India (18 page)

My taxi-driver that evening was a Sikh. He had been a sportsman in his time and still had the sportsman’s presence. He knew foreign countries by the sportsmen they produced, and he spoke English well; he was a diligent reader of the newspapers. He owned his taxi and had a place in the taxi rank of the hotel. I
thought he was better off than most people in India. But his thoughts were of migration. He wanted to go to one of the Arab gulf states. He had paid a large sum of money to a middleman, a ‘contractor’. His papers were almost in order now, he said; all he was waiting for, from the contractor, was his ‘no objection’ certificate. Yet the thought of the large sum he had paid to the contractor worried him. He spoke like a man who knew he had waited too long and had begun to fear that he had been cheated.

For so many people India seemed to have gone wrong; so many people in independent India had become fugitives or sought that status. And this was in Delhi, a migrant city in the better-off north, where people were awakened and energetic, and for whom India ought to have gone right. The land stretched a thousand miles to the east and the south, through the overpopulated Gangetic plain and the rock plateau of the Deccan. At the end of that bad evening it seemed barely imaginable – the huts of the landless along the Poona-Bombay road, the child labourers of Bihar among the blond hanks of jute, the chawls and squatters’ settlements in central Bombay, the starved squatters in bright cotton slipping in and out of the stone ruins of Vijayanagar, the famine-wasted bodies just outside Jaipur City. It was like a calamity that no one could come to terms with. I was without the Indian defences, which were also the attitudes that contributed to the calamity. I could only wait for the morning.

An immovable government, one-party rule, a democratic system which engaged only a fraction of the population, a decadent Gandhianism expressed in the white homespun of the Congress
politician, no longer the sign of service but the uniform of power, the very sight of which could enrage, and now the Emergency, a censored press, secret arrests: it was easy to enter into the hysteria of the opposition man.

But it was also easy to understand why the revolution had evaporated. The leaders, offering what they saw as unassailable Gandhian truths, offering themselves as so many Gandhis, were misled by the apparent answering fervour of the crowds. But the India of 1975 was not the India of 1930 and the Dandi Salt March. Political action couldn’t be concentrated in a single symbolic act (picking up a handful of salt from the shore at Dandi), a religious act, a ritual cleansing of a subject and defiled land. The needs of 1975 were more worldly and difficult. India wasn’t to be cleansed again; it was (as Mrs Gandhi intuited) to be cleaned up and got going; it was to be seen to be offering worldly opportunities. The very fierceness of the Emergency answered the public mood, assuaged old frustrations. The crowds went home in peace.

And the Gandhianism of a man like Mr Desai was as exhibitionist and hollow as the Gandhianism of the men he opposed; it offered nothing. The sacrifice was for others (those corpses outside Mrs Gandhi’s house); Mr Desai (according to that interview he gave to the foreign journalist) saw himself as secure, immune even from arrest. The revolution was an expression of rage and rejection; but it was a revolution without ideas. It was an emotional outburst, a wallow; it would not have taken India forward; and the revolutionary crowds knew that. At its core, absurdly elevated to a political programme, was a subtle distortion of the old Gandhian call to action. At its core were the old Indian attitudes of defeat, the idea of withdrawal, a turning away from the world, a sinking back into the past, the rediscovery of old ways, ‘simplicity’.

Simplicity: it was the obsession that evening in Delhi of the opposition man, and it made discussion impossible. Simplicity was the old India and Gandhi. It was the opposite of everything that independent India had committed itself to, and as a motive for
political-moral protest was inexhaustible. Everything that had been done was wrong; nothing was right. The opposite of simplicity was the power politics that had come to India; the opposite of simplicity was repression, concentration camps, Hitler. This was the direction in which India was going, and it was better for this India to be smashed into little bits. Czechoslovakia was a small country: had Czechoslovakia suffered? This view of recent history was startling. But he was a wounded man; and his Gandhian simplicity – like Mr Desai’s – had become indistinguishable from a primitivist rage.

His simplicity was something that could be defined only by negatives. It was a turning away from the idea of the modern state. (Defence? Who would or could conquer India? And this from a responsible man, a maker of opinion, in just the twenty-ninth year of full Indian Independence, after a thousand years of invasions and conquests!) Simplicity was, above all, a turning away from the idea of industrial development, the idea of the machine. The Gandhian spinning wheel and the handloom would have saved the peasantry and kept India secure in its villages. (Such engineering effort, though, such a need of electrical power, such organization, such a network of brick-lined canals, to take drinking water for the first time in history to the desert villages of Haryana in the north: and not water for every dwelling – that was impossible – but one or two standpipes per village.)

But perhaps this idea of simplicity – though backed up in the Indian way by quotations from Western sources, and presented as a basis for political action – was something more debilitated, something older. Perhaps it was no more than a turning away from the difficulties of a development that had been seen to be impossible, a consequent intellectual surrender, a religious giving up, a yielding to old Indian fantasy: the mystical sense of the Indian past, the idea of eternal India forever spontaneously having its rebirth and growth, the conversion of the destitution and serfdom of rural India (and the heavy-footed vultures squabbling in the rain over the bloated carcasses of dead animals) into a memory of pastoral: a
memory of the time, so recent, just out of reach, when people knew the undefiled gods, and the gods gave brahmins all the answers, and the bull drew the plough and the cow gave milk, and the manure of these animals enriched the fields, and the stalks of the harvest thatched the simple huts of the pure.

