Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity Read online

  The same would be true of an Indian language in Europe. I went once to the prestigious St James’s School in fashionable Kensington in London to hear English children from grade one to six recite Sanskrit. The school had acquired a full-time Sanskrit teacher, a pleasant Englishman who had learnt the language at Oxford. The children did a most creditable job, reciting with confidence well-known shlokas from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the Bhagwata Purana. The hall was full of proud and excited parents, and each group got a standing ovation. I sat wondering about the osmosis of culture. Here, in a school in London, were English children reciting lines written thousands of years ago by Indian sages on the banks of the Ganga, to an audience more familiar with the latest Harry Potter film than the intricacies of Hindu metaphysics.

  It must have been equally surreal to hear Indian children reciting Shakespeare to a Bengali-speaking audience in a muggy school on the banks of the Hooghly 300 years ago. The difference, of course, was that they did so in subjugation, while these young British children in blue uniforms and polished shoes were doing it out of choice. For one group it was a novelty, an act of openness, the partaking of another’s culture out of free choice; for the other it was an act of compulsion, the absence of choice, the subversion of their cultural continuity. But whether then or now, and quite apart from the essential difference in the two situations, the very process of cultural exchange has its limitations. I could not but notice how ‘foreign’ the accent of the English children was. For once I, an Indian, was in a position to judge, to evaluate, to see how the ‘copy’ compared with the original. Many of the words were so accented that I had to make an effort to understand them. I could sense the struggle of the children to make their Anglo-Saxon tongues grip the words, and it struck me again how inflexible languages are, and how only those who have no option but to learn someone else’s language begin to believe that it can become theirs.

  My mother was the repository of traditional culture in our home: of our rituals, folklore, songs and language. As a child she was escorted to the Girls’ High School in Allahabad where the medium of education was English; but she studied Indian classical music in college, knew the Ramayana by heart, spoke Bhojpuri, and had learnt from her mother the songs of the soil, the rituals of worship and the social customs of a Hindu home. On Ram Navami and Janamashtami she got up at the crack of dawn to prepare for the puja, cleaning the ceremonial vessels, making the prasad, rearranging the puja room. The lullabies she sang to me were from the folk tales she had grown up with, and she set to music the poems my father wrote, giving each a different raga. When my father had a heart attack, she did an akhand path—a continuous, unbroken recitation—of the Ramayana. But, it was also she who decided to move me from Modern School to St Columba’s. The level of Hindi at Modern School, I distinctly recall her argument, was too high, and it was more important that I learnt English.

  People don’t make cultural choices in a vacuum. There is a context, a background, a set of circumstances that influence the options before us and what we pick from them. Each choice then unleashes a consequence, inexorable, concrete and long lasting. My generation grew up on the stories of the freedom movement, the sacrifices of the freedom fighters, the greatness of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. But the first books I read were Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. I borrowed my first Enid Blyton from the library of the exclusive Gymkhana Club of which my father was a member. The library had no books in Hindi or any of the other Indian languages, and the position is much the same today. Not far from where we lived, and next to Connaught Circus, was the down-heel tenement of Shankar Market, where one bookstore—Ram Gopal Sharma & Sons—loaned out Blyton books. Often, after my father returned from office, we children would persuade him to drive up to Shankar Market so we could borrow books, and my joy knew no bounds if the Enid Blyton I wanted was there. I’ve seen the same delight in children today when they manage to buy the first available copies of the new Harry Potter novel for close to Rs 1000. (It goes without saying that no children’s book by an Indian author, in any language, sells as much or gets as much media space.)

  If an entire generation of the educated elite in a country reads books mostly in a foreign language, and learns about the milieu of that language in direct proportion to its ignorance about its own heritage, is this a tribute to the plurality and cosmopolitanism of our times? Or is there something more serious afoot here? If we are aware of what is being gained, we must also take into account what is being lost. Certainly, the hard-won political independence of the country may not be at stake, but freedom is not only about having one’s own flag and Constitution and Parliament; freedom is as much about re-appropriating your cultural space, of reclaiming your identity, of belonging authentically to where you come from, because without these your articulation of freedom has a synthetic and imitative quality. The great philosopher Osho once made the distinction between organic unity and mechanical unity:

  Have you observed the difference between an organic unity and a mechanical unity? You make a car engine; you can purchase parts from the market and you can fix those parts, and the engine starts functioning like a unity. Or you can purchase parts of a radio from the market and you can fix them, and the radio starts functioning like a unity. Somehow it comes to have a self. No part in itself can function as a radio; all parts together start functioning like a radio, but still the unity is mechanical, forced from the outside. Then you throw seeds into the ground, and those seeds die into the soil and a plant arises. This unity is organic; it is not forced from outside, it was in the seed itself. The seed goes on spreading, goes on gathering a thousand and one things from the earth, from the air, from the sun, from the sky, but the unity is coming from within. The centre comes first, and then the circumference. In a mechanical unity the circumference comes first and then the centre.4

