help the layman to grasp the outlines of a great battle? Maybe that would help.

Here goes.

First group. 180 million caste Hindus. They were Indians all right, the very core of India. But wait a minute . . . were they? What about the 60 million non-caste Hindus who were standing, or rather grovelling, in their dust? Were they Indians too? According to the caste Hindus, they were not even men and women! They were ‘untouchable.’ To drink from the same cup would be spiritual poison; their very shadow was pollution. Some of them were even ‘unseeable,’ and must hide themselves by day, only coming out when there were clouds over the moon.

If these 60 million—(nearly equal to the total white population of the British Empire)—were regarded by their own brethren as a good deal lower than the lowest animals. how could they be described, by a Westerner, as ‘Indians’? They could not both be Indians. Or could they? It was all very puzzling.¹

Let us leave the Hindus for a moment and turn to the Muslims. How many of them? Nearly 100 million. And we do not have to ask them If they are Indians, for they are shouting it at the top of their voices. ‘We are India!’ they cry. ‘We are the only race, apart from the British, who have ever established a great Indian Empire! And we want our Empire back! It may not be an Empire of all India—(though some of us have our own ideas about what we shall do when we have the power)—but at least it will be Muslim. It will be as free as we can make it from the taint of Hinduism, which is not only a different religion, but a different culture, a different social system. And this Empire we shall call Pakistan!’

Pakistan! Pakistan! What does it mean—this strange unborn Empire that exists only in the form of a dream? Later on, we shall try to analyse it: in the meantime it is enough to note that the cry of ‘Pakistan’ threatens to drown all others in the Indian babel.

So if the Muslims are ‘Indians,’ it would seem that the Hindus are not. And if the Hindus are ‘Indians’ it would seem that the Muslims are not. These vast bodies of men are so acutely conscious of their differences that they not only refuse to eat together or think together, or pray together, they refuse even to live in the same unit of territory. They want their own geography as well as their own history; they want their own earth as well as their own heaven. On the lips of the vast majority of them such a phrase as Civis Indianus sum would sound grotesque.

III

The light is growing fainter and fainter, and it would seem that with it is fading our chance of meeting the ‘Indian’ whom we are seeking.

But perhaps we are bemused by numbers; perhaps the roar of the millions is drowning the voice of the individual?

Let us therefore try a different method of approach; let us begin at the other end with India’s smallest community, the Parsees. There are less than 90 thousand of them, and of these, nearly half are settled in Bombay. The world at large knows little of the lives led by the Parsees; it has been too busy concentrating its attention on the manner of their deaths. For it is the Parsees, the followers of the prophet Zoroaster, who carry their dead to the Towers of Silence, there to be devoured by the awaiting vultures. It is a dramatic way of leaving the world and—on first thoughts—a rather horrible one. But at least it is clean and uncompromising, if you really believe that the spirit is all and the flesh nothing. And it is the last gesture of charity which a man can make to the earth that has nourished him—to give his body to the fowls of the air, who, after all, are also God’s creatures.

However, this is not a book of the dead but of the living, and if we judge them by the achievements of their lives the Parsees immediately assume a position of importance on the Indian scene, out of all proportion to their numbers. And with this thought, our hopes rise again, for if we are seeking ‘Indians’ we should surely find them now.

Wherever there are riches in India you will find the Parsees—not, let us hasten to add, in the role of vultures but playing a dynamic part in the creation of wealth. To give only one example: the vast network of Tata industries is entirely Parsee, in conception, in execution, and in present-day direction. The firm of Tata’s is industrial India. Its steel works at Jamshedpur, employing 30,000 people, are the largest steel works in the British Empire. Its hydro-electric system, with a capacity of 250,000 horse-power, is the largest unit in the country. Its aircraft industry, in a few years time, may challenge the biggest combines of the West. Tata’s make everything, from gliders to golliwogs, from corkscrews to eau-de-Cologne.

Wherever you find culture in India, you will find the Parsees. They are almost the only patrons of art. They are the only people who have apportioned anything like an adequate part of their wealth to the social services, founding hospitals and libraries, establishing parks and playing grounds. Theirs are the only figures that stand out from the vast desert of mediocrity which is the Indian Press.

India without the Parsees would be like an egg without salt. And without a good deal of its yolk too.

