India (14 page)

The author, U. R. Anantamurti, is a serious literary man. He teaches English to postgraduate students at Mysore University, which has a lively English department; and he has also taught in the United States. His academic background seems a world away from the society he describes in the novel; and it is hard to assess his attitude to that society. Knowingly or unknowingly, Anantamurti has portrayed a barbaric civilization, where the books, the laws, are buttressed by magic, and where a too elaborate social organization is unquickened by intellect or creativity or ideas of moral responsibility (except to the self in its climb to salvation). These people are all helpless, disadvantaged, easily unbalanced; the civilization they have inherited has long gone sour; living instinctive lives, crippled by rules (‘I didn’t try to solve it for myself. I depended on God, on the old lawbooks. Isn’t this precisely why we have created the Books?’), they make up a society without a head.

References to buses and newspapers and the Congress Party indicate that the novel is set in modern times. But the age seems remote; and certainly Gandhi doesn’t seem to have walked this way. The Acharya’s anguish about his true nature, though presented in religious terms, is bound up with the crudest ideas of pollution and caste and power. Brahmins must be brahmins, the Acharya reasons at one stage: otherwise ‘righteousness’ will not prevail. ‘Won’t the lower castes get out of hand? In this decadent age, common men follow the right path out of fear – if that were destroyed, where could we find the strength to uphold the world?’ It is an aspect of this righteousness that when an untouchable woman begs for a gift of tobacco, the brahmin woman should throw it out into the street, as to a dog. In this way pollution is avoided, and righteousness and fear maintained.

‘We Indians use the outer reality to preserve the continuity of the self.’ Sudhir Kakar’s analysis of Gandhi’s stupor in England in 1888 is remarkably like Anantamurti’s wonderful description of the Acharya’s wanderings in the world. Gandhi is preserving his purity, his idea of the self, in the midst of strangeness. The Acharya is collecting impurities; the account he will present to the brotherhood is not an account of what he has seen, an account of the world he has decided he must enter, but an account of the pollutions he has endured. In both men there is the same limitation of vision and response, the same self-absorption.

But there is an important difference. The Acharya is imprisoned in his dead civilization; he can only define himself within it. He has not, like Gandhi in England, had to work out his faith and decide where – in the wider world – he stands. Gandhi, maturing in alien societies, defensively withdrawing into the self, sinking into his hard-won convictions and vows, becoming more obstinate with age, and always (from his autobiography) seemingly headed for lunacy, is constantly rescued and redefined by external events, the goadings of other civilizations: the terror and strangeness of England, the need to pass the law examinations, the racial pressures of South Africa, British authoritarianism in India (made clear by his experience of the democratic ways of South Africa).

When Gandhi returns to India for good, in his mid-forties, he is fully made; and even at the end, when he is politically isolated and almost all holy man, the pattern of his foreign-created mahatmahood holds. In the turmoil of Independence – the killings, the mass migrations between India and Pakistan, the war in Kashmir – he is still, at the age of seventy-eight, obsessed with the vow of sexual abstinence he had taken forty years before at the time of the Zulu rebellion in South Africa. But he is roused by the Hindu-Moslem massacres in Bengal and goes to the district of Noakhali. Sad last pilgrimage: embittered people scatter broken glass on the roads he is to walk. Seventeen years before, on the Salt March, at the other end of India, the poor had sometimes strewn his path with cool green
leaves. Now, in Bengal, he has nothing to offer except his presence, and he knows it. Yet he is heard to say to himself again and again,
‘Kya karun? Kya karun?
What shall I do?’ At this terrible moment his thoughts are of action, and he is magnificent.

The Acharya will never know this anguish of frustration. Embracing the ‘demon world’, deliberately living out his newly discovered nature as he deliberately lived out the old, he will continue to be self-absorbed; and his self-absorption will be as sterile as it had been when he was a man of goodness. No idea will come to him, as it came to Gandhi, of the imperfections of the world, of a world that might in some way be put right. The times are decadent, the Acharya thinks (or thought, when he was a man of goodness). But that is only because the lower castes are losing fear and getting out of hand; and the only answer is a greater righteousness, a further withdrawal into the self, a further turning away from the world, a striving after a more instinctive life, where the perception of reality is even weaker and the mind ‘just one awareness, one wonder’.