  Colonial rule robbed the educated elite of India of its organic unity. For three hundred years an entire nation and its people became the object of an external curiosity, brown fish swimming around in a bowl held in white hands. A new circumference came into being, but its coordinates were fixed by the rulers, while the organic unity of the seed lay dormant in the soil. The irony is that those who were the victims of this process fell in love with the circumference, and all its borrowed plumes and transplanted paraphernalia, and developed a sense of heenta, of inferiority about their own culture. If you ask educated Indians a question in Hindi or their mother tongue, more often than not they will reply in English, lest you think that they don’t know the language. The impact of this sense of inferiority, of denial and devaluation of what is one’s own in preference for what was imposed, continues to be felt in every sphere of creative expression: art, architecture, academics, music, sports, literature and language. Reservoirs of organic refinement exist, but there is a predisposition, on a national scale, to borrow and to mimic, to judge one’s own self-esteem by the touchstones of another’s culture. The colonial empires of the past succeeded not merely in the physical subjugation of the ruled; their real success lay in the colonization of the mind and, in this respect, the British were perhaps the most successful.

  In 1985, when I was in my early thirties, I wrote a biography of the great nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. In the Preface to the book I explained what prompted me to write the book:

  Some years ago, I went to a well-known bookshop in Delhi and asked for a book on Ghalib. I was told they had none. A search in some other bookshops yielded a few extended booklets, mostly translations into English of some verses of his Urdu Diwan. I found this situation very strange. It was like going to a bookshop in London and being told that they had no books on Yeats or Eliot, given that in Northern India, especially, Ghalib is a household name; his Urdu verses tend to crop up in everyday conversation … But the example of the bookshop that did not stock Ghalib is only one indication of the cultural malaise that stalks our times. I find it interesting that Ghalib, or for that matter so much else of what constitutes our cultural
heritage, has survived today in spite of the post-1947 generation. Most people of my age in India—and I am no exception—have grown up as cultural orphans: they have learnt neither Sanskrit nor Urdu and so remain (sometimes sheepishly) incurious about a cultural heritage that may soon dry up due to the indifference of their response. This book, therefore, is not just an act of homage to a great man. It is, at a deeply personal level, an act of penance and a pilgrimage, an effort to overcome in my own life the sense of inadequacy many of my age have felt growing up in such culturally nondescript times.

  I did my penance, but I had no option but to do it in English, since by now it had become my first language. Of course, writing in English then, as now, is a passport to success. Penguin India, which had just opened shop in Delhi, published the book. It was widely and favourably reviewed and attracted nationwide notice, because the English media was what the elite read. My boss then, a senior and respected member of the diplomatic service, who represented India with distinction in more than one country, wanted to review it. He was the same person who often whispered to me on the intercom: ‘I say, old chap, there are some UMTs and HMTs sitting with me. Do you think you can take care of them?’ UMT stood for Urdu Medium Type and HMT for Hindi Medium Type. He was perhaps an extreme example of what had not changed in post-colonial India, but his approach to the HMTs and the UMTs was quite representative of the attitudes of the anglicized middle and upper classes.

  Sometimes I feel that it might have been good for us if we had had a watered-down version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We gained political independence, but it led to little or no introspection about the need for cultural emancipation. The same British-created English-speaking elite inherited the levers of freedom, and, much worse, became the role models for those lower down the ladder. The amazing thing is that the absence of change went mostly unnoticed. When Dr Rajendra Prasad was elected as the chairman of the Constituent Assembly in 1946, the first seven speakers who wrote to felicitate him spoke—in unintended tribute to that prophetic strategist, Macaulay—in English. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who, coming from the remote North West Frontier region, was probably less exposed to mainstream British colonialism, was the first to speak in Hindustani. Prior to 1947, Nehru had expostulated against the colonial bureaucratic apparatus, saying emphatically that ‘the ICS and similar services should cease to exist’. But the ICS continued with little or no change after 1947. In Kolkata, the Bengal Club where Macaulay once lived opened its doors to Indians only in 1959, more than a decade after Independence, and an Indian did not replace a Britisher as the president of the club until another seven years after that! In Mumbai, another leading club kept this notice outside its premises for many years after Independence: DOGS AND INDIANS NOT ALLOWED.

  For decades after 1947, the statue of King George V continued to look down imperiously from the canopy at India Gate in New Delhi. When it was finally removed, the newly independent nation, with a civilizational heritage at least 3000 years old, could not find any other to replace it. Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, or Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and the maker of modern India, would have been obvious choices, or a symbol such as the Ashoka pillar from Sarnath,5 but the canopy is still forlornly empty, as though an entire nation has run out of ideas after the departure of the British King’s likeness. Not far from India Gate is the Secretariat built by Lutyens and Baker. It is even today the headquarters of our administration. Here, a visitor to North Block can still read these humiliating lines inscribed by the colonial rulers:

  LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A

  PEOPLE, A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO

  LIBERTY. IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE

  EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.

  Niall Ferguson, the historian who wrote Empire, a nostalgic paean to British colonization, says that these lines ‘must be the most condescending in the entire history of the Empire’.6 No matter, they are still there, and no one feels the worse for it.