That Indian past! That fantasy of wholeness and purity, confusing the present! Indian opposition groups in London have circulated a text of the speech Jaya Prakash Narayan delivered the evening before his arrest. It is quite different in tone from the pious venom of Mr Desai’s interview that same day with a foreign journalist. The Narayan speech explains and informs; it is the speech of a constitutionalist who has assembled his facts and references; it quotes the Indian Supreme Court judges and Sir Ivor Jennings. But it is also the speech of an Indian political campaigner addressing a mass audience; and there is a philosophical-historical passage which has to be quoted in full.

The passage that begins with an antifascist call (and gives India a working class, almost as if to equip it for that modern struggle) quickly becomes less straightforward. India becomes the ancient and sacred land of Bharat, and its past is mystically invoked: leaping the defilement of the British period, the speaker looks back to the eighteenth-century Maratha bandit kings, glances at the Moslem conquerors (the Mughal, the Pathan), jumps a thousand years to the purely Indian Guptas
(AD
320–600), and goes back a further five hundred years to the Mauryas (322–185
BC)
. Through all this – empires, achievement, chaos, conquest, plunder, the steady loss of Indian territory to the world of Islam – India is said to have kept her soul, to have preserved the democratic ways of her village republics, her ‘people’s government’. Democracy hasn’t come to India from an alien source; India has had it all along. To rediscover democracy, India has only to rediscover herself.

But then Narayan turns this rediscovery into something more mysterious. ‘Gandhiji always said that
Swaraj
means
Ramraj.
’
Swaraj
means self-rule, self-government; it was the word used in the British days for Indian Independence.
Ramraj
is something else. It is Rama’s rule, a fantasy of bliss. Rama is the hero of the
Ramayana
, the sacred Hindu epic. This epic echoes events of 1000
BC
, was composed or set down (by a named poet) at about the same time as the
Aeneid
, but (unlike the
Aeneid
) has always been a living poem, more than literature, possessed by all Hindus, however illiterate or depressed, from childhood. Rama incarnates all the Hindu Aryan virtues; he is at once a man and God; his rule – after exile and sorrow – is the rule of God on earth. The narrative of his adventures fills the imagination of the child; and no Hindu can forget that early closeness to figures and events he later learns to be divine, to be legend and not legend.

Ramraj
is something the Hindu always knows he has lost: in one way remote, impossible, just a word, in another way only as remote as childhood, just out of reach. From
Punjabi Century
(1963), the autobiography of one of India’s most distinguished business
administrators, Prakash Tandon, we can get a fuller idea of the
Ramraj
Gandhi offered in 1919, at the start of his Indian agitation, and of the political effect then, at a time of high emotion, even on a professional family. ‘These visitors,’ Tandon writes,

Nearly sixty years later, in 1975, Jaya Prakash Narayan’s appeal is the same.
‘Swaraj
means
Ramraj.’
We have gone far beyond the Indian ‘working class’ and the anti-fascist struggle, beyond political systems and the contemplation of the past; we have gone back to the beginning of the Hindu world, to ‘nostalgic memories’. We have gone back to the solace of incantation, and back to Gandhi as to the only Indian truth. As though Britain still ruled in India; as though Gandhi hadn’t been created by specific circumstances; as though the Indian political situation remains unchanging, as eternal as India itself, requiring always the same ideal solution. The irony is that the Indian tyranny against which Jaya Prakash Narayan is protesting, and the sterility of contemporary Indian political life – immovable power on one side, and on the other side frustrated and obsessional ‘Gandhian’ protest, mixing political and historical fantasy with religious exaltation – the irony is that both tyranny and political sterility were ensured by the very success of Gandhi.

It was Gandhi who gave the Congress Party a mass base, a rural base. Four out of five Indians live in villages; and the Congress remains the only party in India (except for certain regional parties) which has a rural organization; it cannot lose. The opposition parties, even a revivalist Hindu party like the Jan Sangh, the National Party, are city parties. In the villages the Congress is still Gandhi’s party; and the village tyrannies that have been established through nearly thirty years of unbroken Congress rule cannot now be easily removed. In the countryside the men to watch for are the men in white Gandhian homespun. They are the men of power, the politicians; their authority, rooted in the antique reverences of caste and clan, has been ennobled by Independence and democracy.

Like the two who were introduced to me, late one afternoon, at a great irrigation scheme in the south, as ‘farmers’. I had asked – after lunch and visits to offices and viewing points – to visit fields and see farmers; and the irrigation administrator, in spite of his jacket and tie (emblems of his high administrative rank), became nervous, like a man fearful of trespassing. The ragged men gathering silently around us, obviously connected with the work of the land, were not farmers, as I had thought. What were they? They were labourers, less than labourers, nothing; the administrator seemed not to see them. A government jeep was sent to get the two farmers the administrator said he knew; and we waited for a long time in a damp timber yard, in the dying light of a rainy, overcast day, the crowd around us growing, until the farmers arrived, men in their early fifties, hopping nimbly off the jeep in full Congress uniform of white Gandhian homespun, one man freshly bathed and speaking fluent English and with a big wristwatch, the other man tall and pale and paunchy, with a Gandhi cap: not farmers at all, but landowners and politicians, rulers of the district, acting out for the visitor the democratic charade of being farmers and living each man off the income of six acres of land: taking me, after all that waiting, just across the road from the timber yard to a small, over-irrigated field, now in darkness, where their white homespun yet glowed:
around us the serfs, underfed, landless, nothing, less than people, dark wasted faces and dark rags fading into the dusk.