Restful to the outsider, the visitor, this ideal of diminishing perception. But India has invested in necessary change, and a changing society requires something else. At a time of change, according to Sudhir Kakar, the underdeveloped ego can be a ‘dangerous luxury’. Cities grow; people travel out of their ancestral districts; the ties of clan and family are loosened. The need for sharper perception increases; and perception has to become ‘an individual rather than a social function’.

This threatens everything; it unbalances people in a way outsiders can hardly understand. Caste and clan and security and faith and shallow perception all go together; one cannot be altered or developed without damaging the rest. How can anyone used from infancy to the security of the group, and the security of a minutely regulated life, become an individual, a man on his own? He will be drowned in the immensity of the unknown world; he will be lost. He will be like the Acharya in Anantamurti’s novel, tormented by
his formlessness. ‘A piece of string in the wind, a cloud taking on shapes according to the wind. I’ve become a thing. By an act of will, I’ll become human again.’

For the Acharya there is a sanctioned way to becoming human again; he has only to make a choice. But how does a man become an individual when there is no path, and no knowledge even of the goal? How can men learn to presume? Men can only stumble through events, holding on to the idea of the self. When caste and family simplify relationships, and the sanctity of the laws cannot be doubted, when magic buttresses the laws, and the epics and legends satisfy the imagination, and astrologers know the future anyway, men cannot easily begin to observe and analyse. And how, it might be asked, can Indians face reality without some filter of faith or magic? How often in India – at every level – rational conversation about the country’s problems trails away into talk of magic, of the successful prophecies of astrologers, of the wisdom of auspicious hours, of telepathic communications, and actions taken in response to some inner voice! It is always there, this knowledge of the other, regulated world, undermining, or balancing, intellect and the beginnings of painful perception.

When men cannot observe, they don’t have ideas; they have obsessions. When people live instinctive lives, something like a collective amnesia steadily blurs the past. Few educated Indians now remember or acknowledge their serenity in 1962, before the Chinese war and the end of the Nehru era, when Independence could still be enjoyed as personal dignity alone, and it could be assumed, from the new possession of dignity by so many, that India had made it or was making it. Few can interpret the increasing frenzy of the country since then, through the Pakistan war of 1965, the consequent financial distress, the drought and famine of 1967, the long agony of the Bangladesh crisis of 1971.

India is poor: the fact has only recently begun to be observed in India, with the great growth in population, the choking of the cities, the political assertiveness of industrial workers. To many
Indians, however, poverty, just discovered, also seems to have just been created. It is, bizarrely, one of the charges most often made against Mrs Gandhi: her failure to remove poverty, as she promised in 1971: that very poverty which, until the other day, was regarded by everyone else as a fact of Indian life, and holy, a cause for pious Gandhian pride.

A famous Indian politician, in his time a man of great power, once almost prime minister, said to a foreign interviewer just before the Emergency: ‘Here there’s no rice, there’s no wheat … Until five years ago a family used to buy at least twenty pounds of cereals a month … We built factories too … and machinery we even managed to export.… Now we have to import everything once more.’ Did he really believe what he said? No rice, no wheat, everything imported? Did he really believe in that picture of a recent richer past? The chances are that he did. He is a Gandhian, and will not consciously distort the truth. He sits at his spinning wheel every day: the Gandhian spinning wheel no longer a means of livelihood for the dispossessed, or a symbol of labour and brotherhood with the poor, but a sacred tool, an aid to thought (as with this politician) or (as with others) a yogic means of stilling the waves of the mind, an aid to mental vacuity. To know the past (when he had been a man of power) the old politician had only to consult himself, his heart. There he saw quite clearly his own fulfilment and – since the outer world matters only in so far as it affects the inner – he could claim without disingenuousness that there had been a time when things were going well with the country.