But—and it is a very big ‘but’—we cannot really call them ‘Indians.’ Even if they themselves claimed the title—(and a large number of them do not, preferring to regard themselves as a separate community, living on tolerance)—the vast majority of Indians would deny it to them. They say that the Parsees are really Persians, as their name implies. They always were Persians, and they always will be. And they say it in terms which are by no means polite. For the Parsees have aroused great envy; thousands of fingers are itching to get at their gold. ‘Wait till we are free—you won’t be able to see the Parsees for dust.’ So runs the argument. It is an argument to which the Parsees would do well to pay heed.

IV

And now the darkness is almost complete . . . the darkness of the mountains and the valleys surrounding us, and the darkness of our minds in this search that leads to Nobody.

However, just as there are still a few gleams of gold in the sky so there are still a few rays of hope in our minds. For there are still large communities, running into many millions, which we have not yet considered. For instance, we have not mentioned the Sikhs. Nor the Jains, nor the Buddhists. Nor, for that matter, the Christians. Maybe, among some of these . . . ?

So we make a last effort, beginning with the Sikhs. The Sikhs are among the true aristocrats of India; they are virile and clean-living, swift of brain and body. And in the teaching of Nanak,¹ their first Guru, they have a divinely inspired philosophy. Nanak scourged the Hindu Brahmins as Christ scourged the Pharisees, crying . . . ‘Thou bathest and washest and worshippest stones, but without being imbued with God thou art the filthiest of the filthy.’ In words of unforgettable force he trumpeted the power of God—(‘He can appoint a worm to sovereignty, and reduce an army to ashes’)—and the sufficiency of His love—(‘If it please Thee, rivers flow over dry land and the lotus bloometh in the heavens; if it please Thee, man crosseth the terrible ocean; in Thee I shall dwell in peace, to dwell in Thee is all I wish.’) He was a true mystic, but he was also a man of the people and his teaching, with its simple metaphors of everyday life, burned deep into the peasant heart . . . (‘Evil-mindedness is a low woman; cruelty a butcher’s wife; covetousness is a dog, food obtained by deceit carrion, anger the fire which burns.’)²

But their very devotion to the memory of their great prophet makes of the 5 million Sikhs a race apart. They have never forgotten that they were persecuted by the Moguls, and that the treacherous Emperor Aurungzeb killed the ninth Guru for his refusal to embrace the faith of Islam. Their hostility to the Muslims makes them implacable enemies of the dream Empire of Pakistan, for if the dream were ever realized, the Sikhs, who nearly all live in the Punjab, would find themselves hopelessly isolated and outnumbered, a tiny island of the faithful surrounded by a sea of foes.

‘If you grant Pakistan,’ they cry, ‘we shall set up a separate Sikh State of our own. We shall call it Khalistan, and we shall defend it to the death.’

Civis Indianus sum . . . if we ever find any Indians who say those words with real sincerity, without hypocrisy and without any thought of self-interest, it will not be the Sikhs.

So shall we give it up? Shall we lie back and watch the fireflies gathering in the branches of the tamarind, lighting it up with a, thousand sparkles, till it looks like a gigantic Christmas tree? But the associations of the word ‘Christmas’ reminds us that there is still one faith which we have not considered.

Might this ‘Indian’ for whom we are seeking be a Christian? Might there be something in the supreme teaching of Jesus which caused him to forget these fratricidal hatreds, and to regard himself as a member of one of God’s great families, the Indian family?

We can best answer this question by telling a story.

Not long ago I was sitting in a little Indian restaurant in Madras waiting for a friend who was going to show me photographs of some old churches which he had taken in Goa. Goa is Portuguese territory, and it is very rich in churches of late eighteenth-century baroque. They are frail and fading now, their jewels have long been stolen, and two centuries of Indian suns have bleached the last flecks of colour from their elegant facades; they stand like ghosts on the sea-shore, their windows staring homewards. But though they wilt and crumble they are still thronged with worshippers—Indian converts of long ago who have kept to their old faith.

My friend arrived. His head was bandaged.

‘Hullo! Where d’you get that crack?

He grinned. ‘In the best of places. In church.’

‘In Church?’

He explained. He had been to mass. When the sacred wine was being offered a Christian Hindu noticed that the cup had been handed to a woman of a lower caste than his. He got up and tried to snatch it from here. The woman screamed, the other members of her caste gathered round to protect her, sides were taken, and within a few seconds an unholy row was in progress, with the struggling bodies of Indians reeling backwards and forwards over a pavement stained with blood and wine.

‘You look shocked,’ said my friend.

‘Well, it isn’t a very pretty story.’