  Dismantling the past cannot be a mechanical process. The need to do so must stem from a grass-roots desire not to blindly reject but to reconstruct from the debris of the past an edifice that conforms to our ethos and heritage. If the need is not felt, then it is as much a tribute to those who ruled us as it is a sign of our failure to understand just how much of our lives we’ve lost to caricature. In the year 2007, sixty years after the British left, I sat in on an internal meeting in the conference room of the Foreign Office in South Block. All the officers—the men in suit and tie, the women in sari or salwar-kameez—spoke only in English, their notes were in English. Words were mispronounced and the sentences were often clumsy, but they were unable to express themselves fluently in any other language, either. Bright men and women trapped in the shadows of the past, unable to see the sheer incongruity of the situation. If this was not the Chancellery of a country that had pretensions to being a superpower, the incongruity would not have jarred. Earlier that day I had taken the Japanese ambassador out for lunch. He could communicate with us in English but his briefing notes were in Japanese. In Japan, among his own, he would speak Japanese. The Russians, the Chinese, the French or the Koreans would similarly speak and write their own language, acknowledging the utility of English only for purposes of external communication. Percival Spear once insightfully wrote that India broke ‘her British fetters with western hammers’. Over sixty years after 1947, the fetters remain, in so many unnoticed, unexamined ways, constricting our choices about how we dress, how we speak, what we emulate, and who we wish to become, and the tragedy is that we have not yet devised our own hammers to break them.

  On my way to work in New Delhi, the capital of modern India, I see every morning several white Ambassador cars (the vehicle of high office) with this written on the back: GOVT OF INDIA. POWER BREAK. KEEP DISTENCE, a proclamation of the nation of linguistic half-castes we have become. The worrying thing is that such howlers are ubiquitous, but nobody thinks too much is at stake. In the elite residential area of Vasant Vihar where most diplomats in Delhi stay, one of the main boulevards is called Basant, after the Hindi word for spring, but the signage in English reads BASNAT, which means nothing at all. A signboard outside an important government office in the capital city reads: INSURANCE REGULARETY ATHORITY OF INDIA. Not far away, another board warns motorists of a SPEED BRECKER ahead. In a democracy where an overwhelming majority do not read or understand English, it occurs to no one that it is profoundly undemocratic and dangerous to have warnings on highways in English. Or to have information about AIDS prevention, traffic rules, emergency services, the risk of cancer from cigarette smoking, the composition of life-saving drugs—all in English. Like the poor, those without English deserve the tragedies and misfortunes that visit them.

  Why has a civilization where the written word goes back to the dawn of time allowed itself to come to such a pass? The spelling mistakes are of far less consequence than the tolerance with which they are viewed, as though we are meant to be like this, and will muddle through forever in this culturally substandard manner. Not long ago I was invited by an organization called the Federation of Indian Publishers to address them. The meeting was at the Chelmsford Club, a rundown creation of British times whose only asset is that it is in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi. I almost said no, because it offended me to go to a club named after a man who was the viceroy of India when the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh took place. There is a huge cultural amnesia that the colonial project spawns in its victims; it is an amnesia that sanitizes symbols of oppression and humiliation of their true meaning; it creates an indifference based not on objective assessment, or any notion of forgiveness, or a desire to transcend the past, but on sheer ignorance. The once colonized, even years after political liberation, lose the ability to interrogate the past with any sense of self-respect or pride. Why else would ‘respectable’ citizens of free India continue to take pride in being members of a club named after a person who condoned and defended the worst act
of political murder during the freedom struggle? What was even more pathetic was that the group gathered at the club that afternoon called themselves publishers of English-language books, but could hardly speak the language or write it. The president of the federation read out a welcome statement full of grammatical errors and pronunciation howlers, and the entire proceedings were conducted in appallingly bad English. The essential point is that it is unbecoming for great cultures and civilizations to reduce themselves to caricature. My grandfather, in a long coat and top hat was a caricature, as were the publishers in Chelmsford Club speaking bad English.

  But what if people like my grandfather and the publishers I met at Chelmsford Club had trained themselves to speak English better than the English themselves; if they had superior knowledge of English literature and history; if they could put to shame, with their wit and sophistication, any well-bred Anglo-Saxon? Would they have appeared less incongruous and absurd?

  On a visit to Oxford in 2004, my wife Renuka and I were invited to dinner by the venerable Tapan Raychaudhuri, Professor Emeritus at St Anthony’s College. It turned out to be quite an entertaining evening, the only other guests being the novelist Kunal Basu and his wife. The good professor was in an expansive mood, having greatly enjoyed the excellent Indian meal made by his wife, and I could not but resist the feeling that he had been so prompt with his dinner invitation only because it would be an opportunity for him and his wife to make some good Indian food, a break from the microwave fare of every day. Following dinner, I mentioned the name of the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who, until his death a few years ago, had lived in Oxford, almost around the corner from the Raychaudhuri’s. This unleashed a great many anecdotes from our host, some of which were quite priceless.