Individual obsessions coalesce into political movements; and in the last ten years or so these movements of protest have become wilder. Many of these movements look back to the past, which they reinterpret to suit their needs. Some, like the Shiv Sena in Bombay (looking back two and a half centuries to the period of Maratha glory) and the Dravidian movement in the south (seeking to revenge itself, after three thousand years, on the Aryan north), have positive regenerating effects. Others, like the Anand Marg, fusing
disparate obsessions, asserting caste and violence and sexual laxity as if in an inversion of Gandhianism, are the grossest kind of Hindu cult: a demonstration, like others in the past, of the ease with which Hinduism, striving after internal continuity and calm, stripping itself of intellect and the need for intellect, can decline into barbarism.

A party which seeks a nuclear armoury for India, and combines that with a programme for protecting the holy cow (free fodder for cows, homes for old cows), might at first be dismissed as a joke. But it isn’t a joke. This party is the Jan Sangh, the National Party. It is the best-organized opposition party; with its emphasis on Hindu power, it touches many Hindu hearts, and it has a large middle-class following in the cities; for some years it controlled the Delhi municipality. In the 1971 elections one of its candidates in Delhi ran purely on the cow issue.

It might all seem only part of the quaintness of India. It is in fact an aspect of the deep disturbance of India at a time of difficult change, when many men, like the Acharya in Anantamurti’s novel, find themselves thrown out into the world and formless, and strive, in the only ways open to them, to become human again.

With the Emergency some of these parties have been banned and their leaders imprisoned, with many others; and people outside who are concerned about the rule of law in India have sometimes been disconcerted by the causes they have found themselves sponsoring. In India, where the problems are beyond comprehension, the goals have to be vague. The removal of poverty, the establishment of
justice: these, however often stated now, are like abstractions. People’s obsessions are more immediate.

One opposition pamphlet now being circulated is about the torture of political prisoners in Indian jails. The torture, it must be said, is not of the systematized South American variety; it is more an affair of random brutality. But the power of the police in India is now unlimited, and the pamphlet doesn’t exaggerate. It leaves out only the fact that there has always been torture of this sort in Indian jails. Torture, like poverty, is something about India that Indians have just discovered.

There is something else about the pamphlet. It lists a number of strange things as tortures. Somebody’s moustache was shaved off; many people were beaten with shoes and made to walk the public streets with shoes on their heads; some people had their faces blackened and were paraded in the bazaar in cycle-rickshaws; one university professor ‘was pushed from side to side with smearing remarks’. These are not what are usually thought of as tortures; they are caste pollutions, more permanently wounding, and a greater cause for hysteria, than any beating up. Black is a colour horrible to the Indo-Aryan; the moustache is an important caste emblem, and untouchables can be killed for wearing their moustaches curling up rather than drooping down; shoes are made of leather and tread the polluted earth. Almost without knowing it, the pamphlet confuses its causes: democracy, the rule of law, and humanitarianism merge in caste outrage. Men are so easily thrown back into the self, so easily lose the wider view. In this land of violence and cruelty, in the middle of a crisis that threatens the intellectual advance India has begun to make, the underdeveloped ego is still capable of an alarming innocence.

A
T A DINNER
party in Delhi, a young foreign academic, describing what was most noticeable about the crowds he had seen in Bombay on his Indian holiday, said with a giggle: ‘They were doing their “potties” on the street.’ He was adding to what his Indian wife had said with mystical gravity: she saw people only having their being. She was middle-class and well connected. He was shallow and brisk and common, enjoying his pickings, swinging happily from branch to low branch in the grove of Academe. But the couple were well matched in an important way. Her Indian blindness to India, with its roots in caste and religion, was like his foreigner’s easy disregard. The combination is not new; it has occurred again and again in the last thousand years of Indian history, the understanding based on Indian misunderstanding; and India has always been the victim.