India

T
HE LIGHTS OF
Bombay airport showed that it had been raining; and the aeroplane, as it taxied in, an hour or two after midnight, blew the monsoon puddles over the concrete. This was in mid-August; and officially (though this monsoon was to be prolonged) the monsoon still had two weeks to go. In the small, damp terminal building there were passengers from an earlier flight, by Gulf Air. The Gulf was the Persian Gulf, with the oil states. And among the passengers were Indian businessmen in suits, awaiting especially careful search by the customs men; some Japanese; a few Arabs in the desert costumes which now, when seen in airports and foreign cities, are like the white gowns of a new and suddenly universal priesthood of pure money; and two turbaned and sunburnt Sikhs, artisans, returning to India after their work in an oil state, with cardboard suitcases and similar new shoes in yellow suede.

There is a new kind of coming and going in the world these days. Arabia, lucky again, has spread beyond its deserts. And India is again at the periphery of this new Arabian world, as much as it had been in the eighth century, when the new religion of Islam spread in all directions and the Arabs – led, it is said, by a seventeen-year-old boy – overran the Indian kingdom of Sind. That was only an episode, the historians say. But Sind is not a part of India today; India has shrunk since that Arab incursion. No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters. Five hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sind, Moslem rule was established in Delhi as the rule of foreigners, people apart; and foreign rule – Moslem for the first five hundred years, British for the last 150 – ended in Delhi only in 1947.

Indian history telescopes easily; and in India this time, in a northern city, I was to meet a young man, a civil servant, who said his Arab ancestors had come to India eight centuries before, during the great Islamic push of the twelfth century. When I asked where he lived, he said, ‘My family has been living in Delhi for five hundred years.’ And what in Europe would have sounded like boasting wasn’t boasting in India. The family was a modest one, had always been modest, their surname, Qureshi, indicating the religious functions they had performed throughout the centuries. The entry of a member of the family into the Administrative Service was a break with the static past, a step up after eight hundred years. The young man compared his family with those of the Moslem masons and stone-cutters, descendants of the builders of the Mughal palaces and mosques, who in Delhi still sat around Shah Jehan’s great mosque, the Jama Masjid, craftsmen as needy and as ragged as their ancestors had been, each man displaying the tools of the craft he had inherited, waiting to be hired, ready to build anybody a new Delhi.

India in the late twentieth century still seems so much itself, so rooted in its own civilization, it takes time to understand that its independence has meant more than the going away of the British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far older defeat; that the purely Indian past died a long time ago. And already, with the Emergency, it is necessary to fight against the chilling sense of a new Indian dissolution.

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India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far. My ancestors migrated from the Gangetic plain a hundred years ago; and the Indian community they and others established in Trinidad, on the other side of the world, the community in which I grew up, was more homogeneous than the Indian community Gandhi met in South Africa in 1893, and more isolated from India.

India, which I visited for the first time in 1962, turned out to be a very strange land. A hundred years had been enough to wash me clean of many Indian religious attitudes; and without these attitudes the distress of India was – and is – almost insupportable. It has taken me much time to come to terms with the strangeness of India, to define what separates me from the country; and to understand how far the ‘Indian’ attitudes of someone like myself, a member of a small and remote community in the New World, have diverged from the attitudes of people to whom India is still whole.

An inquiry about India – even an inquiry about the Emergency – has quickly to go beyond the political. It has to be an inquiry about Indian attitudes; it has to be an inquiry about the civilization itself, as it is. And though in India I am a stranger, the starting point of this inquiry – more than might appear in these pages – has been myself. Because in myself, like the split-second images of infancy which some of us carry, there survive, from the family rituals that lasted into my childhood, phantasmal memories of old India which for me outline a whole vanished world.

I know, for instance, the beauty of sacrifice, so important to the Aryans. Sacrifice turned the cooking of food into a ritual: the first cooked thing – usually a small round of unleavened bread, a miniature, especially made – was always for the fire, the god. This was possible only with an open fireplace; to have to give up the custom – if I attempt now to expand on what to a child was only a passing sense of wrongness – was to abjure a link with the earth and the antiquity of the earth, the beginning of things. The morning rituals before breakfast, the evening ritual before the lighting of the lamps: these went, one by one, links with a religion that was also like a sense of the past, so that awe in the presence of the earth and the universe was something that had to be rediscovered later, by other means.

The customs of my childhood were sometimes mysterious. I didn’t know it at the time, but the smooth pebbles in the shrine in my grandmother’s house, pebbles brought by my grandfather all the way from India with his other household goods, were phallic emblems: the pebbles, of stone, standing for the more blatant stone columns. And why was it necessary for a male hand to hold the knife with which a pumpkin was cut open? It seemed to me at one time – because of the appearance of a pumpkin halved downward – that there was some sexual element in the rite. The truth is more frightening, as I learned only recently, near the end of this book. The pumpkin, in Bengal and adjoining areas, is a vegetable substitute for a living sacrifice: the male hand was therefore necessary. In India I know I am a stranger; but increasingly I understand that my Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past.

S
OMETIMES OLD INDIA
, the old, eternal India many Indians like to talk about, does seem just to go on. During the last war some British soldiers, who were training in chemical warfare, were stationed in the far south of the country, near a thousand-year-old Hindu temple. The temple had a pet crocodile. The soldiers, understandably, shot the crocodile. They also in some way – perhaps by their presence alone – defiled the temple. Soon, however, the soldiers went away and the British left India altogether. Now, more than thirty years after that defilement, and in another season of emergency, the temple has been renovated and a new statue of the temple deity is being installed.

Until they are given life and invested with power, such statues are only objects in an image-maker’s yard, their value depending on size, material, and the carver’s skill. Hindu idols or images come from the old world; they embody difficult and sometimes sublime concepts, and they have to be made according to certain rules. There can be no development now in Hindu iconography, though the images these days, under the influence of the Indian cinema and cinema posters, are less abstract than their ancient originals, and more humanly pretty and doll-like. They stand lifeless in every way in the image-maker’s showroom. Granite and marble – and an occasional commissioned bust of someone like a local inspector of
police, with perhaps a real spectacle frame over his blank marble eyes – suggest at first the graveyard, and a people in love with death. But this showroom is a kind of limbo, with each image awaiting the life and divinity that will come to it with purchase and devotion, each image already minutely flawed so that its divine life, when it comes, shall not be terrible and overwhelming.