A Writer's People (14 page)

Nehru came of an educated and rich family. He himself was educated for seven years in England, at Harrow and at Cambridge. He should in those years have been granted the
gift of vision and, as an Indian in England in a high imperialist time, an oddity, he should have learned something of the art of self-assessment. Yet, going by the autobiography, he was at the end of this period a perfect blank. He has very little to report about London or Harrow or Cambridge; much less, in fact, than Gandhi has to say about London twenty-five years before. In Nehru's account these places are just their names. It is very strange.

When, in the autobiography, he leaves England behind and, roughly seven years later, begins to write his year-by-year story about his entry into Indian politics (based perhaps on old notes) he is very full; his sensibility is developed; he has a feeling for the material world and has a descriptive gift. It might be that in the beginning he is following an idea of good manners that it is wrong to thrust oneself forward. This permits him to write about a holiday skiing mishap but about very little else. It might be that his sensibility at Harrow and Cambridge was limited; it might be that in those days he was fearful as an Indian of considering himself, and thought that it was enough to take the names of famous places.

It might be that, in spite of the differences between them, he too had to make a journey like Gandhi's, from not seeing to seeing. Gandhi's journey began rudely in South Africa in 1893. Nehru's journey began by chance in 1920, with his discovery of the country poor, overwhelming in numbers, but whom perhaps for that very reason people like himself had always taken for granted: people there, in the background. In those days, Nehru says, the British-owned newspapers hardly reported on Indian politics; and the Indian newspapers, modelling
themselves on the British, had little in their columns about Indian rural politics. So it happened in 1919–20 that a spontaneous unprotected peasant movement erupted and spread in the United Provinces, near Nehru's home town of Allahabad. And if two hundred of the desperate peasants, ragged and starving, hadn't thought one day of walking the fifty miles from their villages to Allahabad, to put their case to public figures they had heard about, Nehru (the son of a famous lawyer and politician) would not have known about their movement, and his life might have taken a different course.

Nehru had known about the poor of India, had seen them in their thousands at religious fairs, part of the pageant of India. But now he was inexpressibly moved to be taken to their villages, to see this pathetic domestic side of the very poor. His visit was casual, an accident. But for the villagers it was everything; they were full of enthusiasm. They called out the neighbouring villages for him, shouting
“Sita Ram”
and getting the same answering call from village after village. They all had unbounded faith in his ability to do something for them. And because he had known so little about them they filled him with sorrow and shame. As a politician he would almost certainly have become involved with the peasants when the time came. But it would have been in a more formal way; the encounter then wouldn't have had this intimate, unexpected, emotional side.

He stayed for three days with the peasants that first time. Later he went back and found that for this visit the peasants had built roads for him. He had taken a “light car” (the date is
1920), and when it got bogged down the peasants simply lifted it out. He ate with the peasants and slept in their huts. Everything would have been new to him. He would have noted a hundred details. He wouldn't have been able to take anything for granted. He would have learned to look. His sensibility would have widened, with his compassion and his political growth; it was with these peasants that he lost his shyness about talking in public, even in front of ten thousand people; and later, when he came to write, this developed sensibility would show. He would be able, for instance, to describe his jail cells in gripping detail; he would be able to do the more difficult thing of describing the ever-changing mahatma, understanding at the end that the man who was truly a great soul was also in a part of his heart a great peasant.

T
HE AREA WHERE
this peasant epiphany, this epiphany of Indian distress, came to Nehru was the area known to the author of
Jeevan Prakash
twenty-two years or so before when he was thinking of migrating as an indentured servant to the South American Dutch colony of Surinam. For many months at that time the young Rahman had been moved from depot to recruiting depot in the Kanpur-Fyzabad area and had preferred not to write to his family, who might have been able to have his indenture agreement annulled. There is no hint in Rahman's autobiography of distress of the kind that moved Nehru. The big men in his book are landowners; they employ Pathan assistants; Rahman, full of the excitement of religious festivals and magic and magical healers, seems to think that all
this is in order. Rahman's world is complete and full; we can never imagine it challenged or disturbed by peasant agitation. He never takes us off the road to a village in the interior; so we have no idea how the poor live. All we know about travel and local roads is that big landowners move about in a palanquin carried by four men, who are apparently always just there, waiting to be hired.

Rahman, whatever family or personal secrets were buried in his heart, would have taken to Surinam an idea of India as a perfect place. That idea, of the good place that was his, to which he might return if he had to, would have supported him all his life. A fair number of indentured emigrants, when they had served out their five-year term, did go back to India (this return was provided for in their indenture agreement); and many of them ended badly, frightened of what they saw when they went back, never getting beyond the docks of Calcutta, and living out their days as city paupers.

Rahman was not among them. He never went back to India, though he lived very long and (from what he says or suggests) had the money to get out of any mess. Perhaps some deep-buried idea of the reality that would have awaited him kept him from going back, something beyond the memory of the gorgeous fairs and festivals, and the maharaja's palace, and the magical healers of home with their wonderful remedies (tortoise urine mixed together with two or three baked earthworms): things far grander and more mysterious than the drab, flat estates of Surinam, where the plantation houses matched the fields and were petty and poorly built (rusty
corrugated-iron roofs, grey weathered boards), where the local African witchdoctors knew only what they knew, and where from time to time ghostly balls of fire rolled over the Dutch-built dykes.