‘Oh—but it happens all over India, in every Christian church. Why, down here in the south, the fights were so fierce that they’ve stopped processions down the aisle. People used to tear the banners out of each other’s hands. It’s worst during Holy Communion. We’ve had to put up little brass enclosures for the various castes. Even so, they complain that they’re been polluted by drinking from the same cup.’

Pollution—from the cup of Christ?

Civis Indianus sum!

The search is off.

v

And now, it seemed a little less dark, for the stars were out and the fireflies were having a gala night in the tamarind; the whole tree shimmered as though its leaves had been dipped in liquid silver. To make it still gayer there was a slip of a moon hanging on the lower branches, like a gaudy toy.

Footsteps on the hillside. My host appeared, followed by a group of coolies. All of them had the pure Chinese cast of features which is typical of Northern Bengal. (Were they ‘Indians’? But no—we’ve given up asking that question.) He gave the coolies some directions and they wandered up the mountain path, humming to themselves in a monotonous chant.

‘Well,’ said my host, ‘we pulled him through—the snakebitten young gentleman. But it was a near thing.’ He reached for the decanter. ‘Chota or barra?’¹

‘On the barra side, I think.’

‘Your Hindi’s come on in the last year.’

‘You should hear my Tamil.² To say nothing of my Bengali.³

‘It’s a strange country, isn’t it?’

‘Country, did you say, or countries?’

He smiled at me in the half-light. ‘You sound as though you’d made up your answer to my question.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s in the negative?’

‘It is.’

‘Well—you’ve learned something; and you’ve learned it sooner than most Englishmen.’

‘Maybe I have. But it’s a damned unsatisfactory answer, when you come to think of it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, I want to write a book. And it’s an exhausting business, writing a book on a negative note.’

‘But supposing you have no alternative?’

He leant forward, and spoke very earnestly. ‘Supposing you come to the conclusion that India is a whole series of negatives? You’ve already told me about your search for modern art . . . and how you found nothing. You’ve met dozens of leading personalities in the political world, and you yourself told me that none of them had any really creative proposals.¹ Isn’t that another way of saying that their favourite word is ‘No’ when it ought to be ‘Yes’?

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘But isn’t it true? Isn’t India one gigantic series of No’s, from start to finish?’

‘I’m too tired to answer abstract questions like that.’

‘But you’ll have to answer them if your book’s going to be of any value. ‘What’s more, you’ll have to find the reason why.’

‘Is there a reason why?’

‘I think so. But it’s not up to me to give it. After all, it’s your book.

Yes, worse luck, it is.

So perhaps we had better begin to get on with it.

¹ In spite of the much publicized declarations of Mr. Gandhi and the strenuous afforts of their leader. Dr. Ambedkar, to say nothing of British legislation, the position of the Untouchables in India is still almost as deplorable as it has always been.

¹ Born 1469, died 1546.

² Thus spoke Guru Nanak, compiled by Six Jogendra Singh (Oxford University Press).

¹‘Large or small?’

² The language of about 30 millions in the South.

³ Spoken by 50 millions. These languages differ from one another, and from Hindi in toto.

¹ This was before I met Jinnah.

CHAPTER II

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

WE may as well begin at the top, by going to stay with the Viceroy.

It will not teach us much about ‘India,’ but it is an instructive experience in other ways. Besides, it was my first port of call, and there is a faint hope that we may be able to keep to some sort of rough chronological sequence. This is desirable, not because we are unrolling a pictorial panorama but because we are tracing an intellectual development. India gets into your system all too soon; the first shocks wear off with astounding rapidity. The flaming blossoms of the golden mohur trees, which scorched your eyes when you first saw them, soon lose their glory; to-day you do not even turn your head whereas yesterday you stared and stared.

It is the same with the horrors. Indians are not deliberately cruel to animals, they have a natural feeling of kinship and affection for them. But their ignorance and poverty are indirectly responsible for appalling suffering. I had not been in India ten minutes before I saw my first typical skeleton horse, limping and staggering down the road, and eventually plunging into the gutter, a quivering mass of pain and sores. When you see that sort of thing for the first time you do something about it. What you do is usually very silly and quite useless, engendering heat, worrying the police, and in no way helping the horse. So you learn, out of bitter necessity, to harden your heart.¹ With the beggars too, you hold your hand. Your first visit to a railway station, the favourite rendezvous of India’s beggars, is like a trip through the galleries of those waxen monsters that used to be exhibited by the showmen at the great Prater fair in Vienna. Here are lepers, and tertiary syphilitics, and blind children—not born blind, but blinded by their parents so that they may prove a source of future income in the beggar market. Here are the St. Vitus dancers, real and bogus, some of them