Authors: Tavleen Singh
Durbar
First published in 2012 by Hachette India
(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd)
An Hachette UK company
www.hachetteindia.com
This ebook published in 2012
(Text) Copyright © 2012 Tavleen Singh
Tavleen Singh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be copied, reproduced, downloaded, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or digital format other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Print edition ISBN 978-93-5009-444-0
Ebook edition ISBN 978-93-5009-452-5
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her and have been verified to the extent possible. The publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
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Originally typeset in Sabon 10/13.6
by Eleven Arts, New Delhi
durbar
noun historical
the court of an Indian ruler.
a public reception held by an Indian prince or a British governor or viceroy in India.
Contents–
ORIGIN
Urdu, from Persian
darbr
‘court’.
W
hen I was sixteen years old I first became aware of being a foreigner in my own country. It happened on a train. The incident remains so fresh in my mind that I can almost smell the pine-scented air that came through the open windows of the second-class compartment with its frayed green Rexine seats. I was coming down from Simla at the end of the summer term in St Bede’s College and with me were other girls from my college. We were on our way home to Delhi for the holidays. At a station on the way to Kalka a group of boys entered our compartment. They were what we called ‘Hindi-speaking types’ and they tried to attract our attention by making cheeky remarks and singing romantic songs from Hindi movies.
We ignored them at first but when their efforts to draw our attention became a nuisance someone in our group stood up and reprimanded them in English. She told them they had no manners and that they had been so badly brought up that there was no point in trying to teach them any. They clearly did not understand a word of what she said but when she finished her lecture on etiquette one of them said with a sneer on his face, in refined Hindustani, ‘
Angrez chale gaye, apni aulaad chhod gaye
.’ (The English have gone but they left their progeny behind.)
The other girls were not bothered by this remark but it troubled me enough to remember it more than forty years later. At the time I looked around at the girls I was travelling with and became aware of how very ‘foreign’ we were. We wore Western clothes and talked of Western things in English. In the train compartment that day we had been discussing a new record by Elvis Presley and a new Hollywood film. Those who
brought books to read on the long train journey were reading Georgette Heyer and Agatha Christie. I liked to think of myself as a more serious reader and had brought with me a beautifully bound copy of the first Russian novel I ever read. It was
And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov that my roommate, a woman of high literary tastes, had gifted me for my birthday that year. I read it zealously without understanding the story or its context, and without finding it strange that I should be reading a Russian novel without ever having read an Indian one even in translation. If I had been asked to name a single book in Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi that I had read I would have had to admit that I could not read in any of these languages and that the only Indian author I had heard of was Munshi Premchand. It was the way it was in those first decades after the British Raj ended.