Some idea of India as a vanished perfection might have been with my grandmother's mattress-maker as well. For him, in 1944 or 1945, India was beyond reach, more than it was for Rahman; and it was easy for this unreachable India of fading memory to be turned to myth. What was true for the mattress-maker was true for the generation that came immediately afterward, my mother's generation. This generation reverenced India. There was nothing political in this reverence; the great names of the independence movement were known, but only as half-deified names; there was no knowledge of the course of the independence movement, and no knowledge of Indian art or history. Indian culture was the Indian cinema and what survived of the religion and the religious festivals. In some patriotic Indian houses I knew—which would have thought it too crude for words to put up pictures of Hollywood actors—there were framed photographs of Indian film stars. Visitors from India were adored. There was something pure and grand about anything or anyone that came from the far-away sacred land.

This adoration, this idea of India as a land of myth, lasted while India was beyond reach. After the Second World War travel became easier. You could travel the well-worn path to England and from there you could go on by steamer or by plane to India. As soon as a few people had done this India
became something else. It became a place that, for the first time for sixty or seventy years, people among us could see in the clear light of day.

This way of looking didn't come to everyone at the same time. Some of my mother's sisters went to India. They would have gone to see their father's family in the distressed Gorakhpur area. They had that address by heart: the name of the village, the name of the
thana
, the name of the district: the names were like lines of poetry—they would no doubt have sung in that way in my grandfather's head, and been enough of a guide, in all the frightening vastness of India, to home. In my grandmother's house the lines were known, as a kind of claim on the great land, which not everyone in the community was privileged to have.

So my mother's sisters, the proud travellers to India, would have known where to go. They also thought it would be a good idea to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change their local jewellery, made from the gold of Guiana, for jewellery made with proper Indian gold. They did so, and when many weeks later they came back and went to local jewellers with their good news, they found that their Guiana gold had been horribly diluted. The story made the rounds. The India of their father still stood high, but the India they had been to took a knock.

Little by little the India of myth was chipped away, and India became a place of destitution from which we were lucky to have got away. I went myself when I was twenty-nine. I went from England; at that time I was eleven years out of Trinidad. And still I went to that second India, the India from
which we had had to get away, and not to the India of independence and the great names of the independence movement. I went with jangling nerves, which became worse the closer the ship got to Bombay.

With all that, unavoidably, the idea of the ancestral land was with me. The water in the harbour had the usual harbour litter, orange peel, a fine web of seemingly dusty, semi-iridescent scum hung with small leaves and bits of twig. It made me think of classical lands and of people making long journeys in ancient times to famous cities, to study rhetoric or philosophy or to put a question to the local oracle. The harbour water would always have been like this, ordinary, unremarkable, until it had been left behind on the journey out.

At the end of that hard year in India, after one or two false beginnings, and after a long period of doubt, I wrote my book which, when it did come, came very fast.

My mother never read anything I wrote. She took it all on trust. And when, fifteen years after my own journey, she thought she should go to India (holding fast to her Guiana gold), it was without any knowledge of what I had gone through or done.

She came in due course to what had been her father's district, and had become the last line of the address-poem the family all carried in their head. After the district—flat as a board, coated all over with dust, with very long views in which it would have been easy to get lost—came the
thana
, and after the
thana
the village, romantically named: “Mahadeo Dubeka.”

There they all fell on her, the relations of eighty or a hundred
years before. They were now well trained in welcoming these people from far away claiming kinship. They offered a chair or a stool. They offered food, but my mother was sufficiently far away from India to be nervous of food in that crowded village: food there would have been like the gold of India to someone who possessed Guiana gold.

If she wouldn't have food with them, they said, three or four speaking at the same time, and all clearly relieved that no food was to be offered, she would at least have tea. And my mother, thinking it a safe substitute, said yes, she would have tea. There was a kind of flurry in the background, excited hushed voices, and in the meantime conversation about ancient family matters and my mother's journey was made with my mother, who was thinking all the time about the tea and was not on her best form.

The tea at length appeared, a murky dark colour, in a small white china cup. The lady offering the cup, for the greater courtesy and the better show, wiped the side of the cup with the palm of her hand. And then someone from these relations of a hundred years before remembered that sugar had to be offered with tea. My mother said it didn't matter. But the grey grains of sugar came on somebody's palm and were slid from the palm into the tea. And that person, courteous to the end, began to stir the sugar with her finger.

This was where my mother ended her journal entry about her visit to her father's ancestral village. She ended in mid-sentence, unable to face that sugar-stirring finger in the cup of tea. The land of myth, of a perfection that at one time had seemed vanished and unreachable, had robbed her of words.

F
IRST IN SCHOOL
you have English Composition, maybe a page or two in an exercise book, with perhaps an occasional piece of précis running to half a page; and then many years later, in a graver place, you have Essays, literary pieces, of many foolscap pages. The pen runs along the ruled page, with hardly a correction. This can give an illusion of maturity and power. But you may not find it easy to move from those essays, full of required reading, full of other men's ideas and language, to what you may already have begun to think of as proper writing, writer's writing, something personal, with authority, something you might imagine printed in a book.

That was how it happened to me. I left the university when I was twenty-two. I had five or six pounds, no more, the remnant of my scholarship money. I went to London, to a cousin's basement flat in Paddington (in a street soon to be pulled
down for road improvements), and set up as a writer. It was as easy as that. Writers often say they need time. I had all the time in the world. My cousin, who honoured my ambition, was paying the bills. (He was working in a cigarette factory somewhere in the East End, and studying law, dreaming of the day when as a magistrate back home he might take money from both sides. As much as the money he liked the professional
style
of the thing. I believe he was modelling himself on some big man.)